In 1995, less than two months after actor Dave Coulier‘s hit show Full House aired its final episode, the actor was stunned to hear a song from ex Alanis Morissette. It was “You Oughta Know,” the first hit from Morisette’s blockbuster album Jagged Little Pill, released in July of that year.
“I’m driving in Detroit and I’ve got my radio on, and I hear the hook for ‘You Oughta Know’ come on the radio,” Coulier explained on Tuesday’s episode of SiriusXM Faction Talk, hosted by Jim Norton and Sam Roberts. “And I’m like, wow, this is a really cool hook. And then I start hearing the voice. I’m like, wow, this girl can sing. And I had no idea, you know, that this was the record. And then I was listening to the lyrics going, ‘Ooh, oh no! Oh, I can’t be this guy.'”
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Coulier then went to a record store and bought the CD — as one did in 1995 — so he could listen to it all.
“And I went and I parked on a street and I listened to the whole record. And there was a lot of familiar stuff in there that her and I had talked about,” Coulier said. “Like [in “Right Through you”] ‘your shake is like a fish.’ I’d go, ‘Hey, dead fish me,’ and we’d do this dead fish handshake. And so I started listening to it and I thought, ‘Ooh, I think I may have really hurt this woman.’ And that was my first thought.”
Although Coulier’s long said that he is the guy Morissette sings about in “You Oughta Know,” she hasn’t confirmed it. In 2004, she told Howard Stern on his SiriusXM show that she plans to keep the inspiration for the song to herself.
“People talk about who that song’s about, and they will continue to, and I never, I never confirm or affirm who it’s about, and I never will,” she said. “Well, I say never, and I really shouldn’t say never, cause I may very well one day do it.”
She teased that no one was in the studio with her when she wrote it, so no one actually knows.
What we do know is that Coulier remains a fan of the Canadian artist.
“Years later,” Coulier said, “we reconnected and she couldn’t have been sweeter. And I said, ‘What do you want me to say when people ask me about this relationship?’ And she said, ‘You can say whatever you want.’ So she was really sweet about it. She was kind.”
Then he shared a touching story about his ex.
“I’ll tell you the kind of person she is,” he said. “When my sister Sharon was dying with cancer, Alanis was living in Toronto. My sister was in Detroit. She actually drove to Detroit with her guitar and sat with my sister playing songs and singing to my sister in the hospital. That’s the kind of human being she is. So I’ve never had anything bad to say about her. She’s lovely.”
Coulier and Morissette met around 1993, when she sang the national anthem at an all-star hockey game in which he was playing. At the time, she was a pop star — a future inspiration for Robin Sparkles — in her home country.
