She didn't spend much time writing songs, either. Quickly cutting those songs was "the shortest distance from the personal to the universal," she told Billboard in 1996 (via Entertainment Weekly). Why? It's more honest, according to the musician. Morissette laid down each and every song on the record in one or two takes. Actually, Jagged Little Pill is essentially a demo.
In other words, it sounds like a demo, a simple, if not raw, collection of songs demonstrating proof of concept. In the waning days of grunge, with its fuzzy, down-tuned guitars and mumbly male singers, here came a record full of tracks showcasing a woman with huge vocal and emotional range, and backed up by little more than some light electric guitars, keyboards, and a drum machine. In spite of not sounding like anything else going on in mainstream music at the time - or perhaps because of that - Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill became a blockbuster hit and cultural phenomenon in the mid-1990s. MCA Records actually dropped her at that point. The follow-up, 1992's Now Is The Time proved it wasn't the time for Morissette, moving only half as many units as Alanis. Her 1991 debut, Alanis, peaked at a middling #28 on the Canadian album chart and sold 100,000 copies. She released a total of eight singles in that era, and none made the top 10. Morissette was never a superstar during her Canadian dance-pop days. Conventional wisdom held that Morissette was just as successful (at least in Canada) as those predecessors, but that was an inaccurate assumption. Clips of a big-haired Morissette performing songs like 'Too Hot" surfaced, earning her comparisons to Tiffany and Debbie Gibson. The official line was that she'd been a teen-pop star in her native Canada and had evolved to perform gritty, edgy, confessional alt-rock. But Morissette wasn't exactly a neophyte. In the wake of the success of Jagged Little Pill in 19, Alanis Morissette earned a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist (she lost to Hootie and the Blowfish) and an MTV Video Music Awards win for Best New Artist in a Video (she beat Jewel).
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