Cover Story: The Adventures of Miss Thing

As you might gather from listening to MJagged Little Pill's "Forgiven," some of Morissette's revelations involved her feelings about sexuality and spirituality. She went to church every Sunday while growing up and attended a Roman Catholic school. "Then I rejected the whole concept of organized religion," says Morissette. "Still do. But now when I'm onstage, it's very spiritual. I feel very close to God when I'm up there."

Morissette says that part of her problem with the Roman Catholic church is its sexual repression. In "You Oughta Know" she describes herself as "perverted." Today she simply describes herself as being "a very sexual person." "I was active and physically doing the things that were sexual when I was younger," she says. "There was one side of me that was crazy and deviant, doing things ahead of my time, and another side that was very held back, wanting to remain virginal for the sake of being the good white Catholic girl."

These sorts of tensions led the overachieving Morissette to a few episodes she characterizes as breakdowns. "I had a few," she says. "That sort of comes from a passive-aggressive approach. From the time I was 10, I was working with all these people trying to control me and tell me what they thought I should be and what I should look like. And I tried to control myself to be what they wanted me to be." Morissette says drugs were never a problem for her "because my getting into drug would have meant that I wasn't perfect."

In an attempt to find more fulfillment musically and perhaps even grow up a little, Morissette moved to Toronto after graduating from high school at 17. "The idea was to let her live on her own and see what's life's about," says Scott Welch, who became her manager around that time. Morissette calls these "a couple of the most growthful years for me." Creatively, however, she searched with little luck for the right musical collaborator.

Eventually, Morissette found free artistic expression in a most unlikely location: Los Angeles. "It was a sort of baptism by fire when I got there," she says. "I was held up at gunpoint in Hollywood when I first moved here. Still, despite all the negatives, it was like in 'Hand in My Pocket': I was broke, but I was happy."

Professionally, Morissette went on about 10 bad "blind dates" with various songwriting pros and in the process "learned only what I didn't want to do." Things turned around in February '94 when she knocked on Glen Ballard's front door. A onetime protege of Quincy Jones, Ballard co-wrote Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror" and has worked with everyone from Evelyn "Champagne" King to David Hasselhoff.

The two hit it off famously. Both had gone the safe commercial route before and were anxious to try something more adventurous. "Glen had a certain history, as I had, and when we met, we immediately connected," Morissette says. "We just started with a clean slate."

"What struck me about Alanis was that she was so incredibly self-possessed," Ballard says. "I just connected with her as a person, and, almost parenthetically, it was like 'Wow, you're 19?' She was so intelligent and ready to take a chance on doing something that might have no commercial application. Although there was some question about what she wanted to do musically, she knew what she didn't want to do, which was anything that wasn't authentic and from her heart."

Feeling safe in the nurturing environment of Ballard's home studio, Morissette's creative floodgates opened. "It was the most spiritual experience either of us ever had with music," she says. "The whole thing was very accelerated and stream of consciousness.

"The record is my story," Morissette says. "I think of the album as running over the different facets of my personality, one of them being my sexual self. To isolate 'You Oughta Know' is a misrepresentation of the whole story. By no means is this record just a sexual, angry record. That song wasn't written for the sake of revenge, it was written for the sake of release. I'm actually a pretty rational, calm person."

Despite her youth, Morissette says the songs on Jagged Little Pill are based on numerous relationships. "Yeah, I've met a lot of people and done a lot of things," she says matter-of-factly.

The album title comes from a lyric in "You Learn," which for Morissette expresses the idea that "a lot of times when you're immersed in something painful, you don't realize there's any lesson. A lot of what I wrote about was difficult times from which I walked away a better person."

Much of Jagged Little Pill was recorded with only Morissette and multi-instrumentalist Ballard in the studio. She wrote all the lyrics and worked out musical ideas with Ballard. Only later did some of the other musicians on the album — keyboardist Benmont Tench and the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea and Dave Navarro — add overdubs. "We'd literally write and record a song in a day," says Ballard. "That process was so much a factor in us capturing the moment."

Confident they were onto something special, Ballard sent a tape of some of the early songs to a friend at Atlantic. Although a full-out bidding war never materialized, a couple of companies expressed interest. "The process was difficult for me," says Morissette. "Since I was 14, I've spent a lot of time with people focused on everything except the music. For me this was not about money or getting patted on the back. I met with some people who'd tell me, 'Why don't you change this lyric, and the kids will respond more.' And I'd say, 'I didn't write it for them. I wrote it for me.'"

Finally, Morissette found a new corporate home shortly after she and Ballard took a meeting with Maverick's A&R executive Guy Oseary, who heard "You Oughta Know" and "Perfect" and went straight to his colleagues Freddy DeMann and Abbey Konowitch. After seeing Morissette sing a few songs live in Ballard's studio, Oseary signed her late last year.