Under Rug Swept - Background and Production

Background and Production

Before recording of the album began, when she hadn't written songs or journal entries for nine months, Morissette went to Toronto not knowing whether she was going to write songs herself or with someone else. In the first week of her stay she had written seven songs alone, and she described the writing process as "really fast and accelerated". As on her previous albums, Morissette took a stream-of-consciousness approach to the songwriting. She wrote the music and lyrics at the same time, spending around twenty minutes or less on each song, and recorded the vocals during the writing process, in one or two takes. "I really wanted to make sure that I wrote in the studio so that, while I was writing, I could be singing it at the same time", she said. According to Morissette, she had a "little space station" with a keyboard, an acoustic, an electric, her journal and a microphone set up, and everything was recorded onto DAT. Morissette had not planned to produce an album on her own, saying "It was just a matter of when it would happen organically". She "kept things from becoming overwhelming" by refraining from cross-connecting her producing, songwriting and performing duties.

Production of the album was delayed when Morissette became involved in disputes with executives at Maverick Records after she testified at U.S. Government hearings against artist-unfriendly record contract practices. As she put it, she had to go through lawyers to "have a dialogue with people" and take extended period of time to "have one little thing figured out". Because she was accustomed to having the producers on her albums act as "the buffer to the outside world" during recording, she found it a challenge to handle the situation on her own. "I was trying to be isolated enough to tap into my artistry while keeping people at bay who don't know fuck all about nurturance", she said. Eventually, it became "too much" for Morissette and she took negotiations into her own hands, which meant she had to halt her work on the album: "I had to be willing to throw the record away and not ever release it."

Despite the relatively low sales of Morissette's previous two albums, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie and MTV Unplugged (1999), compared to those of her international debut album, Jagged Little Pill (1995), Maverick Records considered her a strong commercial asset and were concerned that she would leave because of the disputes and release the album on another label. For a time Morissette was threatening to leave Maverick (according to Entertainment Weekly), until label founder Madonna intervened and persuaded her to stay. During the delay, Morissette brought in musicians such as bassists Eric Avery (formerly of Jane's Addiction) and Flea (of Red Hot Chili Peppers), Dean DeLeo (guitarist for Stone Temple Pilots) and Me'shell Ndegeocello to play on the album. After this period, in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, she previewed the track "Utopia" that she wrote in January 2001 on her website.

During the making of the album, Morissette wrote 27 songs, which she eventually narrowed down to 17. When she was mixing and producing the album, every time she reached the 11th track she, as she put it, "would shut down. My brain would shut off and I just felt like it was information overload ... I didn't want to overwhelm myself or anyone else in the process of trying to cram them all onto the double CD." She planned for several of the excluded songs to be released as single B-sides or on a separate EP to be released after the album; eight of them were released on a CD/DVD package, Feast on Scraps, released in late 2002. "I just could not face the idea of letting all of these songs go", she had said. "They're all precious to me. It's just a matter of finding the right framework in which to share them with the world."