Credit: Far Out / Alanis Morissette
Sun 9 August 2026 15:00, UK
Some of my earliest and most cherished musical memories are of my mum singing along, often at the top of her lungs and always completely in the moment, to Alanis Morissette and her seminal 1995 album Jagged Little Pill.
The songs on that record are all so well-crafted, so deftly and cleverly written and are all so perfectly brought to life with a youthful, exuberant, cathartic and energetic energy, it’s no wonder that they appeal to that side of us that wants to sing along and lose ourselves in the songs, or that the album has sold over 33million copies.
It’s an album that acts as an outlet for all of our frustrations, puts words to all of our confused feelings about anybody who ever wronged us and about every injustice we’ve suffered. All this explains why the record has always meant so much to my mum and allowed her the space to sing along, even back when she was younger than I am now.
There are plenty of other songs and albums that make me think of being young and listening to music with her, as well, like Norah Jones’ wonderful Don’t Know Why, Carole King’s utterly perfect Tapestry, Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too by the New Radicals, but Jagged Little Pill will always have a special place, and especially so now that my mum and I finally got around to seeing Alanis Morissette together in concert earlier this year.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge in all of our lives since Jagged Little Pill first arrived back in 1995, and even though Morissette has since explained that anger is the emotion that drives every act, and especially every moment of her activism, when you see her in concert now, it is clear that the anger is also fuelled by something else entirely: love.
Credit: Far Out / Raph_PH
She’s angry because the people she loves aren’t all able to live the lives they deserve, because she sees so much hypocrisy, division, separation and destruction in our beautiful world of plenty, and because her love has been taken advantage of, but that won’t ever stop her from loving more, loving longer, harder, stronger and more powerfully again.
Her concert in Crystal Palace was spiritually healing and soothing. Her love, and the anger that stemmed from it to power those songs, emitted from the stage all night long and, in the process, helped energise her audience on their own searches for love, justice and fairness, whether that is on an individual scale, or in aid of something larger than ourselves. Personally speaking, it was a night to be cherished. To hear my mum singing those songs again, with Alanis Morissette singing them herself not far away from us on the stage, will be a memory that I treasure forever.
During that show, Morissette played just about everything that you would really hope that she’d sing: ‘Hand in My Pocket’, ‘Right Through You’, ‘Head Over Feet’, ‘You Learn’, ‘Smiling’, ‘Mary Jane’, ‘All I Really Want’, ‘You Oughta Know’. If I were going to be greedy, I’d have loved to hear her sing the hymnal ‘That I Would Be Good’ as well, but there was one request that was far more important to me to hear.
Before the night was out, my mum leaned in and said, “I really hope she plays ‘Thank U’”, and so from then on, when Morissette left the stage without having sung it, I hoped she’d be out for an encore before long to sing it. And it’s not just a song that is important to my mum and now me, but to Morissette herself, as well, who, when asked by Paul Lester in The Guardian to “pick a song that makes you, you”, she went with ‘Thank U’.
“I wrote it when I came back from India after the tour for Jagged Little Pill”, she said, “It was the first time that I actually had space to think and process, and I wasn’t claustrophobic and overcome and overwhelmed with too much stimuli. And I find that when I have time alone, I immediately feel grateful. So ‘Thank U’ was written from a place of stillness, and that song captures the best possible version of me. If I want to recapture that moment, I play the song, and it works every time.”
Thankfully, she did come back out and play ‘Thank U’ in the encore and, of course, it worked as well as ever.
