Alanis Morissette has been reflecting on how the landscape has changed for women in the music industry in the 30 years since she broke through with her 33 million selling album, Jagged Little Pill.
Released in 1995 and spawning hit singles such as You Oughta Know, You Learn, Hand in My Pocket, Ironic and Head over Feet, Jagged LIttle Pill set a template for brutally honest songwriting that is still being followed by female artists today. However, Morissette says that, at the time, the music business was a tough place to be for a woman who was barely into her twenties.
“I was like ‘women power’, but let’s get clear, a lot of the white men in suits loved Jagged Little Pill and got excited about female artists for myriad reasons, one of them being ‘women make us money now,’” she tells The Sunday Times. “I was the one woman in a sea of men.”
Keen to pass on the benefit of her experiences, Morissette reveals that she now acts as a mentor to younger female artists. While not naming names, she says: “Some have a little conversation with me and there’s already a pep in their step. Then the more temperamentally sensitive ones lean a little more into my hug. It’s a sacred role.”
Morissette was recently inducted into The Songwriters Hall Of Fame alongside Taylor Swift and, asked whether the industry is a better place for female artists now, she replies: “I think there’s more scaffolding. I was kind of crafting my own scaffolding the whole time, and it was cardboard and water.”
Morissette’s Butterfly with a Machete tour is just about to hit the UK and, although there’s more to her discography than just Jagged Little Pill, it’s sure to be the songs from that record that get the biggest crowd response. She wrote the lyrics for the album when she was still a teenager, and says that they just flowed out of her.
“I was just able to write, and it was very visceral. It felt urgent and intense,” she remembers.
Of songwriting more broadly, she adds: “There’s this existential imperative in me. Like, I can’t not do it.”
