Morissette laid down each and every song on the record in one or two takes. Actually, Jagged Little Pill is essentially a demo. In other words, it sounds like a demo, a simple, if not raw, collection of songs demonstrating proof of concept. In the waning days of grunge, with its fuzzy, down-tuned guitars and mumbly male singers, here came a record full of tracks showcasing a woman with huge vocal and emotional range, and backed up by little more than some light electric guitars, keyboards, and a drum machine. In spite of not sounding like anything else going on in mainstream music at the time - or perhaps because of that - Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill became a blockbuster hit and cultural phenomenon in the mid-1990s. MCA Records actually dropped her at that point. The follow-up, 1992's Now Is The Time proved it wasn't the time for Morissette, moving only half as many units as Alanis. Her 1991 debut, Alanis, peaked at a middling #28 on the Canadian album chart and sold 100,000 copies. She released a total of eight singles in that era, and none made the top 10. Morissette was never a superstar during her Canadian dance-pop days. Conventional wisdom held that Morissette was just as successful (at least in Canada) as those predecessors, but that was an inaccurate assumption. Clips of a big-haired Morissette performing songs like 'Too Hot" surfaced, earning her comparisons to Tiffany and Debbie Gibson. The official line was that she'd been a teen-pop star in her native Canada and had evolved to perform gritty, edgy, confessional alt-rock. But Morissette wasn't exactly a neophyte. In the wake of the success of Jagged Little Pill in 19, Alanis Morissette earned a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist (she lost to Hootie and the Blowfish) and an MTV Video Music Awards win for Best New Artist in a Video (she beat Jewel).
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