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Grammies are not presented to commercial failures: Morissette has sold six million albums in the US in eight months.
Six million people can be wrong, but in this case they’re not. If Jagged Little Pill is an uneven record, its peaks are high and there are several of them. The first three singles are all bullseyes: “Hand in My Pocket”, a list song (“I’m high but I’m grounded/ I’m sane but I’m overwhelmed”) which nails the indifference and fence-sitting of the slacker generation, while acknowledging that Morissette is part of it; “You Learn”, a beefy ballad which puts a new spin on the old theme of learning from your emotional mistakes; and above all, “You Oughta Know”.A withering ode to an ex who has a new girlfriend, this is already half way to becoming a classic. It’s the one that may be Song of the Year at the Grammies, and it has already been covered – a punk version by 1000 Mona Lisas, itself an “airplay hit” on US college radio.

In a world full of love songs, “You Oughta Know” is refreshingly hate-filled. It starts sarcastic (“I want you to know that I’m happy for you”), soon takes the gloves off (“Does she know how you told me/You’d hold me/Until you died?”), and culminates in one of the great profanities, strategically placed at the end of the middle verse: “Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?”As well as shock value – and there is some, still; on the Letterman Show, they bleep it out – the line offers a delicious cocktail of moods The sentiment is both arrogant and vulnerable The wording is deadpan, conversational The music is optimistic. And the delivery is regal, with a hint of sly satisfaction – the pain of the situation giving way to the thrill of coming up with a good line.If the lyrics, for once, are the main thing, the music is good too: raw, swinging and swaggering, with jagged little verses leading into big, easy choruses. Too rugged to be called pop, too literate to be grunge, too dynamic to be folk, the Morissette sound mixes elements of all three to pass the crucial test for popular music: it is both distinctive and highly elastic.Most people still haven’t heard of Alanis Morissette, and many who have haven’t grasped her name She plays dancehalls and theatres, not arenas But she is already a star And she is 21.MIDTOWN Manhattan, 10 days ago. The snow sits on the sidewalks in heaps, like old mashed potato.

Sixteen floors up, in a hotel conference room, Alanis Morissette’s personal assistant, Jocelyn Rheaume, accosts a photographer.”You’re here to – ?”"I’m shooting Alana.”"Alanis.”The photographer knows her face, though: “she’s beautiful”. He’s a bit edgy because the room is drab and the light is awkward. Selling six million albums means earning, at the very least, six million dollars, but Morissette is sticking to the touring style to which she is accustomed: a bus, not a plane; Loews Hotel, not the Royalton or the Carlyle Even having a PA is less glamorous than it sounds. Rheaume is a homely figure taking a year’s sabbatical from Morissette’s old high school, where she teaches drama.Morissette joins us with soft hellos and shy handshakes.

She is smaller and slighter than she looked on stage, last night, at the Roseland Ballroom; but that’s just another way of saying that she is a star. Her visual signature, her hair, is unchanged: dark, centre-parted, and extra-long, like a Bennet sister at bedtime.”Is there anywhere else?” says the photographer. “Can we go to your room?”"That’s just the same,” Morissette says. “Pretty cheesy furniture.”Cheesiness is a subject on which she speaks with some authority. Aged 10, Alanis Morissette was an actress, a short-haired regular on a cheesy Canadian soap opera.

(In case this wasn’t precocious enough, she used her TV earnings to release a single, on her own label.) Aged 16 to 17, she was a cheesy disco-moppet, just called Alanis, who released two albums on MCA Canada, sold well, and won a Juno Award (a Canadian Brit), while also, to go by a cheesy photo which has now been gleefully dug out by the music magazines, becoming the first woman to wear the smile of the young Donny Osmond under the coiffure of the young Kevin Keegan. One way of looking at her third showbusiness career is as an attempt to avoid cheese. In photographs, her long thin face tends to sport an expression of great seriousness.The more serious the face, the lovelier the smile, someone famously said, and when Morissette smiles, all the lights come on at once. She finally looks her age; even a little cheesy, with an endearing resemblance to Kirby, the butler’s daughter in Dynasty.Her stage outfit is chosen for comfort, she says, but also displays a discreet sexuality – black vinyl trousers, a billowing silk shirt in mulberry. Her interview outfit is just discreet: tweed trousers, of the kind her father, a high-school principal, might wear at work; a long suede jacket; no jewellery or detectable make-up.For one who has made a reputation out of being angry, on “You Oughta Know” and several other songs, she is strikingly polite.