The phenomenal success of Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill came at a price. The intensity of her newfound fame and the never-ending list of commitments that came along with it left her with post-traumatic stress disorder.
At the end of an exhausting 18-month worldwide tour, which ended in December 1996, she travelled to India with her mother Georgia, two aunts and two friends with the hope of healing herself, using it as an opportunity to escape the pressures of superstardom.
The trip inspired much of her fourth album, 1998’s Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, which explores themes of personal growth, inner spirituality and soul searching.
And these themes are at the heart of that album’s lead single, a song named simply Thank U.
In the song’s chorus, Morissette gives thanks to India for mending her – resolving some of the issues that drove her there in the first place, such as disillusionment and frailty. And in the final line of that chorus, she thanks the silence that granted her sanctuary and refuge from the chaos of life in the limelight.
“I thought that fame and success would solve your problems, that there would be a sense of peace or self-esteem raised by having all this external success,” Morissette told the Los Angeles Times in 1998.
In another interview with MTV she spoke of how she had “never stopped” or “taken a long breath” in her “whole life”, which is why she took an 18-month break to focus on herself.
She added: “When I did stop and I was silent and I breathed… I was just left with an immense amount of gratitude, and inspiration, and love, and bliss, and that’s where the song came from.”
These feelings are reflected in the lyrics: “The moment I jumped off of it was the moment I touched down… How ’bout remembering your divinity, how ’bout unabashedly bawling your eyes out.”
More philosophical musings were given in a 1999 episode of VH1 Storytellers, where Morissette explained: “I lived in a culture that told me that I had to consistently and constantly look outside myself to feel this elusive bliss.”
To put it more bluntly, she revealed: “I achieved a lot of what society had told me to achieve and I still didn't feel peaceful.”
As a result of that, she started “questioning everything” and “realised that actually everything was an illusion” – which was a scary experience because everything she was believed in was “dissolving” before her eyes.
She likened this newfound enlightenment to “a death of sorts, a really beautiful one ultimately, but at first a very scary one”.
The break from the industry and music in general led to what she described as “a huge sense of compassion for myself first, and then naturally that translated into my feeling and compassion for everyone around me”.
Thank U essentially served as a vehicle “to express how exciting this was and how scary it was” at the same time.
The song was written and produced by Morissette and Glen Ballard, who co-wrote and produced Jagged Little Pill. Ballard can be heard performing guitar and keys on the recording.
The guitars are buried towards the back of the mix and come in during the choruses and middle eight, based around a D-chord shape on the seventh and eight frets of the high E, B and G-strings.
It’s either played as a straight G Major chord, or changed to a Gsus4 by moving up one fret on the high E, as well as a G7sus by moving up three frets on the G-string. At the end of the song, Ballard strums a G5/D chord.
Thank U is in the key of C Major and a 4/4 time signature at around 92 beats per minute, which sits at the lower end of mid-tempo.
The music video was directed by Stéphane Sednaoui, who had previously worked with Morissette on the Ironic video.
The video for Thank U features the singer walking around in public places completely nude with her private parts either covered or blurred out.
“We were on the streets of downtown LA two nights in a row,” Morissette told Q Magazine in 1999. “It was pretty cold. We had to use a little bit of latex so I wouldn’t get arrested because apparently if you’re fully naked on the street anywhere in America... jail.”
She chose to be naked because she was wanted “to express where the song came from, which was to be really empowered by being vulnerable and not being apologetic”.
The idea for the shoot came to her in the shower, because of how well literal nakedness tied in with the aspects of simplicity and vulnerability explored in the song's lyrics. She wanted the focus to be “less about overt sexuality and more about the symbolism of being really raw and naked and intimate in all these environments where you’d seemingly need protection, like in a subway and those kinds of places.”
Thank U ended up becoming Morissette’s fifth No.1 single in her native Canada, while also denting the Top 10 in various charts around the world.
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