The Alanis Morissette song “Hand in My Pocket” is a list of opposites that aren’t really opposites at all, when you really think about it. “I’m short but I’m healthy,” she sings, in the half-yodel, half-dove-coo that people still channel in late-night karaoke bars. “I’m sick but I’m pretty, babyyyy.” Being petite has no bearing on a person’s hardiness, but of course, that isn’t the point. Morissette wrote the song — which became the fourth track on “Jagged Little Pill,” an album so popular at its height that it sold nearly half a million copies in one week — in less than an hour when she was 20. The lyrics are more affective than logical, more moody than meticulous. Morissette was showing that young people contain multitudes and that they are eager to describe — to themselves, to some distant, judgmental grown-up — their contradictory inner lives.

Listening to the song 25 years later, as I did over and over one morning in May while waiting to meet Morissette at a resort an hour south of Los Angeles, was comforting, like an oversize, beloved cardigan that has grown a bit baggy in the sleeves. Still, taken as a whole, the album has undeniable power: It’s urgent and raw.

It may be difficult to comprehend now, in the fractured world of streaming and microfandom, but “Jagged Little Pill” was once one of the biggest albums in the world. In 1996, the record sold more than 10 million copies; it has sold another 20 million since, according to Entertainment Weekly. To put it another way, this one album, written by a former teenage pop star from Canada, has sold as many copies as Taylor Swift’s entire discography combined. Morissette’s lyrics are funny and rebellious (it’s still electrifying to mouth the words “Would she go down on you in a theater?” from “You Oughta Know”), but they came packaged in high-gloss, catchy, grand ballads. She wasn’t just angry at an ex-boyfriend; she was slicing herself open with rage, interrupting his dinner to howl “you told me you’d hold me until you died, and you’re still alive.

Most of the songs on “Jagged Little Pill” began as a transcription of Morissette’s interior monologue while she was living alone in Los Angeles, spending a lot of time rollerblading on the Santa Monica pier. She had moved there from Ontario, where as a child she became first a television star and then a pop sensation. She began searching for collaborators, finally settling on the producer Glen Ballard, who had worked with Michael Jackson and Wilson Phillips. (“Ironic” was the only song whose lyrics they wrote together; the rest came directly from Morissette’s diary.) After a year, she and Ballard had a demo of unpolished, one-take recordings that they’d made late at night in Ballard’s studio. What happened next is the stuff of rock legend — a dozen labels rejected the demos, but then Guy Oseary, a 23-year-old A.&R. executive at Maverick (which was then Madonna’s label), heard “You Oughta Know,” “Perfect” and “Hand in My Pocket” and signed Morissette on the spot. A majority of the vocals on the album were drawn from the original tapes.