‘I don’t see myself as weird, I just see myself as honest. That’s just the way I am. I find the truth endlessly interesting.’
Tori Amos has had a very productive solo career. Over the past 35 years, she’s averaged an album release every other year. That overflowing creativity didn’t allow her to take a break, as she told Performing Songwriter in 1994: ‘I was gonna take a year off, but the songs just demanded that I tell their story, and their story was about life under the pink. That’s why the album is called Under the Pink. These are just some of the different lives that happen in that world. If you ripped everybody’s skin off, we’re all pink, the way I see it. And this is about what’s going on inside of that. That’s what I’m really interested in, not the outer world, but the inner world. There are many other songs that live under the pink. These are just a few of them, these are just the girls who decided to come to the party.’
For a moment, it was unclear if she’d be able to make another record at all. In a shockingly honest 1994 interview with Joe Jackson (which I highly recommend reading), she described some of the adversity that she’d faced since her debut, including a cervical cancer diagnosis: ‘I had a procedure done and, for a while, I thought it had spread further than it had. But it wasn’t malignant, it was benign, meaning that the cancer was stopped. Yet what also happened to me in New Mexico, where I went to write, and record, this album, was that at one point I was spraying Pledge polish in a cupboard and I inhaled it and I got a lung infection which meant I couldn’t speak, or sing, for three weeks. And I really though my voice was damaged forever and had to do voice lessons on the phone with this voice teacher to try and get the natural cortisone back on the chords.
‘I was thinking ‘what if I never sing again?’ Then I’d say ‘if I can’t sing, what’s the point in being alive, is this person worth anything at all?’ And there were moments where the only answer to that question was ‘no’… And part of it was ‘do I want that girl around if she can’t express herself through music?’ Is she worthy, to me, without that ability? You know what the song ‘Silent All These Years’ is all about. You can see the irony, right? There I was, having found a voice to express myself and suddenly I’m silenced by an accident? That was pretty creepy, to tell you the truth.’
Thankfully, she regained her voice, and was able to use it here with incredible results. Under the Pink did not display even a hint of a sophomore slump — if anything, it was a refinement. While her debut was assembled from multiple sessions with multiple producers, Under the Pink was produced entirely by her boyfriend, Eric Rosse, who she split up with shortly after it came out. While Rosse’s production on her debut could easily be accused of being cluttered, this record has a lot more breathing room. The arrangements are just sparse enough to perfectly complement her performances without ever getting in the way. As such, the production feels much less dated than that of her debut and the album feels more sonically focused.
It also marks the first time that she worked with a consistent band (in contrast to the array of session players who peppered her first two releases). Guitarist Steve Caton and drummer Carlo Nuccio return from the Rosse-produced tracks on her debut, and they are joined by Canadian composer/producer John Philip Shenale on extra keys, George Porter Jr. of The Meters on bass, Brazilian legend Paulinho da Costa on percussion, and a 12-piece string section.
You would never guess that she’d suffered from lung damage here, as her vocal performance is just as nuanced, skilled, and all-around excellent as it was on her debut. The piano playing is a bit flashier this time around — just check out the near-10min classically-inspired closing epic, ‘Yes, Anastasia’ (she told Beat: ‘A lot of Debussy influence on the [improvised] first half, and the Russian composers on the [composed] second half’), which serves as an excellent showcase. She’s not afraid to throw in random moments of dissonance here, as in the intro of ‘Icicle’, where she deftly moves from soft music evocative of winter to suddenly beating the crap out of the piano. ‘Bells for Her’ even features a detuned prepared piano (prepared with nails and mutes by Shenale).
Then there are the epic solos in the lead single, ‘Cornflake Girl’, which absolutely explode with feeling. Sometimes, they even bring me to tears. It’s no surprise that song became her biggest hit — it’s a clear album highlight. It also features another novel element — reggae-inspired swung grooves, which appear in ‘God’ and ‘Past the Mission’, as well, incorporated in the most tasteful and least appropriative way possible. She succeeds at personalizing these sounds — the influence is just subtle enough to make it work. And those aren’t the only novel grooves here — ‘The Wrong Band’ has a waltz feel (but with quirky synth overdubs), while the chorus of ‘The Waitress’ is a military march.
This album was more commercially successful than her debut, opening at #1 in the UK. Many fans still point to her debut as her best work, but Little Earthquakes undeniably has a certain naivete in comparison to her later 90s work. Under the Pink already feels like a big step beyond her debut — it is more mature, consistent, and fully realized on both the songwriting and production fronts, and I think it’s aged far better. She struck a perfect balance between accessibility and experimentation here, using 4-chord pop progressions to anchor all the strangeness.
The lyrics on her first record were just direct enough to emotionally resonate while still allowing you to read all sorts of stuff into them, but this record is intentionally much more obtuse: ‘I think, in a way, to be honest, I put some clothes on after Little Earthquakes — that was so stripped and raw that I just felt like I couldn’t expose myself in that way.’ Even her delivery of the words is often more slurred, forcing you to consult a lyrics sheet to understand them — which will then have you consulting interviews to try to make sense of them. Trying to make sense of her explanations is a whole ordeal in itself.
As she told Keyboard in 1994: ‘Sometimes it is a little more lyrically detached. [The listeners] can really crawl into the painting. I wanted Under the Pink to be more abstract, for many reasons. I was really into certain poets at the time, like e.e. cummings, and painters like Dali. I had this whole thing going where I liked codes and going with your senses. It was a bit of a maze, and you as a listener had to work to find out where we were going. Little Earthquakes was a bit more voyeuristic. You could sit back and watch this girl go through this stuff. You can’t on Under the Pink; you have to go through it to understand it.’
She summarized the overall theme of the album on an Upside Down flyer in 1994: ‘If there’s a theme on Under the Pink, it’s one of self-empowerment — whether it’s women acknowledging the violence in themselves or people coming to terms with the loss of hope. It’s about the refusal to see yourself as a victim, and how to have passion in your life without equating it with violence. It’s just as personal and just as involved as before. There might be other characters in these songs that we haven’t met before, but it’s still me.’
A couple of those characters appear in the opening song, ‘Pretty Good Year’. It starts things off in similar territory to her debut with another piano/vocal song with subtle strings — but this is no mere rehash. She announces that the game has changed when, partway through the song’s bridge, the rhythm section abruptly enters with an explosion of distorted bass and drums and a sudden key change, surprising the listener in a way that feels disarming and introducing an element of unpredictability. The moment is gone almost as soon as it arrived, and the song returns to an almost angelic feeling of brightness.
The song is about a letter sent to her by an English fan named Greg, wherein he described how all the potential he had when he was young had evaporated by the time he was 23 and he simply couldn’t find purpose or direction in life. It’s probably clear why she would relate to this in the wake of Y Kant Tori Read. The sunny atmosphere, sarcastic major key, and resigned chorus (‘Still… Pretty good year’) really work to get the point across, making it one of the strongest tracks in this collection. It is, lamentably, a song I find deeply relatable, delivering a real gut-punch.
While most of her debut was sung in the first person (sans ‘Girl’, which I still read as being about her past self), this is where she really began looking through the eyes of others. As she told the Baltimore Sun in 1994: ‘You don’t really know what my role is. Am I Lucy, or am I that eight bars of grunge that comes out near the end where I express, and then nothing, everything else is Greg’s story? I found that kind of really fun. The emotion is coming from somebody else’s story. And yet it touched me so that I could sing it.’
‘Pretty Good Year’, ‘Baker Baker’, ‘Cloud on My Tongue’, and ‘Yes, Anastasia’ all feature prominent string arrangements. It’s worth noting that all of the strings are real this time around, unlike on her debut, where they could only afford to add a real string orchestra to two songs. The arrangements were created by keyboardist John Philip Shenale, who remained her arranger for the rest of her career. However, he was not the first arranger to work on this project, as she recounted in the liner notes of A Piano: The Collection in 2006:
‘I had called in someone with “a reputation.” I’ll never forget the day that after we completed a four-song session with a 50-piece orchestra at Ocean Way Studios, I went and erased all 50 pieces on all four tracks without telling the record company. I was working with a string arrangement I hadn’t heard before because I was told this was the way the string arranger created, and I would just have to trust. Now I went along with it because of certain advisors on the project and the reputation of the string arranger. This is where I’ve learned to trust my instinct. After the session was over I went next door to the Columbia Bar and Grill. Eric Rosse and the engineer on the string session, John Beverly Jones, were there, and I remember it as clear as the day it happened. They both looked at me, over weak margaritas with extra salt, and asked if I really wanted to do this, if I really wanted to erase the equivalent of what a medium-sized house in Pomona would cost. Without a doubt, after another lick of salt, I got up, walked next door, and pushed the erase button. It was the most liberating feeling to get rid of something that I felt compromised the songs. I knew if I was willing to do that, I would be okay in life.’
That’s a bold statement, but this album is all about bold statements. She really stuck to her guns in these sessions, as she told Blender: ‘The other thing about Under the Pink is that Atlantic wanted to leverage me out in the middle of the project so Eric and I wouldn’t be in control of it. I threatened to burn the tapes… They were going to take the tapes and give them to a hotshot producer. We won’t talk about names. I told them, “Look, I’m the mother of this, and you won’t be able to get to the cubs but through me.” I’m not warm and fuzzy. That’s why labels have such a difficult time with me.’
You could argue that such a move is a rejection of the patriarchy, which is something she explores on the album’s second song, ‘God’. The band enters the picture with with a distinctly ’90s groove consisting of 2 different drum loops hard panned between the left and right channels. It’s got funky bass playing, recurring double tracked guitar noises, and wordless vocal harmonies. There’s some surprising time signature play —the chorus has 3 bars of 4/4 and a bar of 6/4, while the verse pattern is a bar of 6/4 is followed by 2 bars of 4/4. Then, there are lyrics — ‘God, sometimes you just don’t come through. Do you need a woman to look after you?’
She’s made it clear that the God she is singing to here is not her God, but the arrogant and patriarchal creator God that Christianity has come to worship. She told B-Side: ‘I went after the patriarchy and God this time: I figured we went after the son, let’s go after the father. That whole song is about calling forth a Goddess, that’s what it is all about… Singing “God” was really empowering — the primitive, the seduction. Seducing God a bit was wonderful. He’s great, he had a good time. He’s smiling!’ She expanded to Women Who Rock: ‘The woman in this song, the voice of this song, was really about a consort of God. That’s the one song where, in all my work, I’m exploring God’s lover. And I’m not talking about Mary the mother, or Mary who got “impregnated” by God. I’m talking about — if we pull back and look at Christian mythology, and the idea that there is a God, why wouldn’t there be a Goddess? In all of nature, there is not a male-only species. There has to be a female and a male.’
Some of the material here was improvised on the spot (both music and lyrics), but you’d never be able to guess. The first half of ‘Yes, Anastasia’ was an improvisation she had to relearn, as she told Keyboard: ‘The first part of “Yes, Anastasia” is a good example of free form. “Anastasia” was written how you hear it. I wrote that whole first half with a tape recorder: The second half was written first, and then I was just noodling, just stream of consciousness with my ghetto blaster on. It took me six weeks to learn the first half of “Anastasia” from that tape, because it was all about free form.’ The improvised first half is surprisingly more compelling than the composed and orchestrated second half.
‘Bells for Her’ takes this even further — the album version is the original recording, which is more than a little shocking, considering that her performance is perfect. She told the Baltimore Sun that it ‘came in that moment. Words, music, everything.’ She expanded on this in the deluxe edition liner notes: ‘Possession can be used as a pejorative, but there’s something humbling about it because you really know that it’s not coming from you, and in these moments I realize that the muses are at work. I mean that literally, because I know I didn’t write “Bells for Her.” I was just there, and it came. It’s been happening since I was two and a half. When it’s occurring, it’s almost as if every switch is on and I am just desperately trying to get the information because I could lose it. A lot of songs come to me in dreams, and they’re completely arranged and I wake up and they’re gone. Completely gone.’
Despite featuring roughly the same running time and number of songs, the album feels a bit more briskly-paced than Little Earthquakes. This is due to a combination of shorter song lengths (with a few notable exceptions) and increased textural variety. It’s paced well, alternating between more arranged material and more stripped down tracks that really focus on the piano and her voice. As with Little Earthquakes, the trio of songs at the center of the record (‘Baker Baker’, ‘The Wrong Band’, and ‘The Waitress’) is its weakest point — but all of them are stronger than ‘China’. These brief and quirky tracks feel a little more low-key, allowing the more energetic ‘Cornflake Girl’ to hit quite hard when it follows them.
The lyrics on this record cover a lot of new territory. A number of the songs here explore the difficulties of female friendships. As she told The New Review of Records in 1994: ‘There is a triangle on this record: the songs ‘Bells for Her,’ ‘Cornflake Girl,’ and ‘The Waitress’ — a triad about women betraying women, that’s a kind of theme here. We women have to deal with the patriarchy first, but then, what’s the alternative? Do you need a woman to look after you? I’m here to apply for the job. But when you say patriarchy, you don’t have to be a man to be part of the patriarchy. After I read Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker, about how mothers sold their daughters to the butchers; that kind of floored me. One always feels safer when there are good guys and bad ones. But there are no good guys out there. And it’s not as if one sex can make it okay.’
‘Bells for Her’ is about losing her best friend to an abusive relationship. ‘The Waitress’ is about the internal dissonance between violent urges and pacifism, best summed up by these two lines: ‘I want to kill this waitress… …but I believe in peace, bitch’. The first of those lines is sung over light, borderline industrial percussion, while the latter is sung over layered militaristic drums. ‘Cornflake Girl’ explores female social hierarchy in a rather obtuse way. As she told Joe Jackson: ‘This record is about the research for wholeness, and clearly focuses on divisions, even in ‘Cornflake Girl’, which is about Cornflake girls and raisin girls, and they represent two different ways of thinking: narrow-mindedness and open-mindedness and how narrow-minded women betray the rest of us. That division is even there between women, which is something I’ve really had to come to terms with. It is often women who say I shouldn’t express myself as I do and, in that sense, women let each other down, not men.
‘My position differs from a lot of the more militant feminists because all they are concerned about is just the position of women, in the universe, women re-defining their roles. That’s fascism. And that form of fascism is not empowerment at all. I’ve lost women friends over this argument, in the last year. Because all they do is blame men and become bitter because they are dominated, which still allowing themselves to be dominated, in ways. But that’s basically because they haven’t healed the place within themselves that remains both masculine and feminine, is part woman, part man, and needs both halves to be in harmony. I just can’t accept it when the blanket response of my women friends is simply ‘all men are bastards, let’s just cut them out of our lives, be rid of that male energy completely’. And it’s really disappointing in terms of feminism. They are fascists. And I don’t want fascists in my life. I’ve had this idyllic view of the sisterhood that has been shattered over the past year, that they would never betray each other. But I was wrong and that’s what I write about in some songs on the new album.’
She also explores emotional violence against the self or in relationships from several other angles. ‘The Wrong Band’ is about a prostitute friend of hers, as she told BAM: ‘She was involved with a Congressman. And she got in over her head, and she knew too much, and she had to flee. The hooker had to leave. She was, let’s say, rescued by a big Japanese underworld magnate. She fled, and he protected her, and I never heard from her again.’ In ‘Baker Baker’, she turns the mirror on herself and reckons with how she hurt a man that loved her — but more on that later.
‘Space Dog’ is a bit of an anomaly, as it’s the one song on the record that doesn’t seem to tie into that central theme. She has stated that it was ‘a mushroom trip’ and has given some detailed explanations about it involving a spirit from a cave painting visiting her on an airplane and showing her a miserable boy eating peas, but it mostly seems to be about being ungrounded. The way it’s expressed reflects that well, as it features the most surreal and incomprehensible lyrics on the record. It’s one of the strongest tracks here, with an almost disjointed start-stop structure, more prepared piano, and some interesting melodic choices in the chorus which feel strangely disembodied, especially once the backing vocals enter in the left channel with an independent line at the end.
The song’s bridge is especially striking, as she somehow manages to imbue very abstract lyrics with intense feeling: ‘Deck the halls, I’m young again, I’m you again / Racing turtles, the grapefruit is winning / Seems I keep getting this story twisted, so where’s Neil [Gaiman] when you need him? / Deck the halls, it’s you again, it’s you again / Somewhere someone must know the ending / Is she still pissing in the river, now? / Heard she’d gone, moved into a trailer park.’
Her new lyrical approach becomes especially clear when you look at the songs that explore similar themes to her debut. ‘Icicle’ plays a similar role to ‘Mother’ on the previous album, as a near-6min late album solo track with a long piano intro. It once again covers the dissonance between her religious upbringing and sexual awakening that she explored in ‘Precious Things’ — but this time, it’s more provocative. It’s a fantasy about masturbating in her room while her Methodist pastor father holds a prayer meeting downstairs: ‘And when my hand touches myself, I can finally rest my head / And when they say, “Take of his body”, I think I’ll take from mine instead / Getting off, getting off while they’re all downstairs / Singing prayers, sing away / He’s in my pumpkin P.J’s / Lay your book on my chest / Feel the word / feel the word.’ While this could seem edgy for its own sake, the soft delivery makes it feel far more genuine than most other similarly blasphemous songs of the ‘90s.
She told Hot Press in 1994: ‘The concept is that Jesus Christ, through the Father, Son and Holy Spirit experienced life — the human form. Well, what I find quite inexplicable is that he could suckle at a woman’s breast yet not soil his dinky by having sex! How’s he supposed to experience life at the level of his dick, for Christ’s sake! That’s the Church’s core denial of sexuality, right there, alongside the idea that Mary could give birth without “doing it.” It’s absurd. So when I say I want to “do it” with Jesus Christ it’s not just that I want to sexualise Jesus, bring him down to our level, I want to breathe the earth into his lungs. He came from Heaven and we, as women, come from the earth. So it’s the idea of soil beneath the fingers, the notion of, “If this blood is sacred, then drink it.” That’s what it’s all about.’
She expanded on this to Joe Jackson: ‘I am a minister’s daughter, for heaven’s sake! So, of course I can see why some would regard sexual fantasies about Jesus Christ as unacceptable. But that’s part of what I’m saying in ‘Icicle’, when I tell of how I used to masturbate at home as a teenager, while my father and his fellow theologians were downstairs discussing the Divine Light. I was exploring the ‘divine light’ within myself! (laughs) And anyone who sees that as ‘blasphemous’ can go to hell! Like I said to you before, that’s how women are paralyzed, disconnected from their own power by religion. Talk about patriarchal power structures! For centuries the Church has slammed a crucifix between a woman’s legs and even masturbation is a way of dislodging that cross, of self-empowerment. And how dare anybody say that my honoring my woman-ness in that way, my relationship with my own body and my opening to this energy between my legs is a ‘sin against God’, is ‘blasphemous’. That was my act of defiance, of asserting myself against the oppressive force of religion which has always made women deny their sexuality.’
‘Past the Mission’ and ‘Yes, Anastasia’ are about healing from her sexual assault — but unlike ‘Me and a Gun’, where she was clearly trying to communicate a point to the audience, these songs feel like she wrote them for herself and her own process. You’re not likely to guess what they’re about if you don’t know. She told the St. Louis Dispatch that ‘“Past the Mission” refers to a personal experience with sexual violence, which I had a song about on Little Earthquakes also. So, the remark “I once knew a hot girl” is painful. Where’s she gone? On this record there are songs about the healing from that experience, like “Baker Baker” (“Make me whole again”), “Past the Mission,” “Yes, Anastasia.” The idea is to rescue myself from the role of a victim. That I have a choice left. Though I can’t change what has happened, I can choose how to react. And I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being bitter and locked up. That’s also the thought behind the phrase “past the mission I smell the roses”.’
She has also stated that the song touches on the Native American genocide (and thus the missions built by colonizers), the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the suppression of the feminine by the church, and ‘trying to find the pieces of myself that I have numbed over the years.’ The song’s musical structure reflects this, as it is also constructed from disparate elements, as she told Star Tribune: ‘In “Past the Mission,” I was putting three totally different structures together: the verse, chorus and the bridge belonged to different things.’ And then there’s the backing vocal by Trent Reznor, as she wanted to feature a man who made intense and angry music at the time in a role where he sings as softly as possible.
‘Yes, Anastasia’ features cryptic lyrics referencing the Palmer raids and the Romanovs. It was evidently inspired by a spiritual visitation from Anastasia Romanov while Amos had bad food poisoning, with the spirit demanding that her story be told. As Amos explored the story, she found that her own experience with victimhood allowed her to relate to it, as she told B Side in 1994: ‘…it’s really working through being a victim. “Counting the tears from ten thousand men, and gathered them all, but my feet are slipping.” You can’t blame the men anymore; there’s always you. It comes back to us; it comes back to me.’
She told Joe Jackson: ‘I wrote about my experience of rape in ‘Me and A Gun’, but it’s another thing to really go back inside myself and see how that experience seeped into my cells, how the disease has spread.’ When he asked her about her status as a sex symbol, she replied: ‘To tell you the truth, I can’t deal with the fact that some fans would just perceive me that way. They don’t have a clue about all the problems that are involved, in terms of my sexuality. If they did, perhaps they’d change their minds!
‘…A part of me has been unable to open up intimately since I wrote ‘Me and A Gun’. After so many years I wondered what was it in me that cannot be juicy, that is so dry, except when I play music? I can go out and channel this energy during a show yet the moment I walk backstage afterwards I close down, sexually. And in New Mexico I did finally realize that I have to take responsibility for the fact that the man who originally violated me is not stopping me now — I am. But, still, there is a part of me that hasn’t been able to open up since I came to terms with ‘Me and A Gun’. And without Eric, my boyfriend, I couldn’t work my way through it right now.
‘I never talk about this and it helps the healing process to do so. Because people out there must be told about the self-loathing that follows rape and how it’s the greatest breakage in divine law to mutilate themselves, as I have done. Emotionally, I mutilated myself by feeling I’m not worthy of being loved and fucked, and being able to love and fuck, at the same time… I had to deal with the way in which I held so much trauma in that part of my body and psyche. I do believe repression of that nature can cause the disease. I also feel that the great frontier was crossed when I confronted my own violence, which is also what the album Under The Pink is all about. Even though I had been working my way out of that violent experience, I realized that I would remain a victim of it until I recognized the violence in myself. And my willingness to give up my realizing that the withholding of passion and pleasure, from myself, was a form of self-violence.
‘I already had the hatred that women feel for themselves in the Christian Church in terms of their sexual response: that tyranny of believing that love is one thing and lust another, instead of being able to join them together. That was where I first began to be segregated, within myself. On top of that, I took from the rape that man’s hatred of women, so much so that I couldn’t access parts of myself. It’s as though a computer chip has been put in, to cut out contact with your core self, your central energy source. And that hatred ran so deep that I just numbed myself to survive. Even sexually, after the rape, I became the vampire, I drank but would not let the men drink. And I had to be a hooker to have sex. Having felt I let myself, and all women, down because of my total vulnerability the night I was raped, I then had to continually tell myself I was in complete control, so I had to feel like I was getting paid. Even in ‘Baker, Baker’ on this album, it says I’m the one who was endlessly unavailable, to Eric, even when having sex. And now the only way I’m getting out of all this is with him. The only way back now, having taken so much hatred from one man, is to accept so much love from another. But it’s a long, slow process.’
Her first album was about finding her voice, but she truly started using that voice here. She no longer seems concerned about whether you understand her or not — we’re in her world now. Starting with this album, she demands quite a bit of investment from the listener. You’ll get back what you put into it. I certainly feel like it’s worth the investment. It’s a perfect album to listen to on an early summer evening — while a lot of the subject matter is obviously quite dark, the record feels healing — like the sun shining through the window as it’s just beginning to set.
