![]() (“Ironic” was the only song whose lyrics they wrote together the rest came directly from Morissette’s diary.) After a year, she and Ballard had a demo of unpolished, one-take recordings that they’d made late at night in Ballard’s studio. She began searching for collaborators, finally settling on the producer Glen Ballard, who had worked with Michael Jackson and Wilson Phillips. She had moved there from Ontario, where as a child she became first a television star and then a pop sensation. Most of the songs on “Jagged Little Pill” began as a transcription of Morissette’s interior monologue while she was living alone in Los Angeles, spending a lot of time rollerblading on the Santa Monica pier. ![]() She wasn’t just angry at an ex-boyfriend she was slicing herself open with rage, interrupting his dinner to howl “you told me you’d hold me until you died, and you’re still alive.” Morissette’s lyrics are funny and rebellious (it’s still electrifying to mouth the words “Would she go down on you in a theater?” from “You Oughta Know”), but they came packaged in high-gloss, catchy, grand ballads. To put it another way, this one album, written by a former teenage pop star from Canada, has sold as many copies as Taylor Swift’s entire discography combined. In 1996, the record sold more than 10 million copies it has sold another 20 million since, according to Entertainment Weekly. It may be difficult to comprehend now, in the fractured world of streaming and microfandom, but “Jagged Little Pill” was once one of the biggest albums in the world. Still, taken as a whole, the album has undeniable power: It’s urgent and raw. Listening to the song 25 years later, as I did over and over one morning in May while waiting to meet Morissette at a resort an hour south of Los Angeles, was comforting, like an oversize, beloved cardigan that has grown a bit baggy in the sleeves. ![]() Morissette was showing that young people contain multitudes and that they are eager to describe - to themselves, to some distant, judgmental grown-up - their contradictory inner lives. ![]() The lyrics are more affective than logical, more moody than meticulous. Morissette wrote the song - which became the fourth track on “Jagged Little Pill,” an album so popular at its height that it sold nearly half a million copies in one week - in less than an hour when she was 20. “I’m sick but I’m pretty, babyyyy.” Being petite has no bearing on a person’s hardiness, but of course, that isn’t the point. ![]() “I’m short but I’m healthy,” she sings, in the half-yodel, half-dove-coo that people still channel in late-night karaoke bars. The Alanis Morissette song “Hand in My Pocket” is a list of opposites that aren’t really opposites at all, when you really think about it. ![]()
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