Credit: Far Out / Alanis Morissette
Fri 16 October 2026 0:30, UK
In 1993, Alanis Morissette was without a label, and her two albums for MCA Records Canada had run their course. The first, Alanis, went platinum in her home country, but the follow-up record, Now Is the Time, sold barely half the number of copies.
With the two-album deal complete, the 19-year-old, nicknamed the ‘Debbie Gibson of the North’, was left without a recording contract. Seeking a fresh start, she moved from Ottawa to Los Angeles, where a life-changing partnership with songwriter and producer Glen Ballard changed everything.
According to Ballard, the connection was instant, and within half an hour, they were experimenting with tracks in his home studio in the San Fernando Valley, driven by Morissette’s deeply personal lyrics, which were fuelled by a troubled mental state.
The pair adopted a relentless work ethic and aimed to write and record a song a day in shifts of 12 or 16 hours, with Ballard on guitars, keyboards and drum machines and Morissette on harmonica. Her vocals were done in one or two takes, and many of those demo vocals made the final album. The first song they wrote, ‘The Bottom Line’, took an hour. On how ‘Ironic’ was written, Ballard commented: “I’m telling you, within 15 minutes we were at it – just writing. ‘Ironic’ was the third song we wrote. Oh God, we were just having fun. I thought, ‘I don’t know what this is – what genre it is – who knows? It’s just good.”
The problem they faced was whether anyone would actually listen. By January 1995, many labels had passed, and Ballard was considering an independent release. Then Morissette’s lawyer, Ken Hertz, arranged a meeting with Guy Oseary of Madonna’s Maverick Records. Oseary was hooked within moments of hearing the track ‘Perfect’, and Morissette was signed within two days.
Released on June 13th, 1995, Jagged Little Pill shattered the expectations of people in the industry, who had written her off as a failed teen pop star. Propelled by the aggressive, breakout lead single ‘You Oughta Know’, featuring guest instrumentation from Dave Navarro and Flea, the album quickly captured global attention.
Tracks like ‘Ironic’ and ‘Hand in My Pocket’ kept the record firmly entrenched in the top positions of the charts, staying in the top ten of the Billboard 200 for an astonishing 72 weeks. At the 1996 Grammys, it won five of its nine nominations, including ‘Album of the Year’, making Morissette the youngest winner of that award at the time.
Further reading: From The Vault
The numbers are staggering. It was the best-selling album of 1996, with 18 million copies sold worldwide that year alone, a number which has now shot up to 45m. It’s also certified 17 times platinum in the US and ten times platinum in the UK, and it became Canada’s first double-diamond record.
Morissette’s transformation was complete, and she’d finally managed to shake the mononymous pop persona and adopt her full name. Even so, she admitted that she never quite found the acceptance she hoped for from her grunge-era peers, who were “all about aloofness and ennui, and I am not aloof.”
That lack of aloofness was her strength. Two years after losing her contract, she was one of the biggest stars in the world.
