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

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