About Alanis Morissette
Alanis Nadine Morissette is a Canadian and American singer, songwriter, and musician. She began her music career in Canada in the early 1990s with two dance-pop albums. In 1995, she released the alternative rock album Jagged Little Pill, which sold more than 33 million copies globally and propelled her to become a cultural phenomenon. Morissette won the 1996 Grammy Award for Album of the Year among other accolades, and the album was adapted into a 2018 rock musical. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has Jagged Little Pill on their 200 Definitive Albums list, and it appeared on various editions of Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" guide. Its lead single, "You Oughta Know", was also included on Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list.
Morissette followed up with the highly anticipated experimental album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie . Her fifth album, Under Rug Swept , marked the first time Morissette was the sole producer of an entire album. Taking further creative control and production duties, Morissette continued her career with subsequent studio albums, including So-Called Chaos , Flavors of Entanglement , Havoc and Bright Lights , Such Pretty Forks in the Road , and The Storm Before the Calm . Her first three internationally released studio albums topped the Billboard 200 albums chart, and her next four albums peaked within the Top 20.
Morissette has sold more than 75 million records worldwide. She has won a Brit Award, seven Grammy Awards, fourteen Juno Awards, and has been nominated for two Golden Globe Awards and a Tony Award. Her singles "You Oughta Know", "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn", "Head Over Feet", "Uninvited", "Thank U", and "Hands Clean", reached top 40 in major charts around the world. She also holds the record for the most No. 1s on the weekly Billboard Alternative Songs chart among female soloists, group leaders, or duo members. Rolling Stone described her as the "queen of alt-rock angst", and VH1 ranked her the 53rd-greatest woman in rock and roll. In 2005, she was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.
Alanis Nadine Morissette was born on June 1, 1974, at Riverside Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada,: 4 the daughter of Georgia Mary Ann and Alan Richard Morissette. Her older brother, Chad , is an entrepreneur, and her twin brother, Wade , is a musician. Their father is of French and Irish descent, while their mother, who fled Hungary in 1956 due to the failed anti-Soviet uprising, has Jewish ancestry; on a 2024 episode of Finding Your Roots, Morissette stated that her parents had never told the siblings about their Jewish ancestry, which she did not discover until her late 20s.
In 1977, the family moved to Lahr in what was then West Germany, where Morissette's parents started working as teachers at the local CAF base. They returned to Ottawa in 1980, and Morissette began taking dance lessons the next year. Morissette had a Catholic upbringing. She attended Holy Family Catholic School for elementary school and Immaculata High School for seventh and eighth grades; she appeared on the children's television sketch comedy You Can't Do That on Television for five episodes while attending the former. Morissette then attended and graduated from Glebe Collegiate Institute.
Morissette is known for her emotive mezzo-soprano voice and confessional songwriting. She recorded her first demo called "Fate Stay with Me", produced by Lindsay Thomas Morgan at Marigold Studios in Toronto, and engineered by Rich Dodson of Canadian classic rock band The Stampeders. A second demo tape was recorded on cassette in August 1989 and sent to Geffen Records, but the tape has never been heard as it was stolen, among other records, in a burglary of the label's headquarters in October 1989.
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