“I feel like if I do one, I’m going to want to do so many more.” Her idol offers a word of advice: “Don’t get a tattoo unless you’ve been married 47 years.”.

Rodrigo: I just think that’s something me and all of my friends had felt so acutely for so long, and I’d never heard somebody talk about it — even in general, in conversation, and definitely never in a song that’s so popular.

Maybe it’s not hard for you, but as a listener … I went to see Jagged Little Pill on Broadway before lockdown, and that was the first time I heard “So Unsexy.” I remember being like, “I can’t believe she’s saying all of this stuff.” Stuff that is so, so vulnerable and intimate.

Morissette: I don’t know what your process is around songwriting.

It’s still my story, and I’m really intrigued when I hear other people’s interpretations of it, because sometimes it’s a direct match to what my experience was?

A lot of people have said to me very generously, like you just did, “Wow, that’s so brave,” and I wonder what part of it is brave, because it just doesn’t feel brave to me [laughs].

It just feels like a mandatory experience to the point where if I’m not doing that — if I’m not expressing myself in that way — I’d probably get sick really fast.

I think if I tried to sit down at the piano and be like, “I’m going to write a song that everyone likes and that resonates with people!” it’s never any good.

By trying to feel like you can control what people project onto it, it loses magic.

Morissette: The projection is sometimes intense, but I feel like people in the public eye and artists in particular are social activists by mistake, because we’re these screens upon which people project everything.

My dad told me when I was really young — I think I was maybe seven — he said, “Sweetheart, there’s three ways people will perceive you in the world: They’re going to love you and you can do no wrong, they’re going to hate you and you can do no right, or they just won’t give a shit.

I don’t know what your experience is performing live, but it’s like a churn.

It’s like taking the energy and really alchemically crunching it out of my body, but also getting it out?

Morissette: So it’s released, and there’s no way really to anticipate any receptivity.

Rodrigo: We had a similar experience, where we had a really successful debut album, which is weird.

But the “I’m writing songs in my bedroom” to “Oh, my gosh, lots of people know this song” was really quick for me.

I feel obviously so lucky, but sometimes it just feels like it doesn’t have to do with me.

I always think that creativity is sometimes really magical and celestial, and if you’re a vessel for an amazing song, that’s awesome, but sometimes it doesn’t have anything to do with you.

Morissette: Somewhere around 22, I stopped reading everything because it wasn’t really relevant to my personal growth and evolution.

Putting out music in the age of social media can be really daunting, and I think people hold young women to an incredibly unrealistic standard.

I’ve taken the same route as you have and just don’t look at it.

I don’t think anyone is meant to look at that stuff?

I don’t think we as human beings are supposed to know what thousands of people think about what we wore or what we said or how we talk.

Morissette: People ask me what I think of Instagram and everything, and I just think it’s like a storefront in New York at Christmastime?

It’s just hard for me because I had my first Instagram when I was 12 years old.

So I completely had all of my adolescence in front of people, and I think it’s hard to differentiate who you are as a person versus who you are as a person on Instagram.

Morissette: There are so many differences in our generations, and I’m thinking about the social media aspect and to what degree self is defined in today’s era through that?

Rodrigo: Something I think is really interesting, too, is that you used to be a child actor.

Rodrigo: I think it helped me be able to tap into certain emotions like that.

Rodrigo: I think heartbreak is so universal — the feeling that lots of humans feel the most deeply.

And when I put out “Drivers License,” about this really hard time in my life, I watched it just affect so many people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender or age.

Morissette: I think love and anger and pain are energies that move worlds.

Rodrigo: Did you have a hard time with your relationship being pulled apart and poked and prodded and wanting details of your personal life that you don’t feel comfortable giving.

I don’t know the degree to which you have a formal mission or intentionality or whether you’re just busy living it, but something about the servicefulness of continuing to show up keeps me here.

Rodrigo: I think about that all the time, because sometimes it seems a little strange why someone would want this and bring it upon themselves.

Rodrigo: It’s like, to want to be the president of the United States, you have to have this weird thing.

I think what keeps me going is that love of writing a song in your bedroom and being like, “That perfectly captures how I feel better than anything I could have said in a conversation.”.

Morissette: Seeing the profound effect that some of the songs can have on people across from me just really keeps me in the game.

I’m just curious, I’ve never been on tour.

I’m very excited for the day when I get to be a mom like you and just wondering how that is, touring with your kids.

Rodrigo: I feel like I’d regret it if I didn’t ask if you had any advice for me growing up in this industry

It was lovely to journal about it, but if I could go back in time, I would have conjured a few really deeply loving, unconditionally caring people around me to just check in with me