When Alanis Morissette was brainstorming songs for her first internationally-released album, Jagged Little Pill, which marks its 30th anniversary on June 13, her intention was to make a record that would absolutely blow her mind. “That’s all I wanted and it was all I could think about,” the singer-songwriter says.
It was the mid-’90s and after Morissette’s first two albums (released in Canada only), the 19-year-old Ottawa native had become known for a dance-pop style—an image and sound that industry insiders wanted her to keep. Morissette remembers record bosses in Canada who belittled her desire to express herself more boldly in both her lyrics and composition in her third album. “Your contribution to the song you co-wrote is basically 0.08 percent,” she says they told her, dismissing any creative input she made. “It was just the ongoing reduction of my contribution during my teenage years.”
She took the artistic confinement as a cue to move to Los Angeles so that she could make music on her terms—only to come up against more of the same obstacles. Nobody wanted her to wander out of her musical niche: “They were like, ‘Oh you can’t do that because that’s not what you’re known for, sweetheart,’ or ‘Oh, your publisher won’t like it,’” Morissette tells me from her home in L.A., looking bare-faced and casual. The idea of being an artist who musically repeated herself made no sense to her. “These people didn’t get it—they didn’t understand my evolution and what music meant to me,” she recalls. “I wanted to write a record that marked what was actually happening.” She silently vowed never to be anyone’s echo chamber: “I said to myself I’m writing a record that is a direct fucking reflection of where I’m at or bust,” she adds.
Many of the lyrics were ripped from her own experience. Jagged Little Pill’s fifth track, “Right Through You,” for example, calls out talent managers who prey on young women artists instead of supporting their careers: “You pat me on the head/ You took me out to wine dine 69 me/ But didn’t hear a damn word I said.” Setting the lyrics to an alternative rock melody felt rebellious and not only conveyed her anger, but also drove the accusation home. “These were the things that were keeping me up at night,” she says.
To say that Jagged Little Pill was far from a bust is a gross understatement. The gut-wrenching 12-track compilation not only gave Morissette global recognition and commercial success—it took on a life of its own, becoming what media outlets like Rolling Stone called “a landmark moment for the music industry and the soundtrack of a generation.”
Thirty years, five Grammys—including one for Album of the Year—and 33 million copies sold later, the record continues to permeate pop culture and be an effective conduit for female rage. “Her epic war against Mr. Man, begun when both of us were teenagers, still appeals,” Megan Volpert, author of Why Alanis Morissette Matters, writes in her book. “She is our raging sage. She is our punk rock. Something inside of me is frozen there, at 14 going on 40. And whatever that thing is, it’s got Alanis on repeat because there is the laugh of Medusa in it.”
In the 1990s, angst among women was practically endemic. As increasing numbers of women defied gender expectations and attained power, the more noxious the misogyny grew to counter their progress. Those who excelled faced a special kind of sexism that reduced them to chauvinistic stereotypes and repulsive, often violent, sexual fantasies—what Time magazine called “’90s bitch bias” and “bitchification.” “Women have been having their asses kicked since forever, but there was an abject hatred of women at that time,” says Morissette. But the retribution motivated women like her to push back harder: “I won’t do the thing you’re telling me and indoctrinating me to do,” she adds.
When Volpert first heard the album, she felt Morissette was giving voice to her own angst. She was a teenager at the time and “was doing my best just to stay alive,” she tells me from her home in Atlanta. “There was my fledgling consciousness as a queer woman and no elders to shepherd me through the wilderness of becoming an adult.” When Jagged Little Pill came out in 1995, Volpert felt seen for the first time in her life. “Culturally, this was the moment of grunge, so there was a lot of dislocated, misplaced hostility in the air,” she says. “Alanis was able to tap the vein more effectively than anyone else.”
Volpert became a teenaged “subject matter expert in the jagged little pill”—or what she describes as “the thing that kind of sticks into our craw.” “It’s the emotional baggage of living through times where women feel unsourced, disempowered, and oppressed—like when we’re facing violence: big violence and little micro-aggressive violence.” Volpert reminds me that this was decades before “micro-aggression” was in the vernacular. “There was no word to describe what was happening to us,” she adds. Like many listeners, Volpert felt like she was the subject of the album. “At 15, I already knew that the people were doing harm to me and that the systems were out to keep me low-down and in my place, boxed-in and quiet,” she says.
Women not only resonated with the album’s rage, they ran with it, and their reverence for it was music to Morissette’s ears. “It was enough for me to keep going,” she says. Thirty years later, that anger rages on. “I believe it’s worse,” Morissette says with a short laugh. “I feel like if we’re paying attention, and if we’re learning everything we can about patriarchy and gaslighting and narcissism—the more I learn, the feistier I am.”
American women are contending with all of the above under President Donald Trump. During one of his final campaign speeches, the president—who himself was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in 2023—said he will protect women “whether the women like it or not.” After his victory, a report from the nonpartisan Institute for Strategic Dialogue, highlighted a surge in online misogyny.
That’s why the album feels so poignant, even now, says Diane Paulus, director of the Tony Award-winning Broadway jukebox musical Jagged Little Pill—written by Diablo Cody and based around the original compilation—that had a theatrical run on and off (because of COVID restrictions) from 2019 to 2021. “Alanis tapped into something—she challenged something so deep and profound about human nature and how we exist on the planet together,” she says. “That album wasn’t a period album for the nineties. It was from the nineties, but it feels like she could have written those songs yesterday, for these characters in the world we’re living in today.”
When Paulus, a theater and opera director at Harvard University, joined the Broadway adaptation, there wasn’t even a story yet. “I just knew that her music demanded to be made into theater—epic, visceral, physical, ritual theater,” she tells me from New York in between rehearsals for a new show. Morissette was adamantly against the musical being a biopic. “She didn’t want it to be ‘The Alanis Morissette Story,’” Paulus says. “She wanted an entirely new story that speaks to our lives today. And that was exciting.”
At its core, the album is all about the human condition. “What the musical dealt with was how the songs just naturally break people open,” says Lauren Patten, the 32-year-old actress, who had a starring role. “Like the album, the musical was about navigating trauma and coming out the other side—something that was very important to Morissette.”
Over time, Morissette has learned to harness her anger as a force for good. “Part of it is what I’d like to think is my maturity, so I channel that rage through activism, showing up, answering in a certain way, or setting a boundary when something isn’t working for me,” she says. As Volpert adds, “Her ideas are everywhere—she’s keynoting at psychology conferences and writing forewords for books.” There was also an advice column called “Ask Alanis” for The Guardian for 1.5 years. More recently, there’s Conversations with Alanis, a podcast series where she calls on experts to discuss in-depth subjects like neurobiology and philosophy.
Morissette will also begin a residency in Las Vegas this fall. And she’s still producing new music. “Alanis is one of the very few artists from the nineties that is actually doing new work—new, evolving, musical work, and not just reunion tours or summer festivals,” Volpert explains. Just last month, Morissette tells me she was back in the studio to start on what will be her 11th studio record (“I’m terrified,” she adds).
She isn’t one to listen to her own music for self-soothing or inspiration, but there have been times in her life when she has gone back to Jagged Little Pill to reconnect with her younger self. “I haven’t done it in like 15 years, but there were times when I lived alone on and off where I felt lost and I would listen to my own music,” she says, adding in a mock-whisper: “Don’t tell anybody,” with a laugh. “I would listen to it just to be reminded that there’s a human here, there’s a perspective here. I was raised in women-hating and narcissistic environments, so the sense of self that maybe looks obvious from the outside wasn’t happening in here,” she says pointing to herself. “Songwriting is amazing for that—anytime I could express myself it was my way of existing.”
The now 51-year-old Morissette is able to continually perform songs she wrote at age 19 because she still believes in the unwavering truth behind them. “I wouldn’t be able to perform them if I didn’t believe any of these narratives anymore,” she says. “Thankfully, I still do.” And the tracks continue to age with her. “Perimenopause helps us to reattune our evolving identity as women,” she says of her current phase of life. “We’re also contending with what it means to age as a woman in a culture that continues to hate us.” There’s a lot to be angry about, still. A smile creeps up on Morissette’s face, growing into a wicked grin. “Except now, we’re conscientious as fuck.”
