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Under Rug Swept is the fifth studio album and third internationally released album by Canadian singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette. It was the first album Morissette had written and produced entirely on her own. 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. Morissette has said that during the writing and recording of the album, she noticed a unifying theme emerging of "the desire to mend unions and bridge gaps. Whether it be between genders or between human beings, between spirits." She said that when she began working on the album, she was at "the middle of the beginning of the end of a relationship", and that entering the studio and writing new material "would propel me to face some of the truths that were scaring me. Inevitably, we ended up breaking up, so the record kind of followed the grieving of it, then the proverbial phoenix rising and continuing to grow."