Welcome & Introduction

Tori Amos has a dedicated following for many reasons: some people simply enjoy her music, some musicians are impressed by her unusually high aptitude for playing and composition as relates to other contemporary artists, some people find solace in her lyrics, which often carry feminist and pro-humanitarian messages.  I admire Amos for all these reasons: When I first saw her 'Hey, Jupiter' video on VH1, I felt haunted for weeks afterward and then finally bought the album Boys for Pele from which the song came.  The striking visuals of the video caught my attention--in it, Amos is lit to be beautiful but made up to appear to have been through some terrifically devastating event.  The album version of that song was stripped down, with just Amos's voice and spare piano, and it initially disappointed me because it didn't have the slow-trance effect of the single version on which the video was based.  But soon I fell in love with the delicate vocals of the verse and the soaring, mournful chorus, and then over time, the entire album slowly came together for me and became my favorite.

But not just my favorite collection of music.  It was something different that I could not classify; it was entirely unique.  Then I acquired the albums Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink and was disappointed in those because they were comparatively so straightforward and seemed to offer so much less space to explore than Boys for Pele.  And then, one by one, each of those albums hooked me and I realized that each was its own cohesive statement.  It would be years later when Amos entered her concept-album phase, beginning with Strange Little Girls and carrying through every other one that followed, that I realized Amos creates works of art that cannot really be compared with albums I know by any other artist, and that despite their tremendous differences in musical and lyrical compositions, all of Amos's music has a common thread of spiritual exploration and education--at least for this listener.

So where I see Little Earthquakes as pop art, Under the Pink as impressionism, Boys for Pele as expressionism, and so on, each album illuminates encrypted messages that I never understood or misunderstood or did not fully understand within previously released works.  In my MFA in creative writing program, there was a strong focus on Modernism and experimental writing.  Effective works of experimental writing, we students were taught, teaches the reader to read it.  In other words, experimental applications of text often feel inaccessible or even incoherent, but when the reader forges ahead, she or he begins to adapt to what is effectively a new language with its own symbols and sometimes even its own mythology--and in the end, the effect far exceeds the sum of the parts.  So a great experimental novel--the example most often given is James Joyce's Ulysses, but I prefer To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf--may not necessarily have a defined or linear beginning, middle, and end as we typically expect from a plot-driven book, but this may bear a closer resemblance to life as we live it and not as we tend to translate it (birth, life, death and all the things that happen along the one-way road).

So what is the point of all this?  Well, for me, the music of Tori Amos--including instrumentation and vocals, as well as lyrics--are for this human being the most effective experimental literature that I have encountered.  Amos's music always challenges me, and each new work is an acquired taste that earns its place in my mind, and as a person who is naturally cautious and conservative (in the sense of believing what is not proven to me through tangible evidence or sound, linear reason), Amos's music has worked a kind of alchemy on my view of life itself.  My allegiance to her doesn't have to do with, for example, having been sexually assaulted and subsequently healed by her music (as many claim, wonderfully), but the musician who likes to describe herself as a librarian (certainly because she is not pretentious enough to call herself a teacher) has sent me in so many varied directions of knowledge seeking, piecing information together in ways that don't make sense until they suddenly do, and trusting my own creative instincts.  Her music satiates my hunger for information and, in the process, she has passively guided me through realms of possibilities that I have always deemed the domain of religious zealots, potheads and hallucinogen addicts, or schizophrenic people.  I don't think that way anymore and, while I sometimes grow concerned that I may one day become any one of those types, I feel now that that is unlikely because I have an enlightened guide who has taught me and who will continue to hold my hand as I explore ideas and continue to see new correlations between nature, art, history, and humanity and subsequent revelations. 

So, in a sense, Tori Amos's music feels to me as a sort of mechanism of apocalypse--not the end of the world, but the unveiling of hidden meanings and secrets about consciousness and being that suddenly become obvious with certain knowledge and understanding.  My intent with this blog is to do a 'close reading'-style interpretation of Amos's music, with a particular emphasis on her lyrics since the effects of music are inadequately described with words.  Inevitably, I will mis-translate much based on my own assumptions and naivety especially about religious scripture and traditions...but this is what I understand.  So far.