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 STILL REMEMBER THE MOMENT, nine years ago, when I was sitting across from the producer Vivek Tiwary and musical director Tom Kitt in New York, and they ran past me the idea of turning Jagged Little Pill into a musical. It was a heady, intriguing, and inspiring invite, to be sure. I remember quietly telling them (and myself) that I would want to be part of this only if it truly moved me, spurred me to grow, and asked something of me on multiple levels—emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, and intellectually.

After I met with Vivek and Tom, I began to really think about how this record could transform from what Glen and I did alone in the studio when I was nineteen years old into a fully realized Broadway production. Could we really take the hyper-autobiographical, stream-of-consciousness style from the album and reconstruct it for the stage? More broadly, how could we not just reimagine it, but truly integrate into it all that has emerged in our hearts and in this world over the last twenty-five years?

I also wanted this new journey to challenge me in terms of activism and giving back. I told Vivek and Tom, as well as lead producers Arvind Ethan David and Eva Price, that my favorite thing in the world is to collaborate with people who are willing to allow a partnership to push us to the next place in our evolution as artists, scribes, and leaders. In my experience, it is in those kinds of partnerships that our expression becomes more than the sum of its individual parts. I told them that I would be very interested only if we took what the record meant to me to a whole other level. There truly would not have been any other reason for me to do it.

I had a sense of how much blood, sweat, and tears would be required. I was aware that all of us would be asked things of our bodies, our minds, our spirits that would potentially take us out of our comfort zones and shift our perceptions of the world. I had the sense that we were poised at the edge of a great adventure.

I knew that what we could create together would be worth waiting for, that we had to stand by for whatever amount of time it took to build out a full creative team who would share in the mission.

The task was large and looming—but drool-inducing. I love this record, and fortuitously, today I can still sing (almost) all of the lyrics with aligned consistency. For me it is essentially a record about permission giving—the permission to feel anger, rage, sadness, grief,

ambivalence, terror, numbness. It’s about permission to fail, stand back up, and fall again—permission to be human. How could we carefully intertwine a story with the music, ideally with both being expanded upon in the process? Fathoming these questions was truly daunting—and gorgeous.

Turning Jagged Little Pill into a musical presented a unique challenge: so many parts had to be lined up. Perhaps the most pressing next step was to find someone to write the libretto—the “book” that would connect all the songs. It had to be someone with a deep soulfulness, vision, humor, and emotional sophistication. Someone who could hold the complexities and humor and subtleties of each character’s onstage evolution. The search took a few years, during

which I had the privilege of meeting some of the most exciting writers around today. For whatever reason, it didn’t quite feel like an intuitive fit until I met Diablo Cody. She brought a combination of giddiness, terror, certainty, and a searing focus. She was ready to bravely address all that each character would experience—as a family and as a community in an increasingly awakening world. Diablo foresaw a plan to set each character at a personal, self-defining crossroad. (As she brilliantly put it, she “pulled the characters out of the songs themselves.”)

As more of the team began to solidify (Diane Paulus! Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui!), I felt this musical turning into something far beyond myself, far beyond anything I had written in the songs on Jagged Little Pill Diane, Larbi, Tom, Diablo, and I had an incredible brainstorming session at my home where we gathered around a whiteboard and tossed around ideas for characters and songs that might help tell the story. The characters took on a life of their own as we hashed out different songs and storylines. I offered up other songs that the rest of the team didn’t know because either they weren’t singles or were on different albums. Before we knew it, each character started to inform the others to create a truly interwoven, complex narrative.

It became a collaboration of my dreams, of the pinch-me variety—an embarrassment of artistic riches. Each creative choice was one born from a place of deep care. Everyone around me pulled me higher and higher. We would philosophize together while researching. We leaned on and trusted

“I wanted this new journey
to challenge me in terms of
activism and giving back.”