FEATURE:
Perfect
Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill at Thirty
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I do love it…
IN THIS PHOTO: Alanis Morissette in her hotel room in Cologne, Germany, in 1995/PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Cummins/Getty Images (via The New York Times Magzzine)
when two classic albums come out on the same day. There have been some famous examples through the years. However, 13th June, 1995 saw Björk’s Post released alongside Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill. This album ranks alongside the best of the 1990s. Jagged Little Pill was a departure from a more Dance-Pop sound of her first two albums – Alanis (1991) and Now Is the Time (1992). Jagged Little Pill is undoubtedly a work of genius, through it did have its detractors in 1995. Now, I think there has been enough retrospection and praise. Alanis Morissette worked with producer Glen Ballard after she moved from her home in Ottawa to Los Angeles. Jagged Little Pill sports classic singles like Ironic, You Learn, You Oughta Know and Hand in My Pocket. Because the album turns thirty on 13th June, I wanted to spend some time with it. An album that I experienced back in 1995 but have come to appreciate more in years since. The music industry in the mid-1990s not as supportive when it came to female artists and great works like Jagged Little Pill. I want to get to a few features of an album that I feel has inspired so many other artists. Before getting to some spotlighting of an album that went to number one in the U.S. and U.K. (and many other countries) and is seventeen-times platinum in the U.S., here is some detail about the legacy of Jagged Little Pill:
“Morissette's success with Jagged Little Pill was credited with leading to the introduction of female singers such as Fiona Apple, Shakira, Tracy Bonham, Meredith Brooks, and in the early 2000s, Pink, Michelle Branch, and fellow Canadian Avril Lavigne. American singer Katy Perry cites Jagged Little Pill as a significant musical inspiration, and opted to work with Morissette's frequent collaborator Ballard as a result. Perry stated, "Jagged Little Pill was the most perfect female record ever made. There's a song for anyone on that record; I relate to all those songs. They're still so timeless." Grammy Award winner Kelly Clarkson said of the album, "It made me a better writer. It made me a better singer." Avril Lavigne cited Jagged Little Pill as one of her all-time favorite albums, stating: "It is an album I can revisit over and over, belt every song, and never get sick of." In 2018, the album won the Polaris Heritage Prize Audience Award in the 1986–1995 category. Benny Anderson of ABBA listed the album as one of the 6 soundtracks of his life: "I listened to this a lot when it came out, at a time when I wasn't writing pop songs any more. It was a remembrance of solid golden pop, from a fantastically talented woman with great writing and a great voice, and a very nicely produced album by Glen Ballard. It's one of the top 10 albums in my life when it comes to pop records, alongside Rumours and Hotel California”.
I want to start with a feature from Albumism from 2020. They marked twenty-five years of an album that has been ranked alongside the greatest ever. Even though Alanis Morissette hoped Jagged Little Pill would gain her kudos among her late-Grunge peers, she found them aloof – and she herself was never that. However, the influence Jagged Little Pill has had and the life it has taken on cannot be denied. It is a sensational album. I don’t think it sounds too dated. You can hear artists today very much producing their own version of songs from the album:
“Just two years after Madonna co-founded the Maverick record label back in 1992, the company signed a then relatively unknown 20-year-old Morissette. Just over a year later and her debut album for the label had been released and proved to be the smash record the label had envisioned. With total sales now in excess of 33 million units globally, the album not only cemented Morissette’s star status, but went 16x platinum in the US, became the best-selling debut album of all time and garnered the singer five out of the nine GRAMMY Awards she was nominated for in 1996, not to mention taking out the number one spot in a staggering 14 charts around the world. But this album is about so much more than just groundbreaking statistics—it’s a powerful album about personal experiences.
Whilst the walk down memory lane in revisiting the album twenty-five years later is full of coming-of-age stories and in many ways, articulated everything that I was feeling then, aged nineteen, I am also reminded that Morissette was a mere year older than me at the time and wrote and produced music that not only belied her youth, but gave a voice to a generation.
Jagged Little Pill surfaced at a time when grunge was at its peak and although Morissette presented a strong, multifaceted woman, open and honest, she hadn’t ridden the same wave that her feminist peers like Courtney Love and Ani Di Franco had done. Instead, she had received success with her first two pop albums in her native Canada and even dated “Uncle Joey” (Dave Coulier) from Full House, all things that couldn’t have been further from the voice expressing torment, pain and vulnerability on Jagged Little Pill.
All that changed when Morissette met legendary record producer and songwriter Glen Ballard (Michael Jackson, The Pointer Sisters, Paula Abdul). With Ballard now providing some guidance and a wealth of production knowledge, the two set about bunkering down in Ballard’s studio, supposedly recording a song a day. According to Morissette, she penned the track “Perfect” in a mere twenty minutes and requested that her original demo vocals be used to create a rawness on the album. Ballard in tow, it only seemed fitting to have session musicians lend their wares and there was no better fit than Dave Navarro and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers to provide some serious guitar work on the album’s lead single “You Oughta Know.”
A total of six singles were released from the album, with all of these songs (except "All I Really Want”) entering the top ten in various charts around the world and “Ironic” taking out the number four spot on the Billboard Hot 100, her highest charting single in the US. But it was “You Oughta Know” that set the tone for the album and gave license to a type of female sexuality and unabashed raw anger not seen on a commercial scale, showing that women get equally as irked as men, most definitely as horny and may even get a little perverse as captured in lines like, “Is she perverted like me / Would she go down on you in a theater?”
With hope in her heart, the album’s second single “Hand In My Pocket” showcases a self-assured Morissette who is able to have a little fun. The third single and album smash “Ironic”— the much-disputed irony-free song that Morissette stood by in the wake of criticism over its linguistic usage—became her trademark. Whether or not you deem the song situational irony, dramatic irony or even completely unironic, you can’t deny that Morissette’s indifference to the world and how it will eventually do you over in the end makes for a damn good song.
Apart from the officially released singles, there is even more beauty on this album. Whether it be the togetherness on “Mary Jane” as Morissette reassures a friend in the midst of grief or the religious hindsight on “Forgiven,” she adds even more layers to her self-exploration and that of others too.
Morissette delivered an opus of immeasurable beauty on Jagged Little Pill, a beauty entrenched in her psyche, her anger, her lovelorn heart and her hope. She created a fluidity and slickness within this album rare for a twenty-one-year-old novice artist. She kept her words raw and articulated emotions and feelings that many women had felt too ashamed to even acknowledge, let alone put out there for the whole world to hear”.
I want to drop in a feature from Rolling Stone from last year. In their list of the five-hundred best albums ever, they ranked Jagged Little Pill at sixty-nine. Proof that endures to this day. An album that will continue to influence and gain a whole new generation of fans. Jagged Little Pill has been nominated for a score of great awards. I hope it gets new inspection ahead of its thirtieth anniversary on 13th June:
“A very important record from my childhood, I clearly remember going halves with my sister to buy this CD. That would effectively make it the first CD I bought, or amongst the first few and I listened to it to death. While this is her third release, it was the first released internationally. A major shift in sound from her first two, many naively considered this her debut. Following her second album, Alanis Morissette moved from Toronto to L.A., where she met producer, Glen Ballard. Amongst many other releases, Ballard had contributed songwriting and production to Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’ and ‘Dangerous,’ most notably ‘Man In The Mirror’ and ‘Keep The Faith.’ Influenced by Grunge and Alternative music of the time, Ballard would refine Morissette’s angst into well-crafted pop songs, resulting in 12 (13 really) incredible songs.
Why 13? Well, this might possibly be the first album on the list to include a secret track, the stalker song, ‘Your House.’ ‘All I Really Want’ kicks the proceedings off, setting the tone of songs to follow. The middle eight section in the song would be a recurring device used throughout. Track 2 is arguably Morissette’s signature song, ‘You Oughta Know.’ A revenge/break-up song allegedly about Full House’s Dave Coulier, Ballard assembles a super group of sorts to deliver the song; the soaring vocals of Alanis, the unmistakeable bass of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea, as well as their one-time guitarist, Jane’s Addiction’s Dave Navarro. The song was essentially re-arranged by the pair with the middle section heavily resembling their own band’s song, ‘Aeroplane.’ Rounding the supergroup off is Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ organist, Benmont Tench. Although often rumoured, Taylor Hawkins from Foo Fighters doesn’t play drums on the recording (he was her live drummer). The 10/10 album also includes ‘Hand In My Pocket,’ ‘You Learn,’ ‘Head Over Feet’ and ‘Ironic.’ It was nominated for 9 Grammys, winning 5; making the 21-year-old Alanis the youngest winner (at that time) of Album Of The Year. It went to the #1 spot in 13 countries and to date has sold a staggering 33 million copies, making it one of the biggest-selling albums of all time (just behind MJ’s ‘Bad,’ coincidentally). It has recently been turned into a musical. I always forget how incredible this album is, until I relisten to it and I’m reminded all over again. Loved relistening to this after so many years”.
I am going to end with an anniversary review from Billboard from 2015. Their twentieth anniversary piece made some interesting observations. I have taken select sections from the feature which also included a song-by-song review. I have highlighted my favourite three from Jagged Little Pill:
“In 1995, there were plenty of angsty lady rockers with more rage and credibility than Alanis Morissette. The 21-year-old singer-songwriter hadn’t grown up playing basement punk shows or firing off feminist manifestos. Back home in Canada, she was known for the pair of dance-pop albums she released before graduating high school. Her parents weren’t even divorced.
But Morissette was no fraud. Jagged Little Pill, the era-defining international debut album she thrust upon the world 20 years ago on June 13, 1995, wasn’t some act of calculated alt-rock reinvention. Rather, it was a product of growing up. Alanis had been around the block, sung a few bubblegum tunes, and even dated a dude from Full House. It all left her wanting, and with her third album — recorded in Los Angeles after she’d been dropped by her label — Morissette decided to follow her gut and make music she could feel good about.
For the first time, this meant writing songs about feeling bad. Though drawn from personal experiences (bad relationships, career woes, adventures in Catholicism), Jagged Little Pill resonated. By November 1995, it had sold more than 2 million copies, topping the Billboard 200 and finding a mainstream audience that edgier female artists like Courtney Love and Liz Phair weren’t able to reach. This was precisely because of — not despite — Alanis’ past life in pop.
Jagged Little Pill isn’t a rock record. It’s grungy discomfort set to the kinds of tpp 40 hooks and backing tracks one gets working a guy like Glen Ballard, who Morissette met in 1994 and quickly took a liking to.
Pre-Pill, Ballard had produced artists like Wilson Phillips, Paula Abdul and Michael Jackson. With him co-writing and playing most of the instruments, there was zero chance of Alanis relocating to Alternative Nation. In terms of earnestness and emotional directness, Morissette made those Pearl Jam guys look like the cast of MTV’s The State, but that was OK. The ticked-off adolescent girls who constituted much of her audience weren’t necessarily looking for irony, and they didn’t require a spokesperson who even knew the meaning of the word.
This became apparent when “Ironic,” the disc’s famously irony-free third single, reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, continuing a hot streak that had begun with the gutsy scorned-woman rager “You Oughta Know” (long rumored to be about Dave “Uncle Joey” Coulier) and the more subdued, hopeful “Hand in My Pocket.” Two more smashes — “You Learn” and “Head Over Feet” — followed, making Jagged Little Pill one of those albums like Joshua Tree or Born In the U.S.A., where practically every track is a single, and they’re all pretty distinct.
Like those Bruce and U2 benchmarks, Jagged Little Pill today seems a bit dated. Still, Ballard’s drum machines and grunge-lite guitars (many preserved from the original demos) aren’t what anyone thinks about when they wax rhapsodic about this album. It was never meant to be hip or edgy, and 20 years later, it’s more meaningful for what it represents — a smart young woman talking honestly about her feelings and finding herself as an artist — than for how it sounds.
Read on for our track-by-track take on this, a record that earned five Grammys, sold millions and millions of copies, and gave its creator something to really freak out about: success.
“You Oughta Know”: The second-best major-label debut single of the ‘90s, right after Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” this gnashing kiss-off shocked listeners with its raw anger and frank portrayal of female sexuality. Turns out women get pissed off and horny just like men. Some even get freaky in movie theatres. This was no surprise to Flea and Dave Navarro of Red Hot Chili Peppers, who flesh out the Ballard demo and put scraping funk-rock to Alanis’ taunting indignation.
“Head Over Feet”: Alanis knows she’s a handful, and that she’s not the type to get all gushy. “Don’t be surprised if I love you for all that you are,” she tells a guy who actually treats her right. He listens when she talks and asks her how her day was, and he’s probably fine with her calling in the middle of dinner. He’s the opposite of that “You Oughta Know” dude, and Morissette sings in a plainspoken manner suited to Ballard’s basic guitar-and-drum-box backing — and the feeling of relief that has her buzzing.
“Ironic”: Alanis might have been a little unclear on what irony means, but she knew how to choose her battles. Rather than argue that “rain on your wedding day” and “10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife” constitute “situational irony,” as some defenders have insisted, Morissette owned up to the gaff and stood by her song. And rightfully so, as her highest-charting Hot 100 hit is a funny shoulder shrug of a song about how life always screws you in the end”.
On 13th June, it will be thirty years since the mighty and iconic Jagged Little Pill was released. This is an album that will be discussed for decades more. I was twelve when the album came out, so it took me a few years after that to connect with it. I am not sure whether I was a massive fan of the album in 1995 but have become in years since. It arrived in one of the best years for music ever and stands up there with the very best. Thirty years on and Jagged Little Pill still sounds amazing. Alanis Morissette’s third studio album is an…
UNDENIABLE masterpiece.