The Story Behind The Song: ‘Ironic’ by Alanis Morissette
An exploration of situational irony set to hooky mid-1990s melodies, Alanis Morrisette’s ‘Ironic’ has been a source of comfort and bemusement ever since 1996. For now, we’ll dodge the question of whether the lyrics to this much fought-over single are indeed “ironic” and instead trace its journey from fleeting observation to era-defining single. This is the story behind ‘Ironic’ By Alanis Morissette.
By the time Jagged Little Pill came along, Morissette had already released ‘You Oughta Know’, which garnered substantial airplay in the US, and its happy-go-lucky successor ‘Hand In My Pocket’, which was released a few months later and worked wonders on MTV. Sadly, neither was available to buy in stores, keeping them off the Billboard Hot 100.
Like all of the songs on Jagged Little Pill, ‘Ironic’ was written with help from producer Glen Ballard, who Alanis met in March 1994 when she relocated to Los Angeles from Canada in an effort reinvent herself as a solo singer-songwriter, having already released two albums of teen dance pop in Canada. Together they wrote 20 songs in as many sessions, 12 of which made it onto the album. Composed on May 26th, ‘Ironic’ was one of the earliest songs they completed. During Morissette’s Spotify Landmark session, Ballard picks up the story: “Our process began with lunch at Emilio’s trattoria over chopped salads and iced T. I recall her saying something like, ‘Wouldn’t it be ironic for an old man to win the lottery and die the next day?’ We were fresh with this thought when we walked into the studio ten minutes later. This was the beginning of the true magic between us.”
The pair spent the next hour or so trying to make each other laugh by imagining increasingly improbable situations. By the end of the session they weren’t even trying to come up with ironies, which is perhaps why so many of the supposedly ironic situations described in the song have been labelled as flawed examples of irony. “I’ve had my ass kicked for 20 years about it being a malapropism,” Alanis said. “I think people had a lot of issues with perhaps my stupidity or Glen’s and my lack of caring about being perfect. I see words as paint, so I play with them. I use words all the time that don’t exist in the dictionary, so for us it was just making each other laugh and making each other think and feel. After ‘Ironic’ I started writing songs very autobiographically and lyrically on my own.”
The third single from Jagged Little Pill, ‘Ironic’, provided an even greater boost of interest in Morrissette’s debut solo album, helping drive the astonishing five million US sales it earned by January 1996. On release, it topped the charts in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway, reaching number four in the US on April 13th, 1996. However, following the attack on the Twin Towers in September 2001, its lyrics were deemed inappropriate by the American mass media company Clear Channel Communications and was subsequently banned from broadcasts. It has since returned to the airwaves and remains one of the most popular songs from Morissette’s discography.
