So the great thing about Alanis Morissette is if you kept listening post-Jagged Little Pill, you got to listen to her grow up. Her anger has lost its edge if not its depth, but she hasn’t lost her vulnerability or that feeling of searching.
Nearly ten years after You Oughta Know, she released This Grudge, a song that way fewer people haveheard. I like to believe both songs are about the same guy, and that Alanis has forgiven him for herself, as she’s grown wise to the destructive nature of holding on to her anger.
As she writes of the grudge she’s held for “fourteen years, thirty minutes, fifteen minutes”:
But who’s it hurting now?
Who’s the one that’s stuck?
Who’s it torturing now
With an antique knot in her stomach?
Wise words from the woman Rolling Stone once called “one of the Nineties’ most brutally honest voices.”