Songfacts®:

• In the opening track from her fifth studio album, Morissette poses 21 questions to potential suitors, from their thoughts on capital punishment to their proclivities in the bedroom. These things are "not necessarily needs but qualities that I prefer," she sings.
  
  "There's a part of this song where I'm joking, but there's a whole part of this song where I'm dead serious," she explained in the album's track-by-track commentary. "The more aware of the qualities I am looking for, the more I'm able to recognize them when they appear, as opposed to having the initial meeting romantically be singularly dependent on chemical reaction or some intangible, indefinable, heart-palpitating, palm-sweating thing. Because the palm sweating, heart palpitating beginnings of a relationship often result in a huge amount of incompatibility, so the concept of compatibility is so much more important to me as I get older."
• Morissette told Spin magazine her list goes far beyond 21. "I have, like, 673 things," she laughed. "I wrote a new list the other day. It has to be updated after every guy. I want someone who can be a complete dork with me and have no shame and be really disgusting. Because life is just so f--king short. Without a map, I wander aimlessly. And infatuation just blurs the whole thing for me. So I can go, 'Oh, spirituality is very important to me, and this person, no matter how much I want to f--k him right now, does not believe in God.' That list has saved my ass on a few occasions."
• This features Dean DeLeo of Stone Temple Pilots on guitar.
• This was used on the TV series Roswell in the 2002 episode "Crash."