61

“ALL I REALLY WANT”:

YEARNINGS
EXPRESSED

“All I Really Want” is the first song on Jagged Little Pill, but it was the last song that Morissette wrote for the album. She was in the studio writing the song, in fact, when Guy Oseary, a 23-year-old A&R executive with an ear for new talent at Maverick Records, called her and said that he wanted to meet her that afternoon. At first, she told him that she could not go—she was in sweatpants and had dirty hair after spending hours in Glen Ballard’s studio. Still, the label told her to come in so she wouldn’t miss her window, and the meeting—which she went to in her sweatpants—ended up changing her life. Oseary heard “You Oughta Know,” “Perfect,” and “Hand in My Pocket,” and told Morissette and Ballard that he wanted to sign her on the spot.

This page and opposite:
These are excerpts taken
from director Diane
Paulus’s pre-production
notebook. Similar notes
appear later in this book.

Jagged Little Pill went on to be one of the best-selling albums of all time, but that success was not a given when Oseary agreed to release the record. He was taking a huge chance on an untested artist (at least outside of Canada’s niche pop-music scene)—and was one of the only producers in Los Angeles to do so. About halfway through the writing process, Morissette and Ballard started shopping the record, and, according to Morissette, “It was just rejected every-

where.” More than a dozen labels passed on the chance to release Jagged Little Pill before Oseary heard the demos.

“All I Really Want” opens with a growling, fierce harmon-ica riff and sets the tone, both aurally and lyrically, for the rest of the album. It is a song of yearning for connection, a song about wanting to be seen, heard, and understood. “There are masculine yearnings and feminine yearnings, righteous yearnings and just really simple yearnings,” Morissette says. In 1995, it was revelatory to hear a young woman singing openly and directly about what she wants—and in many ways, it still is. Morissette decided to lead the record with the song because, as she said in one interview in 2015, “It was a tying of the bow, it was an encapsulation and a big summary of everything that had been the experience of writing Jagged Little Pill. It was the perfect introduction for what was to come.”

For the Healys, the song—the first one they all sing together to kick off the show—serves as a vibrant, jolting illustration of all the tensions and frustrations that run through the family at the start of the show. From the moment Frankie Healy sings “Do I stress you out?” to her mother over a paleo pancake breakfast, the song becomes a flurry of cross talk and competing desires. Mary Jane, who

is hiding her addictions and traumatic memories from her husband and children, compensates for her pain by nitpicking at her daughter and overexaggerating the celebration of Nick’s Harvard acceptance. Nick, who should be thrilled to be heading to the Ivy League, wakes up feeling numb and exhausted by his family’s bickering. He sings, “All I really want is some peace, man/A place to find a common ground.” Steve, who cannot even get a kiss from his wife on what should be a happy morning, sings, “All I really want is some patience.”

Meanwhile, Frankie and Mary Jane rage at each other throughout the song. Frankie screams for comprehension: she just wants someone to realize that she doesn’t fit in and that she is fighting for others like herself. The Greek chorus swirling around her suddenly leaps into her mind and dances out her imaginary visions; she sees a world where she is leading a righteous protest against injustice and can be a “spiritual woman.” (On changing the lyric “I am fascinated by the spiritual man” to “spiritual woman” for the show, Morissette says, “I have a lot of different women spiritual teachers. Women are just born connected to spirit. We don’t even have to try.”)

Mary Jane, on the other hand, is screaming internally for someone, anyone, to understand what she is going through. “All I really want,” she belts at the end of the song, “is some comfort.” She cannot yet admit what she wants comfort for—to recover from an assault that happened to her years ago, to get help with her addiction—but she knows she needs to reach out for her family and find that she has a soft place to land.

“All I Really Want” cleverly serves as the musical’s “I Want” song—a trope in which the lead characters lay out their hopes and dreams at the start of the show—and also as a broader mission

statement for Morissette’s music in general. She wants to say the things that usually remain unsaid, she wants everyone to speak their mind, she wants everyone to hear others and feel truly heard. When she sings, “Here, can you handle this?” and the music drops out, she’s really asking universal questions: Can you sit with your wants and needs? Can you communicate them to others? And if you did, could it, ever so slightly, shift the world?