Boys For Pele, polllllllllllll

for reference: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Vcxg2eod9c8/RswfQwRGcHI/AAAAAAAABE8/KL3mkjCrLs8/s400/pele.jpg

altho pretty much when she says "chickens get a taste of your meat girl" i lose it

None of them. She lost it after Under the Pink.

girl you need to go listen to marianne and repent for what you just typed

My faves are:

Father Lucifer
Marianne
Caught A Lite Sneeze
Doughnut Song

^^^ All pretty amazing IMO.

This is the one that knocked me down from crazy uber-fan to "well, okay... what's next?" fan. The last one I bought was Choirgirl Hotel. And I haven't listened to any of them besides Little Earthquakes in many years.

So, assuming I can remember what these songs even sound like, I pick Talula.

girl you need to go listen to marianne and repent for what you just typed

johnny, i'm surprised at you. this one takes longer than the first two but it hits deeper, too.

i mean, it's the furthest from contemporary tori she ever got

the traditional favourite for me would be 'muhammad my friend', but having not listened to this for a couple of years i'm gonna opt for 'horses'. it's really gentle and lovely.

Hard to choose between Horses, Marianne, Doughnut Song and Not the Red Baron. I have a soft spot for the latter and doubt anyone else will vote for it, so that I guess.

I was just digging through my CDs over the weekend and found the excellent Talula single. Really love the Alamo b-side. It's probably the only song I can remember hearing in a dream.

fucking love Not The Red Baron

those CHORDS

this was such a formative album for me, i always think of it as the beginning of a rather extraordinary period of creativity for tori (1996-99) where she really seemed to be trying to push her music and aesthetic further and further out there. the first nine tracks are incredible, that run through to "hey jupiter", which might be the pinnacle of her entire career - such an incredible performance. "found your writing on my wall; if my heart's soaking wet, boy your boots can leave a mess..."

"blood roses", "father lucifer", "horses" are the other ones which totally blow me away. gonna have to relisten to decide. "talula" is the only one i don't like so much, but i loved bt's slightly rejigged tornado mix.

lou is right about "alamo", a beautiful song. other b-sides/random extraneities from this era of note - the terrifying merry widow version of "professional widow" and her awesome collab with bt on his "blue skies" single.

the first nine tracks are incredible, that run through to "hey jupiter", which might be the pinnacle of her entire career - such an incredible performance. "found your writing on my wall; if my heart's soaking wet, boy your boots can leave a mess..."

well-put. i remember when this hit me, just how breathtaking this run is. damn.

Love this album --- Tori at her most mystical, inspired, & otherworldly --- though I do think it's a tad... overlong. Lex is right, though, that the first half is mostly amazing. My obvious first choice would be Father Lucifer, but there's also Mr. Zebra and Horses and Marianne and Blood Roses...

I'll go with Mr. Zebra because it needs more lovin'.

ILM Tori polls: where the gays unite.

Listening to the three-part round thing in "Father Lucifer" and thinking that she really is some kinda musical genius from another planet - I mean who else would do that?
― Tim Finney (Tim Finney), Saturday, November 13, 2004 1:15 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

For a long time I was underwhelmed by "Not The Red Baron", and then it just hit me one day and has been another favourite (just below the ones I listed above) ever since. So subtly intense.

"Alamo" is lovely too, yes.

Another vote for The Red Baron. Best from this period, however, is the already mentioned merry widow version of Professional Widow. Live and out of this world. Tori giving Diamanda Galas a run for her money.

The correct answer is Doughnut Song.

mystical, inspired, & otherworldly

aka "i has a harpsichord"

doughnut song kind of condenses the singular perfection of the album into one moment, which is cool. damn shoulda brought this into work today.

i just don't think anything else can approximate the lines

C'mon pigtails girls and all those sailors
Get your bags and hold down won't you just
Hold down cause Ed is watching my every sound
I said
They're watching my every sound

the way she throws off the rhythm, and sinks into the melody is mind-boggling.

Yeah i love that bit. Tori lyrics are easy to sneer at but what I always found fascinating is the way in which (and this album is maybe the pinnacle for that) her performance of them made them feel absolutely bursting with meaning and significance. Like here the way she reaches up towards "sailors" as if this is key (key to what??), and the fact that Ed is watching her every sound (??) seems like the most intimate realisation ever.

otmfm. when she goes up to sailors i nearly burst into tears.

the other thing about this album is the feeling of space. the dark, moonlit space on all the tracks. i just remember walking through the snow on my college campus late, late at night, listening to this on headfones. the campus was stunning -- snow hanging on all the trees. i snuck into the chapel for a smoke. it was like nothing else.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

"Talula" BUT the single version – is that cheating?

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

oh shit i think i forgot to vote :(

ME TOO

springtime is good

marianne & blood roses are better tho and didn't get any votes :(

'blood roses' has that infamous (mis)pronunciation of the word "dead".

wait how does she say it again?

"he likes killing you after you're DAY-ED"

i'm australian though and find a lot of her diction quite strange.

oh that's because it's ridiculous

it's kind of like, irish-british-american

ok i'm listening to this merry widow version of "professional widow" right now and uh, wow

works surprisingly well in dirge mode

also i didn't vote in this poll. might've done "not the red baron" but "hey jupiter" is pretty great as far as "purple rain" rips go

Hey Jupiter (Dakota Version) 〉 album version

love all the not the red baron love

also to be noted: her piano playing on this album is off the charts

Was trying to decide which BFP poll I should revive to talk about this great review, but I decided on this one because of (a) surf’s final comment; and (b) this may be the first published review I have read which really tries to get inside the mechanics of Tori’s piano (and harpsichord) playing, how it does what it does and as well as it does:

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tori-amos-boys-for-pele/

I also enjoy this review for how the writer, clearly a big fan, goes to immense lengths to hold her own enjoyment at arm’s lengths and describe what feelings the music elicits in her as clearly and objectively as possible - but knowingly so, she’s not conflating her private, idiosyncratic enjoyment with objective truth, but rather elucidating how the music’s stimulation of private, idiosyncratic enjoyment can be a kind of objective truth.

*surm obv

really good review. so funny to read this bc i just wrote something that’s not really about boys for pele but brings it up with some frequency. i had no idea tori referred to it as her thrash harpsichord record (i def use the phrase “heavy metal” in the piece)

I was a big ol’ Tori fan in high school and I sorta liked Pele but I think it was incrutable to me at the time. Didn’t keep the CD. Recently I found a copy for cheap and tried it again and holy SHIT that’s a great album. Her masterpiece, easily.

There is a lot packed into that album and the recent Pitchfork review manages to get at a lot of it.

nicely put, Tim.
amused that the review mentioned the Rolling Stone review that prompted an angry letter from 14 year old me.
Twinkle might be my favorite these days.

It’s interesting, as a former Toriphile who has come to realize that the albums after Little Earthquakes just aren’t very good, reading this retrospective review, it feels as if the author is trying to forcefeed points down my throat, while identifying precisely why “Tori fell off”. “Tuna, rubber, little blubber in my igloo” is a turd, please stop telling me it’s chocolate cake

this is a terrible turn of events fgti!!!!

From the Choirgirl Hotel is her best, though.

I’m as surprised as anyone!!

A girl I dated in high school, I made her a tape of Tori songs I liked, and one day when I called her, she was listening to it, and hit pause on the tape just as she was picking up the phone. There was a flash of a chord that hit my ear as she lifted the receiver.

“Listening to Tori Amos?” I said. She told me she’d turned it off just as she was picking up the phone. “How did you know,” she asked. “I heard it, it was Icicle,” I replied. “You heard a split second of a chord and were able to recognize that it was Icicle? You’re an obsessed fan.”

Maybe I was? I’m typing this while “Daisy Dead Petals” cycles in my head. I can sing the entirety of “Baltimore” from memory.

There is something that has started to rub me wrongly about Tori as I’m entering middle age and I think it has to do with the industrialization of my own creative practice. I work hard and I like music that sounds like people did the work, also. I don’t like the sound of people cutting corners creatively, whether it’s a tossed-off stanza or a choice for a chorus that’s ineffective. I find myself straining to like her songs, approaching her latter day catalogue— I can enjoy the first four in a nostalgic way but I can’t even get through a single song from then on out. There’s something kind of insulting about it, like she’s coasting on her pianistic abilities, wasting my time as a listener.

When I consider my other teenage obsession (Lisa Germano) and am aware that she hasn’t had such a financially lucrative go of it, and is now playing fiddle in John Cougar’s band again as she did in the 80s, and Lisa never for a second phoned in a song, was always challenging herself, idk, I just don’t need Tori’s music in my ears any more I guess.

Never spotted that there was an actual cock (as in rooster) strung up on the left hand side of the sleeve, until that Pitchfork piece.

Not here to change your mind fgti, but I think your post begs the question of what “doing the work” involves or looks like.

Fair question! Short answer is: workshopped the songs more than they’ve been workshopped.

But it’s also an age thing. I was into Smog in my late teens early 20s, liked his songs, but I always felt they were kind of tossed off, usually because of production decisions (Kicking A Couple Around, for example). Now I feel the opposite, Smog’s songs sound so well-crafted and meticulously thought out to my middle-aged ears

I don't look to her for pristine sets of coherent lyrics like she was Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell; the scattershot approach seems to be part of the payoff for the successful flights of fancy that wouldn't come from a more disciplined lyricist.
Her real alchemy is using the music to elevate words that would die on the page. Like "you can't gain weight from a doughnut hole" sounds like it was fished out of Erma Bombeck's wastepaper basket, but in context it's the line and the melody that's most imbued with feeling when I think of this record.
As a pianist, I wish she had a little more Nicky Hopkins in her.

I like music that sounds like people did the work

What do you think of Night of Hunters? I say: a lot of hard work that doesn't pay off, and the start of her long-term slump.

I’ll give it another listen. There are songs on American Doll Posse that I really love and am selling short in my posts here

Not dissing fgti or his reasoning here to observe that it’s almost impossible to answer these kinds of questions without drawing some fairly arbitrary implied distinctions wrt what workshopping/craft can involve or look like.

There a “solve for x” quality to lot of criticism of Tori (including the P4K review) where X is basically ‘Boys for Pele’ and more specifically ‘Marianne’ (kind of the album’s square root). And there’s a couple of things I’ve said about ‘Marianne’ over the years (in fact often in exchanges with fgti) which really go to Tori’s brand of ‘craft’, which can be so ephemeral, so elusive to capture in a universally communicable manner that it’s difficult even for fans to really talk about properly. But this point in particular:

I was thinking about this song the other day, and in the context of my comments upthread about the relationship between tori's vocal lines and piano playing, how the intricate piano arrangements tends to complicate and shade the vocal line. In "Marianne" a lot of the tension is built from whether the strings are tracking the urgency of the piano (e.g. the instrumental section between "they're watching my every sound" and "the weasel squeaks") or building on Tori's vocal sustains (this is made kind of explicit with "hoolllld doooowwn, won'y you just hoollld dow-ow-ow-own...") in a way that throws the ceaselessness of the piano tinkling into sharp relief - the effect here, and I suspect this is quite deliberate, is to contrast the inevitable forward motion of time with the arresting nature of memory.

I think of Boys for Pele as a very spatial/geographic-feeling album, which extends (perhaps counter-intuitively) to the relatively two-dimensional quality of most of the songs, the way that often the songs will shift quickly and even jarringly between spare piano and one or two accompanying instruments, often very briefly. In terms of Tori’s own playing, this is captured most explicitly in the shifts between harpsichord and piano on songs like “Caught A Lite Sneeze” and “In the Springtime…” but it’s also in, say, the solitary two bell tolls in “Blood Roses” when she sings “I shaved every place where you’ve been, boy”, and then the tolling stops only to return over the outro which is an entirely different section of the song. Or the flares of trumpet in “Father Lucifer”, or the strings in “Marianne”. These are very deliberate, conscious arrangements decisions which are intended to tell us something about the narrative development of the song itself, the journey inwards on which each song embarks.

The line in the Pitchfork review that startled me the most was:

‘Boys for Pele was the first album over which Amos had near-total creative control, and it was, correspondingly, her most peculiar. Kate Bush’s first self-produced album, The Dreaming, shares that insularity, though Boys for Pele is so deranged that it makes The Dreaming sound more like Teenage Dream in comparison.’

If I had turned my mind to the question, I probably would have reflexively said that The Dreaming is the braver, stranger, more singular album - the experiments with sound, Kate’s willingness to lose herself in some very counter-intuitive character studies (a viet cong soldier, a white Australian running over an indigenous man etc.) and the way she absolutely subordinates her voice and arrangement/production choices to the realisation of those visions.

But on reflection I started to agree with the writer - though potentially not for the reasons she had in mind (it’s not clear what those were). In some senses, Kate’s album really does come on like a series of extremely vivid dreams, but she takes great care to stageblock them and explain them to the audience, to imbue them with a coherent internal logic that allows us to understand the dream from the inside: Kate is not Kate, but an academic, a bankrobber, a mule, and we’re right beside her understanding what it means when she brays.

But if Kate’s songs are “cinematic” in that sense, Tori’s (in that era) were very rarely: to continue the geographic metaphor, they’re more like Myst: you’re abandoned in an unfamiliar landscape, you have to assemble a map by collecting clues, and you have little idea who you are who if anyone/anything you are playing “against” precisely - where does Tori stop and “Tori” start, or “Tori” stop and other characters start?

We could dismiss this as cheaply-bought mysteriousness/allusiveness, of course, but I’ve been sitting with this album for nearly 30 years and each time I return to it it strikes me as more meticulous than I had realised and in ways I had never perceived. e.g. I’ve long thought “Professional Widow” was more about Tori herself than someone else (e.g. Courtney Love), but it only occurred to me recently that it is specifically about Tori’s sense of her own creative process: “starfucker, just like my daddy”, Her dad is a minister, who acts as the conduit between a higher power and his congregation, reduces the mystery and the potentiality of that power to a dead letter of sermon and scripture, to rules that can be followed, and Tori does the same thing by reducing her creative capacity and lived experience to dead “songs” to whom she is the midwife and professional widow, endlessly wheeling them out on display to fans night after night.

And similarly, while I’d always assumed the opening lines of “Marianne” were rhyming free association, I think now it’s very specifically about how memories from our childhood cannot remain the safe havens which we would like them to be: the tuna, the rubber, the little blubber, these are the produce and the implements and the leftovers of our hunting which keep appearing inside the igloo, the place we retreat to protect ourselves from the outside world. As with Freud’s “father can’t you see I’m burning” dream analysis, our dreams and fantasies and memories can’t keep the real world out forever, it keeps invading in ways that both distort reality and potentially reveal some denied kernel of truth within it.

And this, essentially, is what ‘Boys For Pele’ is about at core: the way in which our lived experience is built on lies about ourselves that we conceal from ourselves, turn our eyes away from, cut out of ourselves. Which subject, necessarily, can only be approached obliquely, and by buying into the dream-logic one is trying to see through. It’s ‘Cornflake Girl’ writ large.

There’s probably a mediocre thesis to be written about how tori frequently applies the language and conceptual framework of invasion and territorialisation to the interaction of ideas, and in particular how ideas can be weaponised, taken over and perverted or perhaps redeemed, but also how conceptual neatness is unstable and unsustainable - other things keep invading.

Obv we could talk about Native Invaders here, given it presents itself as wrestling with this concept. There’s perhaps a pivot point in Tori’s career where she shifts from embodying this dynamic (without explaining it) to seeking to describe it. Probably clear from the previous post that I think BFP is the pinnacle of the former. Scarlet’s Walk perhaps captures the latter most clearly. A song like “Your Cloud” is essentially about the difficulty of drawing sharp demarcations between the self and the (significant) other; “Taxi Ride” talks about how “I’m down to your last cigarette and this ‘we are one’ crap, as you’re invading this thing you call ‘love’” - perhaps every experience of someone imposing their (necessarily) reductive notions on you is experienced as a kind of minor violence or affront, but would reql communication (let alone rapport) even be possible without it? How else does one get someone else on their side?