Alanis Morissette dominates most 1990s throwback playlists with her equally powerful and catchy smash hits. But the songs we sing-slash-scream along to now with visceral, nostalgic passion weren’t always so warmly accepted by the masses. In fact, when Morissette first released Jagged Little Pill, she faced intense criticism while also reaching career highs when the 1995 album became one of the best-selling records of all time.
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Critique of strong female voices is a tale as old as time in the music industry. So, Morissette wasn’t exactly surprised when some naysayers called one of her biggest hits “psychobabble.” In fact, she was more than willing to accept the descriptor.
Critics Called This Alanis Morissette Classic “Psychobabble”
Alanis Morissette released six singles from her 1995 magnum opus, Jagged Little Pill. The list included “You Oughta Know,” “You Learn,” “Hand in My Pocket,” “Ironic,” “Head over Feet,” and “All I Really Want.” These empowering anthems gave a voice to the complexities of the young female experience. But no track captured this at-times paradoxical existence like “Hand in My Pocket.” I’m high but I’m grounded, I’m sane but I‘m overwhelmed, I’m lost but I’m hopeful, baby, she sings.
Not everyone understood what it meant to feel these two sides of existentialism tugging on either arm. “They were like, ‘Woah, that’s scary. What are you talking about?’” Morissette recalled in a 2025 interview with The Guardian. “They called it my ‘psychobabble.’ I’m like, ‘I’m going to stay the course with my psychobabble.’”
In the end, Morissette was right to do so. “Hand in My Pocket” made it into the top five of countless U.S. charts, including the Billboard Mainstream Rock, Pop Airplay, Active Rock, Adult Alternative, Alternative, Pop/Alternative, Rock, and Alternative Airplay, the last of which she topped at number one. The song also performed well in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. For something that some critics disregarded as nothing but an angry woman’s “psychobabble,” it certainly resonated with stunning clarity to her listeners.
The Canadian Singer-Songwriter Got A Harsh L.A. Welcome
The hit song “Hand in My Pocket” wasn’t just a testament to the complexities of being young and hopeful and maybe a little naive in an I-can-still-learn-and-get-better kind of way in the mid-1990s. It was also an ode to the simultaneously harsh and beautiful transition of a Canadian singer-songwriter into the sunny California scene of Los Angeles. In a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone, Alanis Morissette described the “baptism by fire” she experienced when she first arrived.
“I was held up at gunpoint in Hollywood when I first moved here,” she revealed. “Still, despite all the negatives, it was like in “Hand in My Pocket.” I was broke, but I was happy.”
Morissette was able to translate all of these feelings into one of many hit singles off Jagged Little Pill with the help of her co-writer, Glen Ballard. Ballard coincidentally also co-wrote other introspective hit songs like Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror.”
In that same interview with Rolling Stone, Ballard said, “What struck me about Alanis was that she was so incredibly self-possessed. I just connected with her as a person. Almost parenthetically, it was like, ‘Wow, you’re 19?’ She was so intelligent and ready to take a chance on doing something that might have no commercial application. Although there was some question about what she wanted to do musically, she knew what she didn’t want to do, which was anything that wasn’t authentic and from her heart.”
Indeed, even if that authenticity sounded like psychobabble to the people who didn’t get it.
Photo by Patrick Aviolat/EPA/Shutterstock
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