Alanis Morissette began her career in Canada, and as a teenager recorded two dance-pop albums, Alanis and Now Is the Time, under MCA Records. Her international debut album was the rock-influenced Jagged Little Pill, which is the best-selling debut album by a female artist in the U.S., and the highest selling debut album worldwide in music history. Morissette took up producing duties for her subsequent albums, which include Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, Under Rug Swept, So-Called Chaos and her upcoming release Flavors of Entanglement.

Alanis Morissette was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.  At the age of six, she began playing the piano and realised she wanted to express herself through the arts. In 1984, Morissette wrote her first song, "Fate Stay with Me", which she sent to a local folk singer, Lindsay Morgan, who recruited Morissette as his protégé.

In 1986, Morissette had her first stint as an actress: five episodes of the children's television show You Can't Do That on Television. Using money she saved from that role, she released "Fate Stay with Me" as a single via a label she founded with Morgan. A limited number of copies were pressed, and it received little airplay. She appeared onstage with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society in 1985 and 1988.

At a New York City audition, Morissette landed a spot on Star Search, a popular American talent competition on which she used her stage name, Alanis Nadine. Morissette flew to Los Angeles to appear on the show, but lost after one round. In 1988, Morissette signed a publishing deal with MCA Publishing, which helped to fund her record deal with one of its independent subsidiary labels.

MCA Records released Morissette's debut album, Alanis, in Canada only in 1991, and Morissette co-wrote every track on the album with its producer, Leslie Howe. By the time it was released, she had dropped her stage name and was credited simply as Alanis. The dance-pop album went platinum,[ and its first single, "Too Hot", reached the top twenty on the RPM singles chart. Subsequent singles included "Walk Away", "Feel Your Love" and "Plastic". Later, this period of Morissette's career would be compared to similar teen singers in the US such as Debbie Gibson and Tiffany. Following the release of "Alanis", Morissette was a concert opening act for rapper Vanilla Ice. Morissette was nominated for three 1992 Juno Awards: Most Promising Female Vocalist of the Year (which she won), Single of the Year and Best Dance Recording (both for "Too Hot").

In 1992, she released her second album, Now Is the Time, a ballad-driven record that featured less glitzy production than Alanis and contained more thoughtful lyrics. Morissette wrote the songs with the album's producer, Leslie Howe, and Serge Côté. She said of the album, "people could go, 'Boo, hiss, hiss, this girl's like another Tiffany or whatever'. But the way I look at it ... people will like your next album if it's a kick-ass one." As with Alanis, Now Is the Time was released only in Canada and produced singles — "An Emotion Away", "No Apologies", and "Real World". The record's sales were roughly half of what she had reached with her debut. With her two-album deal with MCA Canada complete, Morissette was left without a major label contract.

In 1993, after graduating from high school, Morissette moved from Ottawa to Toronto. Living alone for the first time in her life, she met with a bevy of songwriters, but the results frustrated her. A visit to Nashville a few months later also proved fruitless. In the hopes of meeting a collaborator Morissette began making trips to Los Angeles and working with as many musicians as possible.

During this time, she met producer and songwriter Glen Ballard, and within ten minutes of meeting each other they had begun experimenting creatively. According to Morissette, Ballard was the first collaborator who encouraged her to express her emotions. The two wrote and recorded Morissette's third album, Jagged Little Pill, and by the spring of 1995, she had signed a deal with Maverick Records.

As Morissette later revealed, during her stay in L.A., a thief confronted and robbed her on a deserted street, although he did not take the writing and brainstorming notes in her purse; they were the scribblings that soon made up Jagged Little Pill. She focused her inner problems on the soul-baring lyrics of the album for her own health.

Maverick Records released Jagged Little Pill internationally in 1995. The album was expected to sell enough for Morissette to make a follow-up, but the situation changed quickly when a DJ from an influential Los Angeles radio station began playing "You Oughta Know", the album's first single. The song instantly garnered attention for its scathing, explicit lyrics, and a subsequent music video went into heavy rotation on MTV and MuchMusic.

After the success of "You Oughta Know", the album's other hit singles helped send Jagged Little Pill to the top of the charts. "All I Really Want" and "Hand in My Pocket" followed, but the fourth U.S. single, "Ironic", became Morissette's biggest hit. "You Learn" and "Head over Feet", the fifth and sixth singles, respectively, kept Jagged Little Pill in the top twenty on the Billboard 200 albums chart for more than a year. According to the RIAA, Jagged Little Pill is the best-selling international debut album by a female artist, with more than fourteen million copies sold in the U.S.; it sold thirty million worldwide, making it the second biggest selling album by a female artist, and the biggest selling debut album of all time. Morissette's popularity grew significantly in Canada, where the album was certified twelve times platinum and produced four RPM chart-toppers: "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn" and "Head over Feet". The album was also a bestseller in Australia and the United Kingdom.

Morissette's success with Jagged Little Pill was credited with leading to the introduction of female singers such as Tracy Bonham, Meredith Brooks, Patti Rothberg and, in the early 2000s, Avril Lavigne and Pink. Morissette and the album won six Juno Awards in 1996: Album of the Year, Single of the Year ("You Oughta Know"), Female Vocalist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year and Best Rock Album. At the 1996 Grammy Awards, she won Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, Best Rock Song (both for "You Oughta Know"), Best Rock Album and Album of the Year.

Later in 1996, Morissette embarked on an eighteen-month world tour in support of Jagged Little Pill, beginning in small clubs and ending in large venues. Taylor Hawkins, currently with the Foo Fighters, was the tour's drummer. "Ironic" was nominated for two 1997 Grammy Awards — Record of the Year and Best Music Video, Short Form — and won Single of the Year at the 1997 Juno Awards, where Morissette also won Songwriter of the Year and the International Achievement Award. The video Jagged Little Pill, Live, which was co-directed by Morissette and chronicled the bulk of her tour, won a 1998 Grammy Award for Best Music Video, Long Form.

Morissette was featured as a guest vocalist on Ringo Starr's cover of "Drift Away" on his 1998 album, Vertical Man, and on the songs "Don't Drink the Water" and "Spoon" on the Dave Matthews Band album Before These Crowded Streets. She recorded the song "Uninvited" for the soundtrack to the 1998 film City of Angels. Although the track was never commercially released as a single, it received widespread radio airplay in the U.S. At the 1999 Grammy Awards, it won in the categories of Best Rock Song and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, and was nominated for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. Later in 1998, Morissette released her fourth album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, which she wrote and produced with Glen Ballard. Most of the tracks, including "Would Not Come" and "Unsent", challenged traditional song formulas: they included one-chord drone melodies and Morissette singing over letter-like prose texts; some songs lacked choruses or took a long time to reach them.

Privately, the label hoped to sell a million copies of the album on initial release; instead, it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart with first-week sales of 469,000 copies — a record, at the time, for the highest first-week sales of an album by a female artist. The wordy, personal lyrics on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie alienated many fans, and after the album sold considerably less than Jagged Little Pill, many labelled it an example of the sophomore jinx. However, it received positive reviews, including a four-star review from Rolling Stone. In Canada, it won the Juno Award for Best Album and was certified four times platinum. "Thank U", the album's only major international hit single, was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance; the music video, which featured Morissette nude, generated mild controversy. Morissette herself directed the videos for "Unsent" and "So Pure", which won, respectively, the MuchMusic Video Award for Best Director and the Juno Award for Video of the Year. The "So Pure" video features actor Dash Mihok, with whom Morissette was in a relationship at the time.

Morissette contributed vocals to "Mercy" and "Innocence", two tracks on Jonathan Elias's project The Prayer Cycle, which was released in 1999. The same year, she released the live acoustic album Alanis Unplugged, which was recorded during her appearance on the television show MTV Unplugged. It featured tracks from her previous two albums alongside four new songs, including "King of Pain" (a cover of The Police song) and "No Pressure over Cappuccino", which Morissette wrote with her main guitar player, Nick Lashley. The recording of the Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie track "That I Would Be Good", released as a single, became a minor hit on hot adult contemporary radio in America. Also in 1999, Morissette released a live version of her song "Are You Still Mad" on the charity album Live in the X Lounge II. For her live rendition of "So Pure" at Woodstock '99, she was nominated for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance at the 2001 Grammy Awards.

Morissette delved into acting again, for the first time since 1993, appearing as God in the Kevin Smith film Dogma and contributing the song "Still" to its soundtrack. Smith, a fan of Morissette's, asked her to be in the film several times. She had to turn down the female lead, and by the time her schedule allowed her to participate in the film, only the role of God, which involves virtually no dialogue and only an appearance at the very end of the film, was left. She also appeared in the hit HBO comedies Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and starred in the play The Vagina Monologues.

Under Rug Swept debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, eventually going platinum in Canada and selling one million copies in the U.S. It produced the hit single "Hands Clean", which topped the Canadian Singles Chart and received substantial radio play; for her work on "Hands Clean" and "So Unsexy", Morissette won a Juno Award for Producer of the Year. A second single, "Precious Illusions", was released, but it did not garner significant success outside Canada or U.S. hot AC radio. Other singles from the album included "Flinch" and "Surrendering".

Later in 2002, Morissette released the combination package Feast on Scraps, which includes a DVD of live concert and backstage documentary footage directed by her, and a CD containing eight previously unreleased songs from the Under Rug Swept recording sessions. Preceded by the single "Simple Together", it sold roughly 70,000 copies in the U.S. and was nominated for a Juno Award for Music DVD of the Year. In late 2003, Morissette appeared in the off-Broadway play The Exonerated as Sunny Jacobs, a death row inmate freed after proof surfaced that she was innocent.

Morissette hosted the Juno Awards of 2004 dressed in a bathrobe, which she took off to reveal a flesh-coloured bodysuit, a response to the era of censorship in the U.S. caused by Janet Jackson's breast-reveal incident during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. Morissette released her sixth studio album, So-Called Chaos, in May 2004. She wrote the songs on her own again, and co-produced the album with Tim Thorney and pop music producer John Shanks. The album debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 chart to generally mixed critical reviews, and it became Morissette's lowest seller in the U.S. The lead single, "Everything", achieved major success on adult top 40 radio in America and was moderately popular elsewhere, particularly in Canada, although it failed to reach the top forty on the U.S. Hot 100. Because the first line of the song includes the word asshole, American radio stations refused to play it, and the single version was changed to include the word nightmare instead. Two other singles, "Out Is Through" and "Eight Easy Steps", fared considerably worse commercially than "Everything", although a dance mix of "Eight Easy Steps" was a U.S. club hit.

In February 2005, Morissette became a naturalized citizen of the United States while maintaining her Canadian citizenship. Morissette refers to herself as a Canadian–American. The same month, she made a guest appearance on the Canadian television show Degrassi: The Next Generation with Dogma co-star Jason Mewes and director Kevin Smith.

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of Jagged Little Pill, Morissette released a studio acoustic version, Jagged Little Pill Acoustic, in June 2005. The album was released exclusively through Starbucks' Hear Music retail concept through their coffee shops for a six-week run. The limited availability led to a dispute between Maverick Records and HMV North America, who retaliated by removing from sale Morissette's other albums for the duration of Starbucks' exclusive six-week sale. Jagged Little Pill Acoustic sold around 300,000 copies in the U.S., and a video for "Hand in My Pocket" received rotation on VH1 in America. The accompanying tour ran for two months in mid 2005, with Morissette playing small theatre venues. During the same period, Morissette was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.

Morissette released the greatest hits album Alanis Morissette: The Collection in late 2005. The lead single and only new track, a cover of Seal's "Crazy", was a U.S. adult top 40 and dance hit, but it achieved only minimal chart success elsewhere, as did the album. A limited edition of The Collection features a DVD including a documentary with videos of two unreleased songs from Morissette's 1996 Can't Not Tour: "King of Intimation" and "Can't Not" (a reworked version of the latter appeared on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie). The DVD also includes a ninety-second clip of the unreleased video for the single "Joining You". Morissette contributed the song "Wunderkind" to the soundtrack of the film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and it was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.

Rolling Stone reported in January 2006 that Morissette was in between "intense" writing sessions for her upcoming studio album, which was to be co-produced by Mike Elizondo, and that she was going to spend 2006 working on a memoir. She said of her book, "it will be all the wisdom I've accrued in the thirty-one years of my life A lot about relationships, fame, travel, body-image issues, spirit — with a lot of self-deprecating humor peppered throughout, 'cause I just can't help it." 2006 marked the first year in the recorded history of Morissette's musical career that she had not a single concert appearance showcasing her own songs, with the exception of an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in January when she performed "Wunderkind". During this period, she delved back into acting, guest starring in an episode of Lifetime's Lovespring International and three episodes of FX's Nip/Tuck, playing a lesbian. In October 2006, Morissette said in an interview with TV Guide that she was going to start writing new material over the next few weeks, saying "I usually fill two journals for each record and at the present, I have seven journals full. I have a lot within me ready to burst out."

On April 1, 2007, Morissette released a parody of The Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps", which she recorded in a slow, mournful voice and accompanied only by a piano. The accompanying YouTube-hosted video, in which she dances provocatively with a group of men and hits the ones who attempt to touch her "lady lumps", had received nearly five million views by April 13. Morissette did not take any interviews to explain the song. It was theorized that Morissette herself did it as an April Fools' Day joke. Black Eyed Peas vocalist Fergie responded by sending Morissette a buttocks-shaped cake with an approving note. By July 2007, the video had reached the top forty on YouTube's list of the most viewed videos of all time, having garnered more than eight million hits.

"Underneath" is the second song known to be written and recorded during the 2007 sessions. The song had an unofficial premiere on September 15, 2007 at The Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, at the Elevate Film Festival. The purpose of the festival was to create documentaries, music videos, narratives and shorts - regarding subjects to raise the level of human consciousness on the earth.

Morissette submitted her song, and then (like all other 14 videos) had the song's video written, directed, shot and edited in two days. The music video, while not having too much of a known plot - features Morissette and a few other characters around a pool, and swimming. The key symbol in the video tends to be water. Morissette also walks around, or lays down as she sings - either into or off camera. The song and video was met by a very receptive crowd. It is unknown whether this song will serve as an official single, and if so - if this video will be used or not. Morissette is expected to participate in an upcoming tour with Matchbox Twenty and Mute Math.