When most people go to the cinema they like to take something to nibble. Popcorn and sweets are generally the favourite, but when Alanis Morissette went she preferred something else and felt the need to tell us about it in a song. She said at the time, “I was a little worried about putting that incident into a song but I don’t believe in censoring anything, so I used it, it was something I had to do.” If you don’t already know what the incident was, read on. If you do, well I hope you enjoy, so to speak.
A previous song I have written about is You’re So Vain where Carly Simon never wanted to reveal the subject of her song and, despite it having an angry message, she has been tactful enough to not reveal the name and once said she never will say who it’s about.
Morissette, who was born in 1974 in Canada’s capital, Ottawa, recorded a couple of demo songs in the late eighties and one was sent to Geffen records, but a burglary had taken place and the tape, among many other items were stolen and the demo was never heard. In 1991, she recorded her debut album, Alanis, signed a deal with Hot Mustard records and the following year released her second album Now Is the Time in which she wrote or co-wrote all the tracks. They didn’t sell very well and her and the label parted company. She then moved to Toronto and after that to Los Angeles where she was introduced to the songwriter and producer Glen Ballard who recognised her talent and agreed to let her use his studio. He recalled how they got together, “A young publisher named Kurt Dinney, who was at MCA Music Publishing, and was working in the L.A. office, called me and said that he had a writer coming in town from Canada and he had thought of me to write with her and that’s how it all started. It ended up that was Alanis Morissette.”
Ballard had written songs for George Benson (What’s On Your Mind), Randy Crawford (Nightline), Michael Jackson (Man In the Mirror), Wilson Phillips (Hold On) and Curtis Stigers (I Wonder Why) and offered to write with Alanis. In 1995, they got to work on Jagged Little Pill and later the same year signed a deal with Maverick records which was run my Madonna.
The first single released from it was You Oughta Know with words that came originally from a diary entry Alanis had written and later recalled it being, “a very devastated time.” In an interview with Spotify she revealed, “When I hear that song, I hear the anger as a protection around the searing vulnerability. I was mortified and devastated. 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.”
The song’s opening lines give you feeling that she’s happy and has come to terms with a recent split, ‘I want you to know, that I am happy for you, I wish nothing but the best for you both’ but that soon changes into a tirade of heartbreak and raw emotion. The next lines, ‘An older version of me, is she perverted like me? Would she go down on you in a theatre?’ And that’s the incident.
The man is allegedly David Coulier the American actor and stand-up comedian and when they dated in 1992, Alanis was 17 and David was around 33 and that is referenced in the line, ‘An older version of me’. Coulier remembered his thoughts when he first heard the song, “I’m driving in Detroit, and I’ve got my radio on, I hear the hook for You Oughta Know come on the radio, and I’m like, ‘Wow, this is a really cool hook,’ and then I hear the voice and I’m like, ‘Wow, this girl can sing.’ And I had no idea that this was the record. And I’m listening to the lyrics going and thinking ‘I can’t be this guy.'” In an interview with CBC, Coulier continued, “I went to the record store, bought the CD, and I went and I parked on a street and I listened to the whole record. There was a lot of familiar stuff in there that her and I had talked about, like, ‘Your shake is like a fish.’ I’d go, ‘Hey, dead fish me.’ And we’d do this dead fish handshake. I thought, ‘I think I may have really hurt this woman.'”
Talking about the incident in an interview with Michael Heatley, Alanis said, “I did that, it’s true. I went right down on him in a movie theater. It was something I had to do and the whole album came from a place inside of me. But it all boils down to the facts that I want to walk through life, not get dragged through it.”
In an another interview with Songfacts, Ballard gave his thoughts on the project and working with Alanis, “The most wonderful thing for me as a writer is to hear someone’s voice in the room, and she was constantly auditioning how to do it, so at the end of the night on You Oughta Know, we had a track, and she just went out and sang it one time, and since I was the engineer too, I was hoping I’d got it. It’s not the best recorded vocal in the world – some of it is too hot – but that’s the only time she ever sang it in the studio. Even when we were getting ready to put the record out, all those vocals were the original vocals.”
Alanis and Glen managed to persuade guitarist Dave Navarro and bassist Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to appear on the track as well a former Heartbreakers organist Benmont Tench. In the UK it peaked at number 11 and number four in the US. It was nominated for three Grammy’s of which it won two for Best Rock Song and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance but lost out to Seal’s Kiss From A Rose in the Song of the Year category. VH1, however, did rank it at number 12 in their 100 Greatest Songs of the 90’s category.
The saying ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ originated in 1697 by English playwright William Congreve in his tragedy The Mourning Bride, it goes without saying that just over 300 years later, it’s now set in stone in an audio version of it.