Alanis Morissette: The Industry Loved Jagged Little Pill Because ‘Women Make Us Money Now’

Alanis Morissette isn’t sentimental about the embrace Jagged Little Pill received. In a new interview with The Sunday Times, she offers a sharp corrective to the idea that the industry suddenly valued female artistry. “Let’s get clear,” she says, “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.’” At 21, she was often the only woman in those rooms.

The album, which turned 30 this year, shifted 33 million copies and set a template for blunt, diaristic songwriting. But Morissette describes the environment as one where support was largely a reflection of profit, not principle. Her own scaffolding, she says, was “cardboard and water.”

Now, she acts quietly as a mentor to younger artists—some emerging from a conversation with “a pep in their step,” others leaning in for something steadier. She sees some structural improvement. “There’s more scaffolding,” she notes, though the comparison to her own early years is deliberately modest.

Morissette, recently inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, is about to tour the UK. The Jagged Little Pill songs will inevitably dominate. She wrote the lyrics as a teenager, the words arriving in what she calls a “visceral, urgent, intense” rush. Songwriting, she adds, remains a non-negotiable: “There’s this existential imperative in me. Like, I can’t not do it.” The compulsion survives long after the industry’s original business case.