Amos had her third miscarriage two months after To Venus and Back came out, in November 1999. A couple months later, she got pregnant a fourth time, as she told Diva: ‘After the third miscarriage, I went through the grieving process again and said, ‘I’ve had enough, I can’t do it anymore.’ You go to the edges of the living world to speak to any god or goddess to have a discussion and make a deal. Within eight weeks of the loss, I had a stomach flu. And Natashya became the stomach flu.’
She told Irish Independent: ‘I’d lost the others within the first trimester. So when Mark and I went for that ultrasound, our hearts were in our shoes.. The radiologist was there, I had my feet in the stirrups, then it got quiet. And it was in that moment, before, I heard the tears of nurses. But this time what I heard was, ‘Guys! Little dancing feet!’ Then they turned the screen around and truly… tears of joy flowed from both of us.’ Their daughter, Natashya Lórien Hawley, was born on September 5, 2000. She told The Dent: ‘I had three miscarriages. When I was pregnant with Natashya, Husband said, ‘Your writing is getting really good, but why do you have to be a cliche? Why don’t you reinvent the tragic victim, reinvent her into a whole, sexy, spiritual woman?’ I said, ‘Thank you husband.’ So now I’m a woman on a mission.’
As Amos had already thoroughly explored her personal traumas, she took her husband’s suggestion quite seriously and shifted her artistic focus. She began to work on a new record of more externally focused original material, but she was determined not to give it to Atlantic Records. She pulled the classic move of fulfilling her contract with a covers album and a compilation (albeit one that was almost entirely remixed in addition to featuring two new songs, but more on that later). And so we have arrived at the dreaded contractually obligated covers album — but at least Amos has always been great at covers, right? And indeed, Strange Little Girls is more than your average covers record — it’s a concept record where she took songs by men and reinterpreted them from a woman’s perspective.
Of course, she’d done this before — it was the theme of the Crucify EP in 1992. Her take on ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came the closest to what she was trying to do here, as she told MTV in 2001: ‘The perspective I took at the time was male rage. I went after the anima in the song itself…’ Her aim for this record was similar: ‘I wanted to do something creatively, having been a beached whale for many months and nursing my daughter. And it just started to say to me, you wanna create something, you’re drawn to the idea of a world where the men are the mothers, and you’ve been both a song mother and a human mother and they’re very similar. … And that was one of the first light bulbs that flashed — a place where the men are the mothers… You take a man’s word, you take his seed. So let’s take his seed, let’s plant it here, consummation. Man’s seed, woman’s voice.’
The Crucify EP featured songs Amos enjoyed, but that was largely not the case here, as she told Polish Radio 3: ‘This is not just about songs that meant something to me when they came out — this is not what it is. This is about how men say things and how a woman hears. This is about the myths of our time, now. What are they? Whether a song is 30 years old or 2 years old, it had to resonate with that. This is about… words are like guns. Words can wound and words can heal.. This is about building a bridge where a woman could go crawl behind the corridors of men’s eyes, and hang in their heads, likewise, a man can crawl back over that bridge and access a woman’s perception — which is a very intimate thing, her perception! So there is an integration happening there, instead of a segregation which I saw happening in America at this time as I was nursing my baby.’
Or, as she put it much more simply to Blender in 2001: ‘I was nursing Tash in Florida, and I was hearing a lot of male artists on alternative radio. And some of them really hated women. I thought about my daughter and what these guys were thinking about women. I wanted to build some kind of bridge, and I figured that was the only way to get into the heads of these men.’ She told Cosmogirl: ‘I believe in freedom of speech, but if you’re saying stuff just to shock people, and if you don’t believe in it? Then that is what I have an issue with. These guys were saying, ‘It’s only words,’ and they talk about cutting women up and that kind of thing. We all can have a dark sense of humor. But there’s just a place where I said, no, no, no. If you’re going to say stuff, have the balls to stand by it. You can’t sell a million records, then go, ‘Only kidding.’ Strange Little Girls is about the power of the word.’
She also created 13 female characters to go along with the 12 songs (one song features twins). She told KulturSPIEGEL: ‘I have thought a lot about these women … Where do they come from? What do they like? What do they think? In the end, the image of these women was very concrete. I could even imagine how they look, and for the booklet I had myself photographed in those different roles.’ (The make-up was done by Kevyn Aucoin, who died of liver failure shortly after and became the subject of a song on her next record.) The album thus has 5 cover variants, each featuring a different character. Neil Gaiman wrote stories about each of these characters which partially appeared in the album’s liner notes (the full text appeared in his 2006 short story collection ‘Fragile Things’ and can be read here).
As for the band, Matt Chamberlain returned on drums. Jon Evans had mostly become her permanent bass player by this point, but for some reason the bass playing here is split in half between him and Justin Meldal-Johnsen, who also played on half of Choirgirl. He is credited with ‘bass painting’ on two songs. John Philip Shenale, who did the string arrangements on her second, third, and fourth records (and still works with her to this day), returned here to contribute keyboards and arrangements to two songs, leaning heavily on the mellotron.
This was her first record without guitarist Steve Caton, and his replacement was none other than Adrian Belew. The record isn’t particularly guitar-centric, so he only appeared on seven songs. Some of his playing is quite straightforward (and thus not recognizable as him), but a few of the songs get the full Belew treatment. He played his guitar with a drill on the cover of 10cc’s ‘I’m Not in Love’ and evidently played an actual rattlesnake on Lloyd Cole’s ‘Rattlesnakes’. His contribution to The Beatles’ ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ is particularly riveting and dynamic, opening with squiggly guitar synth sounds then moving into King Crimson-esque interlocking dual guitar arrangements and tremolo-bar and wah-infused blues licks.
He told Alternative Press: ‘She said, ‘Bring anything that’s currently intriguing you’, and I had just recently acquired a fretless guitar synthesizer. There may be only one in the world. It’s a fretless guitar, and it also operates as a synthesizer. So I played it on the Neil Young song. The endings of “Happiness is a Warm Gun” turned into a blues version and it was inspiring enough to me that I discovered a different way of playing guitar. I turned my tremolo device in a different way — I’d never seen anyone do that — and it caused me to play in a unique way.
‘All of the tracks were completed, in fact, most of them had vocals and everything. That’s unusual, most people call me at a stage where they hadn’t put the vocals on. So when I played, I was trying to answer her voice, which is not something I usually do. But as I understand it, Tori makes it a performance all at once… It was really quite an experience. I’d go back.’ Sadly, he never did end up going back. I would’ve loved to hear him play on some of her original material, but Amos’s husband and engineer Mark Hawley took over as her guitar player after this point, usually under the pseudonym ‘Mac Aladdin’.
As you‘d probably imagine, this isn’t an album of verbatim covers on a musical level, either. Amos took big creative liberties, completely rewriting the music to many of these songs. The aesthetic here is more organic than her previous record, though there is still a little bit of electronic experimentation. Her vocal performance mostly stays in a lower register, as she is covering male singers. She explored electric piano for the first time in a studio setting, playing it on half of the album, including the opener — a cover of the live version of ‘New Age’ by The Velvet Underground which immediately announces the album’s new sparse and subdued sound. The most energetic and dynamic track here is the title song (by The Stranglers), which has a dated electronic-tinged ’90s pop rock arrangement. Unsurprisingly, it was the album’s sole single.
Unfortunately, the record mostly feels very serious and somewhat disengaged, lacking most of the joy, humor, sensuality, bite, presence, and intensity of her previous work. Many of the new arrangements lack any sort of arc. She completely rewrote the music to ‘Heart of Gold’ by Neil Young, turning it into a totally static band jam with a chaotic dual lead vocal take panned left and right. ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ was transformed from a sub-3min song filled with time signature changes into a significantly more square 10 minute long ad-libbed jam that acts as the album’s climax. It’s considerably more dynamic than ‘Heart of Gold’, but it would’ve benefitted from a clearer trajectory and shape.
Her quiet and eerie cover of Slayer’s ‘Raining Blood’ (a song choice evidently suggested by Justin Medal-Johnsen) is quite compelling at the start, as it effectively captures the eerie mood of the song and translates it to the opposite dynamic. It quickly loses its appeal and becomes tedious, as it goes nowhere, sitting on a pedal bass note for over six minutes. She takes a similarly ominous approach in 10cc’s ‘I’m Not in Love’, stripping out all the lush vocal pads and opting for a sparse and sinister treatment, with a borderline industrial vibe stemming from the combination of a drum machine, live toms, intimate vocal processing, and Belew’s subtle drill guitar. Much like ‘Raining Blood’, it communicates everything it has to say in the first minute and a half, but runs for nearly six minutes.
The larger issue is that the character concept feels like a forced afterthought, and that makes the album feel confused. She told Oor about the process of finding the character for ‘Rattlesnakes’, providing some insight into this: ‘Certain women walked after one listen straight through the door into my head, gave me their whole story and their voice. For others, I’ve had to wait longer. The woman on ‘Rattlesnakes’ took so long that we almost had to drop the song. But on a day I was sitting in the garden and I saw a branch with many curves. The shape reminded me of a rattlesnake. And then, all of a sudden, she took possession of me. This mysterious girl, whom I still didn’t understand, but wanted to be with from the beginning. I was curious about her lust for life, what moved her. I could live into the pain she felt because of her unborn child… It may be weird, but at first I didn’t feel much with this song. Maybe I didn’t let it happen, I don’t know. In any case, at once she appeared and she’s still in that one special place in my heart…
‘I like her really much and of all the girls she probably has the most in common with myself. But have you ever seen me wear a leather jacket with the Kiss logo on it? She’s become a friend.’ She told Spin about the resulting character: ‘She’s a showgirl, much older than the other women. She wants to be a stage actress, but things haven’t been going well for her. She hangs around with a lot of girls who do porn, and she doesn’t judge them; she just wants to love them. Her mentors are some of the old screen legends — like Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. She lives in a fantasy world, in stories.’ This at least makes sense with the song, but the characters she created for many of the songs often feel like barely related non-sequiturs.
For example, she sang ‘Heart of Gold’ from the perspective of twin sister environmental activists, as she told Spin: ‘When I stripped it back, I saw that there was a sort of fury in the song, the ‘Heart of Gold’ that any of us are looking for as we’re rampaging the Earth of all of her resources — for bullion and all sorts of things. You have to pull back from that, and I found this song to be this desperate cry for something. These two banshees came to visit me — as if they were crying for the Earth and loading their water pistols, or like they’ve decided, ‘Okay, you haven’t heard us, you haven’t heard the cry of the Valkyrie, and it’s war.’ And they became these economic espionage characters who chose to go to these establishments that didn’t hear those Sirens cry and say, ‘We’re going to cut you off where it’s really going to be quite painful for you, because you can’t hear anything else. If you think you’re going to destroy our mother, it’s not going to happen.’
‘Raining Blood’ is a song about a man in purgatory attempting to overthrow heaven — the blood in question is angel blood. The character that she envisioned for that song thus feels especially random: ‘She’s a French Resistance women whose sister was killed. She went to the underground after the death of everyone she knew. Shes calling on certain powers, no different than the ones Himmler and the Nazis were calling on, only they used the dark forces. Our French Resistance woman knows myths and is calling on power and working on alchemy.’ She expanded on this to Samsonic: ‘She wanted ten orgasms a day, because chances were high she would be arrested and executed by the Nazis, and it could be her last ten orgasms. She’s as intense as they come. She comes ejaculating up in me, when I feel threatened.’
That wasn’t all the song suggested to her, as she told Oor: ‘The text is really beautiful indeed, the words touched me deep. The ‘Raining Blood’ girl revealed herself to me from the moment that I heard the song. She said from the first line, ‘Come with me Tori, I’ll show you everything.’ She took me to a warfield, pure horror. Still I felt safe with her, because of her braveness. But not only the girl came to me. There was another image. Of a big, beautiful vagina in the air. From which blood is raining. It’s falling out of the air on certain countries which are so terribly violent against women. Like Afghanistan, where women can’t even go on the street without a man, are not allowed to study and often get raped.’ To add further confusion, Gaiman offered three possible (and very different) tales about the character, stating that only one is true.
Other characters simply don’t feel fleshed out. The character she created for ‘New Age’ is trying to understand the developing new age and be a part of it. She is described as passionate and enigmatic. Amos told AP: ‘She’s a writer, an observer. She’s doing research; she’s documenting like an Encyclopedia Britannica of life and experience. Her big line is, ‘Well, I’m doing Research.’’ Gaiman was a bit more poetic: ‘She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood. She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here.’
It seems she struggled to envision a character at all for the album’s closing song, Joe Jackson’s ‘Real Men’: ‘She’s an androgynous being, like a seahorse. Her essence is anima/animus combined, of the joining of two in one. It’s a woman who has really integrated her animus. And this is what she projects to the world. Neil Gaiman is convinced she’s a he, but I don’t agree. I think she’s androgynous.’ All Gaiman had to say about this character was ‘Some of the girls were boys. The view changes from where you are standing. Words can wound, and words can heal. All of these things are true.’ Regardless of all of that, it’s obvious that she truly appreciated ‘Real Men’ and thus didn’t need to subvert it in any way. Because of that, it feels less weighed down than the rest of the album.
She viewed Tom Waits’ ‘Time’ as being from the perspective of death, and thus turned the grim reaper female — does that really change anything? Nonetheless, it’s arguably the most successful and fondest cover here. Perhaps that’s not surprising, as it’s certainly the best of the lot lyrically — but part of the reason it succeeds is that it feels like Amos simply playing a song that she enjoys in a straightforward manner (it’s also the album’s only naked piano/vocal cut). The conceptual elements fall away for a moment, and we get to hear Amos commune with a song she loves, complete with that sense of hushed but intense presence that made her ’90s work so compelling.
These songs stand in stark contrast to the cuts she was trying to use to make a point, which were often selected by other people. She enlisted male help in choosing some of them, as she told Visions: ‘I went to some male friends and tried to find out which songs changed their lives. Often I was fascinated by the brutality — for example like in ‘Enjoy the Silence’ by Depeche Mode — but sometimes also by the depth of mercy, the beauty.’ She expanded on this to Oor: ‘I have really let them bring in all the songs. But of course I was very happy when somebody added ‘Enjoy the Silence’ to the list, it is a beautiful song about the danger of words. How they can make your world collapse sometimes. According to me the man in question asked for the song because he knew what I wanted to demonstrate with this album. The power of words and how they can get a different value if pronounced by the opposite sex.’
Her cover of ‘Enjoy the Silence’ strips out the rhythmic element of the song entirely, turning it into a somber dirge with an ominous ending, sung by an old showgirl named Isis. Her subversion of the song was even happening subconsciously, as she told Associated Press: ‘Most of the songs are one take. That’s how I do it as a performance. And when she shows up, you’ve got to take action. In the Depeche Mode song, I forgot to say forgettable so the line ‘Words are meaningless and forgettable’ turned into ‘unforgettable’, because this is where I’ve been for the last six months. They’re not forgettable.’ Even though she expressed some appreciation for the song, it feels as if she is arguing with it.
She strongly disliked some of the songs she chose to cover, like ‘I’m Not in Love’, as she told Samsonic: ‘Yes, it’s ironic that this has been the ultimate slow dance for teenagers in love for years. The singer is really super-cynical, and the lyrics show a superiority complex that doesn’t know its equal in pop music. He just has a hard-on and looks down on the girl he sings about. I think that the men from 10cc were deeply on coke at the time, because this is real cocaine arrogance. Plus the arrogance from a pop-star that has hundreds of girls down at his feet and can say, ‘Alright, you can give me a blowjob, but don’t you dare think I care about you.’ In my song it’s different — ‘You’re not in love? Well, I’m not in love either, sucker!’’ The character Amos created for it? ‘She’s a little fetish gal — she’s into BDSM.’
Amos’s reading of the song is clearly quite different from that of the songwriter. Eric Stewart described his intention for the song to Sound on Sound: ‘At that time my wife and I had been married about eight years, and she asked me ‘Why don’t you say “I love you” more often?’ I had this crazy idea in my mind that repeating those words would somehow degrade the meaning, so I told her ‘Well, if I say every day “I love you, darling, I love you, blah, blah, blah,” it’s not gonna mean anything eventually.’ That statement led me to try to figure out another way of saying it, and the result was that I chose to say ‘I’m not in love with you,’ while subtly giving all the reasons throughout the song why I could never let go of this relationship.’
The context he described isn’t really evident from just listening to the song, but it strikes me as a humorous song about a man in denial who can’t handle feelings. I certainly won’t say it isn’t problematic, but Amos’s interpretation feels decontexualized. It feels as if she isn’t fully engaging with what the song is trying to express, which makes her commentary feel off target and based on a knee-jerk reaction. That gets at a core issue with this record — listening to someone play songs they don’t love just to make a point is a fundamentally unenjoyable proposition, especially if it’s done without humor. It doesn’t feel as if she got inside the songs she disliked here in the same way that she understood ‘Time’ or even ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, and so the commentary doesn’t really land.
The greatest embodiment of this problem (and the most contentious number here) is the album’s second track, a cover of Eminem’s ‘’97 Bonnie & Clyde’. She told MTV: ‘‘Bonnie & Clyde’ is a song that depicts domestic violence very accurately, right on the money. I did not align with the character that he represents. There was one person who definitely wasn’t dancing to this thing, and that’s the woman in the trunk. And she spoke to me. … [She] grabbed me by the hand and said, ‘You need to hear this how I heard it.’ Music is always a reflection of what’s going on in the hearts and minds of the culture. If you’re singing songs that are about cutting women up, usually these guys are tapping into an unconscious male rage that is real, that’s existing — they’re just able to harness it. So to shut them up isn’t the answer. They’re a gauge; they’re showing you what’s really happening in the psyche of a lot of people.’
She stated on Atlantic’s website: ‘When I first heard the song, the scariest thing to me was the realization that people are getting into the music and grooving along to a song about a man who is butchering his wife. So half the world is dancing to this, oblivious, with blood on their sneakers. But when you talk about killing your wife, you don’t get to control whom she becomes friends with after she’s dead. She had to have a voice.’ She told Spin in 2001: ‘I’m seeing a woman in a victim situation for whom the last thing she’s hearing is the person she had a child with [Amos’ eyes well up] weaving in that child as an accomplice to her murder. I’m seeing it as a mother… this is about getting nailed if you are a fucking pig. On this album, I say words are like guns. And if you don’t believe that, well, check-fucking-mate, cocksucker.’
To me, the result is a bit puzzling. It doesn’t feel horrifying in the way you’d expect, though it is deeply uncomfortable. The synth string-heavy musical setting (arranged by John Philip Shenale) removes all the groove from the song and instead takes inspiration from Serge Gainsbourg, opting for a vintage feel that doesn’t dialogue with the scenario in a way that makes sense to me. It moves from verses with dramatic pulsing low strings accompanied by the occasional military snare to sweetly nostalgic mellotron with clave in the choruses. She speaks the words, rather than rapping them — a wise choice, of course.
The words are unchanged, and thus are still clearly coming from the man’s perspective despite being delivered by a female voice. Amos explained this discrepancy to Polish Radio 3: ‘She is not dead yet [in my version], she is almost dead. And you know, that is the tricky, tricky thing, when you kill your wife, you better check her pulse before you’re cashing in on that will, you better know she’s caught — so she’s hearing, this was a kicker for me when she showed me this, that her daughter is being made an accomplice. And will be divided forever between the two of them. Loving her father, loving her mother, like most kids do. She will grow up to be a strange little girl. Cut to the Stranglers song [the title track]. And that’s our little girl grown up — end of story.’ This was her sole attempt at weaving a narrative between two of the songs.
The other really controversial track is her epic-length cover of ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’, which she turns into a conversation about gun rights with speech clips from both George Bushes and her minister father. As she told Next, the gun control angle was inspired by the death of John Lennon, who ‘had seen an ad that said ‘Happiness is a warm gun’ and he asked in interviews, ‘Why is it warm? Because it’s just been fired’ — without knowing, when he said this, that one would be fired on him.’ Mark David Chapman hired an escort service prior to shooting Lennon, and ‘the service that he asked her to do [was] to be silent. So silent all these years, which is a reference to my life, I was able to hold that frequency, through the silence, through the silencer.’
Amos describes the song as being sung by that call girl, as she told Samsonic: ‘She is the prototype of the abused woman who approaches assholes in an understanding way.’ Gaiman, on the other hand, seems to insinuate that the character is the assassin: ‘She feels at home on the range; ear-protectors in position, man-shaped paper target up and waiting for her… You use the gifts God gave you. That was what her mother had said, which makes their falling out even harder, somehow. Nobody will ever hurt her. She’ll just make her faint vague wonderful smile and walk away. It’s not about the money. It’s never about the money.’ Do the song, the gun control conversation, and these two takes on the character come together into a larger coherent picture? I’m still unsure.
She further explored the gun control angle in her electric piano cover of the oddly cheerful ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ by the Boomtown Rats, as she told Oor: ‘The song was written after the high school murder in ’79 in California where a young girl opened fire on her classmates. In my version of ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ I crawl under the skin of the [female] police officer who had to shoot the girl, that had opened fire. Out of self defense. She had a lot of difficulties with that, also because she, on that bloody Monday, was able to kill. At the time of the murder there was a lot of discussion about trading weapons in the USA. If kids can get a weapon so easily, who is responsible? It’s easier to get a weapon than to get your driving license.’ Note that a police officer did not kill Brenda Spencer, and she is still alive — that’s all creative liberty.
Her focus on topics like gun control, the treatment of women in Afghanistan, and violently misogynistic rap songs makes this whole affair feel rather neoliberal, steeped in second wave feminism and new maternal anxiety (as she has stated in interviews). As such, it hasn’t aged particularly well, and it doesn’t feel like she succeeded at her intent to create a bridge and overcome division here. Luckily, it wasn’t her last chance to explore those themes.
Strange Little Girls laid the blueprint for her next three albums of original material, which were also loose concept albums with a more externalized and political focus. On her next album, Scarlet’s Walk, she took the electric piano textures and conceptual nature of Strange Little Girls and applied them to original material with a new aesthetic. She had yet to fully embrace that new aesthetic on Strange Little Girls, which leaves it feeling awkwardly transitional. It’s at least mercifully brief compared to her other 2000s records, but it still feels rather long at just over an hour due to its relative lack of dynamics and energy.
If she was just looking to fulfill her contract, she could’ve easily whipped out an album of cover songs she enjoyed with far less effort. The result likely would’ve been considerably more enjoyable. The decision to rewrite several of the arrangements and include a concept is what makes it all feel half-baked — these elements feel like they simply needed more time in the oven in order to cohere, placing the affair in an uncomfortable middle ground between being overthought and underdeveloped. The points she’s trying to make here are largely not evident from simply listening to the album, and are often still hard to discern even when engaging with all the extra-musical elements. The music has its moments, but overall lacks the kind of gut-level resonance that I felt from all of her ’90s work — something about it just feels less alive.
The album was promoted with a 3-month stint called the ‘Strange Little Tour’ — her first solo piano/vocal tour since 1994. As such, ‘Me and a Gun’ returned to the setlist, and she once again performed it on every night of the tour (for the very last time — it seems she has only performed it ten times since). ‘‘97 Bonnie & Clyde’ was used as walk-on music. She also began playing some of the Y Kant Tori Read songs for the first time. A Rhodes and a Wurlitzer replaced the synthesizer she used as her second keyboard in the late ’90s. She brought her infant daughter along for the tour.
The B-Sides
She tried out some other songs for the record that didn’t end up working, including Public Enemy’s ‘Fear of a Black Planet’, as she told Alternative Press: ‘I thought it was time in 2001, someone who’s considered a white woman would do this, would talk about it and what it was about to me, because that album was so influential. Just the conviction that Public Enemy has to their beliefs. And that’s another cornerstone to this record. What are our beliefs? What do you believe in? I don’t give many answers on this record but I bring up a lot of questions.’ Thankfully, that didn’t happen.
Strange Little Girl Single (2001)
A couple more covers appeared as b-sides on the Strange Little Girl single — of Alice Cooper’s ‘Only Women Bleed’ and David Bowie’s ‘After All’. Like ‘Time’, they are piano/vocal songs with no additional arrangements — covers in her classic style, unencumbered by characters or concepts. Her cover of the Nietzsche-inspired ‘After All’ feels more lively than much of what made the record, while ‘Only Women Bleed’ is immediately given new weight with a female perspective, without the need for any further contextualization. These tracks give further credence to the argument that a simpler approach may have indeed yielded better results. As a side note, I wonder if she lifted the line ‘Hold onto nothing’ in ‘Pretty Good Year’ from ‘After All’.
A Piano: The Collection, Disc 4 (2006)
She also recorded a single original track — a joke piano/vocal song called ‘Ode to My Clothes’ which wasn’t released until 2006 on the A Piano: The Collection box set (as the only representative from these sessions). It’s a piss-take about a bourgeousie problem. Amos had an affinity for expensive designer clothing. She handed some of this clothing off to a woman she’d hired to take them to the dry cleaner. Because the clothes were in a black trash bag, the woman became confused and thought they were for donation, so Amos’s Gucci and Prada wardrobe ended up distributed all over Ireland. And so she wrote: ‘Sometimes I think that I will lose sleep at night, cause it’s hard, yes it’s hard to say goodbye to my clothes. My clothes… nobody knows things like my clothes. My telephone life in the back of my jeans. Nobody knows how I feel today.’
