Eruditorum Press

November 4, 2019

“Mother” unfolds with strange formality, opening with a minute-long instrumental prelude in Cm before the song proper begins in Gb. (The official sheet music omits this entirely, beginning at the start of the main piano line.) It’s scarcely the only time Amos will use an approach like this—she’ll use the same trick next album on “Icicle,”for instance. But it grounds the song more in Amos’s classical training than anything else on Little Earthquakes, giving the song a strange and almost ritualistic feel when compared to anything around it.

This fits the strange confrontation within it. “Mother” is structured around a relationship of authority—it opens in the imperative: “go, go, go, go now / out of the nest it’s time,” and with instructions to “tuck those ribbons under / your helmet be a good soldier.” But Amos is in no way content to play the submissive underling. The song’s narrative voice bleeds from mother to daughter, shifting midway through the first verse. And the daughter is far from compliant, keeping secrets and plotting her escape.

Within this slippery dynamic, meanwhile, something is clearly very wrong. This comes through not in any clear flashes of trauma but in oblique shadows—the mother’s strangely cruel comfort in the first verse as she coos, “here here now don’t cry / you raised your hand for the assignment,” or the eerie description of a disconnected phone “dripping with blood and with / time and with your advice.” The result is unsettling and creepy, especially given Amos’s performance—“Mother” is the only song on the album that’s recorded as just Amos and her piano, and Amos works her way across the song’s odd, enjambed lines by offering unexpected and asynchronous crescendos between the vocal and piano lines.

Talking about the song, Amos stresses its mystical origins, saying that it “came on a bit like a dream sleep. It was early morning when I made the way to the piano. I knew that ‘they’ were trying to show me something. A memory of ‘the fall.’ Not the one we’ve been taught, but the other side of the story, which is the belief of certain ancient mythologies.” Speaking later, she elaborated on this: “I knew that ‘Winter’ needed to be written, which represented not just the father, but the grandfather—Poppa, my mother’s father. So the positive male energies in my life, and also moments with men, with their disappointment in themselves and how that plays out. I wanted —I needed—the polar opposite, so I felt like this needed to go beyond the human mother. This needed to go back to ideas of Creatrix and that God is not just male, but of the Creator being female and male. So this is the feminine story coming down to earth, leaving this soul space and saying goodbye to Mother Creator as I go to Mother Earth.…

October 30, 2019

A Ghost Story for Samhainn

Jack Graham fiction, ghost story 16

Calder’s Room

(Amended with new draft 12/11/21.)

Thomas Calder, a lieutenant in the 1st Surreys, was sent back to England in autumn 1917 after being injured during the Battle of the Somme. He spent a week or so in a conventional military hospital in France, but his wounds were primarily psychic rather than physical, so he was sent back to England, and to Sandilands.

Sandilands had by that time come under the directorship of Dr. K. J. Ravichandra. Ravichandra was marked out by his universally acknowledged skill, and by his advanced and humane ideas. Before his advent, Sandilands had effectively been a torture chamber for men who were considered weak and cowardly, in need of being shocked or bullied back to obedience. Whatever our modern opinion of Ravichandra’s approach, there can be little doubt that his informal and conversational style represented an improvement on treatment through freezing cold water, or electric shock, or cigarette burn. The men who came under Ravichandra’s care at Sandilands – an Elizabethan manor in East Anglia, bought by the government and converted for use as an Army psychiatric hospital – generally showed great improvement. Calder, it must be said, turned out to be something of an exception.

One of the things Ravichandra insisted upon was that all patients should have single rooms, or at least share with only one other person. Accordingly, the old system of shared bunks (officers excepted, naturally) was abolished, and the large rooms of the old house were converted into a great number of small but pleasant single and double cubicles. This not only increased the comfort of the patients but also expanded the hospital’s capacity, so the Army was inclined to be pleased despite the expense. Ravichandra had made a rod for his own back in that he immediately found that he was being sent a great many more patients.

Not only did Ravichandra find his staff and budget severely stretched, he soon found that space was running out. Calder was literally the last man to be sent to Sandilands before Ravichandra was forced to tell the Army that he could not possibly accept any more patients. Consequently, Calder was not put into a cubicle like the vast majority of the patients, but was billeted in a small attic room. It was the last remaining scrap of space usable for habitation.

By the account of Lumsden, the orderly who showed Calder up to his room via a narrow, cramped, and creaking old spiral staircase, the new arrival was pleased when he saw the room. He seemed to like its privacy and remoteness – though he certainly remarked upon its peculiarities, as nobody could help doing.

Its walls, floor, and angled ceiling were of dark, old wood. Even the loam between the tarred black beams was dark. At some point, probably during the early nineteenth century, the room had been refurbished with new panelling and floorboards. but even then the dark colour scheme had been retained. The wood of the panels and floorboards was stained so dark as to be almost black.…

October 28, 2019

Love Isn’t Forever (Leather)

Elizabeth Sandifer boys in their dresses, little earthquakes 3

Leather (live, 1991)

Leather (1992)

Leather (live, 1997)

Improv/Leather (live, 2003)

Leather (official bootleg, 2005)

Leather (TV performance, 2005)

Leather (official bootleg, 2007, Tori set)

Leather (live w/orchestra, 2012)

Leather (live, 2017)

The confessional mode of songwriting is full of pitfalls for a critic, and “Leather” offers us opportunities to topple into all of them. The song creates as aggressive an intimacy as is possible: “Look I’m standing naked before you,” it opens, immediately making its singer vulnerable with regards to the listener. From there we plunge into debasement: “don’t you want more than my sex? / I can scream as loud as your last one / but I can’t claim innocence.” There is an immediate sense of knowing more than we should—a feeling that we’ve been brought into a space we do not belong.

It’s a trick, of course. To state the obvious, Amos is not standing naked before us. The line is a sly game of medium. “Look,” Amos proclaims in an entirely auditory form. “I’m standing,” she says on a recording that was already two years old when it was released to the public. “Naked before you,” she declares from a position that is almost certainly nowhere near the speaker her voice comes out of. Even in a live performance, the song is an exercise in baldly lying to the audience. To take its most semiotically dense iteration, at a 1997 benefit for the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network Amos sits on her piano bench and makes eye contact with the audience as she begins plonking the middle C note that begins the song. She bows her head, then waves briefly before sitting up and stopping to explain that the person she first sung it to is at the concert and that she hasn’t sung it to him since that time. She then lets out a single “ha,” smiles, plays the opening again, and then, clad in jeans, a black tank top, and a light red overshirt, dives into the opening line.

I recognize that I’m belaboring the point here, but without highlighting the intensity of the artifice involved in that line it’s impossible to quote something like her 2009 account of the song in Rolling Stone that “I think there was a side to me that was trying to—in the shedding—to also really collect my shadow portions. And I would go visit them and take these sides that I had judged. And one side that had been very crucified was the sexual side that did not yet understand erotic spirituality, did not know how to bring this into being. Very far away—years away from this. Little did she know when she was writing ‘Leather’ that we would be years and years away from knowing how to integrate that” without things going catastrophically wrong. And it’s even more dangerous to quote something like her 2001 interview with the UK queer magazine Boyz in which she talked about her life in LA in the years before writing “Leather” and says, “I didn’t want to be anybody’s guinea pig sexually.…

October 23, 2019

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 34 – The Grift Question

Jack Graham fascism, i dont speak german, idsg, podcast 0

This week, we look at a bit more Nazi infighting, and talk a little bit about some reactions we’ve had…

Content Warning.

Permalink

Direct Download

Show Notes:

“This Podcaster Dug Into the World of Neo-Nazis. Now They’ve Put a Target on His Back.” https://www.thedailybeast.com/i-dont-speak-german-podcaster-daniel-herman-exposed-neo-nazis-now-he-has-a-target-on-his-back

“In early September, Harper and his co-host released a pair of episodes that focused on the adherents of an obscure neo-Nazi author named James Mason. A book Mason wrote has become a bible of sorts for terroristic neo-Nazi groups like Atomwaffen Division, and it has helped spawn a new wave of so-called accelerationists—people who believe societal collapse is the quickest way to create an all-white ethnostate.

Many of those adherents flocked to Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, in recent months after getting booted from other social media platforms. And they’ve created their own enclave there, which they refer to as “Terrorgram.”

It was there, in the Terrorgram community, that the threats against Harper took shape.

On Sept. 11, an anonymous post appeared on one of the Terrorgram channels, telling people to send Harper “fan mail” at his address in Michigan.

The following day, the same channel published a video from someone who drove by the address and filmed the house. “Howdy, antifascist activist Daniel Harper,” the text of the post read. “Nice place you’ve got there.”

The posts set off a wave of chatter on Telegram. In the midst of it was a user who went by the handle “Anti-Kosmik 2182,” who chimed in with his thoughts about what to do about Harper.

“Ditch the car somewhere a few blocks away, take back alleys, trails in the woods, etc., and then come up on the house wearing a mask,” he wrote. “I’m not saying do anything illegal, but I am saying it would be a real shame if all he has went up in literal flames.”

In court records, the FBI later said that “Anti-Kosmik 2182” was Smith, an infantry soldier stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas. The bureau also revealed that it had an undercover agent on Telegram who was interacting with Smith around the same time.”

Nick Martin Twitter: https://twitter.com/nickmartin

Spike Williams Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpikeWilliams

The McSpencer Group: “The Grift Question, LeBron and China, Democratic Debate and ‘Centrism'”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu0dS15N6tg

…

October 21, 2019

The Tiny Pressure of My Thumb, Enough to Break the Glass, Would End Everything

Elizabeth Sandifer dalek eruditorum 14

Boys in Their Dresses will be around later this week. For now… something new. You may find yourself wanting a link to my Patreon for this…

A critic once, in a moment of naiveté that hovers between sweet and pathetic, once asserted that “as long as there are stories, there are Doctor Who stories. When the stars go out and the universe freezes, around the last fire on the last world, there will still be Doctor Who stories to tell. And when we are done telling them, at long and final last, in the distance will be a strange wheezing, groaning sound. And out will step an impossible man, and he will save the day.” Perhaps it’s true that Doctor Who will last until the end of stories, but the reality is that this threshold is very likely a couple of decades away, and will happen right here on this planet as manmade climate change triggers a civilizational apocalypse. In which case there’s really not a lot that an imperial adventure hero with a busted-up time machine is going to do for us.

Nevertheless, Doctor Who provides a fascinating record of the fall. The 20th century, particularly the global industrialization of its latter half, is where humanity’s missteps sealed its fate. Doctor Who is a snapshot of British anxieities during that time. And as a fading colonial power that, at its hubristic height, had played the leading role in establishing the ideological preconditions for armageddon as global hegemony, Britain had a lot of anxieties during that time. Where an American franchise like Star Trek would offer a series of delusional fancies about the bright future of liberal capitalism, Doctor Who offers something altogether more interesting—a culture that is half-aware of its self-destruction, murmuring cryptic hyperstitions of its demise into the ears of its children as a means of entertaining and pacifying them.

Dalek Eruditorum is the story of this. Snapshots of a culture as it teeters on the brink, then off it—a record of the things it knows without knowing that it knows. Visions of the end with a thin veneer of “but our heroes will save the day” plastered implausibly on top of it. A fifty-six year chain of contradictory and jumbled prophecies from a mad seer in a strange and magical island at the center of a dying world. It’s a tale of post-apocalyptic hellscapes and the monsters that breed within, of eco-gothic terrors oozing up from the earth, of machines gone so insane they do what they were always meant to, and of hopeless fantasies of rebuilt civilization.

More practically, Dalek Eruditorum is a proposed blog project. If the Patreon hits $650 before December 15th (which right now it already has!), it will begin in January as a thirteen-post run, covering one story from every Doctor. Each story will get a twisted mirror of a TARDIS Eruditorum entry, looking at it with much the same critical approach, but a very different understanding of what sort of world it exists in.…

October 16, 2019

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 33 – Nazi Infighting (News Roundup)

Jack Graham fascism, i dont speak german, podcast 1

Daniel updates Jack on the latest round of infighting among the fascists.

Content Warning

Permalink / Direct Download

Show Notes:

Southern Dingo, “I Don’t Speak Bitch,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHdv8JsbhQM

ABC News: “FBI arrests Army soldier who allegedly discussed plans to bomb major American news network” https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fbi-arrests-army-soldier-allegedly-discussed-plans-bomb/story?id=65802902

Jarrett Smith indictment: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6431405-Jarrett-William-Smith-indictment-September-2019.html

Christopher Cantwell, “Reponse to Motion 20190925.” https://christophercantwell.com/2019/09/25/response-to-motion-20190925/

“The Accelerationists believe that all is lost for White America, and that the only hope we have for salvation is to bring the existing system crashing down by helping the Democrat Party and engaging in shocking acts of terrorism and mass murder. Their thinking on this is roughly that once the system is collapsed, the citizenry will welcome the iron fisted rule of Nazis who will restore order by force.

Though they make a compelling case, I differ from their view on this. I support the President of the United States, they do not. I support the Republican Party, they do not. I want to save America from collapse, they do not. We are part of rival factions, and associating me with them is nothing short of a fraud upon this court.

We disagree so much, that this faction to which I refer has endlessly harassed me, made death threats, defaced my website, made false reports to law enforcement, and launched Distributed Denial Of Service attacks against my website and radio servers. This has gone on for almost a year, ever since the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, of which they concluded I was not nearly supportive enough. In response to the crimes they committed against me, I contacted my local police department, who suggested we involve the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and we did just that. All of this is documented in extensive discussions I have had with law enforcement about these crimes perpetrated against me by the faction Plaintiffs falsely try to associate me with.”

Christopher Cantwell, “Siege Posting.” https://christophercantwell.com/2019/09/27/radical-agenda-s05e073-siege-posting/

Christopher Cantwell, “Radical Agenda S05E074 — Occidental Dissent.” https://christophercantwell.com/2019/09/30/radical-agenda-s05e074-occidental-dissent/

Jim Object tag at The Daily Stormer: https://dailystormer.name/tag/jim-object/

Larry Ridgeway goes on a rant against TRS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLMCzZSilLA

(More TRS drama) The Krypto Report — Episode 87, Jayoh in the Woodpile https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J5x1GuGzPc

…

October 14, 2019

An Empty Cage Girl (Crucify)

Elizabeth Sandifer boys in their dresses, little earthquakes 8

Crucify (live, 1991)

Crucify (TV performance, 1991)

Crucify (1992)

Crucify (music video, 1992)

Crucify (single mix, 1992)

Crucify (Top of the Pops, 1992)

Crucify (TV performance, 1992)

Crucify (TV performance, 1993)

Crucify (live, 1998)

Crucify (TV performance, 1999)

Crucify (TV performance, 2002)

Crucify (live, 2003)

Crucify (official bootleg, 2007, Tori set)

Crucify (radio performance, 2009)

Graveyard/Crucify (TV performance, 2015)

There is a teenage girl, though she doesn’t know it. I don’t remember how she came to Little Earthquakes. More likely than not, it was recommended to her by someone at CTY, the academic summer camp she went to and met all the other awkward teen weirdo nerds, no small portion of which, it turned out, were self-closeted queers just like her. That or she just saw mention of Tori Amos online in discussions of other music she was into, which, alongside a smattering of the contemporary alternative scene, was mostly female singer-songwriters.

Sitting in her bed, she presses play on the CD. It’s immediately clear that Amos fit the bill of her taste. But it’s just as immediately clear that there was more to this than merely being “her thing.” The first forty-five seconds of “Crucify” are an exercise in quiet tension. Like “Take to the Sky,” it opens with a series of open fifths on the piano, this time played individually between kicks of a drum. The drum adds a sense of ominous weight, while the chords, in their solitude, sound hollow and anxious without their thirds. The song moves swiftly into its prechorus, where the piano begins a bunch of yearning runs that seem to climb up towards some higher ground before breaking and receding.

The girl does not consciously notice any of this. Her hands burnt by childhood Catholicism, by fourteen she’s become an atheist with neopagan sympathies. Like her gender, these are not a thing she thinks to express. Her parents don’t want a rebellious daughter; they don’t even want a rebellious son. In a year or two, she will come out at school as bisexual, get outed to her parents when someone called the house to rat her out, and be told flatly by her mother, “no you aren’t.” When that’s all that being yourself was going to get you, what’s the point of figuring out who that was?

So obviously what draws her attention are the lyrics. The verse’s description of anxiety and public castigation resonates with her less than it someday will, but the prechorus is something else entirely. “I’ve been looking for a savior in these dirty streets / looking for a savior beneath these dirty sheets.” She isn’t sure what exactly has arrested her. Subsequent efforts at analysis will unpick why the lines work—the way in which Amos uses wordplay to anchor a sharp turn between a relatively standard Christian image of finding god in materially impoverished places and an image that’s implicitly rooted in a rigorously unglamorous sense of the carnal. It might even be that simple for her, though still doesn’t know to phrase it that way.…

October 10, 2019

Butterflies Don’t Belong in Nets (Mary)

Elizabeth Sandifer boys in their dresses, little earthquakes b-sides, skyfall 1

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)

Elizabeth Sandifer boys in their dresses, little earthquakes b-sides 1

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.…

October 5, 2019

I Never Was On the Fence (When I Was Dreaming)

Elizabeth Sandifer boys in their dresses, misc 4

When I Was Dreaming (c. 1988 demo)

Dreaming (Al Stewart, 1988)

Ten Cents (Al Stewart, 1988)

Year of the Cat (Al Stewart, 1991, live)

Charlotte Corday (Al Stewart, 1993)

Amos’s primary benefactor in the immediate aftermath of Y Kant Tori Read was her producer, Joe Chiccarelli. Much as he’d brought Kim Bullard on board for Y Kant Tori Read after working with him on previous projects, he spent a few years hiring Amos for a variety of session gigs while she regrouped from the album. Most of these were relentlessly unglamorous affairs. She did backup vocals on the album Modern Madness by Robert Tepper (a minor rock star who’d scored a hit when his 1985 song “No Easy Way Out” got used in Rocky IV), sang on Sandra Bernhard’s cover of “Little Red Corvette” (“they’re great ‘oohs,’” Bernhard noted six years later), did three tracks on former Wall of Voodoo singer Stan Ridgway’s album Mosquitos, and sang on pioneering Canadian folk musician Ferron’s 1990 album Phantom Center (this last album having been, cheekily, rereleased in 1995 with Amos’s vocals higher in the mix).

The most enduring creative relationship of this period, however, was with Al Stewart. Stewart was a British folk-rock musician who broke out in 1969 with the first mainstream British record to use the word “fuck,” then became known for a chain of longer songs rich with historical references. His biggest hit came in 1976 with “Year of the Cat,” and in 1988, after a four year absence from the industry, he attempted a comeback album called Last Days of the Century, which Chiccarelli produced and Amos played keyboards and sang backing vocals on. Stewart and Amos hit it off, and Amos penned a couple of songs with or for him.

The first of these was “When I Was Dreaming,” a lightly swinging piano number that never went anywhere save for Amos’s demo of it. The version we have feels slightly unfinished, as though it still needs a second verse, and like it doesn’t quite know what it’s doing. A more finished version of it (with its lyrics essentially completely rewritten but the melody in place) was released as a bonus track for Last Days of the Century in 2007 alongside another Amos co-composition, “Ten Cents.” (The latter being the piece that Amos’s hand is clearest on, to the point that it’s easy to imagine her singing it.) Another composition, however “Charlotte Corday,” made it onto Stewart’s 1993 album. This was a faintly gothic piece about the ghost of Jean-Paul Marat’s assassin, and is at least a pleasant curiosity. (There’s a fourth to talk about, but we’ll come back to that another day.)

The most entertaining intersection of their careers, however, came in 1991 while Amos was in London working to build a profile for Atlantic’s strategy of breaking her out in the easier-to-manage UK market before releasing Little Earthquakes domestically. Stewart’s piano player fell ill the night of a concert, and he hastily rang Amos up asking if she could come to the Royal Festival Hall and play on “Year of the Cat.”…

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