Tori Amos

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.