"I remember thinking during those times that I wanted to write in a way where there are no rules"
About this Quote
The line crystallizes a pivot from pleasing an industry to honoring an inner compass. Alanis Morissette had come through the machinery of early-90s teen pop in Canada and felt the constraints of tidy structures and agreeable personas. Wanting to write where there are no rules names a decision to stop shaping songs to external prescriptions and let intuition, feeling, and language erupt in their own contours. That ethos fueled her breakthrough with Jagged Little Pill: a blend of confession, fury, wit, and vulnerability that ignored the tidy symmetry of verse-chorus-bridge when emotion demanded a jagged path.
No rules did not mean chaos; it meant a different authority. In sessions with Glen Ballard, she freewrote lyrics, improvised melodies, and often kept first-take vocals, preserving cracks, breath, and sudden turns. The songs bend meter, cram multisyllabic phrases into hooks, and veer from whisper to howl. Conversational asides, rhetorical questions, and unexpected images created a diaristic immediacy rare in mainstream radio. That rawness clashed with gendered expectations that female artists be pleasant and polished. By allowing anger, sexual candor, and spiritual searching to sit side by side, she asserted a right to complexity without apology.
There is a paradox here: to discard rules you first learn them, then refuse their tyranny. Morissette still prized melody, momentum, and incisive phrasing; the craft did not vanish, it served emotion rather than formula. The studio became a safe container where spontaneity could be caught rather than sanded down by A&R feedback loops. That choice resonated culturally in the mid-90s, when alternative rock and confessional songwriting were pushing against glossy pop veneers. It also opened a lane for later artists who treat pop as a vessel for unfiltered selfhood.
Ultimately, the statement is an artistic ethic and a personal boundary. It describes a commitment to honesty over acceptability, to discovery over compliance, and to the belief that songs live most vividly when they grow in the shape of the truth that birthed them.
No rules did not mean chaos; it meant a different authority. In sessions with Glen Ballard, she freewrote lyrics, improvised melodies, and often kept first-take vocals, preserving cracks, breath, and sudden turns. The songs bend meter, cram multisyllabic phrases into hooks, and veer from whisper to howl. Conversational asides, rhetorical questions, and unexpected images created a diaristic immediacy rare in mainstream radio. That rawness clashed with gendered expectations that female artists be pleasant and polished. By allowing anger, sexual candor, and spiritual searching to sit side by side, she asserted a right to complexity without apology.
There is a paradox here: to discard rules you first learn them, then refuse their tyranny. Morissette still prized melody, momentum, and incisive phrasing; the craft did not vanish, it served emotion rather than formula. The studio became a safe container where spontaneity could be caught rather than sanded down by A&R feedback loops. That choice resonated culturally in the mid-90s, when alternative rock and confessional songwriting were pushing against glossy pop veneers. It also opened a lane for later artists who treat pop as a vessel for unfiltered selfhood.
Ultimately, the statement is an artistic ethic and a personal boundary. It describes a commitment to honesty over acceptability, to discovery over compliance, and to the belief that songs live most vividly when they grow in the shape of the truth that birthed them.
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| Topic | Writing |
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