“Ironic” by Alanis Morissette

"Ironic" was the fourth single from Alanis Morissette's third album, Jagged Little Pill, released by Maverick and Warner Bros. in February 1996, and it's the record's big, rueful shrug. Morissette wrote it with Glen Ballard, who produced it, and the song is a string of rotten-luck moments she files under ironic, which set off an endless argument about whether any of them actually count as irony. It hardly matters: the sing-along chorus sweeps the pedants aside.

It starts almost conversational, then swells, with Ballard and Basil Fung on guitars, Lance Morrison on bass, Rob Ladd on drums and percussion and Michael Thompson on organ, while Morissette's voice cracks and yodels over the top. Ballard recorded it with Ted Blaisdell, and Chris Fogel mixed.

It became her highest-charting single on the Billboard Hot 100 at number four, spent six weeks at the top in Canada and made the top five in Australia, New Zealand and Norway. Stéphane Sednaoui's video, with Morissette driving through a wintry landscape and playing several of her own passengers, won three MTV Video Music Awards. The song also took the Juno for Single of the Year and earned two Grammy nods, one for Record of the Year and one for its video.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.