Dave Coulier Reveals First Thoughts After Hearing Alanis Morissette's 'You Oughta Know'

"I started listening to it and I thought, 'Ooh, I think I may have really hurt this woman,'" he said

Alanis Morissette's "You Oughta Know" may be considered one of most heated break-up songs of all time, but there's no bad blood between the writer and its long-rumored subject, Dave Coulier.

The Full House star, who has long spoken publicly about believing he's Morissette's inspiration for the kiss-off track, opened up about the 1995 classic on SiriusXM Faction Talk's Jim Norton & Sam Roberts, and revealed that he was driving in Detroit when he heard it on the radio for the very first time.

"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," he recalled. "And then I was listening to the lyrics going, "Ooh, oh no! Oh, I can't be this guy."

Coulier, 62, said he quickly made a trip to the record store and bought the Jagged Little Pill CD, which he listened to all the way through while parked on a street.

"There was a lot of familiar stuff in there that her and I had talked about. Like, 'Your shake is like a fish.' I'd go, 'Hey, dead fish me,' and we'd do this dead fish handshake," he said. "And so I started listening to it and I thought, 'Ooh, I think I may have really hurt this woman.' That was my first thought."

Dave Coulier, Alanis Morissette
Dave Coulier, Alanis Morissette. Ray Tamarra/GC Images; Sven Hoppe/picture alliance/Getty

The Live + Local actor said that he and the now-48-year-old Morissette, whom he dated in 1992, eventually "reconnected" years later, and it seemed that any drama that inspired the track was water under the bridge.

"She couldn't have been sweeter," he said. "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."

Coulier then gave an example of "the kind of person she is," explaining how in 1992 the singer drove from Toronto to Detroit to visit his sister Sharon, who was dying of cancer in the hospital.

"She actually drove to Detroit with her guitar and sat with my sister playing songs and singing to my sister in the hospital," he said. "That's the kind of human being she is. So I've never had anything bad to say about her. She's lovely."

Morissette, for her part, has been tight-lipped about the song's inspiration, saying on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen in 2019 that there would be "no revealing" just who broke her heart.

RELATED VIDEO: Alanis Morissette Opens Up About Struggling with Postpartum Depression for the Third Time

"But I am intrigued at the thought—or at the fact—that more than one person has taken credit for it," she said. "I'm thinking, I don't know if you want to take credit for being the person I wrote 'You Oughta Know' about."

Coulier told BuzzFeed in 2014 that he didn't "want to be that guy" in the song, as the subject is " a real assh---," but that he fed into the rumor while on a red carpet years ago and has since watched it snowball.

"I asked Alanis, 'I'm getting calls by the media and they want to know who this guy is,'" he recalled. "And she said, 'Well, you know it could be a bunch of people. But you can say whatever you want.' So one time, I was doing a red carpet somewhere and [the press] just wore me down and everybody wanted to know so I said, 'Yeah, all right. I'm the guy. There I said it.'... It's just become this silly urban legend that I just have to laugh at."

Whether or not Coulier is actually the subject of the song, his late Full House co-star Bob Saget did lend credence to the theory in 2014, when he shared a memory of having been at Coulier's house for dinner during a Morissette call.

"You have to know this," Saget told the Los Angeles Times, though it's not clear if he was joking or not. "I was at his house and he said, 'Alanis just hung up on me and said sorry for calling you during dinner ... I was at his house when she said that to him."

Morissette, of course, later sarcastically snarled, "I hate to bug you in the middle of dinner" in the song.

Regardless, it seems both parties have moved on. Morissette married rapper Mario "Souleye" Treadway in 2010 and they share sons Ever, 11, and Winter, 2, and daughter Onyx, 6, while Coulier married photographer and producer Melissa Bring in 2014.

Related Articles