FEATURE:
The Iconic Tori Amos at Sixty
IN THIS PHOTO: Tori Amos in 1992
Her Six Essential Albums
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AS Tuesday (22nd August)…
IN THIS PHOTO: Tori Amos in 2002/PHOTO CREDIT: Suki Dhanda/The Observer
is the sixtieth birthday of the iconic and legendary queen Tori Amos, I wanted to put in another feature – I previously shared a playlist of her hits and deep cuts – celebrating this big birthday. Her latest studio album, ocean to ocean, was released in 2021. That was her sixteenth studio album. Since her mesmeric and enormously important debut, 1992’2 Little Earthquakes, Amos has put her stamp on the industry. An enormously influential artist who has inspired everyone from Florence + The Machine, Caroline Polachek, Fiona Apple, and Regina Spektor, it is only right to give her a proper salute. The Guardian recently ranked her twenty best songs. In recognition of her amazing contribution to music, they wanted to deliver this rundown of her essential songs and great deep cuts. I am selecting six of her studio albums that I think are not only my favourite/the best. They are also great starting places if you want a sense of Tori Amos’ incredible gifts and songwriting brilliance. One of her best albums, From the Choirgirl Hotel (spoiler alert: it is one of the six I have selected!), was twenty-five in May. I would urge everyone to explore the full extend of Tori Amos’ unique and phenomenal career. Because she is sixty on Tuesday, here is six gold Amos albums you need to be acquainted with. It leaves me to tip my cap and wish a very happy birthday to…
PHOTO CREDIT: Press
THIS utterly wonderful and loved artist.
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Little Earthquakes
Release Date: 6th January, 1992
Labels: Atlantic (U.S.)/East West (Europe)
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/tori-amos/little-earthquakes
Producers: Tori Amos/Eric Rosse/Davitt Sigerson/Ian Stanley
Review:
“NEWCOMER TORI AMOS’S songs are smart, melodic and dramatic; the deeper you listen, the hotter they get. Amos shares common ground with artfolk songstresses like Kate Bush and Jane Siberry, but while they often deal in abstruse, poetic terms, Amos has a tendency to cut to the quick, to face facts, to call a rape a rape.
Little Earthquakes is an often pretty, subtly progressive song cycle that reflects darkly on sexual alienation and personal struggles. Aiming for a delicate balance between the earthy and the ethereal, Amos shifts from a whispering coyness to full-throated earnestness (overearnestness, at times) and a quivery vibrato-laden holler — akin to Siouxsie Sioux’s.
From the outset, all is not roses. In the opening tune, “Crucify,” Amos sings, “I’ve been looking for a savior in these dirty streets/Looking for a savior in between these dirty sheets.” The difficulty of asserting one’s own voice is the subject of “Silent All These Years.” Rage often bubbles below the sensuous surface.
On the subject of sex, Amos is ambivalent and ultimately poignant. The teasing Kurt Weill-meets-Queen cabaret act of “Leather” sets up a marked contrast to the album’s most chilling track, “Me and a Gun.” After the denser production approaches on the rest of the album — with strings, creamy electric guitars and fanciful arrangements caressing her piano foundation — we hear the stark sound of her unadorned voice taking the role of a rape victim, who endures the attack while desperately rationalizing that “I haven’t seen Barbados, so I must get out of this.”
By the time the refrain in the closing title track comes around (“Give me life give me pain/Give me myself again”), we feel as though we’ve been through some peculiar therapy session, half-cleansed and half-stirred. That artful paradox is part of what makes Little Earthquakes a gripping debut” – Rolling Stone
Standout Tracks: Crucify/Winter/Me and a Gun
Key Cut: Silent All These Years
Under the Pink
Release Date: 31st January, 1994
Labels: Atlantic (U.S.)/East West (Europe)
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/tori-amos/under-the-pink
Producers: Tori Amos/Eric Rosse
Review:
“Tori Amos'second full-length solo effort has often been considered a transitional album, a building on the success of Little Earthquakes that enabled her to pursue increasingly more adventurous releases in later years. As such, it has been unfairly neglected when in fact it has as good a claim as any to be one of the strongest, and maybe even the strongest, record she has put out. Able to appeal to a mass audience without being shoehorned into the incipient "adult album alternative" format that sprang to life in the mid-1990s, Amos combines some of her strongest melodies and lyrics with especially haunting and powerful arrangements to create an artistic success that stands on its own two feet. The best-known tracks are the two contemporaneous singles "God," a wicked critique of the deity armed with a stiff, heavy funk-rock arrangement, and "Cornflake Girl," a waltz-paced number with an unnerving whistle and stuttering vocal hook. While both memorable, they're actually among the weaker tracks when compared to some of the great numbers elsewhere on Under the Pink (other numbers that more openly misfire are "The Waitress," a strident and slightly bizarre rant at such a figure, and "Yes, Anastasia," which starts off nicely but runs a little too long). Opening number "Pretty Good Year" captures nostalgia and drama perfectly, a simple piano with light strings suddenly exploding into full orchestration before calming again. "Bells for Her" and "Icicle" both showcase what Amos can do with prepared piano, and "Past the Mission," with Trent Reznor guesting on gentle, affecting backing vocals, shifts between loping country and a beautifully arranged chorus. The secret winner, though, would have to be "Baker Baker," just Amos and piano, detailing the story of a departed love and working its cooking metaphor in just the right way” – AllMusic
Standout Tracks: Pretty Good Year/God/The Waitress
Key Cut: Cornflake Girl
From the Choirgirl Hotel
Release Date: 5th May, 1998
Label: Atlantic
Buy: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Choirgirl-Hotel-Tori-Amos/dp/B00000I3JC
Producer: Toris Amos
Review:
“IN 1991, AS Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” recharged rock & roll, Tori Amos and her piano appeared. She was a North Carolinian conservatory dropout with a whole lotta love on the brain. A veteran of one failed rock album, a spandex debacle titled Y Kant Tori Read, Amos recharged herself on Little Earthquakes, emerging as a hennaed adventuress, the rare art-rock communicator who could flawlessly drop difficult bits of Béla Bartók into a tasty home-brew of the classical and the lowdown. Old enough to have worshiped Led Zeppelin as a Seventies kid — and bold enough to seize “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as her own (on 1992’s Crucify EP) — she recognized that grunge’s uneasy blend of emotional distress and sonic kicks represented a state of mind as well as a guitar sound.
On From the Choirgirl Hotel, Amos comes clean with the rock & roll that’s always driven her, from as far back as when she stormed out of her rehearsal room at the Peabody Conservatory. Whereas 1994’s Under the Pink and 1996’s Boys for Pele strove to extend Amos’ voice-and-piano foundation into different areas — R&B and dance — From the Choirgirl Hotel closes up shop and starts over with a live-band recording. A woolly jam dynamic pervades Hotel, from the paisley metallicism that kicks off “Spark” (the current single) to the grooving dream world of “Liquid Diamonds.” Throughout the album, Amos throws herself and her various keyboards into bass-drum-guitar ensembles augmented by percussion loops and string sections. In the past, all elements of her arrangements answered to Amos and her keyboards; now, she replaces that hierarchy with rock interaction. On From the Choirgirl Hotel, she’s just one of several tenders of her own sound garden.
But for all of her new material’s bracing accessibility, very little is very straight-up. Amos remains the girl whose background in European piano literature encouraged her to hear the unforgiving structures of the Baroque era, the vast spiritual and melodic vistas of the Romantic period, and the knotty imperatives of twentieth-century experimentalism as one ongoing compositional story — not a bad basis, thank you, for art rock with guts. And although these mixes don’t hesitate to occasionally bury her voice, Amos often still sings like the coloratura president of Robert Plant’s fan club. On songs like the technoish “Hotel” and the beat-happy “Raspberry Swirl,” moreover, she screws with timbre, lyrics and meter in the proud pop-collage tradition of Nineties artists like My Bloody Valentine, the Smashing Pumpkins, Björk, U2 and Garbage. Other times, Amos is more nostalgic, as on “She’s Your Cocaine,” which feels like the music of the hardest-working bar band — on Saturn.
Amos hasn’t completely abandoned ballads, not with showpieces like “Northern Lad,” as well as “Jackie’s Strength,” the center of this consistently alive album. That song, softly offset with clean guitar repetitions, relies on a magnificent string arrangement by Los Angeles hotshot John Philip Shenale. Amos begins as someone remembering the J.F.K. assassination, focusing on how an entire generation of American women immediately spun the event into a story about his abandoned wife. During this meditation, Amos’ character remembers a friend’s David Cassidy lunch box and sings the following hilarious, deeply Tori line: “Yeah, I mooned him once on Donna’s box.” It’s her fluid answer to the Pumpkins’ masterpiece “1979,” a perfect memory of pop-energy past.
From the Choirgirl Hotel offers chewy tales like the tough sway of “Playboy Mommy,” in which a mother never quite apologizes to her dead daughter for not being a squeaky-clean Carol Brady mom; and “Black-Dove (January),” an interiorized ballad about abuse and escape that breaks into rousing choruses of “But I have to get to Texas/Said I have to get to Texas.” What the album is so unfailingly good at, though, is capturing the exact geography of one woman’s imagination. In dashing rhythmic interpolations, a song titled “Iieee” intercuts different meters and moods — suspended piano landscapes, straightforward rock 4/4 beats, gnarled industrial wastelands and a floating symphonic soundtrack from a film that has opened only in Amos’ head. “We scream in cathedrals,” Amos sings, phrasing with an awesome gravitational pull. “Why can’t it be beautiful?” What the hell is rock & roll these days, anyway? Loud guitars? Transgressive hairstyles? Samples? Electric beats? Platform shoes? At any given time, it’s all or none of these things. But right now, From the Choirgirl Hotel qualifies. It’s a logical outcome of what Tori Amos has been doing this whole decade: In more ways than one, she screams in cathedrals” – Rolling Stone
Standout Tracks: Spark/Raspberry Swirl/Hotel
Key Cut: Cruel
Scarlet's Walk
Release Date: 28th October, 2002
Label: Epic
Pre-order: https://hmv.com/store/music/vinyl/scarlet-s-walk
Producer: Tori Amos
Review:
“One of the inevitable results of the period following the attacks of September 11, 2001 was that artists of all stripes would come out with pieces that reflected their reactions to the disastrous events. Whether as an attempt to express the emotional horror, the tragedy, or the need for hope, such expressions are a part of the cathartic process when such an impact has been felt.
For Tori Amos, the events of 9/11 and their aftermath were a call for re-examination, both of what it meant to be an American, and what our nation’s particular history held. Essentially, the roots of the United States’ very peculiar mythology were exposed as we threw flags and solidarity and values and mores and shock into one large suture to cover the wound. But such wounds also reveal the meat beneath the surface of the skin, and while it can be a strange and sickening feeling, it’s impossible not too look and ask questions of it and explore the nature of that which is typically hidden away. In other words, one of the results of September 11 is that people everywhere were forced to question what it means to be an “American”.
These questions merged with a more personal history in Amos, whose direct lineage to the Cherokee people through he grandfather has always been a part of her personal definition. The understanding of the US’s aggressive history, in particular the experience of the Trail of Tears, sat uneasily next to the version of post-9/11 America that pretended innocence. So, in order to rediscover America for herself and directly confront its myths, Tori took a walk, a very long walk. For a year, Amos took to the road, crisscrossing the United States on an extended road trip and personal exploration. As a travelogue, a novel told through song, an expose of myth and personal relationships, and a concept album, Scarlet’s Walk is a record of these experiences.
In fact, Scarlet’s Walk is an incredible idea, and as ambitious as anything in recent pop music memory. Amos has distilled her own real-life road trip into a succession of stories, told through the eyes of a semi-autobiographical character named Scarlet. As Scarlet moves through her life, falling in and out of relationships with friends, lovers, and traveling companions, her commentary ranges from the intensely personal to the complexly abstract. America, both the physical land and the conceptual space, are explored in the context of a wild, scarred, and open free spirit’s own journey through herself. Scarlet and her attendant cast of characters come to represent a unique story of adventure, Amos’s own conflicted feelings, and the American landscape itself. To accentuate this complex narrative, the Scarlet’s Walk CD implements ConnecteD technology which unlocks a special website, called Scarlet’s Web, through Amos’s homepage. On this site you can trace Scarlet’s path across the US with extra details including photos, a fictional travel diary, and geographical information. The same site also includes a running document of Amos’s current tour as well as information on the various Native American tribes that were originally indigenous to each region of the country. In addition, the content of Scarlet’s Web is continually updated with new information, giving the listener an ongoing, lived interaction with Scarlet’s Walk. It’s truly a multimedia experience.
For all that, what makes Scarlet’s Walk truly exceptional is that it is probably Amos’s finest work since Under the Pink. While Boys for Pele and From the Choirgirl Hotel had their definite moments, they were complicated albums, and at times only barely accessible. Last year’s Strange Little Girls album, a disc completely comprised of reworked covers of songs about women originally recorded by men, seemed like a conceit and a stumble. While some praised the idea as genius, the execution failed on a number of levels. Scarlet’s Walk might have gone the same route, a brilliant concept lost to poor implementation, but it does not. Instead, Amos has produced one of the most invigorating and arresting works of her career. It may have something to do with her recent move from the Atlantic label, where she has admitted the relationship was strained, to the Epic label and greater freedom, but whatever the case the results are phenomenal.
Scarlet’s Walk is alternately delicate, lush, soft, gritty, beautiful, painful, wistful and joyous — in short, all the things that devotees of Tori have come to expect. However, with Scarlet’s Walk, Amos doesn’t deliver in spots, she delivers in spades, maintaining a consistent strength throughout the album that supports, or is supported by, the core story at the heart of the album. There’s also a palpable sense of maturity in this disc, which translates to an expansive but commanding songcraft ability. The brash and confrontational Tori of Little Earthquakes seems to have become an introspective and confident woman here, yet another reflection of the Scarlet persona’s growth throughout the album.
Musically, Scarlet’s Walk may actually be the most complete and approachable Amos album yet released. The piano remains front and center, sometimes replaced with organs but essentially the heart of Amos’s sound, and her claim to mastery of the instrument is only reinforced by this album. But while the older musical references of Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell as forebears are still strongly in evidence, Amos seems to have gained a sense of mainstream pop from those whom she herself has influenced. This is nowhere more evident than on “A Sorta Fairytale”, the album’s first and most obvious single, which finds Tori sounding not unlike a combination of Jewel and Vanessa Carlton. Elsewhere she seems to invoke the spirit of Stevie Nicks (not surprisingly, as Tori’s live version of “Landslide” remains the best cover of that song I’ve ever heard), particularly on “Pancake”. This is not to say that Amos has changed her tune. Fans of her older material won’t cry “sell-out”, and the powerful back-to-back combo of “Carbon” and “Crazy” will instantly appeal to her die-hard audience.
Lyrically, Amos hasn’t changed all that much at all. Her lyrics remain cryptic and obtuse here, but the focus of a long storytelling gives these songs a greater readability. Many of these songs can be read as individual explorations of relationships, and the uncanny ability that Amos has cultivated in turning her weird, dream-like ramblings into coded messages that appeal to individual and highly personal interpretation hasn’t diminished. However, in the greater context of describing Scarlet’s journey, these songs take on a larger significance that adds to their weight. Even the gorgeous “Your Cloud”, which is possibly the most straightforward song in Amos’s collection, has added relevance in this context. But this is undeniably a Tori Amos joint (to steal from Spike Lee). Even the obligatory reference to her friend, author Neil Gaiman, works its way onto Scarlet’s Walk in an off-kilter line in “Carbon”. This seems especially relevant considering the similar work Gaiman recently did in his fabulous novel, American Gods, itself an exploration of mythology in America (Amos-Gaiman watchers might also note the song “Wednesday”, the name of one of the characters in American Gods, but that might be stretching things a bit).
If anything keeps Scarlet’s Walk from completely succeeding, it might be Amos’s ambition itself. The disc clocks in at over 74 minutes of music, and makes for a long, involved listen. The rewards for investing the time are certainly great, but by the time the last few songs play through it’s hard to maintain focus, which is a shame considering “Scarlet’s Walk” and “Gold Dust” are both great songs. A part of the problem is that as Scarlet matures over the course of the album, the music becomes softer, more lush and orchestrated, and it causes a bit of a lull. The other problem is that the story of Scarlet itself is incredibly complicated, while Amos is not one to spell things out in bold letters. The lyrics are typically cryptic, and even with the addition of the Scarlet’s Web information, it’s a slightly puzzling story to work out. The fact that the press kit for the album includes a track-by-track description of how each song progresses in the story makes it slightly easier for critics to appreciate than it does for listeners.
But for these small problems, Scarlet’s Walk is an amazing album. The concept alone is worth mention, and is an ambitious and thought-provoking project. One thing that this disc seems to highlight is that America is a land of change, and we are constantly rediscovering it, and ourselves within it. But even as a straight collection of songs, all connections aside, this is some of Amos’s best work. Scarlet’s Walk cements Amos’s reputation, but it also seems like a homecoming from the more contrived work of her recent past. Complex, weighty, often brilliant, Scarlet’s Walk is the album that many a fan has been waiting for” – PopMatters
Standout Tracks: Amber Waves/Don't Make Me Come to Vegas/Your Cloud
Key Cut: A Sorta Fairytale
Unrepentant Geraldines
Release Date: 9th May, 2014
Label: Mercury Classics
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/5679715?ev=rb
Producer: Tori Amos
Review:
“In the last 15 years, Tori Amos’ pop albums have gravitated toward two distinct categories: those where she utilizes elaborate characters and extended metaphors to illustrate her points, and those where she uses more straightforward, subjective inspirations for her lyrics. For fans, this has been somewhat frustrating, as Amos has always been a confessional commentator—especially at the intersection of the personal and political—and deriving emotional attachment from her intricate fictions has often been challenging.
The engaging Unrepentant Geraldines, however, splits the difference between these categories perfectly—mainly because this time, Amos’ muse led her into a variety of deeply personal, vulnerable places. An affinity for visual art is clear in an affecting treatise about the unique struggles women face while they age (the Cézanne-inspired “16 Shades Of Blue”) and a powerful song about not being spiritually oppressed by government or religion (the title track, inspired by an etching from Irish artist Daniel Maclise). A talented trio of bakers Amos knows in real life is the backdrop for a scathing attack on the NSA and unfair taxation in “Giant’s Rolling Pin,” while her daughter Tash inspired “Rose Dover”—which stresses that growing up doesn’t mean having to lose whimsy—and “Promise,” a simple proclamation of love and support.
The latter is also one of the record’s most interesting songs: A mild-mannered duet, the song seamlessly pairs Amos’ ethereal tones with Tash’s soulful, R&B-influenced delivery. Such subtle stylistic nods are everywhere on Unrepentant Geraldines—from the dusty Americana flickering through “Trouble’s Lament,” the flute-augmented pastoral classic-rock vibe of “Wedding Day,” or the electrified rock opera and gothic lullaby tint of “Rose Dover.” Yet the album’s strongest moments are also its simplest ones: Highlights such as “Selkie” and “Oysters” are unadorned piano-and-voice compositions reminiscent of the ones Amos focused on in the early ’90s. (Fitting, considering the latter song is about reclaiming a more innocent self despite rough times, what with lyrics such as “I’m working my way back to me again.”)” – The A.V. Club
Standout Tracks: Wedding Day/Selkie/Oysters
Key Cut: Trouble's Lament
ocean to ocean
Release Date: 29th October, 2021
Label: Decca
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/tori-amos/ocean-to-ocean
Producer: Tori Amos
Review:
“Amos’s newest LP, Ocean to Ocean, arrives four years after it’s predecessor Native Insider. In that time, the world has changed beyond recognition and Amos, like the rest of us, has been forced to battle with trauma resulting from the pandemic and ensuing isolation - but has also had to deal with the personal trauma of losing both her mother and best friend in 2019. The emotional centrepiece of this album - lead single “Speaking With Trees” - explores both simultaneously; referencing the ashes of Amos’s mother, which she hid in a treehouse in Florida (and was unable to visit during lockdown). Like her best songs, it features mystical lyricism alongside left-field arrangements and instrumentation (most notably an addictive guitar lick during the pre-chorus). However, it’s most affecting moment occurs in the song’s most sincere, wounded line: “Don’t be surprised / I cannot let you go”.
Much of Ocean to Ocean opts for this style of forthright song-writing, over the surreal world-building that has traditionally defined her work. Album highlight “Swim To New York State” deals with the aftermath of a friend moving away; capturing the pain of rootlessness but also the enduring beauty of a relationship that transcends physical distance. Amos cycles through all the places she’d like to go to with the person in question (“There’s a rockpool we can dive in”, “meet at that cafe”), but ultimately comes to peace with the separation (“I had to face / Life just wasn’t the same”). The song captures the same mixture of heart-break and resilience that made her early work so captivating.
But whereas Amos’s early work felt unmoored by time, Ocean to Ocean feels like it could only have been made now; “I know, dear, it has been a brutal year” she sings on “Metal Water Wood”; the album’s most explicit reference to the pandemic. “29 years”, as it’s title suggests, seems to reference the 29 years between her debut album and now. Meanwhile, the title track offers the most politically charged and unmistakably of-our-time statement. “Ocean to Ocean” demonstrates, once again, why Amos is such a powerful writer; “There are those who don’t give a Goddamn / That we’re near mass extinction” she sings at one point, referencing the role of uncaring elites in the current climate crisis. But, within the course of one line, she expands her sights: “There are those who never give a Goddamn for anything they are breaking”. What was just seconds ago a relatively straightforward examination of the climate crisis, has now turned into a takedown of all of society’s breakers; all the way from the rich and powerful inflicting environmental destruction to all the exploitative men (who have long been the subject of her songs) who think they can violate women in pursuit of their own desires.
Ocean to Ocean ends up being Amos’s best album in recent memory for the way it manages to combine the strengths of her early music while incorporating newfound restraint and perspective. Even if there’s nothing here as utterly devastating as “Me & A Gun”, or as piercing as “God”, it’s a joy that Amos can at once be as mystifying and inscrutable as ever (singing of “anonymous” hippopotamus and, aardvarks on the London Underground on “Spies”) while finding newfound comfort and understanding on tracks like “Speaking With Trees”. 29 years on from Little Earthquakes, Amos remains an unrivaled talent, capable of discussing and dissecting the very best and worst elements of humanity without ever collapsing under the heaviness of such themes” – The Line of Best Fit
Standout Tracks: Devil's Bane/Spies/Metal Water Wood
Key Cut: Speaking with Trees