Alanis Morissette turned memory and feeling into songs that met millions of people inside their own lives. We heard them first in our youth, and decades later, we return with enough life behind us to hear what we could not yet understand.

By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

Every work of art has a body made from sound, language, pigment, or gesture. The artist’s story reveals its pulse. Once we have some insight into what motivated a person toward the piano, the page, the canvas, or the stage, beauty becomes an encounter with the person herself.

Leo Tolstoy gave philosophical language to part of this idea in What Is Art? (1898), where he described art as the transmission of lived feeling from one person to another. A work carries feeling across time. Like the idea of radio waves themselves, this idea is filled with mystery and wonder.

Dostoevsky approached the human mystery from another direction. In an 1839 letter to his brother Mikhail, he wrote, “Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled.” Art gives us one way into that mystery, and the story behind its creation tells us something about the person whose work we have entered. And, ultimately, also something about ourselves.

I watched such a moment unfold while setting up for a recent rehearsal. My Alanis Morissette playlist was playing through the studio speakers as my college-aged students entered one by one. They set up their props, changed into rehearsal skirts and shoes, and traded casual greetings against the background music.

The song “Thank U” began to play. “Thank you frailty, thank you consequence, thank you, thank you silence …”

One of the young actors asked, “Who is this?”

It was my honor to introduce him to one of my artistic heroes.

“Alanis Morissette,” I said. “She was really popular when I was about your age.”

Then came the question one naturally expects from an audience unschooled in Morissette’s canon.

“Isn’t she the one who sang the song about going down on someone in a theatre?”

“Good grief,” I said. “Yes, but that’s one line in one song. And the song isn’t even about that. It’s about breaking up and watching the other person move on.”

“You’re so defensive about this singer!”

The room laughed.

“Maybe, but it’s like saying, ‘Isn’t Van Gogh the guy who cut off his ear? Isn’t Georgia O’Keeffe the woman whose flowers people compare to female anatomy?’ It’s like saying Elton John’s ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues’ is about rolling like thunder under the covers. It isn’t. It’s about two people enduring the pain of time spent apart from one another.”

“See? Defensive!”

They laughed again as my dramatic mini monologue ended with a disproportionate flourish. “Seriously though. The story behind that song changes the shape of it. Wanna hear it?” After receiving enough nods to justify spending some rehearsal time on the story, I told them how “You Oughta Know” came to be.

Morissette wrote “You Oughta Know” with Glen Ballard in late 1994, when she was twenty years old and beginning to find an artistic identity beyond the polished dance pop she had recorded as a Canadian teenager. Ballard was already an established songwriter and producer, but the two began working with the kind of ease only two artists can quickly accomplish with one another. Within half an hour of meeting, they were experimenting with fragments of memory and turning them into stories in his home studio.

Morissette later said she thought maybe ten people would ever hear what they were making. There is something so charming about her innocence in these moments, which is impossible to recover today. Her first album, Jagged Little Pill, would eventually sell tens of millions of copies, yet the songs themselves began in a room where her enormous success was barely a vision clear enough to motivate. Still, and maybe because of her innocence, Morissette felt free enough in that first studio to speak and write with candor. While she shaped the fragments of truth into words, Ballard played.

Spilling forth more quickly than she could monitor herself, “You Oughta Know” brought Morissette to the edge of her nerve.

Speaking of the lyrics, she told Ballard, “I’ll have to change some of those.”

He asked, “Why?”

He didn’t judge her. He stayed in the moment with her.

Morissette, probably sensing his trust in her artistry coupled with the freedom that kind of trust engenders in an artist said, “Exactly. Okay. Thank you.”

The words stayed.

At eleven o’clock one night, after a long day of working together, Morissette recorded the lead vocal for that song in a single take. Ballard kept it. The voice that eventually came roaring through radios around the world still carries that first performance. Later, she would describe the juxtaposition between the anger in the lines and the crushing vulnerability beneath them.

I was only a few years younger than she was when I first began listening to her work. Back then, I could kind of feel her emotions, but I wasn’t quite sure I understood what they meant.

My own innocence, in that sense, colors the way I remember the song.

At twenty, or close enough to it, you have very little distance from your own life. Everything arrives at full size. Love, for example, can fill your whole field of vision. So can rejection. The future remains largely theoretical, while whatever happened Tuesday can feel permanent. Morissette was writing from inside that immediacy, and those of us who first heard her at roughly the same age were listening from inside it too.

We did not need to know how the story ended. Neither did she.

Her vocal performance became the center of “You Oughta Know.” Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea and guitarist Dave Navarro were brought in later and given her voice to build around. They found an arrangement strong enough to meet it, which gives the song the physical force that still makes it feel slightly dangerous when played loudly enough.

Once the track was complete, fear blew in like a fog.

People around Morissette worried that the song’s fury and sexual candor would define her before listeners had heard the rest of Jagged Little Pill. Morissette understood that risk and chose it anyway. Years later, she described the decision simply: “I will take angry as the first note in the music.”

It became the first note in the public life of Alanis Morissette as we know her.

The song carried her into an international audience and won Grammys for Best Rock Song and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. Speculation about the man who inspired it followed almost immediately, though Morissette has never publicly identified him.

At twenty, I probably found that mystery more interesting than I do now.

Age has a way of changing the question.

The name of the man matters less to me today than the young woman who stood at a microphone and sang from the middle of something she had not yet had time to understand. She could only tell the truth of the moment as she knew it. Looking back, I hear the courage in that as clearly as I hear the anger.

The famous theatre line shrinks accordingly.

It becomes one sharp moment inside a much larger experience of humiliation, grief, desire, and the bewilderment of watching someone you loved continue his life while yours feels like it’s stopped.

And courage.

“Now,” I told the actors, “With all that in mind, I’m starting ‘Thank U’ over. Remember, this song came long after her rise to fame.”

We listened through to the end, and then I told them what had happened after Jagged Little Pill was released to the world.

The eighteen-month tour began in small clubs and grew into arenas. Morissette was twenty-two when her life began expanding beyond anything she could have imagined. I would imagine the beginning of that journey was filled with excitement, anticipation, and that sense of wonder you feel when you begin seeing a dream come true. With all that in mind, she also believed success might bring her some peace and, naturally, strengthen her self-esteem. Instead, the more famous she became, the more hollow she began to feel.

Morissette has since described the pace she kept during those years as work addiction. There is something especially cruel about a compulsion the world rewards. Exhaustion produces another performance. Ignored limits earn applause. A person can disappear inside achievement while everyone around her congratulates her discipline.

After the tour ended in December 1996, Morissette stepped away for eighteen months.

During that break, she traveled through India for six weeks with her mother, two aunts and two friends on a journey she affectionately called their “goddess trip.” Away from the nightly demands of performance, she found a kind of quiet her former life had rarely permitted. She later recalled that she had never paused long enough to take a full breath.

The woman who had written “You Oughta Know” while an experience was still burning through her now had enough distance to turn around and look at where she had been.

This is one of the privileges age eventually gives us. We spend the first part of adulthood moving forward because there is nowhere else to go. We make choices before we know what they mean. We love people before we know what love will ask of us. We pursue things before we understand what possessing them will feel like. Life gives us the experience first and, if we are fortunate, the understanding later.

After her trip, Morissette began asking different questions.

She already knew how much she could accomplish. Fame had answered that decisively. Now she was asking what might make her feel connected to her own life.

Gratitude is what rose to the surface of her silence.

That gratitude became the song “Thank U,” which Morissette wrote with her trusted collaborator Ballard after returning from India. The song looks back at experiences most people would rather have avoided and asks what they gave her anyway. Fear. Disappointment. Frailty. Consequence. Silence. She had begun to understand that some of the most unwelcome parts of her life had taught her things success never could.

At twenty, I understood the forward motion of Morissette’s work. I understood wanting, losing, reaching, feeling everything before there was time to sort any of it out. Decades later, I understand something else in her songs: the strange moment when life begins returning your own experiences to you with meanings they did not possess when you were living them.

The young actors around me stand closer to the age Morissette was when she made the music.

Their lives still hold much of that forward momentum. They are beginning careers, falling in love, and deciding who they wanted to become. The large questions encircle them now, while many of the answers are still years away.

While “Thank U” was being mastered, Morissette found the idea for its video in the shower. She imagined herself naked in the middle of ordinary public life, walking through streets and stores while everyone around her remained clothed. Director Stéphane Sednaoui filmed the video over two cold nights in downtown Los Angeles.

The image is painfully simple. The woman who had spent years being watched by millions of people chose to appear with nothing between herself and their gaze.

When I first saw that video, I understood its boldness.

Now I understand its exposure.

The work remained exactly where Morissette left it.

That may be one of the strangest gifts art gives us. A song can remain twenty-five years old while the person listening to it crosses forty, fifty, seventy. We return carrying marriages, deaths, mistakes, ordinary Tuesdays, years of work, people we have lost and versions of ourselves we can remember clearly but can no longer inhabit.

The song receives all of them.

And then, occasionally, we find ourselves standing beside someone who is hearing it near the beginning.

My students were encountering Morissette from roughly the same place in life where she had once stood. I was listening from farther down the road. They could hear the urgency of a young woman discovering what she felt. I could hear the woman she would become looking back and finding meaning in what she had survived.

Neither experience cancels the other. They belong to the same life.

Perhaps this is what Tolstoy’s transmission of feeling looks like across enough time. An artist gives shape to something while she is living it. Someone her own age recognizes herself in it. Years pass. The work stays available, waiting for the listener to return with a different life.

And when she does, the old song has new things to say.

Art allows us to meet the person we once were without becoming her again. It also lets us recognize the young people still standing where we once stood and remember that their unfinishedness is part of the beauty of being alive.

We live our lives moving forward.

Sometimes art helps us to understand them looking back.