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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