“After ‘Jagged Little Pill,’ I spent time in Toronto, and everyone I ran into was like, ‘When’s your next record? You owe it to the world,’” she continued. I remember feeling like, ‘Dammit, they should have a handbook for this!’ “No one tells you that bullying is ubiquitous and just how alone you can feel. “I didn’t have a mentorship at that time, and it was hard,” Morissette recalled. It took time for her to find the right mental and creative headspace to adjust to her success and continue forward, she said. Between intense media scrutiny and just trying to navigate through the music industry, the then-21-year-old Morissette often felt overwhelmed and isolated. When “Jagged Little Pill” was issued, Morissette was still a young woman trying to find her way in the world.
“But I feel like that was a huge wave that was coming along and I happened to volunteer to be atop that wave.”īeing atop that wave was challenging. “After (‘Jagged Little Pill’), radio and music videos turned into a more female artist-driven culture,” Morissette added. “When I first started, radio stations would say, ‘We play Sinead (O’Connor) or Tori Amos we can’t play Alanis (too).’ “I’ve spent a significant part of the last 26 years trying to wrap my head around the zeitgeist of it all and my role in feminism and female artists finally being taken seriously,” she said. During a phone call to discuss her Sunday concert at at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center as part of her pandemic-delayed “Jagged Little Pill” 25th-anniversary tour, Morissette still expressed difficulty reconciling the moment that transformed her from upstart singer-songwriter into the It Girl for alternative, angst-riddled female artists in the mid- to late 1990s.
It’s a staggering level of success to attain. One more interesting tidbit: Shania Twain’s “Come on Over,” which dropped in 1997, is the only album since to have performed better.