Jagged Little Pill

Morissette wrote the album only with Ballard, who produced it. The demo sessions began in 1994 in Ballard's home studio, where the two recorded songs as they were written. Ballard played guitars and keyboards and programmed the drum machines, and Morissette played harmonica. They tried to write and record a song a day in twelve or sixteen hour shifts. Her singing on the album was done in one or two takes, and the tracks that were later redone in a professional studio kept the demo vocals. The first song they wrote was The Bottom Line, which stayed off the original release and appeared on the 2015 edition. Ironic was the third.

The first song shown to record companies was Perfect, with only her voice and Ballard's acoustic guitar. In December 1994 they took demos into a studio to build full band arrangements of You Oughta Know, Right Through You, Forgiven, Wake Up and Mary Jane, with the engineer Chris Fogel. All the lyrics are hers. She said she tried to work through troubled feelings in the lyrics. The title comes from a line in You Learn.

Release and reception

The album debuted at number 117 on the Billboard 200 and reached number one in October 1995, staying there for twelve weeks. It was certified 17 times platinum by the RIAA, and reached number one in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. In Canada it was certified double diamond, the first time a Canadian artist had done so. The Billboard 200 listed it in the top 10 for 72 weeks. At the 1996 Grammys it won Album of the Year, Best Rock Album, and, for You Oughta Know, Best Female Rock Vocal Performance and Best Rock Song. She also took five Juno Awards in 1996.

Critics were divided at release. The Los Angeles Times' Steve Hochman placed her somewhere between Sinead O'Connor and Liz Phair, and Entertainment Weekly's David Browne found that what sounds arresting on a single grows wearing over a full album. The Chicago Tribune's Greg Kot wrote that she "strives for catharsis but often merely sounds histrionic". Rolling Stone later put it 45th on its list of the 100 best albums of the Nineties, and Pitchfork put it 51st on its 2022 list of the 150 best albums of the 1990s. In 2020 The Guardian reviewed an acoustic performance of the whole album at the Shepherd's Bush Empire in London and found the songs as lacerating as ever.