little earthquakes b-sides

January 16, 2020

The b-sides for Little Earthquakes are a mixture of fine songs that it’s difficult to see how missed the album, or that if it is clear, it comes down purely to tonal fit instead of quality—“Upside Down” and “Take to the Sky”—and the usual mix of songs that fall just short of the album tracks that did make it—“Mary” and “Sweet Dreams.” And then there is “Song for Eric,” the only song among the Little Earthquakes sessions to simply be bad. An a capella love song framed entirely in fantasy romance pablum about a “fair maiden” who will “wait all day for my sailor” that unironically includes the phrases “over hill and dale” and “you know me like the nightingale,” it is at best a cut rate version of “Etienne,” and at worst a rehash of the character-based love songs she wrote as a teenager. (It’s worth comparing specifically to “Rubies and Gold,” which is essentially the same song only with a baroquely complex musical arrangement instead of an a capella delivery.)

Exactly what happened here is hard to discern, not least because it’s one of only two Little Earthquakes-era songs upon which Amos has literally never made any sort of comment. It was on the rejected first version of Little Earthquakes, sequenced between “Sweet Dreams” and the terminally unreleased “Learn to Fly,” but the commercially released version (dumped on a limited edition reissue of “Silent All These Years” in the UK) comes from the London-based 1991 sessions with Ian Stanley that yielded “China.”

Where the second set of sessions for Little Earthquakes were an effort to reconceptualize the album away from the excessive lightness of the Siegerson tracks, these London sessions were essentially just extra. After rejecting the first cut of the album and giving Amos no end of grief (as described in “Leather”), Atlantic executive Doug Ross called Amos up after the second version to say, in his own words, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’ve fallen in love with your record.” (Ironically, the track that grabbed him was “Winter,” one that had been on the original version.) Still puzzling over how to promote an artist as unusual as Amos, Morris decided that the easiest thing to do would be to ship Amos off to London for a year to work the British market. With a much smaller geographic area and national radio stations, the UK had always been a more hospitable market for odd artists. Amos performed a set for East West honcho Max Hole, who as a devoted Kate Bush fan, made the leap to Amos fandom with relative ease, and Amos was up and running. And in the course of her UK residency, she found herself in the studio with former Tears for Fears member Ian Stanley cutting another set of songs.

These sessions are something of a curiosity in general—they’re by far the least remarked upon recording block for Little Earthquakes, and the songs that came out of them are a baffling mix—a handful of new songs Amos had penned between the completion of the home sessions with Eric Rosse in late 1990, a couple of covers, and a few reworkings of old material such as “China” and “Song for Eric” (and possibly “Girl” under one theory of “Thoughts”’s provenance).…

December 27, 2019

The Pain of the Respect Thereof (Girl)

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The traditional Eruditorum Press post-holiday ebook sale is running from now until January 2nd. Details are here.

In many ways the slightest song on Little Earthquakes, “Girl” is hamstrung most obviously by its positioning as the second track on the album. Coming off of “Crucify,” it is doomed to be the markedly inferior of the two post-80s empower ballads. Coming immediately before the jaw-dropping triple threat of “Silent All These Years,” “Precious Things,” and “Winter,” it is subsequently doomed to be forgotten by “that doesn’t make you Jesus” at the absolute latest. That it made the album over “Upside Down,” ”Take to the Sky,” or even “Flying Dutchman” is in hindsight one of the more baffling decisions made about Little Earthquakes.

It’s not fair to say that “Girl” is a bad song. Indeed, individual moments are as fine as anything on the album—the haunting, arrhythmic male vocal over “sit in the chair and be good now,” or the mad spaghetti of sounds that make up the bridge. Really, the overall soundscape of the song is solid, even if there’s a slight degree of overproduction (a problem that arguably plagues all four of the Rosse/Amos tracks, but “Girl” is the least suited to maximalism).

The problem really is in its precise sequencing. Musically, it has the same debt to the 80s as “Crucify,” but where Siegerson’s restraint and desire to foreground Amos and her piano made for a well-crafted pop song with the 80s inflections you’d expect something in 1990 to have, Rosse and Amos’s excess begins to tilt the song towards the same mistakes as Y Kant Tori Read. There’s a profound difference of degree—“Girl” is a mile ahead of even the best songs on Y Kant Tori Read. But the basic error is the same, and coming after a song that does the same sort of thing musically only with vastly more panache is damaging. In the other direction, meanwhile, it also feels like a pale echo—“she’s been everybody else’s girl / maybe someday she’ll be her own” is the same sentiment as “Silent All These Years,” only dissociated onto an unnamed third party and made tentative as opposed to emphatic.

All of this oversimplifies. There is a dark mystery to “Girl” that the songs on either side lack—its skulking piano line laid over a firm drumbeat gives it a sense of strange menace, while its lyrics, with the girl crawling through the shadows, hints at a sense of abjection that makes it clear that this belongs to the same set of songs as “Precious Things” and “Little Earthquakes” as opposed to the cheerier confessionalism of the Siegerson songs. This isn’t simply a song that’s failing to live up to the ones on either side of it. But nothing that it’s doing comes off cleanly and decisively enough to distinguish it either.

Amos has largely seemed aware that the song doesn’t quite do the business.…

December 9, 2019

The Sea is the Sky (Flying Dutchman)

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Flying Dutchman (1992)

Flying Dutchman (live, 2001)

Flying Dutchman (2012)

Flying Dutchman (live, 2017)

Some time early in Amos’s time in LA, while she was still playing the airport Holiday Inn to pay her rent, a friend of hers helped her move, and asked her kinda sorta boyfriend Rantz Hoseley to help. Hoseley was attending art school in the city, and the two hit it off immediately (Hoseley cameos in the video for “The Big Picture”). A few years later, in the wake of Y Kant Tori Read, Amos called her friend to chat. Hoseley, an artist who wanted to make it in the comics industry, had recently left Los Angeles after a number of setbacks that included being told by Marvel editor Tom DeFalco that he should give up and become a plumber and what he describes s “some very scary near-fatal experiences,” and was living with his parents in Washington, but the two remained close. Amos was starting to bounce back from her own setback and in the early stages of Little Earthquakes, and asked her friend how he’d describe himself. Hoseley’s response, delivered from the depths of his depressive spiral, was to say, “Tori, I’m the Flying Dutchman.” And so Amos began to write Hoseley a song.

By legend, the Flying Dutchman is a ghost ship doomed to sail the oceans forever. The stated origins of the curse are numerous. In some tellings, the ship was cursed after it committed some horrific crime; in others, its captain made an ill-advised invocation of the Devil. In any case, the ship is now cursed to never find a safe port. To sight it is to see disaster, not least as the ship exists perpetually within a patch of foul weather. (In practice, supposed sightings were most likely Fata Morgana mirages.)

The song is a soaring and expansive piece, making liberal use of (sampled) strings and clocking in at six and a half minutes, with multiple different verse structures that get employed over the course of it. (One reporter, rather fatuously, suggested the song has “a kind of movement-like structure,” to which Amos, rather more accurately, replied that “it’s not the structure of your typical pop song.”) Lyrically, it’s a rousing statement of belief, first in Hoseley, who she sympathetically portrays as being constantly badgered about what he’ll do with his life, and in the second verse describing a woman who is chronically misunderstood by the “straight suits.” This is possibly Amos portraying herself after the failure of Y Kant Tori Read. Picking up on Hoseley’s identification with the famous ghost ship, Amos spends the chorus hailing the missing ship, imagining it not as a bunch of lost souls desperate to get home, but as some sort of intrepid explorer of far-out conceptual realms. As she tells her characters, “they can’t see / what you’re born to be.”

Understandably given its use of canned strings, Amos picked the song to rework on Gold Dust, where it’s one of the few songs not to feel like a pale echo of its original.…

November 19, 2019

Any Kind of Touch I Think Is Better Than None (Upside Down)

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Upside Down (live, 1991)

Upside Down (1992)

Upside Down (live in Cincinatti, 1992)

Upside Down (live, 2007, official bootleg, Clyde set)

Upside Down (web concert, 2010)

Upside Down (radio performance, 2011)

Upside Down/Upside Down (live, 2014)

By some margin the best of the Little Earthquakes b-sides, to the point that Amos in 1994 described its omission from Little Earthquakes as her “only regret.” (She would eventually say something similar about “Honey” missing the cut for Under the Pink and “Cooling” not making it onto Boys for Pele.) And Amos is right—without being so crass as to name names, “Upside Down” is straightforwardly better than at least two songs on Little Earthquakes, and is heads above the next best b-side. This is, presumably, why it found an almost immediate release, coming out as track two of the “Me and a Gun” single in the UK, and showing up on both the “Winter” and “Precious Things” singles in the US—a clear and easily justified decision to make it the primary b-side of the album.

Much of Little Earthquakes is built in the balance between Amos’s more gnomic tendencies and a confessional approach that relies on a sense of intimate relatability. “Upside Down” stands out, then, for doing both of these things with a focused intensity otherwise seen only in “Silent All These Years.” But instead of that song’s anthemic reclamation of agency, “Upside Down” is a troubled and uncertain song. Its lyrics offer images of anxiety—worlds turned upside down, voices chattering in your head, interpersonal turmoil, and everything being very much not OK. But the song also sees Amos at her most utterly whimsical, whether in her mischievous turn from berating a lover, “you say the world is getting rid of her demons / I say baby what have you been smoking” straight into “I dreamed I dreamed I dreamed / I loved a black boy / my daddy would scream” (a line that’s potentially harsh on her father, who she’s elsewhere described as a strong supporter of civil rights) or in some of the most cheerily bonkers lines of her early career in “you see I’m tangled up / got a kitten, kitten, kitten, kitten in my hair / Cincinnati—I like the word / it’s the only thing we can’t seem to turn / upside down.”

But the strangeness of “Upside Down” goes deeper than its somewhat impish sense of humor, permeating the song with odd images. Most obviously is the song’s overt color scheme—it opens with the declaration that “I love to turn my little blue world upside down,” and subsequent verses invert a little blue girl. Why blue? Possibilities abound: a reference to the famous “The Blue Marble” photograph, a Brian Eno riff, a symbol of depression or melancholy, an allusion to the Blue Fugates, a shoutout to a hentai manga (OK probably not), and more. Whatever the reason, it gives the song a vivid sense of tone and character, however cryptic.

Amos’s explanation of the song in the Little Earthquakes songbook does magnificently little to clarify: “Sticks, rocks, food, all sundry items came into the faery donut, including my feet over my head and a little blue girl.”…

November 8, 2019

Choke Him to Death Daddy (Sweet Dreams)

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Sweet Dreams (demo, 1990)

Sweet Dreams (1992)

Sweet Dreams (live, 2001)

Sweet Dreams (2003)

Sweet Dreams (official bootleg, 2007, Isabel set)

A political song (973.928—History of North America:Politics of Illusion, according to Tales of a Librarian), but let’s immediately be cautious of treating that as a way of distinguishing it from other songs we’ve talked about, as if “Crucify,” “Leather,” or “Silent All These Years” are not also political. The more accurate assessment is that “Sweet Dreams” is a song that is overtly about electoral politics, with a second verse that makes overt reference to George Bush’s “thousand points of light” speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention.

For the most part, there is something vaguely unsatisfying about this sort of thing. It’s not that there aren’t good songs about electoral politics in pop music. But it’s a routine quagmire in which artists turn out badly over-earnest and strident songs about how bad the President is. The problem is not that Amos is wrong that George Bush is “a constipated man” whose friends “got the earth in a sling / the world on her knees / they even got [his] zipper between their teeth.” It’s not even that these are bad lines—“constipated” is a pretty funny insult for Bush, even if the “zipper between their teeth” feels like a cheap and mildly homophobic dig. It’s just that they are so obvious, so direct in their targets, that they pale before the delightful and singular strangeness of Amos’s other material.

Things improve a bit in the third verse, which dips into a psychedelic vision of “lizards and snakes / running through my body” while the summer wind offers strange prophecy, but honestly, even this is a bit Tori-by-numbers—a chain of willful strangeness that doesn’t actually point anywhere.

Amos took another swing at the song in 2003 for Tales of a Librarian, where, as with “Mary,” she rejigged the song. The effect is much the same—the song’s youthful exuberance is traded for a polished control that ultimately saps the song of its appeal. The biggest trick is her updating of the song for the second Bush era by adding a couple of snapped “who’s your daddy” lines throughout.

This set up the song’s larger second life in Amos’s career, its use in the 2007 tour for American Doll Posse, which makes up fully a quarter of its fifty-nine live performances. There the song was reinterpreted to be the work of Isabel, one of the five personae Amos created for that album. Isabel is a photographer, and an overtly political figure—she’s the singer of the album opener, “Yo George,” which is directed squarely at the second Bush. This also served as the traditional opener for Isabel’s live sets, with “Sweet Dreams” the usual follow-up to give an intergenerational approach to whingeing about the Bush family.

The song made a few appearances in the 2009 tour before Amos finally admitted the obvious, which is while Sweet Dreams”’s heart was in the right place, the right place was 1990, when it was recorded.…

October 10, 2019

Butterflies Don’t Belong in Nets (Mary)

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Mary (1992)

Mary (1992, live)

Mary (2003)

Mary (2003, web concert)

Mary (2007, official bootleg, Clyde set)

Let’s begin on January 11^th, 1967, in London, where the Jimi Hendrix Experience went into the studio and to cut “Purple Haze.” With twenty minutes left in the session, they decided to cut a quick demo of a newly written song as well, “The Wind Cries Mary.” Written by Hendrix following a screaming fight with his then-girlfriend Kathy Etchingham (Mary being her middle name, which Hendrix would use to annoy her) over whether her mashed potatoes were too lumpy, the song is a downbeat R&B number with lyrics that can be best described as a sad man’s psychedelic whinge.

A quarter-century later, Tori Amos stepped into a Capitol Records studio with Davitt Sigerson to pen a response of sorts. “Mary” is no straightforward response song reimagining events from Etchingham’s perspective—indeed it’s not even about her in any sense. Nor is it hostile to Hendrix to any real degree—he’s invoked on a chummy first-name basis in the second part of the chorus by way of reassuring the eponymous Mary that “even the wind cries your name.”

Amos, instead, is reaching for what will become one of the wellsprings of her work: the reclamation of the feminine divine. The lyric is gnomic—a wandering piece that repeatedly circles back to the ecological, both in the first verse (“lush valley all dressed in green / just ripe for the picking”) and the second (“rivers of milk are running dry / can’t you hear the dolphin’s crying / what’ll we do when our babies scream / fill their mouths with some acid rain”). Who exactly the Mary that Amos calls upon is vague—there’s no direct Christian imagery, but the name carries enough totemic power that there doesn’t have to be.

Indeed, Amos ends up playing an ambiguity in the space left by the lack of description—the default Mary is the Virgin Mary, but Amos is just as likely to be referring to Mary Magdalene. Indeed, in multiple 2003 interviews around the release of Tales of a Librarian (which featured a rerecorded version of “Mary”) Amos talked about the need “to marry the two Marys together.” And the lyrics certainly lean a little more Magdalene than Virgin in their vagueness, most obviously in the lines “Las Vegas got a pin-up girl / they got her armed as they buy and sell her,” which clearly evokes something adjacent to Mary Magdalene’s traditional (albeit unattested in the actual Bible) role as a prostitute. (The debate is ultimately settled in the compilation’s liner notes, which engage in the amusing game of filing the songs according to the Dewey Decimal System. There, “Mary” is cross-listed in 363.7:Social Problems and Social Services—Abuse of the Earth and 226:The Bible—Mary Magdalene.)

Ultimately, however, the song is more vague than quite works. The dualistic Mary leaning towards Magdalene is an interesting and well-supported read, but it ultimately doesn’t provide much useful insight for a song that swerves from bemoaning the objectification of women into a verse about acid rain without really filling in any of the space between those two concepts.…

October 7, 2019

Some Magic Buried Deep in My Heart (Take to the Sky)

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Take to the Sky (1992)

Take to the Sky (TV performance, 1998)

Take to the Sky (webcast, 2001)

Take to the Sky (TV performance, 2002)

Take to the Sky (official bootleg, 2005)

Take to the Sky (official bootleg, 2007)

Take to the Sky/Datura (webcast, 2014)

In the wounded aftermath of Y Kant Tori Read, with Atlantic demanding a new record on about six months turnaround, Amos was invited over by her high school friend Cindy Marble, who was living in LA also failing to make it in the music industry. Marble had a piano at her place, and Amos, who had gotten rid of her own piano during her excursion as a rock chick, sat down to play, finding herself so utterly engrossed by her old instrument that she lost track of hours and of Marble. Marble implored her to take the instrument back up, arguing that this was the setting in which Amos felt authentic and genuine. And so Amos rented a piano for the apartment she was sharing with her boyfriend/producer Eric Rosse and began to write.

Unsurprisingly, she began with a song that grappled with her failure. “Take to the Sky,” called “Russia” in its earliest demos, is unrepentantly a rewrite of history in which Amos casts herself as a luckless prisoner of other people’s agendas—”you got me moving in a circle,” she complains, and laments that she’s “so close to touching freedom / then I hear the guards call my name.” As we’ve seen, Amos was far more deeply enmeshed in her role than is convenient for the story she’s telling here. But in this case, Amos pulls off the classic trick of making it all up and having it come true anyway. While she may be fudging the details on how exactly things went wrong, the song is ultimately focused not on a forensic examination of why her previous album sucked but on depicting her own internal landscape in its wake. And so we get a pre-chorus in which Amos offers a litany of heckling voices: “And my priest says / ‘you ain’t saving no souls’ / my father says / ‘you ain’t making any money’ / my doctor says / ‘you just took it to the limit’/ and I stand here / with a sword in my hand,” her once prominent prop hanging limply, dumbstruck by her side.

From here, Amos launches her attack, staring down her critics, which is to say everyone. “You can say it one more ti-yime / what you don’t like. / Let me hear it one more time” she belts, before pivoting to her defiant conclusion: ”then take a seat while I / take to the sky.” It’s simple—far simpler than the versions of the sentiment she’ll express in the next couple of songs that she writes. Indeed, it’s easy to see why this ended up as a b-side: it’s solid and catchy song, but its unambiguous earnestness would have jarred on Little Earthquakes itself, where Amos’s reclamations of self run more towards the bittersweet than the anthemic.…