Tori Amos

Little Earthquakes: Kate Bush. Boys For Pele: just plain bad. The Venus live album or whatever: irrelevant--it made no impression on me at all.

Tori Amos live: I've seen one truly great Tori Amos show, Baltimore 98 or 99. It was a big arena show, but she really tore shit up with the full band, especially on "Past the Mission."

Tori Amos videos: run far, far away.

ahemm, not really, as her bio states:

"She began playing the piano at two-and-a-half, and was enrolled in Baltimore's Peabody Institute as a five-year-old prodigy."

vg

Her records drive me nuts but in a good way.

Her hair is trerrif, she's incredinly cute n sweet in person.

She's a no-BS eccentric in the classic mode, and I guess would get most anything posted on ILM and have something strange and funny to say.

I think Venus might actually be my favourite Tori album - I was listening to it the other day, and it's a total trip, esp "Datura" and "Glory Of The 80s" and "Riot Poof". It sounds oddly effortless and natural, as if these bizarre spacey hooks and swirling electronic arrangements just appeared fully-formed in her mind. To me, the Pele through to Venus years will always be her peak (Choirgirl, oh my god how good is that album as well?).

The Beekeeper is pretty dull, yes. Effortless in the bad way i.e. she's being lazy now - knows she has a hardcore fan base who'll buy any product with her name on it, and can't be arsed to make music relevant for anyone else in the world. It could have been a lot better if she hadn't relentlessly stuck to the tinkling piano/soporific bass/muffled drums arrangement every time - though there's probably a decent 10-track album in there with some judicious editing.

That said there are a couple of totally fantastic songs on it - "Sweet The Sting", "Hoochie Woman", "Parasol".

please? thank you!

We have? Didn't Tori PRE-DATE them both?

In any case, while not a huge fan (I'll stick with Kate Bush, thanks very much), she has had her moments. Search: "Cornflake Girl" and her covers of the Stranglers' "Strangle Little Girl" and Slayer's "Raining Blood" (which is actually quite strikingly lovely in its harrowing starkness...much more disturbing that the original).

'liquid diamonds' is very...aquatic, but also decadent. a real sea of music.

the other song which still blows my mind is 'hotel' - about six completely different styles of music in one somehow-coherent song! kate bush trapped in a computer game shoot-em-up!

much of the record sounds "underwater." i think "playboy mommy" ruins the flow in the last 4th, though

her voice, holy christ. on "hotel" especially.

'playboy mommy' is a stone-cold classic ballad, really - the "played glo-ri-a, talkin' 'bout ho-sanna" bit always gets me. and i love the way the lyrics should be an apology, but really aren't: the narrative persona there is probably one of my favourites ever.

The first listen was "wtf?", the second "wait, no this is actually awful", the third - pure roffle! I listened a couple more times after that, and I'm now more baffled about Tori luv than ever.

Only, every time I listen to Scarlet's Walk I get the sense that really I should love it. The lyrics are probably the best she's done on the whole... at first they seem almost too straightforward but they actually come across as much more complex and intricate on paper, lots of extended metaphors and back'n'forth conversations and lovely turns of phrase which shouldn't be able to fit into song structures but somehow do.

And, track by track, the music is actually pretty good, thoughtful arrangements, excellent multi-harmonising vocals, lovely melodies, lots of variety in Tori's phrasing.

I can even see the bits which are supposed to totally blow my away - "Gimme gimme gimmee" in "Sweet Sangria", "your invading this thing you call love" in "Taxi Ride", "you used to look my good right in the eye" in "Pancake", "through the eyes of Laura Mars" in "Gold Dust".

So why doesn't it work out that why? Why isn't this record as effective as it should be?

I'm starting to think that maybe it's just too articulate, that maybe Tori actually finally understood what song she was trying to sing too well.

On Boys for Pele (by far her most cryptic album) you get these songs with ridiculous lyrics but enormous musical and emotional power ("Father Lucifer", "Marianne") - it's like the ridiculous lyrics represent the site of a blockage, an inability on the writer's part to express herself, which the music and the vocals have to burst through - such that "Timmy and that purple monkey are all down at Bobby's house" seems impregnated with meaning and consequence in a manner you could never divine from the lyric sheet.

There are quite a few songs on Scarlet's Walk which are passionate - deeply nostalgic, angry, bitter, crestfallen etc. - but the songs always feel aware of their emotions, self-reflective and resigned in a way that can work really well for other artists (Ani DiFranco springs to mind) but seems to undercut the brute force of Tori's music somehow.

This theory is probably flawed in so far as the more likely scenario is the music came first and the lyrics are added in piecemeal, but it seems to explain why it is that there's at times almost an inverse relationship between lyrical clarity and musical effect in Tori's work.

the scarlet's walk lyrics, more than anything else about that album, turn me off: instead of genuinely impenetrable metaphor like eg that line from 'marianne' which tim quoted, and much of 'riot poof', there's heavy-handed genuine metaphor about putting snowflakes under microscopes. it's all very...conscious, in every sense of the word, and she deliberately tones down musical and lyrical excess in favour of, i guess, what she sees as the Important Theme.

'a sorta fairytale' and 'gold dust' manage to slip under this somehow.

http://www.rkstar.com/video/playvid?qtfile=musicvideo/tramstft

i'm not sure whether to recommend 'datura', 'juárez' and 'raspberry swirl' to fandango or not!

I think I'd end up listening to other songs for the roffle factor right now after that last one though :( Plus, I should probably lend an ear to the other new stuff in my never-quite-empty 'incoming' folder right now.

Politely declining more gifts of Tori, with thanks, for the moment ;)

I did say thanks for that other one before though! I didn't download just to shoot it down, honestly :(

Whereas with something like "Marianne", I think there are the bits which are related to the subject matter ("And they said Marianne killed herself, and I said 'not a chance'") and there are the bits which are just free association ("tuna, rubber, a little blubber in my igloo")

i think those are the most successful songs of hers as well, the ones that are couched in elaborate and seemingly confused metaphors in which she introduces brief moments of startling lucidity (cf. "baker baker," with its extended baking metaphor that's interrupted with snippets of some larger story ("i guess you heard he's gone to LA") and really abrupt moments where she seems to let her guard down ("time, thought i'd made friends with time, thought we'd be flying...")). you sense that she's not consciously playing these components off each other for shock/absurdist value but rather that she's negotiating with herself while singing these songs, as if just playing the music is such an overwhelming, confusing experience for her that she's torn between employing either elliptical turns of phrase or full-blown confessionals. if she leaned too much in either direction i doubt i'd find her as fascinating as i do.

and under the pink in general is just really astounding, isn't it?

i agree with jody re: the confessional stuff. i think this is a point which tim has discussed in depth somewhere else, but what makes tori's take on confessional lyrics so interesting is the way the confessional tone, the overall gist of what she's trying to say, comes across so loud and clear even as she erodes the distinction between meaning and non-meaning, brutally straightforward (and v quitable) lyrics and lines which seem to be purely linguistic/phonetic experiments.

I'm trying to avoid thinking of Scarlet's Walk as a concept album because it was approaching it from that perspective which made me not bother to listen to it much at all for 2-3 years.

I see what you mean about the type of imagery that Scarlet's Walk employs, in terms of sheer subject matter the imagery is much more safe/Lilith-ish than her previous stuff. But I think that going in that direction is not automatically a bad thing - in the Kate Bush thread we've been discussing a lot the domesticity/"blandness" of the album, and I think Jody is correct when she says that, even if Aerial *is* "bland", it makes of blandness something great, makes us question why "bland" comes with negative connotations.

I'm not saying Scarlet's Walk achieves something similar, but listening to the two albums consecutively has made me question the narrative I spun to explain the mildness of my enjoyment w/r/t this album. It may well be that Scarlet's Walk is indeed bland in a bad way, but just saying that by itself no longer seems satisfactory for me, as it has been previously.

Would you say The Beekeeper is better or worse, Lex? Jody?

I'm not dissing "Marianne" by the way, that's one of my favourite tracks! I'm just trying to take a devil's advocate position with myself because the tastes here are something I don't feel I've gotten to the bottom of yet, i.e. I know what I'm responding to but I'm still not entirely sure why.

there's a line about tuna in laura nyro's "captain saint lucifer," which is about, um... somehow sex and the devil are involved.

buckles off shingles
off a cockleshell on norway basin
coke and tuna
boots and roses from russia

i need to listen to both albums again. the beekeeper is fresher in my mind, having listened to it in its entirety once when it came out (and i've still got the tracks i like on my ipod).

the beekeeper is much much worse than scarlet's walk, in my kinder moments i can almost convince myself that the only problem with the latter is that it's overlong. most of the beekeeper isn't just dull or disappointing, but just terrible. whereas i can put the flaws in scarlet's walk down to wrong-headed conscious decisions, the beekeeper is just stale, the sound of completely dried-up inspiration.

i actually think knowing about the scarlet's walk concept helped me enjoy the album a little more, esp the road trip angle which could explain her sonic choices - it's a very feminine, soft take on drivetime music.

"It's ending, again, just before it begins. Look, there's no point in me pretending I don't think this is the best album ever. I already said that from the choirgirl hotel was the best album of the Nineties, and that listening to Tori play live is the most transcendent musical thing I've ever experienced, but this album is greater than either of those. This is the first Tori Amos album that is actually better than hearing her play the songs live. It's the complete control that Little Earthquakes didn't have, it's a better rock album than Rumours, it's more brilliant in its discipline than Hounds of Love or The Speckless Sky. It's better than even music maybe has the right to be, more precious than every assembled loss it arises from. It's bigger than me or you, and I tell you quite literally that I don't understand how a person subject to the same mortal rules could have made it. I've stayed up all night with it, tonight, with a computer in front of me and my hands on the keys, and have only really tried to type around it. The short version of this reaction, and the truest one, would simply have been silence; these thousands of evasive words and irrelevant digressions are merely a version of speechlessness. There is nothing I claim I can add to this album, no obscure points I think I should help to clarify, no clear truths I would hope to obfuscate. It doesn't get any better than this, I don't think it can't be made any better than it is by any action of mine, and trying to convince you of any of that through argument is too heartbreaking a prospect to contemplate. This is my apotheosis, and if you won't let it be yours, I hope you have some other one in mind. "Sometimes I hear my voice", Tori said, amazed, in "Silent All These Years". I hear my voice almost all the time. Too much. It's Thursday morning, and I'm going to shut up now."

"There is a certain place from which Scarlet's Walk looks like the best album ever made by a human being"

And the idea of this sort of fascinates me, perhaps precisely because of its perversity. What is this place?

i am so glad i am going back home on friday, because among other things i'm going to reclaim the tori cds i left there that i've been inspired to listen to again (mostly thanks to this thread).

'pancake' reminds me of something, too. i can't work out what style she's aiming for with it. it's one of the better moments of the album anyway.

i think part of the problem would have been heightened expectation - as far as i'm concerned pele through to venus was an extraordinary creative flowering for tori, and scarlet's walk falls some way short of that peak.

tim and jody, what do you think of strange little girls? i really, really, like it. her cover of '97 bonnie & clyde' is chilling. the concept actually vaguely makes sense!

haha and the beekeeper : the red shoes (that's pretty harsh on the red shoes though)

i like about half of it. it would have made a very cool EP. she should have left off "happiness is a warm gun," "heart of gold," i'm not in love," and "enjoy the silence." sort of on the fence about "i don't like mondays."

"real men" is too good to be stuck way back there at the end.

i like the way she chose ultra-canonical males to deconstruct so completely.

Introducing Norway's answer to Tori Amos - Ingrid Olava.

any Tori fans around - give it a listen, and a verdict:

MIC Norway: Ingrid Olava

Ingrid Olava

01/16/2008

The first single has been released form what is set be one of the most talked about records of the year, Ingrid Olava's debut Juliet Wishes

Album released by EMI Norway in early March.

listen: MySpace.com - Ingrid Olava - - Pop / Indie / Jazz - www.myspace.com/ingridolava

Heard her new album today. What the fuck happened to this woman. Don't even get me started on this.

we didn't.

Hmm?

(I mean, come on. Anonymous bullying? Is your dick THAT small?)

I can't listen to anything before Scarlett's Walk thanks to some personal associations, and conveniently enough I hate everything since Scarlett's Walk.

"sorta fairytale" still fucks me up but good.

blimey.

Well, it wasn't this morning, but that's btw.

I'm saying "we didn't get you started", but by all means continue.

(xpost)

Scarlet's Walk is her best album. Shhh, it's a secret.

Haven't heard anything since, though.

i saw her live last night for the first time in years - forgot what a terrific performer she is, and was also reminded that 'cool on your island', 'putting the damage on' and 'leather' are incredible songs. have also met her in person twice in two weeks, it was kind of weird not to be overawed.

the new album's not bad, as expected you have to wearily trudge through 94938343 songs to pick out the good ones but i'm definitely feeling 'give', 'strong black vine', 'that guy' and 'fast horse' at least.

but your momma ain't new york, she is pure tennessee

Actually I think I'd like Starling without the horrible guitars :(

bahahaha Hoos I have the same deal except w/'To Venus & Back.' Actually I will still rock Choirgirl every once in a while but mostly we've grown in our own different directions, she and I.

She should just make album covers.

this album is better than the last two but only marginally

She should just make album covers.

She should just make albums and leave out the embarrassing concepts, covers and about half of the AOR-leaning tracks.

she's only had about 4 decent album covers in her career. pele, choirgirl, strange little girls, american doll posse.

cover versions, though: more of these. she covered 'smooth operator' at the gig on mon! it was great.

i guess little earthquakes, under the pink, venus and scarlet's walk are boring covers rather than bad, kind of like "ehh, at least she looks prettyish". beekeeper and the new one are awful though

and there's her version of "ring my bell" of course.

i guess little earthquakes, under the pink, venus and scarlet's walk are boring covers rather than bad

Clearly though, Under the Pink is her best album cover. Someone back me up on this.

yeap retty much!

i love the miss 80's ethereality-ness of it

guys remember how good "fat slut" was??

like a glimmer of hope

why is mr. zebra so beautiful, ramzi?

cuz it's like

she just stepped over to the piano

and it just came out

http://i38.tinypic.com/34dhrp3.jpg

Why, Tori? Why?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2Ldt2b-SC8

Y Kant Tori Spelling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLCMC1yDRGE

Are you still friends with Shannon Doherty?

http://www.slate.com/id/2267815/

"It wasn't until a year and a half later, on a tour of Japan, that Tori Amos and "Winter" started playing a role in my wrestling career. "

Revive.

I'm a big fan. That said: why did she stop writing the literate, brilliant, approaching-on-overwritten lyrics found on "Little Earthquakes" and settle into the oblique mumbo-jumbo of "Boys for Pele" onward? Any theories?

well, i mean she didn't settle there. from the choirgirl hotel gets pretty lucid (funnily enough, i think of boys for pele as a record about processing trauma, thus the oblique mumbo-jumbo, but choirgirl is most lucid when it is literally addressing traumatic things).

mm although Pele has some disticntly *non* mumbo jumbo ish stuff too
"I think you're a queer and i shaved every place where you been boy" springs to mind.

I def like the mumbo-jumbo, sometimes it's totally fun, when she sings "met him in a guess world" or the "crackerjacks / tidal wave / pope's rubber robe" etc.

But I noticed when listening to "Little Earthquakes" b-sides last week-- I only get Tori on maybe once every two years, her music mixes up some teenage regretful nostalgia cocktails-- I noticed that the oblique style was already there on the b-sides. But on those b-sides, the lyrics seemed to be in a demo form, placeholders for things yet to be finished. I started to see some parallels between the oblique lyrics on "Boys" and the unfinished lyrics on "Upside Down" or whatevs, and I thought that maybe she might've, well, stopped labouring?

I chatted bout it last night and other theories surfaced from other fans and former fans at the table; a popular one re: the shift in tone was that she sought distance from her obsessive fanbase. I disagreed, as she seemed still to deal with subject matter that was as personal as it comes.

mm yeah the mumbo jumbo only encourages em! there's endless theories online over what "tuna, rubber, little blubber in my igloo yeah" could possibly mean for example.

I think "Marianne" is set up deliberately as a stream of consciousness of childhood impressions free of narrative - think of it as being like a scene from Tree of Life. (not all of Tori's mumbo jumbo fits this explanation, but it does here)

Whereas when Tori wants to be straightforward or story-teller on that album - "Doughnut Song" or "Little Amsterdam" spring to mind - she seems able to to inhabit those roles quite easily.

Her most literate, lucid lyrics (which is obv not the same thing as "best" necessarily) are actually on Scarlet's Walk which strikes me as being a bit like Rickie Lee Jones lyrically.

e.g. the lyrics to "Taxi Ride":

lily is dancing on the table
we've all been pushed too far
i guess on days like this
you know who your friends are
just another dead fag to you that's all
just another light missing
on a long taxi ride
taxi ride

and i'm down to your last cigarette and
this "we are one" crap as you're invading
this thing you call love - she smiles
way too much but
i'm glad you're on my side, sure
i'm glad you're on my side still

you think you deserve a trust fund
just because you want one
sure you talk the talk when you need to
i fear the whole world is starting to
believe you
just another dead fag to you that's all
just another light missing in a long taxi line
taxi line

and i"m down to your last cigarette and
this "we are one" crap as you're invading
this thing you call love - she smiles
way too much but
i'm glad you're on my side, sure
i'm glad you're on my side still

lily is dancing on the table
we've all been pushed too far today
even a glamorous bitch can be in need
this is where you know
the honey from the killer bees
i'm glad you're on my side sure
i'm glad you're on my side sure
i'm glad you're on my side still

got a long taxi ride
got a long taxi ride

I think "Marianne" is set up deliberately as a stream of consciousness of childhood impressions free of narrative

haha i was going to write s.thing incoherent abt 'boys for pele' being her attempt at an 'the waves' style take on biography/'the_self'. its def my fave tori album for that reason

even w/ 'little earthquakes' theres an extent to which the most arresting lyrics are opaque and fragmented, for me theres a sense in which the deeply personal is only communicable in slices of imagery or ideas that dont always cohere or reconcile

^^^^ absolutely OTM.

And often it's the juxtaposition of absolute directness with absolute opacity which most strongly underscores this (and, I suspect, most frustrates the casual listener).

^ Whoa, I never made that connection. I'll re-read/re-listen and think about that.

Hrmmm. Maybe it's just frustrating to listen in hindsight to the stylistic heterogeneity that marks her first two records (and their b-sides). "Flying Dutchman" suggests an entirely different songwriter-- not to mention "Mother", or "Crucify", which again sound highly removed from other tracks on the same record and all tracks to come. There's something I guess I miss about the diversity of her early output, even if "Boys" and "Choirgirl" are my favourite of her LPs

i can see that. i think i already posted this in the p4k poll thread but i rarely listen to tori albums straight through, even when i was 'discovering' her it was via .mp3s so my sense for this isnt that great tbh

but i do think 'boys for pele' has a very modernist approach w/its lyrics that i love a lot

Man, if you could've discovered her as it happened, it was a gauge-fest. Proto-emo kids everywhere penniless from purchasing UK imports. I dumped $30 on a bootleg CD collection of b-sides. First exposure to rarer-than-rare tracks was their appearance in piano scorebooks, etc. Heady.

even w/ 'little earthquakes' theres an extent to which the most arresting lyrics are opaque and fragmented, for me theres a sense in which the deeply personal is only communicable in slices of imagery or ideas that dont always cohere or reconcile

yeah exactly! scattered thoughts on this -

1) this jumps off something tim f posted years ago - what tori often communicates isn't so much confession as the difficulty of piecing together a confession, partly due to the desire to keep things hidden - hence veering into what sounds like oblique/nonsense to the listener but is in fact a mix of private in-jokes and wordplay. confessionalism is a contradictory and complex business, basically.

2) few other singer-songwriters have as great a sense for how words sound together as tori - and for how these phonetics can convey meaning where the actual literal meaning of the words doesn't. when playa fly sampled "horses" for a rap song and noz posted cryptically about how tori is harder than your favourite rapper, it kind of made me realise how appropriate that was given her sense of language - a song like "horses" exemplifies this, it's entirely built on rolling internal rhymes and half-rhymes and assonance and alliteration, and it's the ebbs and flows of the language that make the song so hypnotic and dreamlike. this kind of stuff is what huge swathes of to venus and back rely on too, and the combination of ornate language and out-there production really makes that album for me. on songs like "concertina" and "lust" she does just enough to give the listener a sense of what the song is broadly "about", and then the application of so many odd metaphors to the situation is kind of...sensory overload in a great way even when you have no idea what individual lines "mean".

3) i'm not sure about dividing her songwriting into a time when it was straightforward and a time when it was cryptic - in 1996-99 she was still writing songs as straightforward as "hey jupiter", "1000 oceans" and "northern lad", prior to that she wrote songs as cryptic as "space dog". and as lamp says even her most straightforward examples of "classic" songwriting are couched in opaque or unexpected terms - "what if i'm a mermaid in these jeans of his", "cincinnati - i like the word" etc etc.

"tinie tempurah"!

A friend of mine is rather pleased with the coinage "tinie tempeh".

But yes lex is OTM as one might expect.

"Upside Down" is a fantastic song incidentally.

Esp:

"I say "the world is sick"
You say, "tell me what that makes us darlin'"
you see, you always find my faults
faster than you find your own
You say "the world is getting rid of her demons"
I say "baby what have you been smoking"
well I dreamed, I dreamed, I dreamed
I loved a black boy... my daddy would scream..."

People always describe her early lyrics as "diaristic" but really they were dialogues.

britney's "everytime" always reminded me of "upside down". i think a few early songs - "china", "upside down" and especially "cool on your island" point to an alternative universe in which tori's slogging it out on the LA circuit led to a long and lucrative career as pop songwriter rather than artist in her own right.

it's prob worth thinking about the different varieties of opacity that tori uses, too: phonetic wordplay ("and milkwood, and silkwood, and you would if i would, but you never would"), unexpected metaphors ("slipping the blade in the marmalade"), the introduction of unexplained characters kind of like she's creating her own mythology ("i'm hiding it well, sister ernestine"), fucking around with grammar and structure ("a hot kachina who wants into mine"), using words in contexts that make no immediate sense ("in a bath of glitter and a tiny shiver she crawls through your java sea") and so on.

Haha lex have you heard the early version of "China"? Kind of changes its pop star readiness factor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVRJgoUsej0

i was wondering what you were talking about and then the extra bridge came in and, well, yeah!

everyone otm

my favorite tori word salad is probably the bridge of "talula"

or maybe it's technically the second verse ("i got big bird on the fishing line"). hard to totally pin a structure to that song.

The only thing wrong with that bridge is the double use of "honey". Otherwise it's great.

she's always used the word "honey" as a kind of spacefiller though hasn't she? live, every second word is "honey".

what you want is in the blood senatoooorrrrrrrssssss is amazing.

(the tornado mix of "talula" improves on the original by a ridiculous amount considering how little is changed.)

These are interesting takes. I agree that it's not as black-and-white as "direct" vs. "opaque". But I do feel that "Little Earthquakes" and "Under the Pink" feature a scattering of seeds on her lyrical end. She was making a transition from the "you took my love / you took my money / you took my sex" style of YKTR and transitioning into something greater. Took many different approaches. And with "Pele", I feel that she arrived at something.

I tried to form some cogent responses that illustrate what I mean about a 'settling in' with regards to "Pele" and "Choirgirl Hotel", but there were so many exceptions. Yes, "Space Dog" could've been found on "Pele". Sure, "Happy Phantom" and "Leather" are Tin Pan Alley one-offs, illustrating "Earthquakes"' stylistic diversity; but so is "Mr Zebra"; and if we're talking genre tourism, we'd have to mention "Raspberry Swirl" re: club music, "Beulah Land" re: hymnal, her later records re: classical, etc... I've basically abandoned the argument.

Lex, I don't share your assessment re: "Northern Lad" and "Hey Jupiter" being non-cryptic/less-cryptic on the lyrical end, although they are both very musically straightforward. (On "1000 Oceans" and "Jackie's Strength" I would agree on that point, and both songs are very out-of-place on the albums they're from, and are fan favourites because their pathos is comparatively so direct.)

I love her alliterative skills, as you do. "Marianne" itself is a perfect little capsule; begins with a direct setup and descends into delicious mumbo-jumbo (pesters / lesters / jesters) and then she closes with the caveat "I'm just having thoughts of Marianne / quickest girl in the frying pan". It's amazing to hear her slide from the easy to the difficult and back again as if it's no thing.

I agree with the misuse/overuse of the word "confessional" in describing her music.

After reading your post I realized that I have a (slightly) lower opinion of her lyrics on "Pele" and "Choirgirl" than you and Tim F. Here are two thoughts in that regard-- focusing on "Pele" b/c I know the lyrics from memory,

a) It seems as if many Pele songs were written around a lyrical hook, a strong hook for sure, but the hook is a preface rather than a foundation; the promise of the hook isn't developed. "Horses" is just that, the single refrain "I got me some horses to ride on to ride on" with nothing else concrete to grasp on to, nothing that relates to the opening salvo; pretty phrases, beautiful wordplay, for sure, but not a networked idea, just cryptic crossword clues strung together. "Mohammed" follows the same formula; she states that Jesus was a girl, and doesn't follow through. "Hey Jupiter" is just that phrase, as is "Putting the damage on"; "Red Baron"; "Talula"'s almost the best and worst offender here, delicious as onomatopoeia but completely non-resonant otherwise; in "Voodoo" she devolves into pure scatting, and man; I love every moment, every phrase, it is just that after many years with these lyrics, I still don't find myself *connecting* all these individual ideas into complete pictures.

There are many exceptions, of course, where the entire lyric hangs together, everything connects: "Blood Roses", "Marianne", "Lucifer", "Zebra", "Doughnut", "Twinkle" and "Little Amsterdam". Also imho the best lyrics on the record.

I'd go on about "Choirgirl Hotel" too but jeez this post is getting long.

b) Before you pot-kettle-black me on this, hear me out. The language! Lisa Germano sings that she's a "geek" and that he's a "snot". Tori? You think she's a "queer", "how's your Jesus Christ been hanging", she casually asks Jupiter if he/she's "gay" or "blue", "starfucker", "slag pit stag shit", "give me love, peace and a hard cock"--not enough that she'd sing "cock", she's gotta sing "cack"; Big Bird is a "hooker" and she's got her "rape hat on".

It's not that I'm squeamish about language. But in Pele's case I feel that the off-colour is wasted. The lines often sound forced and create bathos. Compared to, well, everything in "Professional Widow", she is able to say so much more of lust, class, and gender expectation with the single line "And southern men can grow gold can grow purty / blood can be purty like a delicate man"; the same goes for "hominy / get it on the plate, girl" or "and her best friend is a sundress"; she's able to sing of a homicide in "Twinkle" with grace and suggestion; and I'm trying to keep things Pele-specific for brevity here, but she's able to sing of her own attempted rape so arrestingly and with a more economical breadth of language than many songs on "Pele".

What a long post, I'm gonna leave it, my flight is boarding. Hope you get through it.

I would love to continue this conversation and will probably lurk around this thread some more, but this has to be my last post! It's been a pleasure posting here more actively over the last few months, thanks. Let me know if an "I Love Toronto" sub-board opens up (Toronto could use one).

new "covers w/orchestra" album out today -- on first listen it seems kind of superfluous. she does this weird double-tracked vocal on a lot of the songs and i didn't like it, it detracted from the moodiness/emotional heft.

maybe i shouldn't say "covers," re-recordings of her own stuff.

it's the kind of idea for revisiting her back catalogue that could have really paid off but didn't at all

already wary of this based on the fact that 'yes, anastasia' is a mere 4:17

she starts it halfway through. travesty

From the "parents trolling their own kids" department, have you all seen the current contestant in the Jeopardy teen tournament?

http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/c0.0.292.292/p403x403/525467_503814593002795_1928465066_n.jpg

Happy 50th. And thanks to flamboyant's post on Twitter giving me a prompt, still remember the performance where it all clicked in full for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcBBalxGMDU

hey

what's it's gonna take

til my baby's all right

ratatouille strich-i-nine

http://www.buzzfeed.com/sadydoyle/where-would-music-be-without-tori-amos

^^excellent

also, our own flamboyant goon did an epic facebook post on tori recently that i wish could be put somewhere public?

and who else wants to attempt to ignore the new album and its godawful title with me?

new album? (checks wikipedia) oh, ha ha.

if that's the real cover art add an additional "ha ha" to the above.

what new album?

Much of that Facebook post was drawn from the angst-ridden ILX post above (I was anxious and sleepless and in an airport and regret it.) I contest the "we ignored Tori Amos" bent of the Buzzfeed article because her first four albums all went platinum, and she consistently had enormous selling (and low overhead) tours that always put her in the top 5 grossing net profits, through the 90s. And honestly? as soon as anybody (Buzzfeed writer included) starts using words like "eccentric" and "strangeness" to describe the whole of what Tori does, they're no better than the AV Club guy saying "walking tarot card".

The problem with the word "confessional"-- and "cathartic" or any similar terms-- usually attached to female singer-songwriters-- gay ones too ;_;-- is that it effectively erases the artist's intent, suggesting that the writing is an act of therapy rather than an intelligent effort to create work. I feel similarly about, even, any biographical elements about music school, words like "eccentric", I mean, obviously you can't erase somebody's entire biography when writing about the album they made, but the feeling is just like "can we please just focus on the music as a product of the artist's intention, rather than a product of her/his biography?"

In a way it was always vindicating to me to read in the 90s about how much money Tori was making! it was like the one moment that RS or whatever had to admit that regardless of being a dizzy, faerie-loving mushy-femisomething, she is and was a successful businesswoman

Anyway, I always talk about Tori Amos, in all interviews, but usually only the gay press prints it. She pioneered something with "Little Earthquakes" that I've been trying to pin down for a decade: a marriage of indictment with self-indictment. The songs are rabid and raging but the rage is directed equally inward as outward... even the more overt castigations on "Precious Things" and "Me And A Gun" have a resigned quality to them, where she never places herself above the level of her perpetrators, and asks instead for nothing more than equality.

Something I didn't know was that Tori had written an autobiography! Ten full years ago? I am buying that immediately I had no idea.

sorry Lex I hate the album cover font choice but will totally be listening to this album and attending the tour

Best thing is just to focus on the music and forget about trying to second-guess the artist's intention, which is not always available and even if it is, is imo irrelevant to appreciation of the music

xps

goon tie otm

I've seen her live three or four times, and if anything "hurt" Tori Amos it's that her solo shows - which are the norm, right? - can be pretty intimidating for a casual fan. Lots of obscurities, lots of in-jokes, etc. But I saw her with her band once, in a small club behind "Choir Girl," and man did it rock.

dunno, the first time I saw her live I was a pretty casual fan and it didn't seem intimidating at all (actually, the fact that she was playing durham - which I realize is because she grew up near there but still - made things seem less intimidating back then, because I interpreted it as "wow, someone is playing within driving distance that I actually want to see")

Intimidating in the sense that a hit parade it is not. But maybe we're so far removed from Tori Amos hits that no one expects that?

how many hits would a casual fan even know? if you only know "the hits" you're going to surely go in expecting not to know 2/3 of the songs played

also, her commitment to touring and her live abilities (which haven't declined that much, certainly not compared to her recorded output) is basically what keeps her career going at this point.

but re that and I contest the "we ignored Tori Amos" bent of the Buzzfeed article because her first four albums all went platinum, and she consistently had enormous selling (and low overhead) tours that always put her in the top 5 grossing net profits, through the 90s

i think there's easily a case that she might be one of the most ignored artists right now in terms of the critical conversation given how successful she once was and how influential she's been. she basically doesn't get recognition except for the occasional one-off writer who used to be a massive fan. compare to how björk and pj harvey have been adopted firmly into the canon. these days no one talks about tori amos. i mean, look at her profile right here on ilm! only about 5 posters post in her threads and it's the same 5 each time. zero interest from anyone else. i've said this before, but she must be the only tim finney-approved artist to gain no traction on ilm more generally.

whenever i think of tori i unfortunately think of that dom review stylus posted.

Yeah, what are Amos' hits? "Crucify," "Cornflake Girl," "Caught a Lite Sneeze," "God," maybe "Raspberry Swirl" and (in England) "Professional Widow"? If you attend an Amos show in 2014 you'd expect album tracks and rarities.

"silent all these years" and "god" are the only ones i've heard out and about in the last ~10 years, and i think "a sorta fairytale" did well too.

I hear four or five of those with some frequency. Point being she's playing to the fans, not to make fans, IMO. Which is cool! Not unlike bjork.

I don't know if there is such a thing as a casual Tori Amos fan. Surely some are more casual than others but anybody I know who professes even a moderate interest could sing along to deep cuts. I mean, I've had random conversations with strangers where "Here. In My Head" and/or "Cooling" come up.

compare to how björk and pj harvey have been adopted firmly into the canon. these days no one talks about tori amos.

Bjork and PJ created some of their best work post-'99, Tori hasn't. I tend not to think about Tori in the same thought-bubble as those two, but think about her in the same boat as countless other now-unknown '80s/'90s essential songwriters of varying degrees of experimentalism: Sam Phillips, Jane Siberry, Me'shell Ndegeocello, Alanis Morissette, and especially: Lisa Germano. (I'm excluding men from this list because I have no men to include.)

If anything I'd argue that one of Tori's most notable innovations-- less notable than her lyrical creativity, more notable than "her use of piano"-- is somehow inspiring such a rabid and protective fanbase. I have no idea how that happened or if has been productive or desirable to either herself or her fan community

i've said this before, but she must be the only tim finney-approved artist to gain no traction on ilm more generally.

Actually this is true of most of the female "singer-songwriter" etc. artists I am into with a handful of exceptions. Tori is probably just the one who has had the most success over the long term.

Trying to decide whether the defining feature is that they're perceived as artists whose fanbase is overwhelmingly female with a smaller subset of gay males. That seems like a strong and obvious fit for Tori or, say, Ani DiFranco (who in most other senses is a very different artist). I simply have no idea whether it's true of someone like Jane Siberry but if I had to guess I'd say yes.

everybody has casual fans. i have listened to and enjoyed her first couple albums many times and can hum a bit of the non-singles but am not too passionate. and given how much more those albums have sold than her later stuff, there have to be a good amount of people like that.

I think that's partly down to casual fans and partly down to the fact that Tori became harder to like over time (at first for stylistic reasons and later for quality reasons).

I expect there are various points in her oeuvre where erstwhile fans tap out - it feels like her discography has pretty clear off-ramps after Under The Pink, From The Choirgirl Hotel and Scarlet's Walk in particular.

Yeah I bailed out after Under the Pink. I loved that and the debut and saw her play numerous times in London in the early 90s but Boys for Pele held no interest for me and I didn't bother with any of the later albums.

I owe lex a great deal for promoting From the Choirgirl Hotel at The Guardian three years ago. It's not great but it's inventive and astonishing enough to have sent me scurrying backwards to see what else I missed.

This is quite a common thing I imagine, but to me it always seemed like with, Tori's first four albums, each one would feel radically different to the album before, and then the next album would come out and would make the differences you'd perceived previously seem minor or less important. So in an odd way my sense of what kind of album Boys For Pele ~is~ was almost more shaped by hearing From The Choirgirl Hotel than by the actual album.

it's 100% a trend of ignoring of female singer-songwriters. unless you're lucky/connected enough to be canonized to the degree of a st. vincent or angel olsen, or perhaps country enough to find luck down that route, no one is going to write about you. nobody. maybe it's that everyone just begrudgingly covered them 15 years ago (the general disdain for lilith fair these days suggests as much), or maybe it's PR or musical trends or who even knows what. but it's not that she's ignored in the critical conversation -- most mainstream sites will post her album updates with the rest of 'em -- so much that all the acts she influenced are. the people influenced by the theatrical stuff get lumped in with amanda palmer and her fans as Places The Music Press Just Don't Want To Go, and as far as piano pop it's complete radio silence -- charlotte martin just released an album that's pretty good that literally no one, NO ONE, nowhere, is covering. (which includes me, but who would I even pitch?)

as for "inspiring a rabid, protective fanbase" that might be part selection bias -- in lieu of getting massive press coverage, those rabid, protective fans and their rabid, protective purchasing power are the only way you are going to be able to sustain a career. if you don't have them, you just get forgotten, as many artists have. (this is why a lot of acts in this vein are sustained partly/entirely by Kickstarter or similar ventures. in some cases that's their sole release channel, even.)

I'm not even sure why Angel Olsen gets critical attention tbh.

There's an Austin City Limits show recorded around the time of From The Choirgirl Hotel that's worth tracking down.

Incredibly, I thought the new one was the first Amos album since "Scarlet's Walk" in 2002, and then I realized it was her seventh!

We used to have a 'classic alternative' station here for almost a year, and if their playlists were anything to go on re: the new canon, Tori (along w/Hole & Belly) were totally absent.

Man, I'd say I hear Amos 10 times what I hear from Belly or Hole, but I don't hear the latter at all. Or veruca salt. I do hear down by the water by PJ Harvey.

"Incredibly, I thought the new one was the first Amos album since "Scarlet's Walk" in 2002, and then I realized it was her seventh!"

well you aren't missing all that much in between to be honest. I'm a fan but I don't really listen to any of those records. they're...alright at times. maybe the new one will be good? I kind of want to see her theater thing in London this year.

"american doll posse" is by far the best of her post-"scarlet's walk" albums. i feel like it got praise when it was released (at least from the people who still cared), but since it's ensconced between relative duds in her discography it doesn't get mentioned much anymore.

Not familiar enough with "American Doll Posse" to go deep with it, was at first turned off by lead track "Yo George", and grammatically frustrated by the first single "Big Wheel" ("I am an M-I-L-F"), but like-to-love a lot of it, especially moved by the transformation of this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ycwJOkiZxc

into this ;_;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS9f_XQqVi0

feel weird about posting such a famous clip, but hey! for the casual fans in the room ;)

american doll posse was one of those massive cross-media concept albums, which turned a lot of people off (personally I thought that part was quite well-executed, but I'm pretty much alone there)

"Smokey Joe" and "Dragon" were the best tracks on that album, of course they were the bonus tracks.

they were? I'm pretty sure they were on my regular copy, it's just a long-ass album

(also, the downside of half the blogs and supplemental materials being hosted on outside sides like myspace etc means about half of it is missing, possibly forever)

Well they were on all the copies of the album but the "official" last song is "The Dark Side of the Sun" (which sounds like it should be amazing but isn't) then you get that "Posse Bonus" interlude and then those two tracks.

I skipped around through her past ten years of recordings this afternoon, listened to about 20 songs.

- super impressed by her voice on these latter day recordings, she (and her engineers) have figured it out, a perfect bone-dry sound, rich and expressive. I don't know whether it's her own efforts or that she's married to one of her engineers, but somewhere somebody spent a long and loving time with her voice and a pile of microphones and cracked the code.

- very turned off by all the revisionism: the remixing/fragmenting of her work on "Librarian", the remixing/remastering/rerecording/fragmenting on "Piano", the re-recordings on "Gold Dust" (though I prefer the new version of "Winter" to the original), the re-composing of older work on "Graces".

- overall, I was exceptionally bored by all the original songs. "Boring" is not a word I like in music crit because much of my favourite music is boring by traditional standards, but these songs are featureless.

But after I kind of gave up about it and walked away, I started remembering my first experience in listening to "Pele" and feeling the same sort of sensation of featurelessness. Songs ending abruptly and armed with no clear hooks. It was BB's "blunt force repetition" that made me fall in love with that record and-- spurred by katherine's comment about the impermanence of Tori records as digital content-- made me think that maybe, skipping around from Youtube to Youtube, I'm trying to digest this music with twitchy 2014 ears instead of immersing myself in it the way I did in the 90s, and that is doing Tori no favours? Anyway I'm changing my tactic

huh -- "boring" is not the word I'd use to describe a lot of the later material except maybe beekeeper or scarlet's walk. "embarrassing," maybe, at its worst, but even the embarrassing tracks have this kind of balls-to-the-wall commitment to them

Agreed., esp. for American Doll Posse.

at first i was going to say i feel comfortable calling "the beekeeper" boring, but really there's a lot there that actively grated on me (i don't think i hate any song in her oeuvre quite as much as i hate "ireland"). i tried pretty hard to love this album but i just can't take the lite-FM vibe that permeates so much of it.

idk, has anyone itt heard enough of her later work to form a POX from, say "the beekeeper" to present day? (while i think "scarlet's walk" sounds more like her later stuff than her earlier stuff, "the beekeeper" seems to be where both critical approval and sales start to decline). i'm interested in compiling my own, but i haven't listened to "abnormally attracted to sin" or "midwinter graces" more than once and i'd want to relisten to them first.

- very turned off by all the revisionism: the remixing/fragmenting of her work on "Librarian", the remixing/remastering/rerecording/fragmenting on "Piano", the re-recordings on "Gold Dust" (though I prefer the new version of "Winter" to the original), the re-composing of older work on "Graces".

what's disappointing is that this sort of revisionism has always been integral to tori's work - she's always given her songs radical reworkings live. her skills in reinterpreting others' work have always been amazing but she really applies it to her own as well. but gold dust and those remasters just seemed dry and pointless, like she was tooling around with her back catalogue because she had nothing else to do. she can still pull it off live though (that tour with the octet was great).

i think her voice has gotten much much worse in the past decade, she doesn't sound comfortable unless she's either at the top or the bottom of her range now? and i'm not into that glassy dead-eyed tone that was all over night of hunters.

american doll posse is definitely the closest she's come to a "return to form" since scarlet's walk - think it's telling that she was able to tap into a measure of what once made her great via an elaborate dressing-up strategy, ie when she could duck under the dead-eyed stepford couture image she's created for herself.

post-scarlet POX...all but one off ADP

big wheel
bouncing off clouds
code red
smokey joe
teenage hustling
dragon
beauty of speed
shattering sea
body and soul
father's son

bouncing off clouds
teenage hustling
beauty of speed
body and soul
smokey joe
give
[one of police me, fire to your plain, that guy, or welcome to england -- different ones of these are going to stick for different people]
starling
curtain call
flavor (gold dust version)

new single, "trouble's lament."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EAVmVijVw4

genuinely surprised by not only how much i like this but how unaffected, breezy and natural-sounding it is. in a very low-key way that won't blow anyone away, but it does strike me that this rectifies in a stroke a lot of what's been cringeworthy with tori since 2002.

i mean, this could be off scarlet's walk - actually the song it brings to mind is "tombigbee", which was one of the extra tracks floating around that album

It is pretty nice, isn't it? Apropo of not much, it made me wonder what kind of music Joanna Newsom might be making in 20 years.

I think it bodes well for the record! I am trying to make it to one of the concerts

Agree with Lex.

into this.

Best thing she's released in years. Cautiously optimistic for the album.

i like this song a lot.

i'm having a really sympathetic re-listen of The Beekeeper right now. probably tori at her happiest and most candid, and even though the sonic palette she's chosen is not one i'm super-into, SHE is super-into it, and i'm loving how happy she sounds as she plays with it! she is having a blast on "witness" in particular. i started my listen trying to pull songs for the late-era POX i've been meaning to do, but i've discovered that even the songs i don't particularly like have something that redeems them: a hook, a turn of phrase, an unexpected sentiment.

the track on here that most resembles early tori is "the beekeeper," and it's my favorite track on the album. she wrote it about a point when her mother was very ill, and it starts off abstracted in that tori way and then becomes surprisingly concrete and plaintive. there are a couple songs on here that are very concrete for tori ("ribbons undone" is straight-up "you guys i love my daughter so much"), but this is where it works the best: she builds up this edifice of myth and metaphor and then drops it for the reality of her mother in a hospital bed. the chorus is eerie:

don't be afraid
i promise that she will awake tomorrow
somewhere

my second favorite track is "barons of suburbia" just for the way the music builds and builds to that triumphant "she is risen" at the end.

THIS IS GOOD.

lyrics have been posted thnx :P
what next?

akhiyan nu khuaab vakha gaii an sanu choothay laray laa gaii an
ishq da rola paa k tu saday dil nu q thukra gaii an
ki dasiay tainu asii hal-e-dil asii sooli utay tngay an na din langda na chain hnda asi dar dar rulday firday an
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni
muk gaii muhabbat muk gaiyan aasan pr nai mukdi ay jind mar janii
pau phar k asi tainu rok lainday jy chalda sada koii zor hnda
asii tery pichay q ruldy jy teray jya koii hor hnda
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni
try ish ny jogi kita ay tery ishq ny rogi kita ay chaihay da ni kuj dunia to teray ishq abhogii kita ay
ahy duniya walay pagal ny jiray aashiq nu samjhaundy ny jirii aag na bujhdii samandran to onu fookan maar bujha gy ny
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni

Man, she really needs to do something about her art direction tho.

um this album is actually good!!! i was not expecting it or daring to hope for it

good on a kinda scarlet's walk level rather than PEAK TORI (obvvv) but most impressively, good in the sense that i'm properly enjoying it and she seems to have consciously purged herself of a LOT of the things that have made the past decade so trying

I woke up with "America" in my head this morning, man, what a great song. There are others too. At least six and maybe eight of these songs are imo the best of her Scarlet's-onward era

the chorus of the title track gives me actual "crucify" feelings

also TWO barbed songs about her husband?

Ooh! You like that chorus! Interesting, I don't at all. Most of the "I have a band" moments on this record remind me too much of St. Vincent, all squareness and no emotion. The only dud imo is "The Giant's Rolling Pin", what is the name for that kind of cute songwriting? It drives me nuts

It's tough with the domestica "fractured postcards from a life of contentment" songs to separate "Tori-as-artist" from "Tori-as-person". Esp. that duet with Tash <3 <3 omg

oh that one is horribly side-eye worthy but even on this album's worst moment she seems to have...idk, a bit of levity? it's not awful because it's self-serious and overthought (but still dull), it's just overly zany

there are actually a ton of nice production details on this as well, just little things about how the arrangements pop

the "unrepentant geraldines" chorus feels like the most effectively direct songwriting tori's done in...two decades. it's almost like a back-to-basics declaration

Huh! I will give the title track a few more plays. "Zany" is the word I was looking for, yeah

i actually can't believe that the duet with tash is so lovely. i love that a) you can't tell whether they're interrupting each other or finishing each other's sentences, b) unlike whatever happened on night of hunters, they actually have mother-daughter chemistry rather than piano teacher-pupil non-chemistry

the coda of the title track about the vicar's wife is what needed to be chopped really

Struggling to think of a better parent-child duet tbh, it really flies high

I adore "Trouble's Lament."

AHHH more Tash on this album?? she was my favorite thing about Night of Hunters!

her best album since Scarlet's Walk

Better imo.

dunno, I really like Scarlet's Walk. But it's up there.

not sure how i feel about the rest of this (feel like either her melodic sense has gotten somewhat obscure or i haven't lived with the songs long enough yet) but holy shit "promise"

i'm constantly getting bits of these songs coming into my head, i feel it's her most consistently straightforwardly melodic album...maybe ever? maybe even the first that succeeds on very direct pop terms. i mean i barely remember a single melody she's done recently, this is a retreat from laboured obscurity imo

i'm now past the point of being shocked this isn't terrible into properly liking it and being excited about her as an artist again - a different artist to peak '90s tori perhaps but still an exciting one. i'm still listening to this all the time!

appaz she's been covering taylor swift and miley cyrus live; can't help but wonder whether having a teenage daughter has resulted in her having an actual knowledge of wider pop culture rather than a hermetically sealed inner circle with husband and his classic rock records.

also can't get over how great her VOICE sounds - neither the weird glassy tone of some of her recent stuff nor audibly struggling with everything except the lowest and highest notes. some of the self-harmonies on this are ridiculously pretty

 rather than a hermetically sealed inner circle with husband and his classic rock records.

she wrote a blog about her husband's 'stupid record collection' iirc
;)

even the video is good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=285Lospdgb0

she also looks better these days than she did a few years ago; cut down on the botox or something.

I wish i loved this, but in truth I think I just like it a lot. Some bits are amazing, but if this is her prettiest, best sounding and least problematic album since Scarlet's Walk, I'd say it's also not as powerful as the great album lurking in American Doll Posse once you cut out the unnecessary bits (I have a pretty great proposed track list if people need it).

Some additional thoughts:

1. Her vocals are definitely approved. Not nearly as many jarring ai and ay sounds.

2. Kind of ironic that, now people have finally gotten over comparing her to Kate Bush, she finally records an album where she sounds like Kate Bush at some point in basically every song (albeit at times very different parts of KB's career - I'm most reminded of Never For Ever and A Sea of Honey).

3. I definitely want a whole album of Natashya. What a voice. Like someone boiled down the best bits of Mutya, Keisha and Siobhan into a single vocalist.

Her vocals are definitely improved, that is.

tim-approved vocals

I finally gave "gold dust" a listen and I really like it, as a compilation, it's more interesting than putting those songs together without the orchestration. obv some of these songs had orchestration before (anastasia for one) and were done better, but some of these are quite nice versions. super important or vital? absolutely not but it's more listenable than peter gabriel's orchestration re-recordings, to me (and I'm a huge gabriel fan)

"Flicker" sounds like a classic Little Earthquakes style track.

"girl"off of Little Earthquakes is so good.

i don't really know any of her other albums. back in high school a friend put little earthquakes on one side of a cassette, under the pink on the other, and i just rewound the little earthquakes side every time i reached the end.

The b-sides from the first two albums are key.

^ OTM. "Honey" is so good.

Yes. Also don't get me started on "Sister Janet" or "Here In My Head".

Take to the Sky still gives me a little chill 25 years later.

"Sugar" and "Black Swan" too. Tori must be one of the most rewarding b-sides artist out there, and as a plus for fans she would show reverence to these songs live.

the great album lurking in American Doll Posse once you cut out the unnecessary bits (I have a pretty great proposed track list if people need it).

tim i am curious about this! especially bc i agree there is a great album lurking in that record

"Honey", "Sister Janet" and "Here. In My Head" are probably the b-sides I'd single out first as well!

Also "Bachelorette", "Alamo", "Purple People", and "Siren" even if it wasn't an actual b-side...

my ADP edit would probably be

Big Wheel
Bouncing Off Clouds
Teenage Hustling
Body And Soul
Father's Son
Code Red
Beauty Of Speed
Smokey Joe
Dragon

I think I did have a tracklist but I'd have to reproduce it now.

Lex's choices are all excellent and would be on my list but I'd definitely add "Secret Spell". You could probably throw in "Roosterspur Bridge" and "Almost Rosey" as well.

There's often a lot not wrong with the rest, other than that it's slight (e.g. "Programmable Soda") or just lesser or doesn't hit what it's aiming for ("Digital Ghost", "Girl Disappearing", "Dark Side of the Sun") or adds to an existing sense of bloat (most of the interludes, which with some exceptions are unobjectionable or even quite good).

But the core of the album is effectively the great "return to relatively straightforward songwriting and performing" album that Unrepentant Geraldines is billed as being (not that there's anything wrong with the latter album, but arguably it's actually less direct, probably on par with Scarlet's Walk). The irony is that this is obscured by the heavy ~concept~ of ADP, which in truth seems more like Tori's post-facto attempt to retrofit a narrative where none exists, but nonetheless hangs more heavily over the album than her other attempts do (possible or even probable exception of Night of Hunters which I never got around to).

There's a live version of "Here. In My Head" that was on More Pink (second disc of b-sides that came with Under The Pink in Australia for a while) which was the first version of it I heard and which totally demolishes me, but if it's on youtube it's impossible to find under all the other live versions. Key is that she doesn't totally brock out at the end (the "here, hey, do you know what this is doing to me?" bit), instead it's like all of her rage is suppressed and poisons her bloodstream.

I kinda jumped off the Tori bandwagon after "The Beekeeper" but did hear "Gold Dust" and enjoyed "Night of Hunters". Aside from ADP, am I missing much?

i see this year's deluxe reissue of Pele is on Spotify.

"Aside from ADP, am I missing much?"

the new album is good. it's not exceptionally great (I don't think anything she's done after Scarlet's Walk is) but it's pretty good

a major frustration with the deluxe pele is they've restored the original "talula" and didn't even include the tornado mix on disc two

Hey what does a Brad think about "Sugar" and its jack antonoff from the womb production job?

I'd swap "Roosterspur Bridge" for "Code Red," but I'd co-sign lex's ADP edit down the line otherwise. That would make for a great album. I got a ton of angry emails from her diehards when I reviewed that album and said it was indicative of her need for an editor willing to challenge her. I remember liking "Abnormally Attracted to Sin" quite a bit when it came out, but damned if I could name a song from it now.

Going back to he original mix of "Talula"-- always one of my favorite singles of hers-- for the Pele reissue is inexplicable, since I'd argue that the Tornado Mix is probably the one that most people are familiar with. I prefer it to the original by a pretty huge margin.

Keep the original for the album proper by all means but at least but the Tornado Mix on the bonus disc.

Mind you there's some odd choices down the line. Including all the jokey b-sides from Caught A Lite Sneeze but not "Samurai"? Not including "A Case of You" or "If Six Was Nine" or the UTP bonus disc?

Hey what does a Brad think about "Sugar" and its jack antonoff from the womb production job?

one of my fav tori b-sides, it's so cloudy. it also seems to predict choirgirl six years ahead of time?

or really you could kinda put it on any of her records and it wouldn't sound out of place

oh wow "flicker" really is excellent

also, fav pele lyrics? right now mine is

he said 1 + 1 is 2
but Henry said that it was 3
so it was
here I am

also, of course, "got an angry snatch / girls you know what i mean"

"I'm trying not to move
It's just you ghost
Passing through"

Pele is my favourite album by miles (FTCGH second)

*sorry should say your ghost, copied that lyric absent mindedly from a website. :-/

this is just kinda baseless speculation but it's possible the lyric "this little masochist / is lifting up her dress" had a considerable effect on my sexuality

angry snatch for ever. Also Tori's Eagles lift on the opening couplet of that song really is very witty.

Not from Pele but I was thinking about this line from "Honey" yesterday: "And you know what you're doing / So don't even" - I can't even remember whether dropping the verb like that was common parlance back in c. 1994? It feels very much this decade.

She's a really difficult artist to vote for in the polls too, I mean "Black Dove" and "Marianne" both got zero votes - which is insane.

"Black Dove" feels a bit forced to me, like she wanted to write something with the immensity of scale and emotional heft of "Little Earthquakes" or "Upside Down" or "Pretty Good Year", but she doesn't really have a central narrative conceit or ~state~ to work with, so she blows up and over-invests in these component parts which individually are pretty great but ultimately add up to something like a "Past The Mission Pt. 2".

"Marianne", OTOH, is impeccable, perhaps the best example of Tori using her word salad lyricism to extract more impact from the narrative rather than less.

Wow I typed so far up my ass in this thread over the years my apologies to everyone

My favourite Pele lyric is "and last time I knew / she worked in an abbey in Iona / she said, "I / killed a man, T, I gotta stay / hidden in this abbey""

fgti! That's one of my favourite Tori lyrics :) nice one. "Twinkle" is my #1 song by her.

HI DERE

Hey what does a Brad think about "Sugar" and its jack antonoff from the womb production job?

― Tim F, Friday, November 25, 2016 4:29 PM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm always surprised by how quiet the production of the original is, like she's singing along to a memory of a beat. The first version of "Sugar" I heard was the live solo piano version on the "Hey Jupiter" single and it surprised me that the original was so calm. (Best version is probably the full band live performance though - weirdly the Proper Rock Star vibe of that tour is such an anomaly in Tori's career but I think a lot of her songs peaked with these arrangements.)

I always forget how good "Black Dove" is because so much of its heft comes from the arrangement (esp the decision to delay the full band for half the song - and there's really no warning that it's coming, I still remember the huge surprise the first time I heard it) and also the middle eight. But I always thought of it as a sequel to "Girl" thematically.

I spent the last few days binging and - this will probably change again in future but - I mostly clicked hardest with anything that really spotlighted the interplay between Tori's voice and her piano playing.

I think that specific quality is one that doesn't get talked about much... Her piano playing is less remarkable considered in isolation than understood as this remarkable backdrop to her songs, the sense that these figure-eights she draws around the vocal melodies really accent the songs' emotional content, facial expressions you don't see but hear. It's really unusual for the pop song form, I think, the extent of chromatic density which is essentially there to closely complement the core melodic/narrative/thematic structure.

Take a song like "Doughnut Song": the way the piano rolls through the song like storm clouds, countervailing waves of light and darkness, the way she uses the lower register to really punctuate and emphasise the heavier moments ("and if I'm wasting all your time this time..." and then the left hand really digs in) and then the higher register to suggest wandering and tentativeness that leads off her questioning conclusions ("I guess I'm way beyond the pale....?") - this is one of several ways in which "Doughnut Song" is a sequel to "Honey", which has that same sense of storm clouds rolling in, and is similarly built around very delicate piano/guitar interplay.

Or on "Upside Down", the way the piano follows along with the middle-eight vocal ("I say 'the world is sick' / You say 'tell me what that makes us darlin'" etc.) but fills in all the bits in between the song's dialogues, like the notes are registering the impact, a bruise forming on the skin of the vocal lines.

Or on "Sister Janet", the way the central figure through the verses is played with increasing intensity, until she follows up "slipping the blade in easy" with "slipping the blade in the marmalade", and a sense of lightness suddenly enters with these higher notes, that leads directly into the chorus's reframing of the central riff as somehow optimistic and widescreen rather than claustrophobic and shadowed. And then she jumps up the register for the first half of the second verse to simultaneously suggest a ratcheting of intensity and an increased sense of vulnerability, a turning of the screw with ambiguous consequences.

And maybe the very specific thing about Boys for Pele which is so far out, and which maybe makes it her greatest album in the final analysis, is how it places this particular quality of her performances at the centre of almost every song. Whereas on From The Choirgirl Hotel, if she wants to do southern boogie skronk, she fucking gets the band in*, on "In The Springtime of his Voodoo" the centre is always always the piano (except when, bizarrely given the surrounding song, she switches over the harpsichord). The first minute and a half is in some ways one of the most astonishing things she ever did, the way she uses these exploratory, ruminative piano lines to trace out an idiom that is not even hers except by genetic extraction - and the pay-off when the crawling baseline and percussion come in is just massive.

* Not that this is a bad thing at all, and some days that aspect of FTCH (is part of what) makes it seem to me like her best album, but from a particular vantage point one could almost argue that simply blowing up your sonic palette is maybe the less radical gesture; the harder manoeuvre is to work out how to do anything with the one you've already got.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wVOpTTV5ds

Tori Amos will always be classic to me

wow i missed that booming tim post

and the pay-off when the crawling baseline and percussion come in is just massive.

you gotta owe! something sometimes!

Great post Tim

http://pitchfork.com/news/73081-tori-amos-announces-new-album-native-invader-announces-tour/?mbid=homepage-more-latest-and-video

http://pitchfork.com/news/pitchfork-announces-talk-with-tori-amos/

i would go if i was in NY :-/

New single is out.

http://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2017/07/27/539523176/listen-tori-amos-shares-cloud-riders-from-upcoming-album

Not bad? More excited for her shows than any new material, but this is better than expected

lmao "native invader"

This thread makes me happy.

is she pretending to be an indian again this time? because I like scarlet's walk but kind of hate that shit

Watched a recentish performance of hers and was elated when she played "Putting The Damage On"

anyone catching her on this tour? one of the best live acts in existence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsSBNNjhGJY

holy shit this song rules

I didn't like Cloud Riders or Up the Creek much (the first one IMO being boring and the second a cool yet not fully realised idea), but yes, Reindeer King is gorgeous. Love every second of it.

I don't know WTF is up with the iMovie lyric videos, though.

this is so good

Good to hear her wax about Y Kant Tori Read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAenlXjCVLE

Nylon interview is also really good. Tori is such an eloquent speaker and totally genuine and empathetic. Legend

because I do not value my time I threw a couple clicks into the buzzfeed tithe, and immediately regretted it:

http://i.imgur.com/ZjEkkVb.png

(the worst thing? this is sponsored content by Tori's own team. also, American Doll Posse was a much better "which one is you?")

^ I got Raspberry Swirl :-/

I'm sure anyone that has wanted to hear Y Kant Tori Read has heard it by now?? but I just found out it is up on Spotify in a Remastered version.

Maybe you want to listen to it?

https://open.spotify.com/album/5pnAHJIW4UWmdlFnjyN0IT

Still so great.

new album's out - just started listening, first track is "raindeer king" and yeah it's an instant classic

second song a little middling
third track, "broken arrow," super great

oh thanks for the reminder, definitely want to hear this. not keen on her daughter's vocals tbh

in a recent interview Tori made a reference to how she wasn't acknowledged by an artist she admired for many years. Couldn't help but wonder if it was Kate Bush

I think her fans established that it was either Stevie Nicks or Joni Mitchell.

oh cool, thanks!

i believe I saw Bush say something complimentary about Amos around the last time she bothered to do any kind of press at all. maybe not.

i like this better than the last one, it's way too long and my attention drifts occasionally but, like, "reindeer king," "broken arrow," "cloud riders," and "up the creek" are all really wonderful songs

oh also, "bang"! "bang" is like my favorite tori song in years

This album is like if, after the 90s (or maybe Strange Little Girls / Scarlet's Walk) Tori had started transitioning to a "mature artist" instead of spending a decade messing with her formula.

I haven't come to grips with most of it yet but stylistically it's on point.

Reindeer King is so lovely, absolute classic.

This album is like if, after the 90s (or maybe Strange Little Girls / Scarlet's Walk)

it's def got a "long-delayed follow-up to scarlet's walk" aspect about it, though that may be me projecting bc "mary's eyes" is my fav tori closer since "gold dust"

feel like "reindeer king" is Tori's bid at 50 ft of snow KB

"reindeer king" is classic Tori

might sound cheesy but I started playing piano as a teenager because of Tori

yeah reindeer king is one of her best songs.

Yooooooo, how long has she been covering We Don't Need Another Hero??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7jio-XxVuA

ugh i wish i had seen her on this tour. the last tour too

Apparently that "We Don't Need Another Hero" was the first time ever she's done it. But according to setlist.fm she's already done over 50 different covers on this tour. Almost 120 (!!!) on the previous one.

Wow, that's a whole lot of effort on top of digging through her own repertoire.

a friend saw her in new orleans last night and was a tad disappointed at the amount of covers actually, though he said it was still good.

I saw her in New York and there were only about two covers (honestly, I preferred the Tuesday setlist, which I didn't see, to Wednesday's, which I did, but Kristin Hersh was playing Tuesday and I saw her instead)

Really hope I can her in Washington (I'm in Vancouver). Tori's covers are one of my favourite parts of her shows, absolutely love her hyper ballad, and dream of sheep, I'm on fire, hounds of love and Philadelphia covers. Course there's plenty more good ones :-)

Oops meant running up that hill not hounds

seeing her on friday, so excited. Haven't seen her since the strange little girls tou

Saw her in Washington last night. Energy level felt a little lower than some of the recent sets wherein she would quickly traverse from one original/cover to the next. Energy briefly picked up on apollo's frock, but that was 10 songs into the set. Honestly, I would have been happier with a covers set and she was better on the strange little girls tour, but I admire her decision to play how she feels every night and keep it spontaneous.

Highlights: Silver Springs, Running to Stand Still, Raspberry Swirl and Another Girls Paradise. Nice to hear a few LE tracks as well.

Night of hunters is a fucking good record

^ it's her best since from the choirgirl

somehow i forgot night of hunters in my tori top 5 - what a record, clearly she still has it.

Happy belated birthday

POLLing the Damage On - ILM Artist Poll #91 - Tori Amos (voting open until 9 September 2018)

forgotten to link this here until now but here it is for posterity

New album, Ocean to Ocean, apparently to be announced soon?

https://i.imgur.com/8SyRjps.jpg

01 Addition of Light Divided
02 Speaking with Trees
03 Devil's Bane
04 Swim to New York State
05 Spies
06 Ocean to Ocean
07 Flowers Burn to Gold
08 Metal Water Wood
09 29 Years
10 How Glass is Made
11 Birthday Baby

The cover is horrendous per usual but the unusually short tracklisting + the appearance of musicians other than the Amos Family Band (Matt Chamberlain, Jon Evans and John Philip Shenale are apparently all credited) make it sound somewhat interesting. Bracing myself for the track(s) that deal with her mother's death, her way of dealing with grief lyrically always fucks me up.

Tried to send this Facebook post on to an ILXor and discovered they’d deleted their account, so posting it here instead:

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10220578352989813&id=1263695503

The gist: “Strange Little Girls” is 20 years old

hm this seems good

Yeah, this is good and I'm glad she's still at it.

where my other tori heads at

Listened once so far and enjoyed it quite a bit, probably way more than anything else she has released in the past 15+ years? I liked bits and pieces from the last two albums but this one just sounds much better (I suppose this is because of guest musicians contributing as well, instead of just the Amos family band and their shared Macbook) and there are no clunky genre pastiche tracks or overwrought concepts.

Would you describe it as ... back to basics?

it's not really a return to her peak form or anything but it would be pretty easy to make the case that it's still her best in a long time, it's pretty solid

Yeah, I don't think it's up there with the best of her albums, but it's good. Love some of the textures, like on "Metal Water Wood". I actually dug some of the Native Invader tracks quite a bit so I'd put this on the same level

saw her on wednesday, my first time in person (i owned the welcome to sunny florida dvd as a kid), her band rn is jon evans on bass and ash soan on drums and that's it, and they sound really incredible, all the improv was gorgeous and i got surprised a lot by the set ("spring haze"!!!), kept thinking if she made an album with just these two guys it would fucking rule (evans was carving soundscapes with his bass like he was playing in talk talk or something), idk if that'll ever happen though

triggered a desire to listen to every tori amos song for the first time since the ilx poll. been having a really great time, even though her last three albums are all the same album (some songs that rise to the occasion of her earlier work, plus many songs that are just fine)

oh also, "bang"! "bang" is like my favorite tori song in years

― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Wednesday, September 13, 2017 8:42 AM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

still the high-water mark of her late period

Coincidentally, I was curious about Tori recently – a video came on; I realized that I've never really "heard her stuff"; and it struck me that she seems like an artist I could either become obsessed with, or have no taste at all for. (An initial Wikipedia dive was pretty intimidating... I didn't realize she has so many albums.)

it is so much goddamn music

always makes me so happy to see a tori thread update from ivy

Scarlet's Walk vinyl / reissue is out; heard bad things about the black vinyl pressings, waiting for a red vinyl amazon one to show up which is supposed to be better, but have been re-listening to it on streaming. Two things: The reissue, on streaming, sounds a little muffled, or bass-heavy; but I also am suffering from some hearing loss over the past year and it's possibly related to that (the new Mitski album sounds similar to me, like the highs are missing). 2) this is kind of the last Tori album I loved or even thought was any good until Geraldines and the following (which I still don't think measure up) but somehow I never paid that much attention to the actual lyrics of a lot of it, so color me surprised to read the lyrics to Taxi Ride and find out she was not singing "just another dead fly to you".

“Taxi Ride” is such an interesting song I think. Trying to capture the experience of being both suspicious of / irritated by someone but also thankful for them feels very Tori, so many of her songs describe these sorts of emotionally ambivalent relationships but rarely with such specificity (although being Tori it’s not like the lyrics are consistently clear).

Under The Pink = 30 years old today.

It's interesting, I was drinking at a coffee shop over the holidays and they had on a playlist and "God" came on. Removed from the context of me saying "today I am going to listen to Under The Pink", it is a crazy fucking song. Caton's guitar has none of the "atonal, but catchy" appeal of a Marc Ribot solo, it's just a squall of irritation; the piano writing is Tori at her most elegantly "guitaristic"; the verses are grand but fragmented and the "bridge" is brief but also the climax? It's so wild to think that this song was even picked as a single, let alone charted... and I'm sitting there thinking "and this is Track 2. This comes after the insanity of 'Pretty Good Year' and before 'Bells For Her'. This might be the strangest album to ever go platinum"

I listened to this album about 200 times before I turned 16 and so its features feel like my own, but I just realised really that the extreme-placid photo shoots and the easy-colour design of the packaging likely perfumed this album extremely, disguised it visually as "something pretty", drove it like a Trojan My Little Pony into my brain to surprise-infect me with its brilliant craziness

This album terrified my younger brother. He was 13! I asked my mom if we could listen in the car and he said "I don't like that album" and my mom said why not? and he started crying! At 13! My younger brother was not usually a crybaby but he was crying. "Mom it's about her wanting to kill waitresses and touching herself and eating babies and stuff it is so horrible." That's right! Cry you fucker! Listen to this and cry your heart out

This is such a nice sounding album too - the step up in production from Little Earthquakes is so huge.

Although I got both albums not much later in 1995, I think my listening was not yet sufficiently developed to really appreciate how much production quality was improving for so many bands and artists during the early 90s. Was this something that people actively noticed at the time? In my head now it would be like watching layers of grime being wiped off your windows.

I mean, my family only got a CD player around this same time. My immersion in these albums occurred at the same time I was introduced to the glory of 44.1 kHz, so I didn't really have a basis for comparison

Until recently , this was my favorite album of hers. At the time I thought Boys For Pele was a disappointment, but I’ve since realized it’s the best and I wasn’t worthy when it was released.

Now I’m wondering if Choirgirl Hotel is also good. That’s where I got off the bus.

it is. it's not AS good but it's very strong.

under the pink just dazzled me yet again! magnificent, otherworldly.

in the mid-90s my best friend was in the peace corps in diffa, niger, which is at the ass end of the ass end of countries not so far from what used to be lake chad but also 820 miles over impossibly slow roads to niamey, the capital

he had no books and was more or less dependent on me to send him anything related to then-current western culture. (so naturally i sent him THE EIGER SANCTION by TREVANIAN, which had long been made into a truly awful movie featuring clint eastwood, george kennedy and jack cassidy)

but i also sent him mixtapes, one of which included the jawbox cover of 'cornflake girl' (which is great)

a few years later i met one of his fellow peace corps volunteers, named Pcarolyn (but the P was silent). she asked me if i was the person who'd sent the jawbox cover of 'cornflake girl' to michael; i said yes, and she said 'i didn't like that'

anyway that was 25 years ago and i'm told she's since dropped the ~ silent P ~ but also she was super nice and now this story is all i can think about when i consider 'under the pink'

LOL

Under The Ink

Yeah, I think Under the Pink just edges Little Earthquakes as her best album. Like Cow_Art I was disappointed in Boys for Pele, but unlike them I've never gotten into it and indeed it's where I got off the bus.

Little Earthquakes had three producers working on it at different times, which I think helps to account for its fairly nondescript sound. Under the Pink was a real step up in production values.

I don't think Tori Amos really figured out a "signature sound" until Choirgirl. I can't pick between which is "my favourite" of the first three, but I am pretty sure Choirgirl is "her best" in terms of realisation and execution. Those first three albums sound like albums of prototypes, buying plots of land and doing some surveying. Surveyor-Tori might be my favourite mode of hers, as a listener. Sometimes it gets too safe ("China"), or zany ("Leather", "Mr. Zebra"), or theatre kid ("The Wrong Band", "Happy Phantom"), or annoying ("In The Springtime Of His Voodoo"), or fake-rawk ("Professional Widow"), or uncomfortable ("Me And A Gun"), but the risks feel riskier and the rewards feel greater.

I was reading about Under The Pink on wiki yesterday and seeing that there were song rankings ("God" is her 3rd best song! "Cornflake Girl" is #1!) and I was puzzling over my own ranking. When I try and draw one up, I find I'm listing the more "complete" songs and overlooking the deformed experiments. It doesn't feel right.

Like if I had to pick a Tori song to play at a party it'd def be "Cornflake Girl" or "Crucify", but if I had to take one song with me to the afterlife it'd be "Yes, Anastasia" (or "Mother", or "Here. In My Head")

got an angry snatch
girls you know what i mean

I put "Past the Mission" on a mixtape once, hoping to impress a girl. One of her friends later told me that she hated Tori Amos. Alas.

the piano work on Yes Anastasia is insane

so glad to have seen her once, sat front row. she fully rollicks on the piano.

got an angry snatch
girls you know what I mean

See... if "Voodoo" was just the body of the song I'd have a different feeling about it, because it's amazing, but that first minute of snarling always made me annoyed. But then again, maybe I'd think less of the song without it, who knows, it's definitely a beautiful strangething

so glad to have seen her once, sat front row. she fully rollicks on the piano.

Literally have never once seen her, which is crazy to consider

I put "Past the Mission" on a mixtape once, hoping to impress a girl. One of her friends later told me that she hated Tori Amos. Alas.

― Washington Post Malone (Ye Mad Puffin)

kind of riffing off this (nothing about you YMP) and thinking about my complicated feelings about amos as a cultural icon in this era

i had this sense in 1994 that amos was sort of a synecdoche for an entire gender, "me and a gun", that really kind of... i think overshadowed her early career. like #metoo if people just focused it all on one woman, one song. and honestly, that was how i, a fairly confused young person who thought of themselves as a "man" and wanted to understand What It Was Like Being A Woman, approached her music.

it was actually when boys for pele came out that i realized with some embarrassment that it was... kind of shitty to view someone like that. _boys for pele_ was _weird_, and to some extent amos herself was (unsurprisingly!) _weird_. "weird", that i understood. amos wasn't "every woman", she was _a_ woman.

and the thing was, like a lot of gen x shit, i think there was a lot of stuff people were trying to do back then that just wound up not going anywhere. not, like, because people _did it wrong_ or anything like that. she did these songs and they _were_ powerful, passionate songs, and people paid it lip service and nothing changed except that things got worse. the reason i was looking for a synecdoche was because i believed strongly that the way men viewed women, men treated women, needed to change, and listening to women was how you did that. and i failed at that for a couple of reasons... i wasn't ever a man, but that wasn't the major reason. the major reason was that i wasn't in a place where i could understand and acknowledge women as _individuals_. which is a problem that also underlaid my inability to understand _myself_ as a woman.

anyway as much as people seem to love those first couple records i really treasure that amos did find a distinctive individual voice. it doesn't seem like she was in an environment that made that sort of thing easy.

-

when i listen to something like "god" it makes me think of, i don't know, 1994. post-nirvana, labels were just throwing anything at the wall and seeing what would stick. sure, let's sign royal trux to a major label, why not? i get the sense that a lot of the label a&r people heard nirvana as the latest variety of electronic noise. and responded by saying "hey let's throw a lot of obnoxious noise on our songs, the kids seem to like that". (i don't think the guitar on "god" is "obnoxious noise", at least not in the sense that my hypothetical label people would have.) in that context "god" as a lead single makes sense!

god i love god

Agree but "Crucify" remains my sentimental favorite

With "Sorta Fairytale" a close second; it is the best driving song ever

Is "Sweet Dreams" the apotheosis, musically and lyrically, of the Poppy Bush Interzone?

I said this a while back about Voodoo (and in particular its intro) and I hold to it:

And maybe the very specific thing about Boys for Pele which is so far out, and which maybe makes it her greatest album in the final analysis, is how it places this particular quality of her performances at the centre of almost every song. Whereas on From The Choirgirl Hotel, if she wants to do southern boogie skronk, she fucking gets the band in, on "In The Springtime of his Voodoo" the centre is always always the piano (except when, bizarrely given the surrounding song, she switches over the harpsichord). The first minute and a half is in some ways one of the most astonishing things she ever did, the way she uses these exploratory, ruminative piano lines to trace out an idiom that is not even hers except by genetic extraction - and the pay-off when the crawling baseline and percussion come in is just massive.

I love that, Tim!

I myself feel like I’m bargaining for a wrap and a barista is growling at me about it for a minute before delivering the wrap I desire, but either way the wrap is delicious

those first four albums are an all-time great run

quite unfathomable

Listening to Pele again now and every time it gets better. There are moments and phrases within the songs that are incredibly rich: "and this little masochist is lifting up her dress." In Muhammad My Friend where she mentions having her own TV show and a cheesy little theme song wafts in.

The length of the album works for it too, in contrast to a lot of bloated discs from the same time.

Maybe it was ahead of its time? I feel like a doofus for writing it off. The production is amazing.

i think very much a grower, that's the way it happened to me. the strings are incredible and Marianne for me reshaped music. i imagine it must have felt like a big risk which i think is commendable, and feels like sometimes you have to do that to get at the best nuggets