Fabulous Friday: Alanis Morissette

I've asked my friend Jori Hume to write a few Fabulous Fridays in the Rock and Roll Woman series. Jori is a friend from high school, without a doubt the coolest person ever to attend Delavan-Darien High School. I was about to write "ever to graduate from" but I bet there are some cool people who were dropouts! Jori is cooler than any of them.

I'll hand the baton to Jori:

Do you remember the first time you heard “You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morissette?

Picture it: Kansas City. Summer, 1995. A young, 20-something (me), driving to work in a 1984 Corolla - after dropping off the husband and baby. Struggling, newly-married, career woman and first-time mother of an infant. Forging a career path (plus marriage and motherhood), overworked, broke, far from home, in a male-dominated industry, harboring naïve beliefs about hard work, and misplaced faith in meritocracy.

It felt like I was the star of an acrobatic plate spinning act on LIVE tv, a la Ed Sullivan (Do they spin plates on America’s Got Talent? IDK.).

A song started spilling out of the radio - at first, background to our morning banter, but it quickly jumped to the foreground. We stopped talking to listen.

Some badass woman, rocking fresh, honest, bawdy lyrics; demanding to be seen and heard. A new sound. Raw emotion. Pain, truth, anger. Borderline psychotic. It spoke to me on a cellular level. My whole body started paying attention. It felt like she was having a meltdown so I didn’t have to.

I turned up the radio. “What is this?! Do you know? I must know who this is.”

My husband worked at an audio studio – there had to be someone in there who knew who this was. I asked everyone. They did not.

That year, the fabulous hits kept coming from Canadian-American Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” album. Her third studio album (first to be released worldwide) made it to no. 1 on the U.S. Album Charts by October. It was nominated for nine Grammys, winning five.

It was brilliant, cathartic, and healing.

Her releases were, quite literally, my releases. Yelling in the car to those songs - it was exactly what I needed to keep my energy up, cup full, and those damn plates spinning.