Book Review: Resistance: A Songwriter's Story of Hope, Change, and Courage by Tori Amos (Hodder & Stoughton, 2020)

With 2005's Piece by Piece, created in collaboration with the journalist Ann Powers, Tori Amos rewrote the rules of the rock star memoir, producing a book that went broad, intimate, playful and deep as it placed her personal and professional experiences in the context of wider patterns, ones reflecting both her Native American and Christian heritage, as well as her Jung and Joseph Campbell-schooled study of archetypes and myth. 

Via an ambitious structure, and in prose as image-rich, perceptive, surprising and witty as her best lyric-writing, Amos and Powers explored formative family influences, music biz machinations, motherhood, creative process, live performance, and much more besides, the book drawing a great deal of its power from its structure as a wide-ranging dialogue between the two writers. 

Seven diverse albums (including the conceptual tours-de-force American Doll Posse and Night of Hunters), several world tours (encompassing band, solo and orchestral set-ups) and a one-of-a-kind National Theatre musical later, the prolific Amos now follows Piece by Piece with a second book, Resistance: A Songwriter's Story of Hope, Change, and Courage. 

As its title suggests, this new work feels very much like a companion to Amos's last album, 2017's Native Invader, which mostly took inspiration from two events: the 2016 American election result and her mother's debilitating stroke. Over two years on from the record's release, Donald Trump remains in the White House and Amos's mother, Mary, a muse for many songs and the person to whom the book is dedicated, is sadly deceased. Those two facts are pivots for the volume, inspiring Amos to investigate the artist's position and potential in what she defines as an "unprecedented moment of crisis." (And that's before the horror of the current pandemic.)  

A feature of Piece by Piece was a number of "Song Canvases" - short sections focusing on specific songs - and in Resistance the prose sections are juxtaposed with full lyrics from a range of songs drawn from across Amos's catalogue (plus some never-seen-before photos, too). The book begins, appropriately, with Scarlet's Walk's majestic finale "Gold Dust" and Amos's memories of her late '70s/early '80s piano bar days in Washington D.C. Here, from her vantage point as a teenage girl starting her career under the supervision of her father (a minister with "more than a dose of Mama Rose pulsing through his veins" [p.8]), Amos observes the Carter-Reagan shift and right wing lobbyists' rise, finding herself playing in "a hotbed of conservative thinking on its rise to power" (p.13) as she smuggles songs like "The Last Chance Texaco" into her set. 

A lengthy section focusing on the 1979-1981 American hostage situation in Iran indicates the ambitious political dimension of the volume, as Amos aims to trace American foreign policy decisions from reaction to that event through the later Afghanistan invasion and the Iraq war/s. These elements are interwoven with many other reflections, from memories of her return to the piano following her first failed record to events as current as Christine Blasey Ford's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee.   

"[I]ntersecting situations can compel a future work" (p126), Amos writes, and that observation clearly compels the volume itself. Amos shows songs both reflecting and refracting personal and political events, and expanding their meanings and resonances over time. Overall, though, Resistance ends up at once less expansive and less cohesive than Piece by Piece. An associative, place-based fluidity of structure is attempted, and sometimes achieved, but there's a restlessness to the book which often doesn't let an idea settle and develop before moving on to the next. The transitions, though at times arresting, can also be jarring, giving a random, unfocused quality to some chapters.  

"Part of a songwriter's discipline is being ruthless with lazy concepts" (92), Amos notes, and originality of thought and response has defined her as an artist. Still, while the writing here is often striking and vivid - check out the great description of "Cornflake Girl"'s genesis, for one (p.91-3) - some sections resort to rhetoric you could find in a social media post on any day of the week. There are predictable shorthands ("our Handmaid's Tale-like reality"), overused fashionable buzzwords ("gaslighting", "weaponizing"), and a touch of TDS, especially in the accusations of Russian meddling in the US election. (The linked Native Invader songs "Benjamin" and "Russia", with their teasing cryptographic elements, evoked the latter much more subtly and potently.)

But Resistance gets better as it progresses. As Amos writes frankly of the time that it can take for an artist to find their style, about the lessons learned from "failure", about the vital importance of recognising your own story as unique and valuable, so the book itself belatedly finds its shape. Her account of 9/11 and its aftermath, during which she was one of very few artists not to cancel a planned US tour, is powerful - showing how interactions and conversations experienced at that fraught time inspired Scarlet's Walk. 

The book also broadens out from a US context to take in her experiences in Russia on the mighty 2014 Unrepentant Geraldines solo tour, which she describes as "a turning point for me as a person and as an artist" (p.171-2) and where a highly emotional Moscow concert was followed by an encounter with Putin's heavies. Touring in Turkey, meanwhile, Amos observes restrictions of liberty under President Erdoğan that contrast with her experiences of the city 9 years before, reminding "how freedoms can be taken away before you realise they are gone" (p.175). As such, the book gives a vivid sense of the value of the touring life and its ability to expand the perspective of an artist dedicated to taking the temperature of every city and creating ever-evolving set-lists reflecting current events. (Oddly, though, given Amos's status as at least a part-time UK resident, reference to recent British political strife - Brexit, for instance - is completely excluded from the volume.)

Equally powerful are the later sections dealing with bereavement: firstly, her husband Mark Hawley's grief over the death of his father (an experience that inspired the songs "1000 Oceans" and "Invisible Boy") and then Amos's pain at her mother and friend Beenie's deaths within days of each other last May. As tender and lacerating as Michael Haneke's Amour, these sections find Amos finally taking comfort in her sense of continued communication with her mother, which provides encouragement and inspiration for a new album in development. (A verse from one of these new tracks, the beautiful "Mary's Raven," is included in the book.)

While Amos's creative process - as mystical as it is intensely practical - was more deeply sketched in Piece by Piece, the new book does yield some fresh insights, especially her disavowal of the notion of "writer's block" or artistic "barrenness," which she dismisses as a "delusion" that keeps too many people from making work at all. "Artists don't have 'limited' access to the universal creative force," Amos argues (p.245).

Ending with the lyrics to "Climb", her subtle, spiritual song about abuse and transcendence, Amos presents artistic creation as an endeavour requiring discipline, commitment, risk-taking, trust in one's own story, and respectful attentiveness to the force she figures throughout as "the Muses." Resistance doesn't always bring its strands together as seamlessly as you would wish, but at its best this anti-despair book offers a provocative, intelligent perspective on the necessity of keeping open, present, perceptive and creative in our deeply challenging times.

Resistance: A Songwriter's Story of Hope, Change, and Courage is available from 5 May. 

Concert Review: The Light Princess in Concert (Cadogan Hall, 1 July 2018)

There are shows that you enjoy, and then there are shows that change you. An example of the latter, for me, was Samuel Adamson and Tori Amos's musical The Light Princess, which was a case of love at first sight and first hearing when I encountered it at the NT in September 2013. That love for Marianne Elliott's production only deepened across the 10 visits I made to the show - I wrote a little about why in a piece here - and it was with a heavy heart that I and many others who had connected deeply with The Light Princess bid farewell to it at the final performance in February 2014. A heavy heart - and also the sense that the musical hadn't received anything like its due from certain mainstream critics ("Saint" Lyn Gardner among them), who'd proved themselves inadequate to the task of engaging with the show's intricate, densely patterned, classically-inflected score and the highly original ways that it serves character and narrative. 

The release of the cast recording in October 2015 was a delight; still, the hope of seeing the show revived has remained. Organised by Club 11 London and Alex Parker Theatre Company, and directed by Paul Foster (Staff Director on the original production), Sunday's concert performance at Cadogan Hall went some way to fulfilling that desire. This most physical - even balletic - of musicals, with its floating heroine, requires a bold approach to movement (such as it received at the NT thanks to Steven Hoggett's startling, surreal choreography) to fully soar. But Foster's simple and unfussy concert staging - with the terrific ensemble occupying the back of the stage, the musicians, conducted by Parker, in the centre, and the leads at the front - succeeded in placing the focus firmly on the music, which sounded rich and glorious - with a chamber intensity - throughout. With so much character and narrative detail packed into the score, the show's themes of generational conflict, patriarchal tyranny and the necessity of finding your own path emerged clearly, as did the parallel arcs of its hero and heroine: she towards gravity, he towards levity, he learning the value of rebelliousness, she becoming responsible on her own terms. 

Returning to the role that she so powerfully originated, Rosalie Craig sang with all the passion, wit and sensuality of her NT performance, delivering standouts such as the yearning "My Fairy Story," the jubilant " Better Than Good," and the wrenching "No H2O" with deep feeling. Taking on the role of the Solemn Prince Digby, husband Hadley Fraser proved an unsurprisingly great sparring partner, bringing swagger to "Sealand Supremacy" and romantic spirit and sweetness to the intoxicating love duet "Althea," as well as thrillingly partnering Louis Maskell's Llewellyn on "Bitter Fate."

Gabrielle Brooks offered a winning combination of tenderness and defiance as Piper, doing well on the very complex duet pieces "Queen Material" and "The Whistleblower," and stepping forward for Craig to touch her tears on "No H2O." Trevor Dion Nicholas - the Genie of the West End's Aladdin - proved himself every inch King material with a galvanising performance as Darius that fully conveyed both the character's arrogant authority and his wounded core. As the Sergeant-at-Arms, the stylish Anna-Jane Casey took on the hilarious "Scandal" with relish; returning to her role as Falconer, Laura Pitt-Pulford maximised her "Sealand Supremacy" cameo (aka the show's "Bonnie Tyler moment"); and an on-fire David Langham tripled up spectacularly as Messers Flowers, Crabbe and Grey in the great "suitors" sequence. 

Some judicious edits set the scene and condensed the narrative so that only the omission of Darius's aria of repentance "My Little Girl's Smile" felt like a great loss. And, in a lovely surprise, the concert also restored to the score several sequences that were cut in NT previews. The addition of "Not a Fairy-tale" and Darius's death song brought the "Althea Selma Isadora Darcy" theme to completion beautifully, while tweaks to individual lines kept things fresh and interesting throughout. ("I'd rather eat my spleen" declared Althea on her great face-off with the King at the start of "Queen Material".)

With the swell and soar of the voices on the majestic finale "Coronation" "ringing out" across the hall and inspiring a standing ovation, the love for this most loving of musicals was moving to witness. What emerged afresh was the huge ambition, originality and emotional range of the show, conveyed through music that's as thrillingly diverse as it is wonderfully cohesive. The show needs - and deserves - another full production soon. Still, this heartwarming evening proved conclusively that there's more than one way of feeling Light. 

See concert photos here: https://www.club11.london/light-princess-photos/ 

100 Greatest Tori Amos Songs

Four years ago, the fine folks @torisongs polled Tori Amos fans for their Top 50 Amos tracks. Now the task is to create a Top 100 list of the greatest Amos songs. Double the number, double the fun! Or double the difficulty: Amos is a true "album artist" and so it can be very challenging to prise songs from the context of the records in which their meaning comes, in part, from associations and transitions, and claim them as favourites or "best." But here’s my attempt at it anyway. I can’t quite believe that even a list of 100 songs wasn’t enough to allow me to include every Amos track that’s meant something to me (particularly as the great Light Princess songs, written by Amos with Samuel Adamson, are also list-eligible) but that difficulty does make clear once again the - still often undervalued - range and breadth of her artistry. Anyway, my list is below, as before complete with a favourite lyric from each song,  and preceded by  some wise words from one of Amos’s most insightful critics, Jon Pareles. Get voting! Here are links to the information and ballot form.

"Ms. Amos’s songs combine meticulous musicianship with willful abandon. Some repeatedly shift mood and tempo as her voice metamorphosises from croon to embittered rasp to near operatic declamation. Her classical piano training shows in strenuous keyboard parts that can be as brawny as Elton John’s two-fisted chords or as dainty as Baroque counterpoint. And her lyrics dive into unexplained memories and allusions, emerging with a line that rings true for her listeners:  'I hear my voice and it's been here, silent all these years.'

"Some use melodies as concise as lullabies while others are rhapsodic, leaping from bruised low notes to pure soprano heights. To pull off such idiosyncratic songs takes unwavering conviction, something Ms. Amos has never lacked. She merges the calculation of a recitalist with the intensity of a torch singer, and she [makes] every keening, wordless note sound heartfelt." (Jon Pareles)

My Top 100 

      1.  Silent All These Years - “Do you think there’s a heaven where some screams have gone?”

   

     2.   Yes, Anastasia – “It’s funny, the things that you find in the rain.”

   

      3.    Liquid Diamonds – “Surrender, then start your engines.”

     

     4.     Me And A Gun – “I haven’t seen Barbados so I must get out of this.”

     

          5.  Code Red – “Sometimes I love myself best alone.”

   

     6.     Tear in Your Hand – “I know I know you well - well, better than I used to.”

   

     7.     Taxi Ride – “Even a glamorous bitch can be in need.”

      8.     Hey Jupiter – “Took my leather off the shelf.”

   

     9.     Forest of Glass – “Lift up your head, lift up your heart.”

    10.    Jackie’s Strength – “My bridesmaid’s getting laid.”

   

    11.    Pretty Good Year – “Some things are melting now.”

   

    12.    Caught A Lite Sneeze – “I’m hiding it well, Sister Ernestine.”

     13.    Spark – “How many fates turn around in the overtime?”

     14.    Winter – “When you gonna love you as much as I do?”

   

     15.     Leather – “But why do I need you to love me?”

     16.     A Sorta Fairytale – “I don’t know what takes hold, out there in the desert cold.”

     17.     Precious Things – “Little fascist panties tucked inside the heart of every nice girl.”

  

     18.     Welcome to England – “Who can stay strong, when they only give us lies to lean on?”

     19.     Datura – “Golden shower tree.”

     20.     Scarlet’s Walk – “What do you plan to do with all your stories?”

     21.     iieee – “Need a lip-gloss boost in your America.”

     22.     No H20 – “I have a choice and it's cling to my life or I die.”

     23.     Purple People – “Thunder wishes it could be the snow.”

     24.     Sugar – “Cold war with little boys.”

     25.     Dragon – “I will bring kisses for the beast.”

     26.     Upside Down – “You always find my faults, faster than you find your own.”

     27.     Gold Dust – “You can see in the dark, through the eyes of Laura Mars.” 

   

     28.      Barons of Suburbia – “We’re on the other side of midnight.”

     29.     Professional Widow – “Strike a deal, make him feel like a Congressman.”

     30.     Cool On Your Island – “Sometimes I’m not afraid to let it show.”

     31.     Zero Point – “We are now in the Photon band.”

     32.     Nothern Lad – “You change like sugar cane.”

    33.     Invisible Boy – “Jump on a Triumph like Steve McQueen.”

   

    34.     Glory of the 80s – “I’ll clone myself like that blonde chick that sings Bette Davis Eyes.”

     35.     Girl – “Yes, with a message for my heart.”

     36.     Digital Ghost – “Your heart only beats 1s and 0s.”

     37.     Josephine – “In an army’s strength, therein lies the denouement.”

     38.     Hotel – “I have to learn to let you crash.”

     39.     Pancake – “Seems in vogue to be a closet misogynist homophobe.”

     40.     Crucify – “You're just an empty cage, girl, if you kill the bird.”

     41.     Smokey Joe – “One’s past is not a destination.”

     42.     Cooling – “Is your place in heaven worth giving up these kisses?”

     43.     Job’s Coffin – “All forces are being called to dismantle this.”

     44.     Twinkle – “She worked at an abbey in Iona and –”

     45.     The Beekeeper – “I will comb myself into chains.”

     46.     Juarez – “The Indian is told the Cowboy is his friend.”

     47.     Honey – “Cowboys know cowgirls ride on the Indians’ side.”

     48.     Playboy Mommy – “A good friend of American soldiers.”

     49.     Mother – “You raised your hand for the assignment.”

     50.     My Own Land – “Father, I would rather stay confined.”

     51.     Etienne – “As the gypsy crystal slowly dies.”

     52.     Reindeer King – “Ice you were the one most tender with the rivers.”

     53.     Almost Rosey – “He bats as the Virginian Slim.”

     54.     Beauty of Speed – “Even still I was built to tolerate your temper.”

     55.     Climb – “The temple of the soul will have to heal the flesh.”

     56.     Cloud on My Tongue – “I don’t need much to keep me warm.”

     57.     Black Dove (January) – “They don't know you've already lived.”

     58.     Little Amsterdam – “Her best friend is a sundress.”

     59.     Shattering Sea – “Every brutal word.”

     60.      Velvet Revolution  – “Feeling radical in cotton.”

     61.     Body and Soul – “ Boy, I think you need a conversion.”

     62.     The Waitress – “And is her power all in her club sandwich?”

     63.     Blood Roses – “God knows I know I’ve thrown away those graces.”

     64.     Battle of Trees – “In our enemy, his own laureate.”

     65.     Baker Baker – “If you see him, say hi.”

     66.     Sister Janet – “Slipping the blade in the marmalade.”

     67.     Concertina – “I’m not policing what you think and dream.”

     68.     Little Earthquakes – “Black-winged roses that safely change their colour.”

     69.     Fearlessness – “Did we begin without knowing it/To find fault in every gift?”

     70.     To the Fair Motormaids of Japan – “The last banana hairdo got a laugh from the samurais.”

    

     71.     Ruby Through the Looking Glass – “Don’t you think she feels us fighting?”

     72.     Flying Dutchman – “They say your brain is a comic book tattoo.”

     73.     Amber Waves – “They told me to tell you they’re waving.”

     74.     Althea – “A vision of golden light falling.”

     75.     Spring Haze – “My only way out is to go so far in.”

     76.     Garlands – “Phileda's Lesson: We're not his possession.”

     77.     Marys of the Sea – “There’s a new Jerusalem.”

     78.     Girl Disappearing  - “I’m boycotting trends, it’s my new look this season.”

     79 .    Bang – “One story's end seeds another to begin.”

     80.     Bouncing off Clouds – “I think fate is now, waiting on us.”

     81.     Virginia – “To ghetto pimps and presidents.”

     82.     Star Whisperer – “I saw a me I didn’t want to see.”

     83.     Father’s Son – “Can we blame Nature if she’s had enough of us?”

     84.     Putting the Damage On – “I say her skinny legs could use sun.”

     85.     Past the Mission – “Some things only she knows.”

  

     86.     General Joy – “Is that why you gave her dress to happiness?”

     87.     In the Springtime of His Voodoo – “Every road leads back to my door.”

  

     88.     Cruel  - “My vine twists around your need.”

     89.     Secret Spell – “18 wheels in a high heel.”

     90.     Take to the Sky – “This house is like Russia.”

     91.     Lady in Blue – “I wronged the right man.”

     92.     Way Down – “Yes, I am the anchorman, dining here with Son of Sam.”

     93.     Carry  - “In the procession of the mighty stars.”

     94.     Dolphin Song – “I sought shelter in our child’s room.”

     95.     Suede – “I walk the missionary way.”

     96.     Talula – “Ran into the henchman who severed Anne Boleyn.”

   

     97 .    Nautical Twilight – “Every alchemist knows fusion and fission can unify or drive a force to split.”

     98.     The Wrong Band – “She says it’s time I open my eyes.”

     99.     Mary's Eyes - “Patterns matter, stringing sequences together matters.” 

   

    100.   Seven Sisters 

CD Review: Native Invader by Tori Amos (Decca, 2017)

“Knowledge sown in Gaia’s bones…/Her uncorrupted soul/Will not be possessed or owned.” Briskly intoned by Tori Amos and her daughter Natashya Hawley on the centrepiece song, “Up the Creek,” these lyrics are among those that cut closest to the heart of the concerns of Amos’s new album, Native Invader, a record which frequently turns to nature, to the rhythms of (Mother) Earth, as a source of strength and wisdom against divisive, destructive forces. As the album’s pitch-perfect title suggests, and its closing (bonus) track “Russia” makes clear, these forces may be internal as much as external, referring to illnesses and disabling thoughts that might inhabit/inhibit an individual as well as to the oppressions perpetrated by leaders against their own people or against the land itself.

Originally inspired by a Smoky Mountains road-trip undertaken last summer, the album, Amos has said, dramatically shifted its focus due to two events: the result of the US election in November, and a stroke that left her mother Mary partially paralysed and unable to speak. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that Native Invader combines and fuses all these elements, resulting in a work whose overt combination of personal and political preoccupations makes it a spiritual sister to two of Amos’s masterpieces, Scarlet’s Walk (2002) and American Doll Posse (2007).

Such syntheses have always been central to Amos’s music, of course. At her best, she’s an artist with an extraordinary gift for taking the temperature of the present moment, but doing so via unpredictable excursions into myth and history, and references (variously arcane or direct) to personal experience that render her work truly unique. The aforementioned “Up the Creek,” for example, is an urgent, echoy duet that feels both edgily contemporary – synth stabs, dramatic electronic flourishes, cathartic piano breakdown – and weirdly old timey in its incorporation of the expression “Good Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise” (itself made into a Jerry Reed-penned, Johnny Cash-popularised song in the 1950s). That expression (apparently a favourite of Amos’s beloved Cherokee Grandfather) is suitably subverted here, not least through a title that nicely nods to the notion that the phrase might refer to the Creek people as much as a body of water.

In its allusiveness, then, Native Invader is an album that makes the listener work: don’t be surprised to find yourself inspired to brush up on the theories of Carl Sagan, Thomas Nast’s 1830 cartoon of Andrew Jackson as the “Great White Father,” or the Veil of Veronica at various points as you listen. Following such trails is not only productive and exciting, though: it also seems absolutely central to the anti-isolationist ethos of an album that stresses the value of making connections, of seeing one thing in terms of another. Of building bridges, not walls.

As an in-house production built around Amos’s collaborations with her engineer/guitarist husband Mark Hawley (plus John Philip Shenale on two tracks), Native Invader shares much the same base as its predecessor, Unrepentant Geraldines (2014), which came after two of Amos’s most ambitious collaborative projects: the epic classical song cycle Night of Hunters (2011) and the sublime musical The Light Princess (2013) at the National Theatre. But the sound here is darker, richer-toned, and more ambient than the lighter, lower-keyed arrangements on Geraldines, sometimes gesturing back to Amos’s more elaborately produced works:  from the choirgirl hotel (1998), To Venus and Back (1999), and Abnormally Attracted to Sin (2009).

A case in point is the album’s stunning opener “Reindeer King,” a majestic seven minute epic on which strings and synths are used as haunting accents to Amos’s piano-work, which is gorgeously rich and deep here. In commanding voice, Amos locates the listener (after Eliot) “at the still point of the turning world,” reporting the title character’s advice to the divided. Entrancing and cinematic, it’s a spine-tingling song, destined to be canonised as a classic in her catalogue.

Without ever quite hitting that height again, the rest of the album offers many pleasures and puzzles for the listener. Those with kneejerk objections to Hawley’s guitar-playing (which is rather dominant throughout the first half) may be as resistant to the record as those sad cases who still keep complaining when each new  Amos album turns out not to be More Boys For Pele.

But those listening without prejudice will find that Hawley’s contributions add nuance and atmosphere at their best.  Warm washes of guitar reverberate through the measured, deceptively mellow first single “Cloud Riders,” on which a shooting star serves as an ambiguous portent of challenges to come, and the sensuous “Wildwood” which finds replenishment in the forest on its way to a poignant reunion. Meanwhile, there’s wah-wahing urgency to the intricate “Broken Arrow,” another standout track that advocates the avoidance of snap judgement reactions to political events at the same time as it urges citizens’ to vigilance of those in power. Amos drops a heart-stopping piano part behind her tribute to the resilience of “Lady Liberty” and the nation she represents: “she may seem weak/we may be battleweary/still those songlines sing.”

The album gets into somewhat stickier territory when it ventures into what has been one of Amos’s strongest suits: couples’ communication and relationship conflict. The twitchy, skeletal “Chocolate Song,” a tale of warring opposites spun from a domestic scene, works best as a rejoinder to Geraldines’s “Wild Way.” But the notion of “vowels and consonants” as “weaponry” was more dynamically explored on Night of Hunters’s great “Battle of Trees,” while the cooed opening line to the chorus sadly sounds destined for a Thorntons’ commercial. The softly pulsing “Wings” fares rather better as a song of relationship renegotiation, Amos bringing both sadness and sultriness to her delivery. Still the track doesn’t quite take flight, especially when the lyric “Sometimes big boys they need to cry” renders the theme too explicit.

More compelling and mysterious by far is the plaintive piano dirge “Breakaway,” a quiet heartbreaker that laments betrayals, words unsaid and associations regretted, Amos smuggling in a tribute to a cherished collaborator and a reference to Miss Saigon, to boot. The beautiful “Climb” movingly sketches out suggestions of childhood transgression, trauma and shaming (and the challenges of overcoming that legacy) to brisk acoustic guitar and piano, with superb lyrics to make Sylvia Plath proud.

The one-word-titled alliterative songs are among the album’s oddest impulses. “Bang” is driving and dramatic, boldly subverting anti-immigrant sentiment through astrophysical references as it defines all humans as refugees from the cosmos, “molecular machines” composed of star stuff. “One story’s end/seeds another to begin,” Amos intones, and the song builds to an exhilarating finale. “Bats,” by contrast, is drifting and ambient, Amos’s narrator anticipating the arrival of a mythological female force: “dripped in mist sisters rise/quietly from the fens and marshes/… Keep breathing, girl.” “Benjamin” celebrates other subversives, approaching the “Juliana vs. United States” climate change case via the figure of a “science whiz” investigator. There’s some lyrical awkwardness here, but the track’s proggy, retro ambience is arresting, with bleeps and buzzes providing their own message to decode.

The song leads into the album’s closer “Mary’s Eyes,” on which Amos confronts her mother’s aphasia. In contrast to the more intense and lugubrious tone of the similarly-themed  title track of The Beekeeper (2005), the vigorous piano work and beautiful strings here give the track an uncanny jubilance, as Amos refers to attempts to communicate through music. The sentiments expressed in the chorus encapsulate the mood of an album that's as devout as it is questioning, its merging of Christian, Pagan and Native American beliefs speaking not only to Amos's personal history but to the history of America itself. In a culture that presently feels so divided and fragmented, the record seems dedicated to revealing the importance of connection, the multiple ways in which, as “Mary’s Eyes” has it, “patterns matter/stringing sequences together matters.”

The titles of the bonus tracks, “Upside Down” and “Russia,” gesture back to two of Amos’s earliest songs. Intimate piano-only numbers which are equally delicate yet determined in tone, the former focuses on an outsider’s resolution to see the happiness of others as inspiration rather than threat. Book-ended by numbers station samples, “Russia” is more pointed, highlighting the divisions stoked by both Left and Right as it locates State surveillance in the East and West. A Russian leader (though not necessarily the one you might expect) gets name-checked, as Amos at last unfurls the album’s title here.

It's a stirring, quietly anthemic conclusion to an album which, despite a couple of underachieving moments, feels vital, its combination of the combative and the conciliatory speaking directly to our polarised period. Encompassing earth and sky, spirit and machine, science and soul, Amos has once again produced a richly absorbing record that bestows balance, bringing us back to ourselves, giving us the strength and courage to go on.

Native Invader is released on Decca Records on 8th September 2017. 

All album images by Paulina Otylie Surys.

My interview with Amos will be published at PopMatters next week. 

CD Review: Boys for Pele, Tori Amos: Deluxe 20th Anniversary 2-CD Reissue (Rhino, 2016)

As anyone with even a passing interest in pop culture won’t have failed to notice, acres of media coverage, some of it sceptical but most of it rapturous, greeted the release of Beyoncé’s stunning visual album Lemonade back in May. The cultural conversation raised by that record rightly continues, yet, amid the articles and think-pieces examining the album’s inspirations and intertexts, one connection failed to be made by major commentators: namely, Lemonade’s links to Tori Amos’s Boys of Pele (1996), which was released exactly 20 years before.

From the fierce, feminist play with Deep South iconography, to details such as Beyoncé’s Amos-echoing left-leg-slung-across-the-chair-arm posture in the “Sorry” video, from the shared musical quoting of Led Zep’s “When the Levee Breaks” (in Pele’s notorious “Professional Widow” and Lemonade’s equally blistering “Don’t Hurt Yourself”), to both albums’ detection of wider historical, mythic and cultural patterns in the intimate sphere of male/female relationship conflict, the connections between the two records are numerous. Aside from short memories, maybe critics’ ignoring of the parallels is down, in part, to the current polarisations of US culture and its worrying segregation of “Black” and “White” artists, even as Lemonade itself subverts that tendency through Beyoncé's fruitful collaborations with Jack White, Ezra Koenig, and others. (Amos, for her part, performed two Beyoncé songs, “Crazy in Love” and “Halo,” on her last tour.)

For many listeners, Boys For Pele remains as significant and indelible a cultural touchstone as Lemonade will doubtless prove, and, 20 years on, the album gets the recognition it deserves thanks to a two-disc reissue from Rhino, who put out deluxe editions of Amos’s first two albums, Little Earthquakes (1992) and Under the Pink (1994), just last year. (You can read my review of those reissues here.)

The format is very much the same for the Pele release: once again, a re-mastered version of the record is supplemented by a second disc that contains B-Sides, live versions and rarities. But where the Earthquakes and Pink reissues featured no material that hadn’t already been released elsewhere, the new Pele goes one better, with a second disc that includes some previously unavailable tracks, most notably the near-mythic “To the Fair Motormaids of Japan,” a song that Amos devotees have been hankering to hear for many years. The inclusion of that track alone pretty much renders this an essential purchase.

When it came out in 1996, Boys for Pele sounded like nothing else out there, and, 20 years on, the album’s freshness, strangeness and idiosyncrasy haven’t dimmed. The record’s heady mix of styles - with classical flourishes (has the harpsichord ever sounded this demonic…?) merging with post-punk fury and ghostly gospel interludes segueing into surreal show-tune strut or achingly beautiful torch songs - remains as confounding as it is cohesive.

What links the diverse parts is the consistency of Amos’s vision (this was her first solo production job) and her skill at constructing an album as a compelling narrative in which sequencing and transitions are crucial. A brutal and beautiful fever dream of a record that boldly confronts violent impulses (while making space for lyricism, tenderness, humour and hope), Pele takes the break-up album into previously uncharted areas of myth, madness and magnificence. It still stands out as the weirdest, wildest item in the Amos canon, its musical ingenuity matched by brilliantly bizarre, allusive free-association lyrics and seriously strung-out vocals. (The album’s infamous, The Night of the Hunter-referencing liner art, meanwhile, involving dirty mattresses, pig-suckling, and pianos aflame, proved the perfect visual complement to the musical and lyrical subversiveness.) 

Amos’s bravery in going to emotional extremes had already been signalled on Earthquakes and Pink, of course. But Pele, recorded in Ireland and the American South and named for the Hawaiian volcano goddess who demanded the ritual sacrifice of young males, represented a whole new kind of exorcism in its confrontation with patriarchal power. “She’s crawling on her knees towards a telephone that isn’t ringing,” Amos said, at the time, of the album’s protagonist. “To go there, you have to remember when you did that.”

As it turned out, a lot of folks were willing “to go there,” and Boys for Pele remains the album that certain fans would have liked Amos to have carried on remaking - a stance which may say less about her own evolution than about their inability to move on. Rich and daring, expansive and intimate, Pele still rewards, unnerves and challenges. And this reissue does what a good reissue should do: it succeeds in deepening a masterpiece. The second disc is the place where fans will head first and while some will probably find something to whine about there (the complaint “Where is ‘Samurai’”? has, inevitably, already been made) it’s likely that most will be sated by the abundance of riches on offer and the attention paid to the material’s sequencing and presentation. 

 

The second disc actually opens with a familiar item: the so-called “Dakota Version” of “Hey Jupiter” which was released as a single and which Amos still performs in concert. B-Side fan favourites featured include the Chas and Dave covers “That’s What I Like Mick (The Sandwich Song)” and “London Girls,” which retain their quirky charm, thanks to the supple arrangements and the incongruity of Amos gleefully scatting out ineffably British lyrical references to “kippers,” “pie and mash,” “Derby chinaware,” and “Glenn Hoddle scoring a goal.” The deceptively playful childhood reminiscences “Toodles Mr. Jim” and “Frog on my Toe” are also highlights, as is the subversively mournful, resigned reading of “This Old Man” and the brisk, tremulous “Alamo.”

Some of the tracks here first featured on the mammoth A Piano collection that Rhino released ten years ago: these include “Fire-eater’s Wife/Beauty Queen,” a delicious prelude to Pele’s oblique opener, and “Walk to Dublin (Sucker Reprise),” a sublimely unhinged piece that finds double-tracked Amoses wailing “Do a jig!” against chunky piano and brusque harpsichord. Both songs gain from this new context, and the latter track now gets supplemented by its previously unreleased sister, “Sucker,” a wonderfully mean classical/grunge hybrid that starts out echoing “Jingle Bells” before morphing into something that Wanda Lewandowska and Kurt Cobain might have cooked up in collaboration.

Easily the most highly anticipated track here, “To the Fair Motormaids of Japan” does not disappoint, either: from its tumbling piano introduction, it’s an exquisitely evocative and enigmatic piece that could have fitted snugly into Pele’s arc, as it finds its narrator contemplating all manner of feats and humiliations in order to recapture something lost. “The things that I would go through/To turn you back around/The laces I would trip on/To bring on the circus crowds” Amos seethes, the song debating whether transformation (“the things that I turn into”) might be an expansion or a betrayal of the self, and ending in fittingly unresolved suspension. 

 

Emotional complexity and ambiguity has also been a large part of Amos’s appeal, and songs like the brief and beautiful elegy “Graveyard” showcase her peerless combination of the sexual and the spiritual (“I’m coming in the graveyard/To sing you to sleep now”). Southern influences also continue to surface on a number of the tracks, including the demanding piano dirge “Sister Named Desire” (which might be Blanche du Bois’s post-incarceration fever dream) and “Amazing Grace/Til the Chicken”, a lovely piece of improvisation that showcases Amos’s warm rapport with bassist George Porter Jr. “This is our church, George,” Amos quips in the segue between the two songs.

Such exposing, loose and jazzy jams demonstrate the kind of spontaneity that Amos prefers to leave off of her studio work and save for live performance these days. The fine concert versions of “Honey” and “Sugar” included here find the songs starting to take shape in front of an audience in a way that their recorded versions can’t match, while the ironically subtitled, and frankly terrifying, “Professional Widow (Merry Widow Version)” remains one of Amos’s most uninhibited and startling vocal performances ever. The album signs off - succinctly and elegantly - with “In the Springtime of His Voodoo (Rookery Ending),” a spare and emotive extension of part of that song, as, against delicate piano, Amos breathes out: “Right there for a minute, you were my enemy…/Right there for a minute, I was over it.”

For many listeners, Boys for Pele has, over the years, served as its own church of sorts: a place of enlightenment, succour and empowerment in the midst of pain and confusion. Amos has produced much fantastic work of comparable ambition and immersive impact since: whether its 2002’s Scarlet’s Walk, 2007’s American Doll Posse (a record whose relevance seems only to have multiplied in the last week), 2011’s Night of Hunters or her sublime foray into musical theatre, The Light Princess (2013). Pele, though, finds Amos at her most overtly radical and risk-taking: boldly challenging the oppressions of culture and history, pushing the album form in fresh directions, discovering a productive way to burn. In its expanded form, the brilliant Boys for Pele thrills, moves and inspires anew.

Boys For Pele: 20^th Anniversary Reissue is out on Rhino on 18^th November.