Alanis Morissette Reflects on 'Jagged Little Pill' 20 Years Later

The Canadian-born singer reveals her favorite song from the album.

ByABC News
November 2, 2015, 10:10 AM

— -- Alanis Morissette’s monster hit album, “Jagged Little Pill,” was released in 1995, a year when Bill Clinton was president, O.J. Simpson was acquitted and Windows 95 had just been introduced to computer users everywhere.

Now, 20 years and 33 million albums sold later, Morissette is re-releasing the multi-Grammy-winning album with a few surprises.

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Included in “Jagged Little Pill: Collector’s Edition” are 10 bonus tracks that Morissette, 41, said had been kept “in the archive vault.”

“So these were songs that we were writing leading up to ‘Jagged Little Pill’ and I thought it’d be fun to share them,” Morissette said today on “Good Morning America.” “They’ve been in the archive vault for a while.”

The album spawned pop culture anthems like “You Oughta Know,” “Ironic” and “Hand In My Pocket,” but Morissette says it was another song, “Perfect,” that was her favorite.

“It still brings a tear to my eye,” Morissette said of the song that ends with the lyrics, “We'll love you just the way you are … if you're perfect.”

Morissette is now the mother of a 4-year-old son, Ever, with her husband, the rapper Mario “Souleye” Treadway. She is writing a book and is the host of a podcast "Conversations with Alanis Morissette," available on iTunes.

The Canadian-born artist says she believes it was the passion and emotion in her songs on “Jagged Little Pill” that made it the smash success it was.

“It was a wave of people wanting to hear what was going on in the underbelly, in the underneath of the presentational,” Morissette said on “GMA.” “As a Canadian [I was] very polite but underneath it was this boiling, all the emotions, like anger and sadness and shame, all these things I wasn’t allowed to feel, they came out when art was being written.”

One of the album’s most emotional songs, “You Oughta Know,” has been in the headlines for years with theories about which of Morissette’s former boyfriends – “Full House” star Dave Coulier included – the revenge-filled song could be about.

Morissette says she’s “so sorry” but the song is just a fantasy about revenge, not real-life.

“I wrote that for the sake of having fantasy revenge versus actual revenge,” Morissette said. “So if it had been actual revenge I would have said names and addresses and phone numbers but it was about entertaining the fantasy of it, not acting it out.

“I’m not a fan of the acting out of the revenge situation.”