Twenty-six Thoughts on Tori Amos’s “Boys for Pele”

Written in January 2016 for the album’s 20th anniversary

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No anniversaries to prompt me exhuming this older piece, but these last two weeks I’ve had whatever non-Covid crud is going around, and I haven’t been up to writing. I like what I wrote here; I find that sometimes “notes”-style drafts read just fine as “notes”-style drafts.

1. Interesting thing about Tori Amos’s diction: she enunciates well when she chooses to, displaying a small bit of loyalty both to her conservatory roots and her early reputation as a “confessional” singer-songwriter. It’s interesting because throughout her career, she’s spent a lot of time not doing that. She mumbles and garbles and elides and slurs, and it’s maddening when she’s written a clever line that could actually get a laugh with the right delivery and syllabic emphasis, but it can only ever be her own private joke if listeners aren’t following along with printed lyrics. Regrettably, this puts her in league with Darius Rucker: his mushmouthery about Michael Stipe and the Miami Dolphins isn’t funny, but it’s an evident stab at bittersweet humor. While Amos’s opening lyrics to Boys for Pele are opaque as poetry, the album does start with her singing them very clearly.
2. That opening track is “Beauty Queen/Horses,” and after the former’s sotto voce incanting, we get classic Tori: Southern Gothic, Tubular Bells rain-on-tin piano, the slow-burn epic turmoil of a 1970s miniseries.
3. While sexual trauma looms over “Blood Roses,” and while half-cocked ears might hear Amos’s vocal leaps and flurry of harpsichord as thrashing, the track makes an excellent case for her ability to let artistic agency have the upper hand over unedited emotion. “Chickens get a taste of your meat, girl” is atavistic and darkly carnal, but “chickens” is also a funny word, reminding me of Bob Dylan’s “The sun’s not yellow / It’s chicken” from “Tombstone Blues.” Dylan’s alacrity toward impressionism often makes him favor the arresting and unusual-sounding over a more risk-averse approach. So too Tori: she leans into the second syllable of “chickens” just a little, enough to make it a percussion instrument, and “get a taste” is the rat-a-tat on top.
4. She breaks rules. On “Blood Roses,” she gives almost unswerving vocal fry, so much so that the intent is undeniable: it’s a tool. She saves the pure, breath-supported belt that was in her all along for the “God knows I’ve thrown away / Those graces” section two-thirds through. The key changes come out of nowhere, springing from dead silence into battle, vocal and harpsichord in entrance lockstep, her vowels pregnant with diphthongs and heys, and again she chooses it because part of the design/build of emotional impact is going up to those walls of taste and deciding how hard you want to push.
5. The piano on “Father Lucifer” pulses. Downbeat-upbeat-downbeat-upbeat, mezzo-forte, mezzo-piano, metronomically. And a reprise of the K sound: milkmaid, and she transitions cleanly from the K to the M.
6. Amos’s voice and primary keyboard sounds are recorded beautifully on Pele; as a producer and arranger, she doesn’t quite know what to do with the supplementary instrumentation.
7. I’ve never liked “Professional Widow,” neither the album version nor the Armand van Helden remix. The sweetly sinister “Strike a deal, make him feel like a congressman” a cappella line smartly anchors the S.S. Tori through the storm, but in the main, the song and her performance read as colicky and bitter. It’s the rare example on Pele of Amos failing to alchemize emotion into valuable artistry.
8. It’s unfair, then, that “Professional Widow” clocks in at a Cage-ian 4:33 while the intriguing “Mr. Zebra”—echoing the Beatles’ “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” and inventing a surrealist Ken Russell music-hall fever dream—sneaks through at 1:07. Conjuring Edgar Allan Poe: Perhaps the burial was premature, she said and smiled.
9. I like the lope of “Marianne.” “Horses” at the album’s beginning would suggest a titular graceful trot, but its sweep is ultimately too vast; “Marianne” teases that idea back in, tentatively. It’s a coaxing beat, comforting on the surface but pulling us under, to a place of grief and mourning. But she’s still a writer: her bruised heart is on her sleeve but she’s taking the overcoat on and off. A lot of what’s here is Amos putting a frame around the junk that moves through our minds as we’re figuring stuff out, making the clutter the work, showing us how key those thoughts are whether we want them in our heads or we desire to reach an end-state we decide is healthier.
10. The long, slithery sibilance of “Just bring your sssson” on “Caught a Lite Sneeze.” How the melody of “buildings tumbling” arches up before retreating.

11. The long, slithery sibilance of “Shissseido red” on “Muhammad My Friend.” The tenebrous marsh of sustain and bottom in its intro section.
12. “Muhammad My Friend” has flickers of radiance but lacks full, consistent flame. The music has a whiplash momentum, but the lyrics are where it falters; nothing there’s as electric as “Moses I know / I know you’ve seen fire / But you never seen fire / Until you’ve seen Pele blow,” and once you’ve introduced Hawaiian volcanic goddesses, more rote phrases like “on that fateful day” feel like something to pad out a Reader’s Digest word count.
13. But listening now, her half-whispered aside of “Used to be so sweet to me, well” transcends a lyric that isn’t instantly quotable. It’s not a song I hear “wistful” in, for all its fragmented fury about women’s erasure from the historical record and the double standard they’re held to and the wrath they might let run riot, but for two seconds I do.
14. I wonder if it’s intentional that “Hey Jupiter,” the ninth track of 18 on Amos’s third album as a solo artist people think of as baring her guts, includes the line “This little masochist, she’s ready to confess.” I wonder if it’s intentional that on subsequent records, she took sanctuary behind bigger production values and eventually shed her experiments with industrial for a generic soft-rock template. Confession is hard, and it’s exhausting, and if you’re a guarded introvert you can adopt the survival skill to keep that shit in the abstract or just point your brain-car somewhere else. But “Hey Jupiter,” as direct as it is with its vulnerability, offers a universal connection it’s hard to find with other Amos songs.
15. And then there’s the callback: “And this little masochist / She’s lifting up her dress.” The dress is a charged image in pop music. We get devils in blue ones and long cool women in black ones and party dresses being taken off, but we also get Polly Harvey playing with the male gaze when she sings about putting one on and ponders whether there “Must be a way I can dress to please him,” and Courtney Love reversing the gaze with “You look good in my dress,” and Kim Gordon’s agitated narrator not only wanting someone to take off her dress but to “shake off your flesh.” Lifting up a dress is something little girls are scolded for; heaven forbid they’re unladylike even when they’re not yet ladies. And of course, it’s a minefield for adult women. You’re damned either way, and probably a masochist.
16. Filler lyrics can work sometimes, too. “Gonna meet a great big star / Gonna drive his great big car” is the stuff of moon/June/spoon, but on “Way Down” she’s “with a band, you know,” and not necessarily thrilled about it, judging from her intonation. Star/car is breathy and hyperfeminine, a Marilyn/Angelyne surrogate, a damsel looking for a widescreen Mulholland Dr. moment. The affectation only lasts for those two lines; then she gets morose.
17. Amos does Southern Gothic better when it’s implied than when she’s spelling it out, and the “Hominy / Get it on a plate, girl” MFA-workshop clichés of “Little Amsterdam” ring false. Besides, her D.C. suburbs are more bagels and lox than hominy.
18. “Talula” is an upliftingly weird maypole dance. And to match the congressman of “Professional Widow” and the upbringing around the District, the song’s got a senator, perhaps the same one from Under the Pink‘s “The Wrong Band.”
19. The beginning of the downcast “Not the Red Baron” orbits around a C minor chord, sometimes almost subliminally switching into major. The effect is unsettling, like déjà vu, like one of the dramatizations in the old commercials for Time-Life Books’ Mysteries of the Unknown.
20. Adding to the hint of a teetering paranormal in “Not the Red Baron” is the subtlety with which Amos intersperses pictures of death and fire and devils with less prominent ones of beautiful heels pointed and “girls with red ribbons, the prettiest red ribbons.”

21. Red, the color of blushing virginal cheeks, cherry lollipops from the pediatrician, prostitution, war, blood, hell, the Shiseido lipstick of the feminine Christ from “Muhammad My Friend,” and Amos’s famous hair.
22. Orange, the color we associate with radation, smoggy sunsets, Donald Trump, herbicidal warfare—“Agent Orange” slinks dissolutely from the shadow of those girls with the prettiest red ribbons like a cabaret act through moth-eaten curtains. “Mr. Agent, yeah / He’s my favorite,” Amos sings, dewy with sarcasm and history, and the song dissolves from an ascending walking-blues piano line into the magical-realism of an eternally swimming woman in an underwater city.
23. The “doughnut hole” of “Doughnut Song” has a double meaning. There’s the negative space at the center of the doughnut, the part we eat around because it’s just air, and there’s the product bakers sell from the leftover dough that has been punched out, like Entenmann’s Pop’ems. And it can be a metaphor for a heart, or a person. Are you someone who walks around with an emptiness inside you, or are you capable of making yourself into a whole, standalone product? Annie Zaleski’s wonderful Boys for Pele appreciation in Salon rounds up past quotes about Amos’s impetus for the album; the singer-songwriter talks about negotiating the desire to take creative control and “jump off a cliff” without the strong male presences she’d always had, but also using her then-recent breakup as the catalyst to figure out who Tori Amos the human being actually was when off-duty. Amos’s countermelody in the second verse highlights this dualism too: it’s her voice and her voice, and one is mixed to be more forward and has the same melody as the first verse, but which one are we listening to? Which one should she listen to?
24. That walking blues of “Agent Orange” makes another appearance on “In the Springtime of His Voodoo,” jump-cut into a baroque psychedelia fit for a satanic majesty’s request. It’s not her best song, but it has an Eagles shoutout, if you want it.
25. The one that made me lose it when I was all lost in the supermarket one rainy January night with my headphones on, “Putting the Damage On,” is the one with references to orange rinds and Angie Dickinson. (I was fine; I just probably bumped into a shelf from going “wow” too much.) Again, that psychic junk that can be either associative-riffing-as-coping-strategy or, as Amos sings, a “ghost passing through.” It’s a quiet piece. It’s a wind-down.
26. And the even quieter “Twinkle” closes Pele, revisiting the album’s motifs of strength and self-discovery. The girl who’s “twice as hard” as the boys? Grab your thesaurus: she’s difficult, she’s rock-solid, and she’s likely some other things that wouldn’t pass a family show’s standards and practices. But knowing all that, it’s a place for her to start.