Songfacts®:

• Many songs on the Jagged Little Pill album are very Zen. This is one of them - it finds Alanis staying composed and relaxed in a maddening world, all the while railing against conformity. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Bertrand - Paris, France
• One hand is in her pocket, but what is the other one doing? Five different things throughout the song, it turns out:
  
  Giving a high five
  
  Flicking a cigarette
  
  Giving a peace sign
  
  Playing the piano
  
  Hailing a taxi cab
• Morissette wrote this with Glen Ballard, who produced the album. In a Spotify session, she told the story: "I was scribbling all these dichotomies and dualisms. Human beings are all things. At any given moment, if you said, 'What are you feeling right now?' I'd probably be feeling 16 different things - it's rare that I feel one emotion at any given time. So I thought, I'm just going to chronicle in this moment right here while Glen's out of the room. When Glen came back in the room, I showed him the piece of paper and he started playing while I sang the lyrics. We wrote that song in about 15 minutes."
• This was the follow-up single to "You Oughta Know," which was a huge hit for Alanis and introduced her to the world outside of her native Canada, where she had released two dance albums. "Hand In My Pocket" was a different style, but had similarly introspective lyrics. Like "You Oughta Know," it wasn't sold as a single in America so fans would have to buy the album to get it. This made it ineligible for the Hot 100, but helped push Jagged Little Pill to sales of an astounding 16 million in the US. In October 1995, "Hand In My Pocket" went to #1 on the Modern Rock chart (as did "You Oughta Know") and rose to #15 on the Airplay chart.
  
  Alanis mania continued well into 1996, when her singles "Ironic" and "You Learn," which were sold in stores, reached the Top 10 of the Hot 100.
• Alanis played harmonica on this track, as she did on "All I Really Want" and "Head Over Feet."
• Producer Glen Ballard put the track together using a Linn 9000 sequencer/sampler. He planned to replace these sounds with live instruments, but when they tried, it didn't sound as good so they ended up using the demo version made on his Linn.
• This was supposed to be the theme song to the hit '90s teen drama Dawson's Creek until Morissette changed her mind at the last minute. Paula Cole's "I Don't Want To Wait" was used instead.
• It never reached "Y.M.C.A." level, but when Morissette performs this in concert, audience members often do some hand gestures to interpret the lyrics about what the free hand is doing as she sings.
• The Glee cast covered this in the 2015 episode "Jagged Little Tapestry." It was also used in the TV shows Crossing Jordan (in the 2002 episode "The Gift of Life") and Transparent (in the 2016 episode "Exciting and New"). In the latter, it was sung by Judith Light.
• Morissette performed this during her first Saturday Night Live appearance on October 28, 1995.
• In the 2017 movie Lady Bird, the title character (played by Saoirse Ronan) is in a car with her dad when this song is playing. She says: "Did you know that Alanis Morissette wrote this song in only 10 minutes?" His reply: "I believe it."
  
  This exchange works for character development, as Lady Bird tends to exaggerate and stretch the truth and her dad doesn't question her, although in this case she was pretty close, as Alanis says she and Ballard wrote the song in 15 minutes.
• Rolf Harris covered this in 1997 on his album Can You Tell What It Is Yet?
• Alanis Morissette described her songwriting to Kelly Clarkson as "composting": she gathers scraps of experience, emotion, and memory, then lets them break down and reform into something new. "Hand in My Pocket" is a perfect example of her "composting" process: she pulled together fragments of ideas and contradictions from her journals, then realized later that the patchwork reflected the balance she was always trying to strike in her 20s.