“I didn’t want to put that number on the record.” “Ironic” became her biggest hit and curse

“Ironic” is a song about the fact that in life there are often perverse coincidences and even if we are lucky with something, something unlucky can happen soon. The idea for the song was born when Alanis Morrisette met music producer Glen Ballard for dinner. The singer at one point thought: “Wouldn’t it be ironic if an old man won the lottery and died the next day?” 10 minutes later, they entered the recording studio and started composing songs, and this line ended up in the song. In total, Morissette and Ballard wrote 20 songs, and only 12 of them ended up on the Jagged Little Pill album.

Alanis Morissette didn’t want to put “Ironic” on her album

“Jagged Little Pill” was released in 1996 and was not really the Canadian singer’s debut. Alanis Morrisette previously released two dance-pop albums in Canada. However, she decided that she had a different idea for herself and prefers more rock sounds. To make a change in her image, she moved to Los Angeles, and it was there in March 1994 that she met Ballard. “Ironic” was one of the first songs they composed together, and the singer herself treated it a bit like a warm-up and material that would make it easier for them to compose better materials together.

Ballard, on Spotify’s “Landmark” show, recalled that they spent about an hour in the studio that day making themselves laugh by coming up with increasingly implausible situations. At the end of the session, they didn’t even try to find examples of ironic cases. This ultimately led to them being pointed out over the years for not understanding the meaning of the word “irony”. Alanis Morissette in an interview with “” recalled:

I’ve been getting scolded for 20 years for this song being a malapropism. I think people get in a lot of trouble because it’s because I’m stupid or because Glen and I didn’t make sure everything was perfect.

I treat words like paint – I play with them, rearrange them, invent words that don’t even exist. For us at that time, the most important thing was to have fun and make the other person feel something and start thinking. After ‘Ironic’ I started writing songs very autobiographically, I write the lyrics myself.

In the “Music Now” podcast of the magazine “Rolling Stone” also: – I didn’t even want to put this song on the album. I remember that many people urged me to add it there. I agreed, but it was one of the first songs we wrote, kind of like a warm-up demo. But people really liked the melody and I didn’t feel that way. Later, I realized that maybe I should have cared more,” she recalls.

“Ironic” was only the third single released to promote the album “Jagged Little Pill”. The album sold five million copies in the US alone. The single topped the Canadian RPM Top chart for six weeks and also hit number one in Australia, New Zealand and Norway. In the US, “Ironic” reached number four on the “Billboard Hot 100” – to this day, no other Morissette song has gone so far there. The single itself was certified gold, won a Juno Award for Single of the Year and received two Grammy nominations. In 2001, a controversy arose around the song related to one of the lines of the song: this was about a man who was afraid of flying all his life and when he finally decided to get on a plane, it crashed. The American company Clear Channel Communications decided that after the September 11 attacks, the song was incorrect and unsuitable for broadcast. This status persisted for several years.

*Malapropism – incorrect use of a word that sounds similar to a word with the correct meaning for a given context. In the Polish language, the words “by least” and “at least” are often confused on this principle.