It was Alanis Morissette’s third album Jagged Little Pill that established her as a global music force.
It also saw the Canadian-American singer leaning more heavily on her alternative rock influences, with some star names enlisted to help out on certain tracks.
For the album’s lead single You Oughta Know, released on 10 July 1995, Morissette roped in half of the Red Hot Chili Peppers as her backing band at the suggestion of mixer Jimmy Boyle.
The Chilis in question were bass player Flea and guitarist Dave Navarro — the latter having replaced John Frusciante in 1993 and appeared on the One Hot Minute album.
You Oughta Know also featured pianist/organist Benmont Tench, a founding member of Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, and session drummer Matt Laug, who also performed with Slash’s Snakepit, Alice Cooper and now plays in AC/DC.
You Oughta Know was the song that would quickly change the 21 year-old Morissette’s life, with the right kind of talent and expertise to bring her anthem-in-the-making to full fruition.
According to Navarro: “There were no guide tracks, we just had the vocal to work from... and we basically jammed until we found something we were both happy with. Alanis was happy too.”
Flea described his contributions as “very instinctive” in a 1996 interview with Bass Player magazine. “I showed up, rocked out, and split,” he said.
“When I first heard the track, it had a different bassist and guitarist on it. I listened to the bass line and thought, ‘That’s some weak shit!’ It was no flash and no smash!
“But the vocal was strong, so I just tried to play something good.”
The song opens with Morissette and Laug setting the scene before Navarro’s tremolo-effected guitars arrive, with arpeggios built around the classic open A chord and the B chord found by moving the same shape two frets up.
During the chorus, the tremolo is disengaged and a more overdriven tone is dialled in as Navarro aggressively strums through the F#/E/A/B chord progression.
The bridge section after the second chorus alternates between a B7sus4 chord and a straight B7 before leading into the final verse and chorus.
Morissette and her producer Glen Ballard wrote the music and lyrics in October 1994. They’d been introduced in March of that year and hit it off instantly, with no shortage of creative sparks flying around to form the backbone of the album that went on to change her life.
It was, however, a period of instability for Morissette, after disappointing sales for her second full-length brought an end to her two-album deal with major label MCA Records.
But the singer and her new collaborator knew great things were on the horizon, with ideas coming through thick and fast, even — as the story goes — in the dead of night.
“On You Oughta Know it was 11 o’clock at night,” Ballard told CBC Music in 2019. “She sang it once. We were exhausted. That was it. That’s the record, that’s the vocals.
“From a vocal standpoint, no one has that much courage. Everybody wants to fix their shit. She never did. And of course it was spectacular.”
Ballard noted how there was no Auto-Tune or studio trickery to get the results heard on the final recording — simply one musician singing lyrics she’d just written after a very long day — which, for him, remains arguably one of the most impressive things about their collective achievements.
For Morissette, it was a case of sharing as much of herself as humanly possible, from the safety of the studio and under the watch of someone she deeply trusted.
“Until the crazy fame that ensued, I literally thought maybe ten people would hear this song,” she told CBC Music. “I mean, I wanted to share it with as many billions of people as I possibly could, but I was alone in a room with Glen, and it was safe for me to talk and share and write, and so I did, and it felt really liberating.”
Years later, she realised that this documentation of her own personal struggles would become a symbol of hope and inspiration for others in similar situations.
Though Morissette never revealed who the song was written about, her intentions were made perfectly clear with lyrics like “It was a slap in the face how quickly I was replaced” and “Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?”
In 1996, You Oughta Know was nominated for three Grammy awards, claiming Best Rock Song and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, but losing out to Seal’s Kiss From A Rose in the Song Of The Year category.
Since then, You Oughta Know has become a feminist anthem for the modern age, becoming hugely influential to a future generation of female singer-songwriters.
Britney Spears famously covered the track on her 2009 tour and Beyoncé incorporated parts of the song into her live set, worked into the middle of her own relationship-dissecting hit If I Were A Boy.
In 2015, Morissette teamed up with Demi Lovato on stage for a rendition of You Oughta Know at the American Music Awards, culminating in one of the most memorable and talked-about moments of the ceremony.
That same year, Taylor Swift invited Morissette to perform the single with her in Los Angeles.
Swift cited You Oughta Know as the greatest break-up song of all-time. And that was just a taste of the praise that she was about to offer, confessing how Morissette had “inspired a generation of confessional female singer-songwriters who all of the sudden felt like you could actually say these raw feelings that you had.”
She went on to explain how through songs like You Oughta Know, Morissette had given permission for female musicians to vent their anger and frustrations in ways that hadn’t been normalised in the past. As a result, the avenues of creative expression for female artists had been blown wide open.
Swift was only five years old when You Oughta Know was first released in the summer of 1995, but she said of Morissette’s lasting influence: “You could actually sing about your real life. You could put detail to it. You could get really, really mad if you wanted to.
“And I think that it is fair to say that so many of the female singer-songwriters of my generation, including myself, would not write the way we do without her and her music.”
30 years on, You Oughta Know remains arguably one of the most important songs of its era. Morissette has referred to the lead single as a journal entry from a very devastated time, one where she was ultimately forced to choose between strength and weakness.
“When I hear that song, I definitely hear the anger as a protection around the searing vulnerability,” she told Spotify, while promoting Jagged Little Pill’s 20th anniversary reissue.
“I was mortified, devastated, and it’s a lot easier — it was a lot easier — for me to be angry, and feel the power from that anger, versus the broken, horrified woman on the floor.
“I remember writing some of the lyrics and turning to Glen and saying, ‘I’ll have to change some of those,’ and he turned to me and said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Exactly, okay, thank you.’”
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