Glen Ballard, Alanis Morissette, Guy Oseary & more looking back at one of the best albums of All-Time, it´s an amazing read, here some highlights but the whole article is amazing
Morissette: I really was dying to go to Hollywood. But I knew that if I went from Ottawa straight to Hollywood it just would've been too big of a cultural change for me. So I spent about a year or so in Toronto, and then I was dropped by MCA. And so I just kept writing. I was a workaholic then, I'm a recovering workaholic now. I was just writing day and night — I have calendars from that period of time where I have a writing session in the morning and a writing session at night, seven days a week, Saturdays and Sundays, and that's all I did.
Morissette: A lot of other people that I'd been put together with to collaborate had their own agenda. Especially in Canada, understandably. They'd known me as a teenage artist. So everyone had an agenda often when I would go into the studio with them, whereas Glen had no agenda. His begged question for me was, “Who are you? What do you wanna write about? What's going on with you?”
Ballard: On “You Oughta Know” it was 11 o’clock at night, she sang it once. We were exhausted. That was it. That's the record, that's the vocals. From a vocal standpoint, no one has that much courage. Everybody wants to fix their ****, she never did. She never did... all those vocals are just her at the end of the night, singing something she just wrote.
Morissette: I literally thought maybe 10 people would hear this song. I didn't think anyone would really hear it. It was only later that I realized that my own personal intimate experiences were things that people related to or were inspired by or comforted by. That came much later.
Ballard: I think the biggest thing is that she wasn't on a record label, and we weren't really trying to write something for the radio or for an A&R guy or whatever, we were just writing songs and I think that’s the best thing that could've happened, because I think she was much too original. She didn't want to copy anything, I mean that wasn't in her. And so it was the least derivative thing I've ever done, it was literally just whatever we wanted to do we started doing.
Ballard: What astonished me was that she was writing stuff in real time. I mean “Perfect” she wrote right in front of me, and the whole concept of a child, sort of the pressure that a child feels from their parents. I mean, we weren't even writing that song, she wasn't thinking about it, it just kind of jumped into her brain.
Ballard: Every now and then, when something like that happens, it can't be stopped. And this couldn’t be stopped. Lord knows, I tell you, at the end of 1994, right at Christmas, I was deeply depressed. We had all these songs. Alanis had to go back to Canada, and no one had signed it. I actually didn't know if I was actually going to see her again.
Ballard: [We shopped it to] all the major record companies. Every single one. Every one. Interscope almost signed it, Atlantic, there was this guy at Atlantic named Steve Greenberg who loved it, he couldn't get his bosses to sign it. Warner Brothers passed
Morissette: I was in the studio writing "All I Really Want" with Glen in my sweatpants [laughs] and we got a call from Ken Hertz, who was a partner of one of the lawyers I was working with. He said, “You've gotta come with me right now, meet me at Maverick.” And I said, “I can't, I'm wearing my sweatpants.” [Laughs] And he said, “Too bad, I don't care, get in the car.” So Glen and I were laughing and we just got in the car and I was like all right, well this is zero presentation, I'm not coming in with my stilettos and my special makeup or anything.
Oseary: They both walked into my office, I didn't know if they were a band, actually. I didn't know anything, really — when I saw Glen I didn't have background, I didn't know Alanis's background. I didn't know anything about them. The first song they played me was the demo of "Perfect." Within, I don't know, 20 or 30 seconds into the song, I was done. I was already blown away and never heard anything like it and wanted to sign her. That was really it, for me.
Morissette: Guy was maybe two or three years older than me at the time. We played him “Perfect” and “You Oughta Know” and “Hand in My Pocket” and he was completely freaking out.
Ballard: It's a sweet vindication when a small label like Maverick and a young genius like Guy Oseary hears one song and wants to sign it. I mean, after everybody had heard all of it and passed.
Morissette: I think there was something to be said for the fact that [Guy] was my age, right? He was my generation and so those lyrics resonated with him in a way that perhaps a 54-year-old at the time didn't get. They were scared of me [laughs]. But the people who were younger were high-fiving me.
Ballard: There was a sense, especially with Alanis, and I think with Guy, to try and not overproduce it. I mean my instinct was like OK we'll recut everything but boy, that would've been the wrong thing. Because I just looked at it as demos, you know? "My little demos."
Morissette: I think [Warner] thought it was a little too caustic, and they were just afraid of how intense it was, to be honest. And I said, “Well, I'm 19 and I'm intense.” [Laughs] If you want a Steely Dan record, why don't you go sign a Steely Dan band? Because I'm 19 and I have some intensity, so you just may have signed the wrong person.
Ballard: Of course I know that it moved a lot of people, and I'm still astonished by how many people were touched by that record. Over 30 million people went out and bought it. These days, you can't even imagine it.
Halket: She was an MTV artist. She was a MuchMusic artist certainly, but it was MTV Awards, it was all of the video outlets, everything. VH1. Everything was all about Alanis. She was the artist.
She was Justin Bieber then, without the Internet.
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