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20 years after Jagged Little Pill, the icon talks feminism, androgyny, and how it's okay to "be a little strange" in this world.

"Thankfully, the the stories that were being told I can stand by, so I'm not cringing when I repeat them," Morissette says. "There was a timelessness to what I was expressing, which, of course, I had no idea about at the time. When I wrote it I was in a bit of a vacuum—so I thought that I was going through whatever it was that I was going through alone—and then when people connected with it, I realized that I was being given this opportunity to support and uplift and empathize with people. So that got really exciting because then I could be an artist, be in the public eye, and serve at the same time. That was the perfect slam dunk for me."

Morissette co-wrote JLP when she was just 21. The resonating lyrics were ripped from her journals and her experiences, written and composed during an intensive studio session with Glen Ballard (Wilson Phillips, Aerosmith, Michael Jackson) in Encino, California. And while Ballard may have coaxed the album into existence, Morissette called the shots in many ways: "There were a lot of these songs we were going to try to recut, but she absolutely insisted: 'No, we're not going to recut them, because this is the essence of what makes them good," Ballard told the AV Club last month. "She was absolutely right. She was so right."

Morissette has taken some flak for her New Age-y leanings in the past, but as mindfulness and meditation have become increasingly popular GOOP fodder, the meditation altar she showed off on a 2005 episode of MTV's Cribs seems less out of place today. She leaves me with this advice: "I steal [time to meditate] when I can—sometimes it's as gross as sitting in a bathroom stall for three minutes. Sometimes I build things, like on airplanes I'll put a scarf over my head because people don't want to disturb the scary lady with the scarf over her head. It's okay to be a little strange," she says with a laugh, "because then people leave you alone."


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