Author Talk: Megan Volpert on ‘Why Alanis Morissette Matters’
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Alanis Morissette’s alt-rock classic, Jagged Little Pill. We sat down with Megan Volpert, author of the engrossing new book, Why Alanis Morissette Matters, to discuss the album that sold more than 33 million copies worldwide and spawned six hit singles, including “Ironic,” “You Learn,” and “You Oughta Know.”
Megan Volpert has written numerous books on popular culture, including two Lambda Literary Award finalists and an American Library Association honoree. She is the author of Straight Into Darkness: Tom Petty as Rock Mystic, and she teaches at Kennesaw State and Reinhardt Universities.
Editor’s Note: This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Scroll to the bottom of the article to view the full video interview.
360°Sound: This book is part of the University of Texas Press series, Why (insert artist) Matters, which includes a wide range of subjects, from Patti Smith and Sinead O’Connor to the Ramones and the Beach Boys. Please start by telling us why you chose to write one on Alanis Morissette.
Megan Volpert: I love this series so much. Half the books you mentioned are books that I reviewed or read. I just really liked the feminist agenda that seems to be very clearly operating at the University of Texas Press in regard to this series. I knew I wanted to do a book for them. I might have been interested in the Ramones or Patti Smith, but they were already checked off, so I made up a short list, and Alanis was at the top of my list and also at the top of theirs.
The Jagged Little Pill album came out when I was in 10th grade. And that’s an emotional moment in the life of every young American. The album just really spoke to me in a way that no other music on the radio had. And so, it was kind of a no-brainer, to be honest.
Tell us about your memories of listening to Jagged Little Pill as a teen, and what resonated with you.
It was the sound, first and foremost. No one sounds the way Alanis sounds. And to hear that kind of powerful female vocal was news to me. And then also the words that she was saying were news to me. I just thought, “Oh, this lady speaks the truth.” The things that she says seem real and true to me.
Even though she was talking about subjects that I didn’t necessarily know anything about, like what it means to be a creative participating in the marketplace or what it means to try to be an adult. She was 19 when she was working on this album, and so we weren’t that far apart in the age that I was first listening to it and the age that she wrote it, but she was just a little more mature in terms of romance and business.
When you go back to this album 30 years later, what are some things that are revealed to you that maybe weren’t evident when you first heard it?
Well, something you can’t know when you’re 15 is how right you are when you are 15. When you don’t really have any resources and you haven’t really seen any of the world, it’s hard to be firm in your convictions. I guess most 15-year-olds are pretty fundamentalist in nature. Everything seems black and white, and so they act very certain of themselves, but they don’t know deep, deep down.
Now, in my early 40s, I have to say, looking back on my 15-year-old self, she really was equipped with everything that she needed, as far as truth telling and authenticity and self-awareness. It was all there at the time.
You write that “You Learn,” the second single, is the theme and anchoring message of the album. Tell us why that is.
Yeah, I didn’t know that at 15. It’s more subdued than a lot of the other tracks. What really flipped the switch for me was going to see the Broadway musical, Jagged Little Pill, in New York. My wife and I were lucky enough to go and see it, like six weeks before COVID shut down all of Broadway. It was amazing. “You live, you learn” is really the anchor to the musical.
And so, then I dug into things that Alanis had said about working on that show and things that the director had said that Diablo Cody, who wrote the book for the musical, had said. Everybody was just super clear that the real message of Jagged Little Pill is that you live and that’s how you learn. Seeing its position front and center in the resolution of the conflicts in the show caused me to really approach it with a fresh ear when I was looking back on analysis of the album.
My personal favorite of the singles is “Head over Feet.” You write that it’s the only love song on the album and that it gave you the lasting impression that Morissette was queer. Please expound on that.
That chapter in the book speaks to a number of ways that, over time, she’s pretty consistently, or even constantly, demonstrated her allyship to my community, starting with the lyrics to the song. She doesn’t use any particular pronouns, which is a time-honored trick amongst musicians who are still in the closet. But also, it just left me free as a listener to imagine who I was as the speaker and who I would be speaking to with these particular song lyrics. There’s a freedom there that’s not locked into some heteronormative assumption on the part of the songwriter.
But when going back to look at her videos, now that I’ve taught a couple of Film Studies classes and taken a whole bunch of Film Studies classes in graduate school, I can say there’s some definite use of techniques in those – the multiplicity of personas starting with Jagged Little Pill, but even in subsequent records and music videos that she’s done for those, like showing multiple versions of herself, all acting as sort of different sides of herself or different elements of her personality.
The way that she makes eye contact with the camera, sometimes there’s a real campiness and silliness to it, a self-awareness to it, and just a lot of the techniques that she uses are deliberately leaving space. And then there’s also the way that she has changed some lines over time in a sort of jokey way. In “Ironic,” for example, she’ll say, “meeting the man of my dreams and then meeting his beautiful husband.” That’s not on the album, but fans go wild at shows when she says that.
And so, they stuck it in the in the musical version, and she does that all the time now, and she loves it. She says that that is also true to her experience, falling in love with gay men. And so, she knows that we’re out there in her audience, and she appreciates us and respects us enough to give us the space.
What do you hope readers take away from your book?
The 30th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill is coming up in June, and of course, we should celebrate an album as important as that. But also, she has this whole body of work for the past 30 years that she’s been cranking out.
She’s not retiring anytime soon from any of her creative or intellectual pursuits, and so we should continue to pay attention because a lot of us missed a lot of things for the last 30 years. We should go back and scope out what it is that we missed. Because, you know, our love of that album should go a little more distance, as far as our attention span for her subsequent work.
Why Alanis Morissette Matters is out now on University of Texas Press. Order it here.
