boys in their dresses

Etienne Trilogy (1988)

Etienne (live, 1996)

Etienne (live, 2002)

Etienne (official bootleg, 2007, Tori set)

Etienne (live, 2017)

We have been returning frequently to the lens of Amos’s eventual reclamation of her Y Kant Tori Read work, mostly in the course of her 2014 tour. And so it’s fitting that we end discussion of that period of her career with the first song from the period that she played live, the album closer, “Etienne.” It happened on April 28th, in her old stomping grounds of Washington DC, about two month into the 1996 Dew Drop Inn tour for Boys for Pele, and five days before she debuted “Cool on Your Island” in a medley with “Hey Jupiter.” It went on to feature twenty-six times over the course of that tour—far from one of the most played songs, but in no way one of the least either, and ahead of multiple songs from all three of her albums up to that point. She cooled on the song a bit past that—those twenty-six performances make up nearly half of the song’s total appearances—but once reclaimed it never entirely left her setlists. 

Of course, “Etienne” marks only a part of the Etienne Trilogy—on the CD it’s saddled with a synth-heavy opening by Amos and Bullard entitled “The Highlands” that spends about 90 seconds stalling for time before Amos’s piano comes in for the main song, and given a bagpipe-based rendition of the traditional “Skyeboat Song” as an outro that, at sixty seconds, is almost perfectly designed to finish just as you locate the remote to turn it off anyway. These excesses serve to ground the song within the album, where it would otherwise be an odd fit for precisely the reason it had such an easy time being integrated into Amos’s later career: at its heart, “Etienne” is a straightforward piano ballad. 

The simplicity of this similarity, however, poses a trap. Asked in a 1998 interview about whether the song represented “more of what you were wanting to do” than the rest of the album, Amos was withering, replying, “Not necessarily, it was more just me at the piano.” When the interviewer attempted to push the point, she firmly rejected the idea of comparing her solo work to “Etienne,” noting that if there was a similarity between it and “Precious Things,” “Waitress,” or “Cruel” then “I wouldn’t have made the four records I just made.” This is a puzzling claim with a questionable understanding of how artistic development works (does she also reject the idea of comparing those three songs to each other?), but it highlights the problems with treating “Etienne” as though it’s some sort of “proper” Tori Amos song orphaned on Y Kant Tori Read. 

Amos eventually threw the interviewer a bone, offering that “‘Etienne,’ as a song, was more of what I was doing before I came to L.A.” We’ve already looked at her pre-L.A. work (or at least, people who back me on Patreon have), and there’s a sense to this: the bulk of those songs are love songs in which Amos seems to be going through a writing exercise of imagining different perspectives and narrators to work with.…

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The Big Picture (1988)

The Big Picture (video, 1988)

Pictures of You/The Big Picture (live, 2014)

Selected as the lead single and sequenced as the first track, “The Big Picture” serves as the first and, for many, last impression of Y Kant Tori Read. It’s tempting to offer some snark about how unwise this is, but frankly, survey the other options again. There are certainly better songs, but the bulk of them are the downtempo numbers—”Fire on the Side,” “Floating City,” or “Cool on Your Island,” which ended up being the second single. The overblown production and 80s chintz of Y Kant Tori Read is consistently at its worst on the uptempo numbers, which meant that good choices of high energy lead singles were thin on the ground.

Nevertheless, it means that the album opens on a note that borders on self-parody—two bars of rapid, slightly clappy-sounding drums counting off the sixteenth notes in the song’s 128 bpm, followed by a melodramatic synth stab before Amos attempts a swaggering vocal delivery of “someone smashed my window / broke into my brand new car / last night” in a vaguely New Jersey-inflected accent such that it comes out roughly ”someone broke my winduh / broke into my brand new carrh.” Coming at it with any knowledge of Tori Amos, it instantly sells the album’s reputation as an early career embarrassment. On its own terms, it’s a try-hard effort at 80s synth rock that lands squarely in kitsch. Either way, by the fifteen second mark the entire band’s reputation is already set in stone.

And yet “The Big Picture” is not quite bad either. Musically, there are several interesting components. The highlight is a rattling, neurotic guitar line ripped off from John Parr’s “Naughty Naughty.” But the source material also reveals why Y Kant Tori Read’s take on the riff is doomed and gives a preview of most of the poor decisions to come on the album. Parr’s song is in no way good—it’s a swaggering song about pressuring a woman into sex, with an utterly sickening chorus hook of  “Don’t tell me ‘I don’t want to be a girl like that’ / do you want to see a grown man cry” delivered over a bunch of bland power cords that finally resolves into the riff from the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.” But the opening riff that’s used over the verses—the one that Y Kant Tori Read nicks—is in fact fantastic, and the song has the good sense to let it be, giving it four repetitions completely clean as an intro, followed by four more with a simple drum backing before the vocals kick in, and returning to it regularly. 

Given that they were stealing it from a minor hit from only four years earlier, it is perhaps understandable that Y Kant Tori Read did not lean quite so hard on the riff. But there’s a vast amount of space between the clean groove of Parr’s original and the cluttered mess of “The Big Picture,” where the line is mixed well behind the vocal, drowned behind a deluge of synths, and moved from the harsh, processed twang of Parr’s tone to an anodyne jangle utterly devoid of personality.…

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Pirates (1988)

Pirates (live, 2014)

Jamaica Inn/Pirates (live, 2017)

1. Captain Blood

Upon joining the project, Joe Chicharelli introduced Amos to Kim Bullard, a keyboard player he’d used on several albums, mostly with the band Poco. Bullard ended up playing most of the synths on the album, and formed a brief writing partnership with Amos that resulted in three songs on Y Kant Tori Read. Two of these became the album’s singles. The third was “Pirates.”

On an album of frustrated love songs, “Pirates” stands out for completely and utterly not being one. It is instead the sort of song that characterizes Tori Amos’s later career, namely one in which it’s difficult to straightforwardly make a statement of the form “the song is about X.” I mean, it’s about pirates, obviously, but not in some straightforward narrative sense in which Amos relates the story of a pirate ship. The pirates exist somewhere between a metaphor and a straightforward subject. In the first verse, they seem to be imaginary—“Traveled far / from my home / foreign streets / paved with stone / deep in my dreams / Moroccan sand / I sail my ship / on dry land.” But the second verse has no obvious escape into the figurative even as it continues to resist straightforward subject matter: “steal the jewel / watch it break / it cuts with an eye/ I cant escape / the ruby heals / alone I stand / when I sail my ship / on dry land.” The chorus, meanwhile, sets them up as a solution, describing how “on a dark night / when you feel lonely / and the world just / can’t understand you” before answering simply “Pirates, yeah.” 

If one is hell bent on interpretation—and I think ultimately that’s going to prove an inconsistently helpful approach to Amos—the cornerstone line is clearly “I sail my ship on dry land,” which finishes each of the two verses and cements the sense of distance between Amos and her piratical career, giving a sense of her as a pirate in exile, forced to spend her days fronting a crap 80s band while by night she dreams of the open seas. But this is still visibly incomplete—what on earth does one do about the lacerating jewel and the healing ruby, which may or may not be the same thing? No. We’re clearly on a hiding to nothing here.

Let’s try again. The centerpiece of “Pirates” is clearly the enthusiastic “Pirates, yeah” in the chorus. This is the heart of what the song is actually about: an unbridled enthusiasm for the basic idea of pirates. And while “fuck yeah pirates” may be a tenuous thing upon which to hang an entire pop song, ultimately its novelty wins out. “Pirates” is a straightforwardly upbeat song—around 130 bpm, with no major shifts or evolution in its sound, and with a chorus that’s a straightforward alternating two-chord pattern—that sings the praises of pirates. This is an odd thing for a song to be, and that oddness carries it, especially given Bullard’s particularly vivid synthesizer textures.…

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Floating City (1988)

Floating City (live, 2014)

Floating City (live, 2015)

At first, casual listen, another song of heartbreak and disappointed love: “you went away / why did you leave me / you know I believed you,” it opens. In fact, “Floating City” is the first shot in a longer and larger battle with the patriarchal Christian god of her upbringing. Eventually this would go on to fuel multiple albums in which Amos constructed her own sprawling alternative mythology. Compared to those songs, “Floating City” is a half-developed thought; compared to the rest of Y Kant Tori Read, it’s a song of towering scope and ambition.

Amos is, as she often notes, a minister’s daughter. In some ways this led to all the stereotypes you’d expect. Amos went to church multiple times a week, and sang frequently at weddings and funerals. Her father was reasonably progressive—Amos recounts that he marched with Martin Luther King and was a supporter of women’s rights. But this had clear limits—her account of how after “being exposed to so many gay people who work on my tours and shoots he’s evolved to seeing them as individuals, as people, and not as ‘the gays’” is decidedly modest in its praise. And while he was open-minded enough to chaperone her as she played DC-area gay bars in the late 70s, he also barred music like The Doors and Led Zeppelin from the house, accusing Jim Morrison of being of the Devil. He also embraced the usual sexual repressiveness of American Christianity—Amos describes his ethos as “no short skirts; stay a virgin until you’re married. ‘Gird your loins’ was his favorite saying.”

Even more repressive, however, was her paternal grandmother, Addie Allen Amos, a devoutly religious woman who Amos recalls speaking in tongues on one occasion. It was her grandmother that pushed Amos’s father into ministry, and she was fiercely critical of him afterwards—Amos recounts that she’d “write him letters criticizing his sermons. She just wanted him to be Billy Graham or something.” In terms of her treatment of Amos,  she recalls how “she’d pound into me that only evil women give away their virginity before marriage. If you even thought about doing that, you were out of the Kingdom of God.” Amos, for her part, was inclined to do more than just think about it, and was less than impressed by her grandmother’s suggestion that “a young woman should turn her body over to her husband, who then owns it.”

Amos, meanwhile, was developing a spirituality that was heavily influenced by her maternal grandparents, each of whom were deeply invested in their Cherokee heritage. (Each had a full-blooded grandparent.) From them she learned an animist spirituality—Amos recounts her grandfather teaching her to talk to trees and talk to her about shape-shifting, and credits him with helping her think of songs as coherent spirits that she has to nurture relationships with. Amos recounts talking with fairies into her adolescence before she began distancing herself from that aspect of herself in a largely unsuccessful bid at conventional popularity.…

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On the Boundary (1988)

On the Boundary (live, 2011)

On the Boundary (live, 2014)

Caught a Lite Sneeze/On the Boundary (live, 2017)

“On the Boundary” is the rare Y Kant Tori Read song that is neither embarrassing nor good. It is of course another song of frustrated love, but unlike most of the album it is at least not bothering to pine for its subject. Here Amos is clear that the romance is over and is settling on castigating her lover for his inadequacy instead of holding out hope for fixing things. This has the pleasant effect of making the song one in which the swagger of Y Kant Tori Read makes sense, as the song actually casts Amos in a position of confidence and assertiveness.

The song is built around a reasonably effective crescendo from the verses to the chorus. The verses are built on an alternating major chord progression that’s largely carried by the bass, which blats out a two note pattern over some synth pads and, in later verses, a smidgen of acoustic guitar. The lyrics here show Amos sketching out her lover’s failures, which generally amount to his insistence on shutting Amos out and not letting her help him—”I was there to save you / but you’d rather drown”). Particulars are scant, but in a way that is both normal and arguably wise for anthemic pop, as it allows the listener to project themselves into the song. (To make the obvious and always applicable comparison for Y Kant Tori Read, go ahead and scour the lyrics of “Love is a Battlefield” for a hint of specifics.) The song gets to stand in for all the relationships in which a woman has been frustrated by her inability to rescue her partner from his own self-destructiveness, which is, let’s be honest, an awful lot of relationships. 

The chorus, meanwhile, is a soaring anthemic thing rooted in minor chords. The instrumentation shifts to be more guitar-forward, while the drum adds in the eighth note to give the illusion of a tempo shift. All of these are standard tricks for a song built around softer verses and harder choruses, and here end up as examples of “the classics are classics for a reason.” Where things get strange, however, is with the lyrics. The first part of the chorus, in which Amos, voice straining from intensity, wails “On the boundary / on the boundary baby / on the boundary / don’t you need my love” is at least a sensible extension of the first verse’s discussion of her lover pushing into dangerous situations and not letting her help him, although it’s not quite clear what the boundary is, but the chorus’s second half, “you won’t even let me / keep you from falling / from the boundary / that divides our love” is aggressively non-sensical, and not in the charming way that would become her hallmark later on. 

And so the song finds itself riding its chorus groove hard in a furious attempt to bluff it’s way past the nothing of its lyrics.…

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Fire on the Side (1988)

Fire on the Side/Purple Rain (live, 1996)

Fire on the Side (live, 2014)

Fire on the Side (live, 2017)

Another song of frustrated love, but ultimately one that is elevated by the particulars of its subject matter, which sees Amos tackling a classic of songwriting: infidelity. There are, obviously, three perspectives one can write a song about infidelity from. The most common is the person being cheated on, a perspective that allows for sadness (“I Heard it Through The Grapevine,” “Lyin Eyse”), anger (“You Oughta Know,” “Before He Cheats,” the first half of Lemonade), or more innovative perspectives (“Jolene”). Less common but still frequent is the cheater, which allows the singer to cast themselves as a villain, whether a self-pitying one (“The Call”) or an unrepentant one (“O.P.P.”, “It Wasn’t Me”). 

The least common, however, is the most consistently interesting: the other woman. Examples exist—Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend” is the example par excellence here, although The Long Blondes’ “Giddy Stratospheres” deserves mention. And it is into this more arcane tradition that Amos steps with “Fire on the Side.” Amos approaches the subject, however, without any of the wizened and ironic distance of those artists. Both of those songs take the position of an illicit victor, Robyn full of compassion for the soon to be ex-girlfriend of her lover, the Blondes with nothing but glorious contempt. “Fire on the Side,” however, is a song of the vanquished. The lyrics are as overwrought as anything from the period (“ashes blow / in the windy skye / take my heart / as you go” is, depending on your perspective, either the worst offender or the biggest delight), but are all emphatically pointing in the same direction—a smoldering, frustrated desire for a lover that isn’t going to choose you, which results in the song having a focused coherence that neither “Fayth” nor “Heart Attack at 23” were capable of mustering, and that stands out compared to most of the rest of the album as well.

Autobiography is a cheap but inevitable lens; certainly it’s the one that Chiccarelli favors, explaining that “I remember [“ Fire on the Side”] was really difficult for her—because with her, she really had to put her whole self in the song emotionally, so that one was a tough one because it dealt with a period of her life I don’t think she really wanted to re-experience.” But frankly, one doesn’t need autobiography to explain why the singer would need to be a bit amped out to belt out a chorus of “Baby it burns / baby it burns / baby it burns / to be your fire on the side.”  The song is built around a series of repeated three-note walkdowns, starting in the prechorus with “kiss goodbye / go back to your  / separate life” all phrased with a Bb-A-F walkdown, with “to your” adding an extra C-D at the bottom to tease the Gm chord that would resolve the key.…

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Heart Attack at 23 (1988)

Generally speaking, Y Kant Tori Read is not nearly as bad an album as its reputation would suggest. Misjudged in its presentation, dated, and a poor use of Amos’s talents, yes, and certainly not an album anyone would still care about thirty-two years later were it not for Amos’s future career, but not the cringing embarrassment that Amos’s disavowals (highlights include “Madonna and Kate Bush in a headlong collision after eating bad mushrooms”) and decision to leave it out of print until 2017 would suggest. For the most part it is a competent minor 1980s album—not something you’d single out as a hidden gem, but not something on its own terms that is mockable or embarrassing.

“Heart Attack at 23” serves as the biggest exception to this. Most of Y Kant Tori Read has been at least partially reclaimed by Amos, worked into concerts as a winking extra for fans die-hard enough to recognize it. “Heart Attack at 23,” however, is one of two songs on the album that Amos has never performed live. Good-natured reclamation of your juvenilia has its limits; here we find Amos’s.

It’s not hard to see why. “Heart Attack at 23” is an absolute mess. Its opening forty-five seconds feature Amos attempting a swaggering greaser voice to talk about stealing the keys to her brother’s car. This constitutes the less dreadful part of the song. Once Amos talks about wanting to put her foot to the floor the song takes off with a scream of guitar. From there the only move it ever finds for itself is to try to get bigger and louder. On an album that lived up to the hair metal convictions of its cover, this might have worked, but Y Kant Tori Read, for all its Pat Benatar aspirations, is not a hard rock band, at least in its heavily label-meddled album form. On top of that, the song is pushed to an unsustainable 158 BPM, leaving a sense of everyone involved feeling like they’re struggling to keep up with it. With an energetic band that can push the song back this can be a conscious and savvy choice. Here it just sounds like a bunch of jobbing musicians in over their head. 

This would not be salvaged by a good chorus hook, but that’s ultimately beside the point as what the song has in practice is Amos howling about how “if I have a heart attack at 23 / I’m loving you too much” and insisting in the face of all audible evidence that “you’ll miss me.” By the time the backing vocals of “roll, roll, roll, roll on” start up in the bridge about 3:40 into the song (which stretches an astonishing 5:19) they’re just icing on a cake of misjudged bathos.

What went wrong here? As noted, the production is a big problem. The obvious person to finger here is the album’s producer, Joe Chiccarelli, but things aren’t quite that simple. Chiccarelli’s account, which has Amos calling him after the album is finished to say, “I really love this album, I’m so proud of it.…

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Fayth (1988)

Faith/Fayth (live, 2014)

Way Down/When Doves Cry/Fayth (live, 2017)

Flash forward seven years.

Our protagonist has spent all of them working towards becoming a pop star.  Her first serious effort in 1983, a recording session with Narada Michael Walden, who would go on to produce Whitney Houston on the soundtrack for The Bodyguard, produces neither anything of value nor anything that has made it into the public sphere, although lyrics including the chorus “give me the go/ and let me / rub you down /I’m in your power, when you’re / takin’ me down / I’ll just lay low until / you come around / good to go / rub down / good to go /rub down” suggest we’re not missing out. In 1984, she moved to LA, at first doing basically the same sorts of bar gigs she’d been doing in DC. In 1985, she cut a commercial for Kellogg’s short-lived Just Right cereal, where she’s cast as “the piano player who isn’t obviously supposed to look like Elton John.” That year, things finally began to coalesce. She met Steve Caton, a guitarist who will end up sticking with her through To Venus and Back, and ends up forming a band along with future Guns ’n Roses drummer Matt Sorum and a bassist, Brad Cobb. The group cuts a demo tape of five songs (the contents of which will be another Patreon-exclusive in a few months. Don’t worry, this won’t be a habit; the period of Amos’s career where we have a pile of extant demos that never went anywhere ends here).

The tape is sent to Atlantic Records under the name “Tori Ellen Amos and her band named Y Kant Tori Read,” (the name, apparently, is a reference to her frustrations at the Peabody with regards to sheet music) firmly positioning Amos as the project’s focal point, and is enough to net Amos a contract that she’ll spend the next fifteen years working her way out from under. The resulting project is a messy compromise. Amos had only reluctantly shifted gears into the band setup, writing home to her parents, “I have to accept that the girl and her piano are dead. That time in history is over.” And so she reinvented herself in the vein of 80s arena rock. Upon being signed, however, Amos found herself at the mercy of an over-involved label. The ten tracks of Y Kant Tori Read were ultimately recorded across six studios with a rotating cast of musicians. Sorum remained the drummer across all of it, but Caton was exiled to “additional guitars,” and was ultimately one of four guitarists on the album, while Cobb did not appear on it at all save for a cowriting credit on “Fayth.” Pulled in so many directions, the album ends up being a smorgasbord of 80s cliches, almost all of them a few years past their sell-by date. The largest and most obvious inspiration, however, was Pat Benatar, a fact made obvious in the hiring of Joe Chiccarelli, fresh off of work on Benatar’s 1985 album Seven the Hard Way, as producer.…

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