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Tori Amos

Music Monday: “Running Up That Hill” – Kate Bush

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The entire internet is talking about Kate Bush today.

I love it! (If you’re wondering why, it has to do with yesterday’s post. If you’re ready for spoilers, Variety has a great write-up and interview about it.)

I came to Kate Bush relatively late in my life of music consumption. As a teen, my main lady piano rocker who communes with the ethereal world was Tori Amos.

I’d encounter older music fans who felt Tori was derivative of Kate Bush, so of course as a major Ears With Feet (that’s what Tori fans were called, in her heyday) I completed eschewed Ms. Bush for nearly a decade, until I picked up her LP Aerials at Tower Records in 2005.

That record was certainly Amos-esque, so I felt I finally understood the comparison. Imagine my surprise when in 2018 I finally dug into the rest of Kate Bush’s catalog to discover how much more she is than “lady piano rocker” (just as Tori is, as well).

I’m sure I had heard “Running Up That Hill” many times prior to that (including from Tori’s own cover of it, medleyed with her own “God”). It hit me in a completely different way when I finally I listened to it in the context of opening of Hounds of Love

The insistent galloping of the drums. The strange synthesizer sighs swirling around my head, darting from headphone to headphone.

And, that iconic chorus:

And if I only could
I’d make a deal with God
And I’d get him to swap our places

Be running up that road
Be running up that hill
Be running up that building

Say, if I only could, oh

When I first heard “Running Up That Hill”, it made me think of Sisyphus. His is the eternal struggle of pushing the same boulder up the same hill every day, only for it to roll back down again. He is the undying patron of lost causes and impossible struggles.

Would you willingly exchange places with him, even for a day? Could you survive? [Read more…] about Music Monday: “Running Up That Hill” – Kate Bush

Crushing Comics S01E061 – Comic Book Tattoo + The Music of Tori Amos

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Today brings a rare book that I could identify in its wrapping simply by picking it up thanks to its peculiar shape and heft. Comic Book Tattoo is an anthology of stories based on the songs of singer/songwriter Tori Amos, including work from comics stars like Colleen Doran and Jonathan Hickman. That makes this a sort of hybrid episode that’s half Crushing Comics and half a journey through Tori’s massive discography.

Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

Episode 61 features the hardcover slipcased edition of Comic Book Tattoo: Tales Inspired by Tori Amos.

35-for-35: 1992 – “Tear In Your Hand” by Tori Amos

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[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]tori-amos-little-earthquakes-alt-cover-photoI stopped seeing Tori Amos live because of “Tear In Your Hand.”

It is one of my favorite songs of all time.

It is one of my favorite songs of all time, and after seeing Tori Amos five times she had played it at every show. When the next tour rolled around, I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing her and breaking the streak.

(Of course, that was probably her best tour since 1998. And she did play “Tear In Your Hand” in Philly. Oh, well.)

I cannot entirely explain my fascination with “Tear In Your Hand.” It’s not the most memorable song on Little Earthquakes, by far. Yet, it has a hypnotic quality to its constantly circling chords that draws you in and than keeps you spiraling.

Tori redraws the same piano figure again and again – a B suspended fourth to major to suspended second that then puts the fourth in bass for the same figure and returns back to the top – as she rambles through a stream-of-consciousness that starts when all the world just stops and rambles through reading Sandman comic books, liking the same ice cream as a serial killer, and how that other girl might just be another side of herself.

I think the entire song exists in that stopped-world moment. He says he doesn’t want to stay together anymore, and as she takes a deep breath he touches a hand to her cheek to wipe away the first tear and when he does her life just flashes before her eyes in an instant, like a forever dream sent from Morpheus himself.

tori-amos-denim-chair-1991Meanwhile, the arrangement is a beautiful puzzle of pieces tugging at your ear drums. The sighing backing vocals are pulled right from “Crazy For You,” while a chugging woody bass sound hints at indie rockers like R.E.M., and the increasingly intricate tangle of guitars begins to obscure the initial piano line – plus, the headbanging bridge, one of the hardest rocking moment on Little Earthquakes.

She knows him better now than she used to, and she knows it never could have been – even if that other woman is just the pieces of herself she hadn’t yet revealed. And so it’s time to say goodbye.

I don’t think it’s a marvelous song, especially without Steve Caton’s beautiful guitar arrangement. Yet, there’s something undeniable about its unspooling narrative that became synonymous with seeing Tori Amos live, and I’m half afraid she’ll skip and half afraid she’ll do it and that fragile magic will be gone.

Here’s a 2005 live version from VH1 – perhaps its only major TV broadcast: [Read more…] about 35-for-35: 1992 – “Tear In Your Hand” by Tori Amos

30 for 30 Project, 1992: “Precious Things” – Tori Amos

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Tori Amos has a new album out today, Night of Hunters, released just a few months shy of the twentieth anniversary of her seminal solo debut, Little Earthquakes.

I spent this morning tweeting my reaction to the new album, a classically set song cycle heavy on mythological themes. The music is bold and haunting, but the lyrics are largely obscure and off-putting.

Little Earthquakes was practically its opposite, all about clever wordplay even when the piano was reduced to music box simplicity, quoting the same lines again and again, or utter silence, on “Me and a Gun.”

(Watch me cover “Precious Things” on YouTube. For more info on my 30 for 30 Project, visit my intro post or view the 30for30 tag for all of the related posts.)

I remember Tori’s debut tickling at the fringes of my consciousness that year, maybe on MTV. [Read more…] about 30 for 30 Project, 1992: “Precious Things” – Tori Amos

I’m a dreamer (but I’m no Paul McCartney)

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Last night I dreamed a song. It was not the first time.

I used to brag in grade school that I could memorize my bible verses by osmosis. I’d just practice them before bed and then sleep with the bible open next to my pillow.

I was joking, of course. It was just the good luck of a procrastinator whose talent for memorization outstripped his clear distaste of repeating maxims from centuries old dead guys.

Well, it turned out that I wasn’t entirely joking. My subconscious studying continued into college, as I would compose French essays in my head while asleep and then jot them down in the morning before class.

Ultimately, the brain – or, at least, my brain – has a lot of extra wiring that our (my) conscious thought can get in the way of. Resting opens those circuits, and when it came to bible verses and French homework it was installing a new stick of RAM into my biological computer.

I don’t recall when I first started dreaming songs. I know the first success was “Standing” which came in so powerfully that it literally woke me up! It also surprised the hell out of me, because the genesis of it occurred entirely while I was asleep. I didn’t have the basic lyrics or a melody worked out, resting next to my head like my erstwhile bible. Like asexual production or spontaneous combustion, “Standing” wrote itself.

If that sounds weird and implausible to you… well, it is, but I’m not the only weird and implausible songwriter out there. Allow me to present exhibit A, Sir. Paul McCartney, describing the genesis of “Yesterday“:

“I woke up with a lovely tune in my head,” Paul McCartney recalled to his biographer, Barry Miles. “I thought, ‘That’s great. I wonder what that is?'” He got up that morning in May 1965, went to the piano, and began playing the melody that would become “Yesterday.” At first, lacking lyrics, he improvised with ” Scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs.” While he really liked the tune, he had some reservations: “Because I’d dreamed it, I couldn’t believe I’d written it.” – Betsy Querna, US News

There you go. It’s not totally unprecedented, because a Beatle did it, too.

Dream songs don’t always write themselves. Sometimes a dream person writes them for me. In one instance, Madonna sang me a song while playing it on an acoustic guitar, claiming it was a cover by REM or Wilco. I woke up really wanting to hear the song, but searching it’s lyrics and melody yielded nothing. Or, in the words of Sir Paul:

So first of all I checked this melody out, and people said to me, ‘No, it’s lovely, and I’m sure it’s all yours.’ It took me a little while to allow myself to claim it, but then like a prospector I finally staked my claim; stuck a little sign on it and said, ‘Okay, it’s mine!’ It had no words. I used to call it ‘Scrambled Eggs’. – Paul in Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

Of course, Paul didn’t have Madonna singing the song to him in his sleep claiming it was a cover! For a precedent on that, I turn to my resident loon muse, Tori Amos, talking about her ballad “Hey Jupiter” from Boys for Pele on VH1 Storytellers:

Let’s see, I was lying in bed. Um, strange things happened to you on tour, Like strange Englishman start sitting at the end of your bed – apparitions of dead guys. And they start singing songs to you. And this guy was definitely dead, and he was definitely singing to me. So I’m confused about the copyright laws. I’m not sure if I need to call his ex-wife and give him part of the song or not. But why should I do that! She’s rich, she’s not nice. So … I kept the copyright, and the song’s mine.

Thus, I didn’t have to credit my imagined Madonna (or anyone else) for the tune, and so the yet-to-be-recorded “Message” became mine.

I’m not sure about last night’s song, yet. It didn’t come with lyrics like “Standing” or “Message,” possibly because in my dream I was distracted by the effort of walking on stilts while I was singing it. However, it did provide a full, two-handed piano arrangement. I literally woke up, walked to the keyboard, and played the song without much pause.

I wonder, what is it I have to put into my brain to have it pop out songs like tiny ping pong balls from a lotto machine? Can it be predicted? Is it something I ingested yesterday? I’m pretty sure I’m not ingesting some of the things Paul and Tori have ingested…

Or, are Paul and Tori and I just wired that way?

Is one of your favorite singer-songwriters also a songdreamer? Please point me towards their story!