hat is the soundtrack to your life? Is there a song, an album, or even a music video you keep turning to for comfort, wisdom, or motivation? When did you hear it first? How did it make you feel? Why do you go looking for that emotion again and again?

Music is maybe a universal language, but sometimes it is more than just that. Sometimes it becomes a secret language that only you know. Only you know the meaning, history and nuance of a particular lyric, a specific riff, a six-second beat. You listen to this one song, this one album over and over, till you think you know its heart, and it knows yours.

Alanis Morisette became known to me through words etched on a school desk in the summer of 1996. Of course we had all heard ‘You Oughta Know’ by then; it was only on MTV/ Channel V every 30 minutes. But for a 14-year-old, the words were too dark. The unbridled emotion in every note Morisette sings was unfamiliar. Plus, she was just so angry – why?

The desk in the ninth grade class where I had been volunteered to help a teacher out during the summer bore the most contentious lines from ‘You Oughta Know’, and sparked my curiosity enough to make me go home and steal my older sister’s copy of Jagged Little Pill and listen to the track on repeat. First, just the one song. Then, the rest of them.

On a loop, which in 1996 meant I rewound and replayed the album till – I’ll assume – someone threw a coaster at my door and asked me to shut it.

Slowly, every song on that album began to make sense. ‘You Oughta Know’, the ultimate angry-girl breakup anthem, was sharper after a first heartbreak. ‘Mary Jane’ was the quiet, admonishing voice nudging a wo-man entering young adulthood, not unkindly trying to get her to look at herself and her life.

There will always be songs, films, books and pieces of art that hit you straight in that small, secret heart of yours, that you keep hidden because you simply don’t know what to do with it. Jagged Little Pill is an entire volume of words that do just that. And like all good art, the music and lyrics take on new meaning through every age.

It wasn’t just that Alanis Morisette sang with the power that only her voice holds, and it wasn’t really the way her songs were composed, a little unruly for the time, it was how unabashedly wordy she was. Alanis Morisette is a poet, in the same manner as Bob Dylan is one, or Tori Amos is one. Sometimes the words they sing sound like they shouldn’t make any sense at all, but once they do, you will find yourself returning to them to understand your life and its many situations better.

There will always be songs, films, books and pieces of art that hit you straight in that small, secret heart of yours, that you keep hidden because you simply don’t know what to do with it. Jagged Little Pill is an entire volume of words that do just that. And like all good art, the music and lyrics take on new meaning through every age.

That is the only reason why ‘You Learn’ felt familiar in 1997, or ‘Not The Doctor’ just fit into a general frustration with emotional connections in 2009.

The transcendence of Mori-sette’s work has carried through my own teens, 20s, 30s and 40s, with ‘All I Really Want’ reflecting in its composition and poetry the constant chaos with-in, which if we are all honest with ourselves, never really goes away.

And one day maybe, like me, you will find yourself singing ‘Hand In My Pocket’ out loud, stopping only to wonder how it has taken so many years of living for that particular emotion to sit with you.

If Alanis Morisette had figured it out 30 years ago, what a marvel her mind must be now!