0.24.1 - Dreamed a little dream, made my own Pretty Hate Machine*
**Tori Amos was the first name I put on that list.
When Catherine came home this week to me cooking while listening to From The Choirgirl Hotel, she said "Are you doing all the Tori albums? That's a lot of albums...". I'm pretty certain Tori Amos is going to stay at the number one spot on my Most Listened Songs widget in my dashboard for the rest of the year; only really Taylor or Sufjan when I get to him have a chance of dislodging her from the top spot. I'm totally fine with that.
I'd really like to hang out with Tori Amos. Not for tawdry star-chasing fanboy reasons, let me be clear - this is not some weird parasocial obsession, but because I think she'd be an unbelievably fascinating person to talk to. I've spent three decades listening to and being influenced by her music, and despite following every release in her body of work, she has a perspective I can't imagine, can't place myself inside - even with 216 songs as points of data to work from, the picture is incomplete, I don't have enough points of reference to draw any but the most vague of conclusions. When I think about Tori Amos I'm left with a puzzle I can't solve, too many blank spaces, more information required, and it haunts and compels me.
Like much of my formative music, my first exposure came through my circle of friends. As a bunch of slightly out-of-mainstream young men, we all had different ways we'd connect with the music of the day, and expose our friends to it; but only my friend Hado had a cool older sister. Somehow, between the 10 or so of us that hung out together for all those years (and still do) nearly all of us were the eldest children, and even where we had siblings, many of them we brothers rather than sisters. But Rachel, Hado's sister, was 20 when we were all 16; she was an enigmatic presence, a ghost glancing in at us playing Tekken while out her way out to do cool, mysterious, adult things. But through her, Hado found Tori Amos, and through him, we all did too.
The memories are fuzzy such a long way back, but my gut tells me that Under The Pink had not even been released when we first heard Little Earthquakes, which Hado had copied onto a blank C90 from Rachel's more legitimate version. It was common practice at the time for us to visit each other carrying a blank cassette tape or two, handed over with instructions to copy for us which ever album had taken our fancy when we heard it at their house, and that's how I acquired Little Earthquakes, but I definitely owned an original, legit cassette copy of Under The Pink, and for me those two albums in combination genuinely helped change or inform my teenage perspective on things that were mysterious to me. At the time, my conception of a female musician was Kylie Minogue singing The Locomotion; it was Madonna doing Material Girl; Diana Ross singing Chain Reaction. Both of those first two albums showed me there was another way, that passion and fire and trauma and unashamed honesty could translate into the kind of music that could do just with a piano and vocals propelled by unbridled emotion what it took a band full of guitars and drums and distortion pedals to do previously. You could rage against the machine without having to sound like Rage Against The Machine. A long journey towards understanding started with those albums too - no-where in my life were there women talking about sex, and sexual assault; rage and frustration at double standards in society between men and women, and the now far more accepted position of talking openly about sexism and misogyny in society. Tori Amos singing "Boy you'd best hope that I bleed real soon, how's that thought for you?" launched me into understanding things not taught to boys in school in my day because they were shameful and secret.
I could write twenty gushing paragraphs about how much I love these first two albums. How I think "Every finger in the room, is pointing at me" starts what I think is the best introductory stanza of lyrics for any artist and exists as a window into the authors emotional state which we see move and develop as her storied career expands through the following albums. How The Waitress takes the formula Nirvana had used to launch themselves into the limelight and recontextualises it as a commentary on inner monologue vs the face we show in public. I adore these first two albums, they're an emotional kaleidoscope, a cathartic outpouring that will never fail to make me feel something powerful every time I listen them them. If for some reason they have passed you by, I can't realistically tell you to listen to one over the other; listen to both, they are worth it.
As a result of my complete devotion to these first two albums, the arrival of Boys For Pele was a shock to the system, because the first thing I heard from it was the Armand Van Helden remix of Professional Widow which dominated the UK music charts by being number one for several weeks***, and was not at all what I was looking for in a Tori Amos song. The whole album sounds very different to the first two, and different again from the popular dance club remix and it left my head spinning. I've long since made my peace with Boys For Pele but it took several years and repeated listens to start to take hold. One of my all time favourite Tori songs, Putting The Damage On appears on this album, but like other albums where the artist deviates from a strong debut to explore a new musical direction, it made me question a lot of the affection I had for her work.
From The Choir Girl Hotel dispelled whatever doubts I had, by finding a middle path between what I loved about the first two albums, and the musical experimentation of the third. Raspberry Swirl is an amazingly high energy song which recalls the dance mix which reached number one, but instead of stilted samples we are treated to a full unhinged vocal performance over the top of the thumping bassline which makes this my highly unlikely pump up jam****. The rest of the album careens wildly between pensive and reflective and a kind of deep south dirt rock vibe that I absolutely adore. This was also the first Tori CD I ever bought, it cost me £8.99 in 1998 (another CD where I have left the price sticker on because its welded to the jewel case), and I went in sight unseen (if there were singles from this album, they did not get airplay in where-ever I was paying attention at the time) with the feeling that if I didn't like this album, that would be it, I'd mentally break up with Tori Amos forever. It remains amongst my favourites of all time by her and set me on a lifelong path of questioning (as we will discuss) but never losing faith in her ability to produce interesting music.
Sidebar: While 1998 was firmly in the middle of my Summer Music Festival period, I was not plugged in particularly to musicians touring in the UK unless those tours happened to be advertised in the pages of Kerrang!, or sometimes the NME if my dad had splashed out for one on a whim. As a result, I completely missed the fact that Tori was coming to play in Sheffield in that year. One person who did not miss that fact was my partner Catherine, who bought a ticket on her own, having never been to Sheffield before, and took the train from Leeds University where she was studying to see the show. Arriving hours ahead of doors opening, she walked around the City Hall building to try and get her bearings, and at the stage door ran into Tori Amos who was leaving. Catherine had bought a disposable camera with her for some reason, and so she has, in her possession, a selfie from 1998 taken of her and Tori Amos. I'm not a jealous man by nature, but the fact that Catherine got to meet Tori makes me green with envy every time I think about it. I'll see if she minds me putting a copy of it in this blog, but she's quite protective of her photos so my guess is she will not be wild about the idea. I've seen it though, its real, and really for 90% of the people reading this, next time you visit our house I am sure Catherine will show you it if you ask.
If we are starting to skip around in the chronology here, album-release wise, it's at this point that I'll remind you I have already listened to Strange Little Girl for my article of cover albums, Scarlet's Walk when I did my albums-with-colours themed week and Tori And The Muses when it came out earlier this year, and wrote about them at these links. Also for the sake of satisfying my OCD need to match images to album titles here's the three album I already listened to, portrayed in black and white to show they don't count twice. I would have put them in the tessellated album block at the top but it would have been 15 albums in one image and that's too many.
To Venus And Back is without doubt my least-listened-to Tori Amos album (apart from Night of Hunters, of more later) because I never owned it (and still don't) because fully half of it is a live album and I have established feelings on those. This period in the Tori Amos canon (this and The Beekepeer) never really found purchase with me. You could play me a track from either of those albums right now, and I'd be able to tell you it was Tori but not much else about it. However, those two albums (and Strange Little Girl and American Doll Posse) taught me a different important lesson about Tori's music in particular and other music in general, and it's this:-
I would much rather artists take big swings than make music that sounds the same over and over again. I want intentionality, I want vision, and if that intention and vision don't always land for me because they want to explore ideas or themes or musical styles that are not totally my jam, that doesn't mean I don't want them to try; the standards to which I have been known to hold bands - I want it, now, the same, but more and better - are not sustainable, not realistic, and result in all music sounding bland, boring, aimed at the safest baseline. So if Tori Amos wants to write an album about beekeeping, femininity and motherhood I'm in favour of the choice even if the outcome isn't my favourite. I love a weird concept album, and writing songs created by alternative versions of yourself like American Doll Posse is the kind of imagination I wish more musicians would embrace. This run of albums ends with Abnormally Attracted to Sin, the first album Catherine and I owned together (in fact, my hazy recollection suggests I bought it for her as a present, but who's counting?) and the kind of delta-blues, southern gospel music running through an album exploring sin, morality, and our relationship to it and perception of it is exactly what I am talking about. This album is entirely my shit, both musically and intellectually and I have deep, abiding affection for it. Apart from one thing.
There are actors who like to give directors a different performance every single take. They can then sift through the various takes and 'find' the performance in the edit; presented with a myriad of options, the director themselves chooses what works and what doesn't to build the scene. Generously, I think Tori Amos is in a similar relationship with her audience during this time. The Beekeeper, Scarlet's Walk, Abnormally Attracted To Sin and American Doll Posse are all around 80 minutes long each, with an average of 19 tracks per album. I've said more than once that this run of albums could probably be condensed to a pair of albums which would rival in quality her first two; those albums are in there, available in the edit, scattered amongst a variety of takes just waiting for you to discover them.
The less generous reading is that Tori Amos really needed a editor or was desperately missing the idea of the B-side, so just put everything she wrote onto every album. I like my first theory better.
With only four more albums to go, time for another sidebar; while Catherine and I are now staring down our 18th anniversary coming in December, our second date took place in the same building she had seen Tori Amos over a decade before. Readers, if you are ever stumped for a good date idea, take your prospective paramour to a comedy club. It's a solid gold date choice - everyone likes to laugh, it's relatively inexpensive but doesn't mean sitting in silence like going to a movie, you can choose how much or little of the show you want to stay for as you disappear between sets, and no matter whether the comics kill or bomb onstage, you are guaranteed to have something to talk about after. Trust me, it's a winner every time.
So for one of our first real dates, we went to the Last Laugh Comedy Club in Sheffield, had a nice night, and in the bar afterwards we talked about music and had a kind of playful argument about the order in which the Tori Amos albums had released, and specifically the order which From The Choir Girl Hotel and To Venus And Back were released. It's weird to remember that back in the distant past of 2008, people didn't have smartphones to immediately answer those questions, and we must have playfully argued about it for 20 minutes before agreeing that whoever was wrong had to pay for the next date - a deal I was happy to take even if I was wrong (I was not, Catherine had flip-flopped Venus and Choir Girl Hotel in her head). I don't remember if she ever did pay for that third date, but I'm not sure I really cared.
The final four Tori albums (not counting the most recent one, I guess, so actually the final five) keep very much to the pattern of finding a creative idea and exploring it. Night of Hunters is a kind of Peter and the Wolf meets a Midsummer Nights Dream, a hallucinatory ballet of classical music which is fascinating conceptually but (for me), the hardest listen in her studio canon. It's perhaps too whimsical for me, too high-concept, but it's beautifully performed even if I can't find my place inside it. By contrast Unrepentant Geraldines is a fantastic collection of alternative piano music, a string of musical musings which shows that Tori can still draw on the same songwriting and musicianship and fire from her earlier albums when she wants to - but she just wants to less frequently, and is more interested in exploring other sides of the galaxy. I really love Selkie from this album which is just a musical telling of an old folklore tale, but its beautifully captured in song here.
Native Invader might be an album as full of pain and frustration and rage as Little Earthquakes but fifteen years on; wounded by family tragedy and witness to the despair of the first Trump presidency, it's a kind of bleak and terrible quiet poetry across the songs on this album. Not quite the pounding fury of something like Precious Things***, more Emily Dickinson melancholy. I listen to Up The Creek as one of several songs to give me some kind of perspective when anxiety has me spiralling, but because of the album's subject matter and it's almost totemic place in my mental musical rolodex, I never end up listening to this album for fun - instead, it's like a free 60 minute opportunity for me to externalise some of my own concerns by letting Tori Amos sing about it.
Ocean to Ocean is the pandemic album, the lockdown album, the "I'm losing my mind isolated here" album. I said to Catherine at the time that I thought some amazing music and some terrible first-time novels (sorry first time novelists reading this who wrote their book during lockdown, I don't mean you specifically, just all the other ones. I learned to play the drums during the pandemic and I'm not great at that, so you've got me beat). We went to some creative lengths to entertain ourselves, so if you're a musician cursed with inspiration, locked at home with a full studio, what else are you going to do but write? Tori and her family live in Cornwall, a part of the country we visit frequently on holiday and its a surreal thing to see her stood on the cliff paths we have walked along on the album cover. If I am honest, I have not sat with this album as much as the others. I've listened to it a good few times, but it hasn't stuck with me the way her other records have; that's purely a function of time and repetition - as you might remember, I started this project in part because I spent nearly all of 2024 listening to the same 15 or so albums - so it's something I can work on.
And that's where we leave Tori Amos for now; perched eternally atop my most-played (songs) list for this year, a performer who's music is interwoven with every aspect of my life since I first heard it three decades ago, a fascinating enigma I can't stop trying to solve whose music has been a part of the fabric of my relationship with my partner. She's inspired, and talented, and capricious, and I can't guarantee you'll love, or ever like everything she produces, but inside those many grains of sand are flecks of gold waiting to be discovered.
And in the unlikely event that you, Tori Amos, ever read these words, let's have a coffee sometime. I still have so many questions.
* If you are following me on Bluesky where I record every album as I listen to it and what I was doing when I was listening to it, you'll know that I listened to many of these albums while travelling to and from the Nine Inch Nails concert last week. There's a fascinating history between Tori Amos and Trent Reznor that I know very few of the details, but it sounds....complicated. Anyway, I always tend to think of her and NIN together, if only to the hat tips to NIN in 'Precious Things' and 'Caught A Lite Sneeze' and Trent singing on 'Past The Mission'. Oh, and the Nine Inch Nails gig was outstanding - there are no casual Nine Inch Nails fans so the whole arena was locked in for the performance and as a result the energy was incredible.
** This is exciting, I've not footnoted a tessellated album cover image before. I just want to acknowledge here my great respect for the consistency of visual language on all of the Tori Amos album covers. It's always her, not some abstract image, but in each cover something of the essence of the album is captured in the way the album art has been shot. I love it.
***Can I say what a weird choice having 'Caught A Lite Sneeze' from Boys For Pele being the lead single is? I mean, I don't know what I would have chosen, but it almost certainly would have been something else.
****Not kidding, I've listened to Raspberry Swirl to get pumped for Tennis matches and for Netrunner tournament top 8's. If I was a wrestling promoter I'd use it to open every one of our shows.
*****I've only seen Tori live once, in Manchester, for the Unrepentant Geraldines tour. I'm hugely invested in my love of music (obviously), but a live performance has only given me goosebumps, legit whole body shivers twice - once was hearing the opening notes of 'The District Sleeps Alone Tonight' when we saw The Postal Service last year; and when I saw Tori Amos play 'Precious Things' at the Manchester Apollo.
