When the Canadian singer’s album ‘Jagged Little Pill’ debuted in 1995, it quickly became the soundtrack for angry girls everywhere. Her songs were raw anthems, vibrating with frustration and defiant power. (The New York Times’s pop music critic Jon Pareles described her as ‘an avenging banshee.’) The album sold nearly half a million copies in one week, and more than 30 million in the years since.

But the poster child for righteous rage is decidedly more mellow these days. The woman who wrote the eviscerating ‘You Oughta Know’ is happily married now, with three children. She has a musical on Broadway (or at least,  she did, before the coronavirus outbreak closed the theaters) and a new album on the way — her first in eight years. And her early music, while still just as powerful, has also become, as the writer Rachel Syme put it in The Times Magazine, ‘comforting, like an oversize, beloved cardigan that has grown a bit baggy in the sleeves.'”