Things seemed to be going better for Tori Amos after Boys for Pele. She’d gotten the rage out of her system and settled down with her engineer, Mark Hawley. She began working on a fourth record, which was going to be a concept album about Vlad the Impaler — another exploration of male violence. She planned a research trip to Romania and Turkey, but then got pregnant and miscarried in December 1996, causing her to cancel the planned trip and abandon the concept. Instead, the grief that came out of that experience ended up becoming the focal point of her next album.
She told Scottish Daily: ‘I finished the Boys for Pele tour at the end of 1996 and, surprisingly, I got pregnant with Mark’s child. I had known from very early on, from within a week, that I was pregnant. So I lived with the feeling and got attached to the soul that was coming in. I had really gotten used to the idea of having a baby. And then, after almost three months, I miscarried. It was a great shock to me because I really thought I was out of the woods and I was really excited that I was going to be a mom. It wasn’t a planned pregnancy, but Mark and I went through the miscarriage together and became better friends.
‘I went through a lot of feelings. You question what is fair. I got angry with the spirit of my baby for not wanting to be born and kept asking myself why it had happened. It was a really difficult time. The strange thing is, the love doesn’t go away for this being, this unborn child that you’ve carried. You can’t go back to being the person you were before you carried life. And although you’re not a mother, either, but you still are connected to a force, a being. I was trying to find ways to keep that communication going, so the songs started coming. It was a girl, and that’s why on the song Playboy Mommy, I sing `Don’t judge me so harsh, little girl’. I was going through the anger and the sorrow when the songs started to come, without me really being aware, until they were coming to me in droves. I didn’t intend to make another album so soon.’
The grief left her nonfunctional, as she told US Weekly: ‘Right after it happened, being able to get from the kitchen to the bathroom to the bedroom again, to sit outside, that was the best I could come up with. Besides the emotional loss, you’re crashing on so many levels. And the drugs don’t take away the pain. Crawling into the pain was the only way out, if that makes any sense.
I have a tiny little dock on the river, sort of like Huckleberry Finn. Sorrow came and sat down next to me. And she would come and hold my hand, and I really began to see that sorrow understands tears. But she also likes going to raves, and she’s very multidimensional. And I started to see the depth of sorrow and that there’s so much calmness in being able to see all sides of it. And I started dancing with sorrow. That’s when I started, in my mind, to go with the rhythm.
I feel songs coming from across the galaxies to find me sometimes. They’re busy doing something, disagreeing with Jabba the Hut somewhere, and then they tear across the universe when I am really in a bad way. Choirgirl is not a victim’s record. It is very much about appreciating the life force and trying to connect with this being that I had become connected to but I can’t find anymore.’
Unfortunately, her struggles didn’t end with one miscarriage. Amos miscarried again in May 1997 while working on this album, without having realized she was pregnant, and a third time after that, a couple months after her next record came out. She told She UK: ‘I suffered my second miscarriage the following May. I don’t think the pregnancy had ever really established itself, because of my endometriosis and the fact that I hadn’t got over the grief of losing my first baby. I hemorrhaged constantly for 27 days and I lost the baby just weeks after conceiving. That pregnancy was never as hopeful as the others. After the second miscarriage, Mark proposed and we decided to keep trying. I had my third miscarriage 18 months later, which was really devastating. I had such high hopes. I saw some of the best doctors in America, but none of them could see a reason why I couldn’t stay pregnant. I was totally disheartened.’
From the Choirgirl Hotel isn’t a concept album about her miscarriages in any straightforward sense. Only three songs directly address them in an obvious way — the lead single ‘Spark’, ‘i i e e e’ (pronounced eye-eye-eee), and ‘Playboy Mommy’. Three songs explore her marriage (in February 1998, after the first two miscarriages), and two others explore her friends’ relationships. She told the Dutch publication Oor: ‘The miscarriage was only a starting point, the songs subsequently developed into different directions. They are about my perspective of life and about how this life changed after the loss.’
She envisioned the songs on this record as people staying in different rooms of a hotel: ‘Although Pele is one of the most soul-searching records about blood-letting, choirgirl is about loss and emptiness. This was a very dark time for me. I kept seeing all these children that had been separated from their mother. They seemed to be coming through the door with the songs ushering them in. I saw the songs shadowed by these children, and it appeared to me as this hotel with this choir ushering themselves in and out through doorless entrances. Throughout this time I would lay on the sand, on the earth, and I would cry to the Great Mother for the loss of this Being. She didn’t come back at that time. But I think that the songs did instead, and I think that was the gift.’ Indeed, this album frequently creates the feeling of a sort of liminal hotel space, perhaps in a desert, upscale and orange-lit in the evening. We are ushered through its various rooms to meet the different songs. Sometimes, we’re brought to the lobby, or underwater in the pool — quite a lot of the record feels aquatic.
This was the first time she envisioned each song on the record as its own character — a concept she’d revisit later. She told the New York Times: ‘The inside cover will portray a map of some mysterious mystical world. That drawing will map the scenery of the songs. My girls make up a [singing] group, they are mutually connected. They belong in a fixed part of the universe. This is their territory, their hotel. More strongly, they run the place. The group, the choir, knows no age limit, their origin also doesn’t matter. Yet every girl is an individual. A couple of them are sitting on the edge of the pool with margaritas in their hands, another one works with reception and has a telephone-fetish and maybe there’s a lady in her room just knitting, or so. This is their territory.’ She told Mojo: ‘I really wasn’t sure what my role was: if they’d let me be part of the troupe sometimes, or if I was just reporting what they were doing, or if they were trying to show me bits that I really needed to express.’
She told Attitude: ‘This record’s called From the Choirgirl Hotel so you don’t know if I’m reporting from it or sending dispatches — it changes… This record makes a lot more sense than the last one, trust me, cause it’s not just an inner journey. But you do have to read the words. It’s poetry. It’s not ‘and my crotch itches, here we go’.’ As such, she decided to make a more accessible record this time around — a shorter, tighter, more heavily arranged and rhythm-oriented record. She replaced the harpsichord of the previous album with a synthesizer, placing it behind her signature Bosendorfer and often playing both at once. While some songs feel like the arrangements were built around her piano parts, others started with loops — a novel approach which opened new songwriting avenues.
Her approach to the recording process also changed, as she recorded live with a rhythm section for the first time. She told The Inside Connection: ‘This is the first album I recorded with a live percussionist, the first album where there was interaction with other musicians. Usually I recorded the vocals, the piano and the rest of the instruments were somehow placed around it… I wanted to capture a certain atmosphere that was only possible with drums, not with additional drums but with real life drums. I needed the interaction with a drummer. I want to grow, personally and musically, and to grow you have to move on, you have to experiment, otherwise it becomes far too static.’
In order to record the album, her now-husband Mark Hawley built a new studio, Martian Studios, next to their new house in Cornwall, surrounded by farms. They started tracking the record in September 1997. Hawley told Sound on Sound: ‘The last album [Boys From Pele] was quite a classical sounding thing and a very personal project for Tori. It did extremely well in the States and it will always be one of my favourites, but the record company were rather unsure about it. I guess it was not too great on radio because it was so dynamic, and so this time we decided to make a bit of a pop album. Tori had never recorded with a drummer before — she had always recorded piano and vocals then we put any drums on top. That was a great way of working for her because a lot of what she does is improvised, and working with a drummer would have been too restricting, but we found Matt Chamberlain and she got on so well with him that a lot of the tracks on the new album are her singing and playing the piano with Matt drumming along live.’
Matt Chamberlain was introduced on drums here after being suggested to her by Eric Rosse. She told Phoenix New Times: ‘After the miscarriage when I’d begun writing, I put it out there to Eric [Rosse], ‘I’m kind of open to a drummer,’ and he said, ‘Well, I’ve found him.’ And Matt came out and within five minutes of us playing together we just started giggling hysterically, going ‘This is fun!’ If you have the wrong drummer, the whole thing fails. Most drummers can’t keep time, but he was always really aware of what the keyboards were doing because he felt the songs.’
Chamberlain is a session drummer who has played with everyone from David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Elton John to Frank Ocean, John Mayer, Phantogram, and Lorde — but he has rarely appeared with another artist more frequently than Amos. He remained with her band through 2009 and returned to work with her again on her latest record. His grooves here are incredible — tight, intricate, and with a lot of feel. The drum sounds on this record are also fantastic.
Steve Caton is still the guitar player here, as on her previous 4 records (though different guitarists appear on two songs, one of which includes Al Perkins on steel guitar). George Porter Jr. returns on bass from the last two albums, but split the duties with Justin Medal-Johnsen (of Beck/NIN/M83/St. Vincent fame). Johnsen plays on the first half and ‘Hotel’ (and also recorded live with Amos and Chamberlain), while Porter plays on the rest of the second half. This was the last time Porter worked with her — I’m not sure what the story is there, but his bass playing is as great as ever here. Programmer Andy Gray was responsible for the album’s many electronic sounds and looping experiments, including the electronic drums which are often layered with Chamberlain’s live drums.
This record is much more layered and texturally rich than her previous albums, and considerably more stylistically diverse, with far less focus on piano balladry. Even when familiar elements return (like prepared piano in the ominous but beautiful ‘Black-Dove (January)’ or a string orchestra in ‘Jackie’s Strength’), the band makes them feel fresh. While her vocal performance is as excellent as ever, the vocals are oddly low in the mix for a pop record a lot of the time, which in combination with the vocal processing often renders the lyrics incomprehensible. This really drastically shifts the focus of the music — while previous records were really focused on the intimate details of her vocal performance and lyrics, this one focuses instead on the arrangements and production details — and there are plenty of those.
The album really comes alive when you listen to it at night, with headphones. It largely sounds amazing, with great textural depth, but the sound isn’t perfect. The vocal tracks often distort, and while that was clearly intentional at times, it often sounds quite harsh and unpleasant - a bit more de-essing would’ve helped. The original master is a hair heavy on the treble in general in a distinctively ’90s way, but the masters have supposedly degraded, so this album never got the deluxe treatment or a proper remaster and supposedly never will.
The sequencing contrasts the band-oriented tracks with more electronic material. The opening track, ‘Spark’, introduces the band. It’s an excellent song which clearly announces the change in direction, featuring keyboards that will trick you into thinking they’re guitars, complex mixed meter in the verses, and a very climactic bridge. It’s a surprising choice for a lead single, especially given how upsetting the lyrics are: ‘She’s convinced she could hold back a glacier, but she couldn’t keep baby alive’. It feels oddly warm and bright for its dark subject matter — the chorus seems to address disingenuous expressions of a death wish, though it could be interpreted in many ways. It gives me the feeling of being underwater in the ocean, surrounded by seaweed, with the sun shining through the surface. It creates a feeling of beauty in all the suffering — a sort of emotional complexity that can only be created through the contrast between the words and the music.
The forays into electronic sounds are quite successful, as well. ‘Cruel’ is a moody trip-hop track with layered and complex drum production (often stripping things down to just drums and her voice), distorted bass, marimba, and a classic pop key change into the final chorus that is somehow deftly navigated to avoid feeling like a cliche. The enigmatic lyrics reference grief olympics, as she told Vox: ‘…when you hear people listing their griefs, it can become a bit like a Billboard chart. “Hey, only your uncle abused you? I had 17 sailors and then my uncle!” That’s what that was about…’ It deals with her miscarriage in a roundabout way, perhaps reckoning with cosmic cruelty: ‘I really don’t know why the angels aren’t there for everybody, but they’re not.’ As she told Q magazine: ‘…you know that saying, Bad things don’t happen to good people? That’s a painful lie, and it hits you on such a core level.’
‘Raspberry Swirl’ is a four-on-the-floor upbeat dance track filled with fun production details — the first of its kind for her, outside of remixes. She has described the song from two different angles. As she told VH1 storytellers in 1998: ‘…my husband and I are “Married” but my friend Beenie is, we are married. Now she has had some real bad relationships, there is this one, if I ever see him I’m gonna kick his ass and well. I’m gonna kick his ass right now.’ Alternative Press got a different side of the story: ‘The animus in me is “Raspberry Swirl.” I’m in love with my women friends, but I just don’t eat pussy [laughs]. But I’m still in love with them. If I had a different sensibility, then you know I think I could, you know, really fulfill someone down there, where a lot of men in their lives don’t. And eating pussy is a metaphor, too — it’s about crawling in there, being with their juices, really being with them.’
‘i i e e e’ also explores trip-hop territory, featuring quite a compelling bass line, mellotron, a layered choir singing the song’s title, and a noisy rock bridge. She described the song to VH1 Storytellers: ‘Some of you know that we like really good wine. So, I wasn’t quite sure if um, the things I was seeing was from that, or if they were really happening. And uh, it was a strange time, I had just uh, I had a bad pregnancy and I lost the baby. And I started having this vision of this little Pueblo boy everywhere I went. And we knew it wasn’t a little boy, so… I really didn’t know who he was. And uh, the wine really wasn’t that good, you know what I mean?
‘So um, I would close my eyes when he would appear and I would follow him and he would say things like, Come, rabbit, come on. And I would go. And we had this 1959 convertible and he was a Zuni boy, Zuni or Pueblo boy. And he would sit in the back with his arms like that [spread out] and we would drive for hours and hours and hours. And I would sit there and we didn’t know where we were going, but when we would get there, nobody would be alive. So um, it was a strange thing, it was like being in, I don’t know, a bad Dustin Hoffman killer virus movie, you know. And I didn’t know what we were supposed to do, so we would leave the town and uh, he would tell me to build a campfire. Um, and I’m an arsonist so I, I really like that bit. So I would build this thing and um, he would start dancing. And um, he would say, you know, “We failed today but we have to go to the next town tomorrow.” And this happened over and over and over again. And we were always too late. Um, and he would sing this thing in my head. And he would go, he would pat me on the head and he’d say, “It’s okay… iieee, iieee, iieee…”
No one in the audience even batted an eye in response to that — the ’90s truly were a different time. Despite all of that strangeness, the chorus of the song is actually quite straightforward. She addresses the cosmic cruelty and senselessness of miscarrying even more directly here: ‘I know we’re dying, and there’s no sign of a parachute / We scream in cathedrals: ‘Why can’t it be beautiful? Why does there gotta be a sacrifice?’ While there are plenty of more direct moments like this, much of the album is as lyrically obscure and as filled with loose associations as you’d expect by this point.
She often approaches the topics she sings about in roundabout ways. She has often partially fictionalized her accounts of her life in her most emotionally honest moments. ‘Me and a Gun’ is the obvious example of this — she changes a few details of the event, perhaps making it a bit easier to sing the song each night. I imagine this acts as a sort of shield, giving her just a small buffer in all of her public vulnerability.
She takes a similar approach on this album’s penultimate song, ‘Playboy Mommy’, in which she reckons with the guilt she felt over her miscarriage in a roundabout way. She stated in the album’s press kit: ‘In “Playboy Mommy” I’m much more voluptuous, you know, but I’m allowed to do that because I’m the writer, so I can make myself that way. And I saw myself in a different way than I am — with a thirteen year old daughter. And I saw that mother/daughter relationship of just not being enough. I saw my mother, you know. I saw how I felt when I was… not ashamed, but that moment of, Why couldn’t you be the thing that I want you to be? and realized that I would probably have that experience with my own daughter.’ She envisions herself as a wartime prostitute instead of a touring musician, but the core sentiment remains the same — she is wracked with guilt over feeling that she failed as a mother, and is begging for forgiveness from her dead child.
The more layered and groove-oriented approach on this album makes the music feel more extroverted than her prior work, but the subject matter feels even more withdrawn and personal in some ways. This often creates a feeling of irony or dissonance between the words and music. ‘Playboy Mommy’ is the perfect example of this — the song’s swung groove has a bit of a ‘hip sway’, as she’s described it. The arrangement is exposed and uncomplicated, featuring a standard pop 4 chord progression, a slide guitar solo, and few of the album’s usual fancy production tricks. The plaintive and almost pedestrian music evokes a formal dance event, as if the protagonist is at a party, hiding a crushingly sad internal dialogue behind a cool and extroverted exterior while dancing with an unsuspecting partner. The result is especially devastating to listen to — it‘s the album’s emotional core and climax, and its most upsetting track. The dance between vulnerability and obfuscation is happening on multiple levels, and she managed to strike a perfect balance between them.
Her approach to singing about her marriage is similarly roundabout. The second single, ‘Jackie’s Strength’, is the album’s sole piano ballad with orchestra. Each of the album’s three verses moves forwards in time. The first verse is a recollection of her mother holding her as an infant while praying for Jackie Onassus’s strength in the wake of JFK’s assassination. The second verse consists of high school memories — a time she mooned a picture of David Cassidy on her friend’s lunchbox, sleepovers with cannabis, and the way in which anorexia was the secret to popularity. The third verse is a fantasy about getting lost on the way to her wedding. The chorus keeps bringing us back to her relationship in the present: ‘Make me laugh, say you know what you want / You said we were the real thing / So I show you some more and I learn what black magic can do.’
It’s a puzzling combination of subjects that serves as a great example of her lyrical idiosyncrasies, but it somehow works. It’s all delivered with a bit of a wink — there’s a naive glow to it which makes it feel a bit cheeky, even in its darkest moments. She told the New Orleans Times about how the song was a response to a piece of her panicking about getting married: ‘A part of me really wanted to do it; another part of me could see myself in flashback to my whole life having said I would never do it, because I would never go in front of church and state and do such a thing… A part of me could see myself in this wedding dress sitting at 7-Eleven on the curb, having a Slurpee and missing the whole thing. Not because I wanted to, but just because I’m still frozen in a piece of film somewhere when I was 18 and that was my outlook on life. So “Jackie’s Strength” was written about the girl that went to the 7-Eleven; I went and got married… It’s a pretty sacred day, and yet it can go so horribly wrong. Mine went right, but I think because I wrote the song. I let my alter ego go exist and live and be [in the song], so she didn’t have to do it in front of everybody else. That’s where songs come in handy: You don’t pretend that this side doesn’t exist, so it doesn’t have to become so vulgar, in 3-D.’
It’s not the only thing she needed to get out of her system before getting married — ‘Hotel’ explores her lingering attachment to an old flame. It feels considerably more straightface, despite dubbing her former lover the ‘Lollipop Gestapo’. She told Alternative Press: ‘I think as you’re getting married, all the loves, even 10-minute loves, are popping up. Hotel was really like feeling like an agent — a spy — in that he was the greatest guy at one time and they were giving me time behind enemy lines. Even though she knows they can’t be lovers because it’s a whole other life, she just can’t let him go.’ It feels like the album’s epic, moving through many different tempos, moods, dynamics, and textures, seamlessly blending the electronic and rock sides of the album.
The first half of the record is especially strong, but there’s a little bit of a lull in the back half. The moody ‘Liquid Diamonds’ features Chamberlain playing live drums on top of a trip-hop drum loop — and while it’s a great song, it’s the longest track here and one of the least dynamic, in addition to having some of the most obfuscated lyrics. I’m not sure it was placed in the most advantageous spot in the tracklist, as it stalls the record’s momentum just a little bit. ‘She’s Your Cocaine’ attempts to bring back the energy, but it’s the album’s biggest misstep — an irritating swag-rocker that is likely another swipe against Courtney Love for interfering in her friendship with Trent Reznor.
The two weakest songs here are placed back to back. The ballad ‘Northern Lad’ has the most stripped down, simple, and frankly almost bland arrangement on the album, foreshadowing her later adult contemporary era. It’s another song processing her decision to marry Hawley, and it certainly has some emotional resonance, but placing it after the album’s worst track does it no favors. Thankfully, the last two songs return to the quality of the first half, with the heartwrenching ‘Playboy Mommy’ and the excellent loungy closing track ‘Pandora’s Aquarium’, which are both clear album highlights. The latter features one of the record’s most surreal lyrics, bringing together the running aquatic theme with the tale of Pandora’s box, the rape of Persephone, and the Lord of the Flies.
The booklet lists the songs in a different order, providing a somewhat different view of the space. While the album order feels more based around contrast, momentum, and energy, particularly in the first half, the booklet order starts off on a very mellow note and steadily builds its way to the more energetic material. Both orders have their own appeal. ‘Pandora’s Aquarium’ surprisingly works equally well as an opening and closing song. Some songs benefit from the booklet order (‘Liquid Diamonds’ and ‘Northern Lad’ work quite a bit better when not preceded by more energetic tracks), while others benefit from the album order (‘Cruel’ makes for a perfect second track, and ‘iieee’ feels just right following ‘Jackie’s Strength’). The different sequences transform how I experience the album’s spaces — the album order primes me for the blue aquatic space, while the booklet order primes me for the orange hotel space at dusk.
On the whole, From the Choirgirl Hotel is an extremely successful change in direction. It’s yet another extremely heartfelt, moving, and emotionally complex record, but with a new emphasis on her band, production, arrangement, and layering. This allows the music to enter new and far more diverse territory, with the genre shifting somewhat on almost every song. The result is her fourth consecutive classic record. Sure, it’s not perfect — there are a couple lesser tracks in the back half, some of the synth sounds are dated, and the high end can be harsh at times — but considering how excellent the record is in every other way, these are hardly dealbreakers. The album was followed by her first tour with a full band, consisting of Steve Caton, Matt Chamberlain, and new bassist Jon Evans. More on that soon…
The B-Sides
‘Merman’ was initially released as a bonus internet download for people who pre-ordered the album, following in the footsteps of Aerosmith and David Bowie in utilizing this new technology. It’s the one straight piano/vocal song from these sessions — a lullaby for Hawley: ‘Go to bed / The priests are dead / Now no one can call you bad’. She told Attitude: ‘It’s inspired by a man with integrity, such deep integrity that I married him. It’s about having someone heal your whole life. I’m talking about the times when lines have been crossed by men.’ I imagine it misled many people into thinking that this record was going to be in a similar vein to her previous work. It later got a proper CD release on the compilation No Boundaries: A Benefit for the Kosovar Refugees.
Spark Singles (1998)
The sessions for this album were not as prolific as her prior records, yielding only five proper b-sides (three original songs and two covers), four of which appeared on versions of the ‘Spark’ single. The best of the three original songs is the loungey ‘Purple People (Christmas in Space)’ — a song about a woman who constantly threatens people with her judo skills. It appeared as a bonus track on the Japanese issue of the record and has really become part of the proper running order for me — it feels just right as a bit of ending credits.
‘Bachelorette’ works well as a companion to ‘Purple People’. It’s an odd tune that’s trying for a Spanish / French hybrid feel, I think, with an occasional drunken microtonal synth. I imagine it was another part of her process in deciding to get married — perhaps imagining an alternate future if she chose not to go forwards with it. Despite being unlike anything else from these sessions, it still feels like it lives in the hotel. Nonetheless, like ‘Merman’, it’s clear why it didn’t make the record — these songs feels like stylistic outliers, and they’re also among the weaker songs from these sessions.
She recorded two cover songs during these sessions. Her cover of Steely Dan’s ‘Do It Again’ works really well — she added more harmonic movement and some new melodies which almost feel like they should’ve been there from the start. The arrangement feels oddly unfinished, as if they’d been planning to add guitar and flesh out the drum and bass production but just never got around to it. Nonetheless, it’s a very strong cover and extremely enjoyable track. Her rendition of ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ is surprisingly atmospheric and pleasant, with a moody synth pad providing a bed for a heartfelt piano/vocal performance.
Three b-sides from the Boys for Pele sessions (‘Never Seen Blue’, ‘Beulah Land’, and ‘Cooling’) appeared on the singles for Spark and Jackie’s Strength, as they weren’t mixed until the Choirgirl sessions. The Pele b-side ‘Walk to Dublin (Sucker’s Reprise)’ was also mixed during these sessions, but wasn’t released until 2006. You can find my commentary on these tracks in the Boys for Pele b-sides article.
Cruel/Raspberry Swirl Singles (1998)
The Cruel/Raspberry Swirl singles feature slightly shorter radio edits of each of those songs. The ‘Shady Feline Mix’ of ‘Cruel’ extends the final chorus with a segment in the original key prior to the key change, cuts down the intro and a couple other spots, and adds some small production details. The ‘Lip Gloss Mix’ of ‘Raspberry Swirl’ treats that song similarly, abbreviating it and subtly changing the drum production. The ‘Sticky Extended Vocal Mix’ of that song is extended and given bigger beats to make it especially dance floor-ready. It’s considerably better than most of the dance remixes from the prior record, though it still doesn’t touch the original song or provide a lot of reasons to revisit it.
The other two remixes are ‘ambient’ reworks of ‘Raspberry Swirl’ (‘Scarlet Spectrum Feel’) and ‘Spark’ (‘Mainline Cherry’). These mixes are not truly ambient — they both still feature quite a lot of drums — but they’re a good bit more subdued than the usual dance floor mixes, and also considerably better than the usual fare. It’s cool to hear ‘Raspberry Swirl’ deconstructed from an energetic dance track into a slow and moody vibe track. ‘Mainline Cherry’ uses tiny chopped up bits of the drums and keyboards as loops, somehow making the song feel more off-kilter despite normalizing the rhythms into straight 4/4. It’s not as successful as ‘Ambient Raspberry Swirl’, but it’s still a cut above the average dance mix.
Jackie’s Strength US Remix Single (1999)
Jackie’s Strength features three versions of the ‘Wedding Cake Mix’, a dance mix which feels insanely dated at this point, much like the ‘In The Springtime of His Voodoo’ remixes from the previous record (they share an especially plastic Casio piano sound). The ‘Meltdown Mix’ is the strongest of these. There are also three versions of the ‘One Rascal Dub’, which are a hell of a lot better than the ‘Wedding Cake’ versions overall — they’re not amazing, but the first of them is at least listenable. The single also includes a ‘Sylkscreen’ remix of ‘Father Lucifer’ from her previous record, plus an instrumental version of it. This remix is surprisingly good — it’s got a hip-hop beat feel that’s aged a whole lot better than all the tacky club remixes, and it’s even a bit moody.
A Piano: The Collection, Disc 4 (2006)
From the Choirgirl Hotel gets downright shafted on the A Piano: The Collection box from 2006, with less than 30 minutes of representation. It doesn’t even get its own segment — 5 songs from it appear intermingled with tracks from her early 2000s albums (Scarlet’s Walk and The Beekeeper), while 2 b-sides (‘Bachelorette’ & ‘Merman’) and a brief ‘Playboy Mommy’ demo appear on the bonus disc. The only track from the original album to appear in a merely remastered form is ‘Spark’. The other four album tracks are remixed with her dry mid-2000s aesthetic. This allows them to fit in more seamlessly with the songs from the other albums, but otherwise the mixes are a big downgrade, losing all the moodiness of their album counterparts. The electronic elements simply don’t work anymore in these mixes.
Great Expectations Soundtrack (1998)
She has one notable soundtrack contribution from this era, for the film Great Expectations. She contributed vocals to two of composer Patrick Doyle’s orchestral songs from the score, ‘Finn’ and ‘Paradiso Perduto’. Both tracks only feature her on their especially corny back halves, which evoke a cheaply shot movie scene of a woman in a garden whistling and breathily making wordless expressions of ecstasy while she communes with the butterflies. An abbreviated version of ‘Finn’ serves as the intro to the soundtrack, cutting off the more somber whistling intro and diving straight into the cheesy bit.
That intro leads directly into her proper song contribution, ‘Siren’. This song was also co-written by Doyle, and it’s quite an oddity. While it was still recorded by Hawley and van Limbeek, it doesn’t feature her usual band from the time, nor do I think she ever worked with anyone from this lineup again. It shares the orange-lit hotel feeling of the Choirgirl album, but the production is quite different and feels a bit cheaper, with excessively reverby drums.
It moves from odd vocal incantations in the verses to a somewhat memorable melody in the pre-chorus, only to land on an uninspired 3 note melody for the chorus, which features some of her most bizarre lyrics yet: ‘No Teenage Flesh / Know that she’ll / Know she breaks / My Siren / Never was one for a prissy girl / Coquette, call in for an ambulance / Reach high, doesn’t mean she’s holy / Just means she’s got a cellular handy / Almost brave, almost pregnant / Almost, ya know, in love / Vanilla, Vanilla, Vanilla.’ To make things even stranger, there’s a barely perceptible harpsichord buried in the mix alongside the burbling synths. It’s a real head-scratcher, but it ended up becoming a live staple.
