boy you better make her raspberry POLL: Tori Amos - From The Choirgirl Hotel poll

So of course (inspired by this thread) I listened again this morning and "black-dove" didn't seem nearly as clunky as it does in my head. It's really only the first "but I have to get to texas" section that feels forced to me. Sympathetically, it feels like an attempt to fuse together a lot of disparate ideas she had previously explored.

OTOH:

anyway instead of talking about that we could talk about the piano breakdown in "hotel" and how i can't believe that it's played in any earthly time signature

― mutant slow drum (BradNelson), Monday, 15 August 2011 21:58 (ten years ago) link

which, is it 5/4? it's just played so well that you get lost in it

― mutant slow drum (BradNelson), Monday, 15 August 2011 22:05 (ten years ago) link

10/8?

― clams cassingle (donna rouge), Monday, 15 August 2011 22:10 (ten years ago) link

This bit is so fucked up in the best way.

Counting it out in my head, it feels like the bars for the first cycle of "where are the velvets" bridge go 10/8, 12/8, 10/8 and then 13/8, then for the second run-through it switches to 10/8 throughout, and then immediately switches to 4/4 for the "you were wild, where are you now?" section - but none of this ever feels remotely jarring!

went looking to see if anyone transcribed it and this has it as basically what tim describes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFMQtRm2R_A

whole channel is filled with tori covers & transcriptions, really glad to have found it

So of course (inspired by this thread) I listened again this morning and "black-dove" didn't seem nearly as clunky as it does in my head.

I did the same (for the first time in MANY years) and those transitions read to me as something like another iteration of what she'd already done with the bridge of "Pretty Good Year". Not in a lazy sense at all, more in the sense of "reaching into one's bag". (An aside: not sure if anyone was better at writing bridges than Tori circa '92-'98.) "Black-Dove" also a much better song overall than I'd remembered it being, though the me of 1998 would've voted "Jackie's Strength" (which seems heavy-handed now, but then, I was an actual teenager in 1998) and the me of 2021 is all in on "Spark" (speaking of killer bridges).

Yeah bridges - or if not always technically bridges then a profusion of new melodic sections and overlays appearing in the second halves of songs - was her secret weapon. You can hear Taylor Swift leaning into this style on recent tunes like "August" and "Ivy", but the other parallel I think of sometimes is Xenomania. If Tori had ever moonlighted as a pop songwriter she might have ended up producing tunes a bit like Sugababes' "Ace Reject".

it's a bit of a shame to me that "hotel", which is my favourite on the album, ultimately ended up being an extreme of her sound, having pushed her songwriting as far as she could, & not a branching off point for all sorts of new ideas. she did keep playing around with electronics on to venus and back but none of the songs on that come close to "hotel".

imo: "datura"

but yeah it is a shame that there are not more tori songs like it, and that she retreated from this sound pretty much entirely

the thing about "spark"'s bridge that makes it even better somehow is that it feeds right into that stretched out version of the chorus, where every line just builds on the already overwhelming emotion of the previous: "you thought that you were the bomb yes well so did i / say you don't want it / say you don't want it / again and again / but you DON'T / DON'T really mean it." and then i love the way it deflates after that, exhausted, and retreats back into the first verse. ugh. "spark." it's the greatest song of all time

If Tori had ever moonlighted as a pop songwriter

Ha, while I was thinking about bridges earlier today, I briefly considered an alternate reality in which instead of going solo after Y Kant Tori Read, Tori became an industry writer who was brought in on other peoples' sessions as a specialist in fixing the problem of "this song has two parts, but should have three", had a solid 8-10 year run of cowriting credits, then got forced into retirement by Swedish Math.

xp Exactly this. "Spark" is so, so good.

"Datura" goes further on paper, but in reality it feels more in the tradition of "cruel" / "iieee" / "juarez" / "riot poof" but with a long spoken-word section. That's not a criticism, as all of those songs are great, but there's a sense of them using obliqueness as a strategy, as if one of the aspects of trip hop that really fired Tori up was how the apparent diffusion of the songwriting impulse into production (like aspirin dropped into a glass of water) resulted in moodscapes where tension is creeping and cumulative, where the song weaves around the listeners rather than confronting them head-on.

"Hotel" can't be described in those terms IMO. At a vibe level it's more like techno than trip-hop, a direct attack with the filters pushed into the red throughout. I wonder if Tori ever got into the big singles from Beaucoup Fish?

i would probably bargain with satan to have more music that sounds like "hotel," maybe it's good that we only have one. keeps us humble

yeah as soon as i mentioned "datura" i should've been like disclaimer: "datura" is not a funhouse ride through progtronica

there's a sound effect on "hotel" that reminds me directly of a song on the passengers album but that is probably a coincidence

Ha, while I was thinking about bridges earlier today, I briefly considered an alternate reality in which instead of going solo after Y Kant Tori Read, Tori became an industry writer who was brought in on other peoples' sessions as a specialist in fixing the problem of "this song has two parts, but should have three", had a solid 8-10 year run of cowriting credits, then got forced into retirement by Swedish Math.

― New York Review of Wooks (swim), Friday, 8 October 2021 03:11 (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah! "Tear In Your Hand" is always the go-to example for me, the way it appears to start as a fairly conventional post-Elton John pop song and gradually, almost imperceptibly becomes more ambitious and complicated: the way the melodic shifts are so intimately locked into the shifts in the lyrics (e.g. "maybe it's time to wave goodbye now" or "I know, I know you well - well, better than I used to...") as well as into each other. Until you realise that she's also picking up (consciously or otherwise) on the compositional ambition of Rickie Lee Jones' "Living It Up" and "Pirates (So Long Lonely Avenue)" but replacing the vertigo of those tunes with a kind of sweep-of-inevitability, more convertible sports car speeding through the Alps than rollercoaster.

I never even noticed the uneven beats in the bridge of "Hotel"! The rhythmic displacement in this song that I always loved was her phrasing of "I guess that what I'm seeking, guess that what I'm seeking...isn't here."

a profusion of new melodic sections and overlays

"Almost Rosey" on American Doll Posse is the song of hers I always think of this way. Each new section introduces rhythmic, harmonic and melodic ideas to the song to increase its intensity; it's like a series of bets being laid down, and she wins each one.

well i know we're dying
and there's no sign of a parachute