I use words all the time that don’t exist in the dictionary, so for us it was just making each other laugh and making each other think and feel. I see words as paint, so I play with them. “I think people had a lot of issues with perhaps my stupidity or Glen’s and my lack of caring about being perfect.

“I’ve had my ass kicked for 20 years about it being a malapropism,” Alanis said. By the end of the session they weren’t even trying to come up with ironies, which is perhaps why so many of the supposedly ironic situations described in the song have been labelled as flawed examples of irony. The pair spent the next hour or so trying to make each other laugh by imagining increasingly improbable situations. This was the beginning of the true magic between us.” I recall her saying something like, ‘Wouldn’t it be ironic for an old man to win the lottery and die the next day?’ We were fresh with this thought when we walked into the studio ten minutes later. During Morissette’s Spotify Landmark session, Ballard picks up the story: “Our process began with lunch at Emilio’s trattoria over chopped salads and iced T. Composed on May 26th, ‘Ironic’ was one of the earliest songs they completed.

Together they wrote 20 songs in as many sessions, 12 of which made it onto the album. Like all of the songs on Jagged Little Pill, ‘Ironic’ was written with help from producer Glen Ballard, who Alanis met in March 1994 when she relocated to Los Angeles from Canada in an effort reinvent herself as a solo singer-songwriter, having already released two albums of teen dance pop in Canada.

My pocket alanis morissette