Rearranging Tori Amos

I have the power! The power to erase filler from albums. Thanks to the power of iTunes, I can trim the fat from a cheap-cut album and get a muscular collection of songs - slicing away until I end up with the album that I would have wanted to listen to.

Why, you might ask, would I even buy albums that I don't want to listen from beginning to the bitter end? Loyalty.

There is a period in your life, around early adolescence, where your mind is plastic and your tastes embryonic. Whatever happens to lodge itself into the little space between your eyes will quickly ossify and exert an undue influence on the listening habits of the rest of your life. (Of course, a few exceptional individuals have fresh ears their whole lives and include many music critics and sycohpahnts).

One of my idols is the tremendously talented tiny bundle of vocal histrionics, the one and only Tori Amos. All the way back in 1992, I stumbled onto her album, "Little Earthquakes" and quickly fell in luurvee. Heartbreak, poetry, gorgeous melodies, ethereal harmonies, and a very wry sense of humour packaged in, what is for me, an almost perfect album. Alas, it's been downhill ever since. It's not that she lost her ability to write great music, or her facility for language. It's just that somewhere along the way, Tori decided to produce her own material. You can definitely hear the learning-pains in "Boys for Pele" where the production veers from the harshly underproduced to songs that were bewilderingly over-layered. Compare that to the almost perfect production in "Little Earthquakes", which were produced by some real old-hands. But sonic-wise, she has always had a firm grasp of the sublime - evidence her experiments with the harpsicord and electronica.

Her main problem is that without someone else as producer, there isn't anyone else who is in a position to say, "huh! what the f*#uck are you yakking on about????" Maybe her writing is simply dense poetry. Yes, great poetry is similar in many respects to great lyrics, but there is one important difference. Poetry is written, and the speed of comprehension can be slowed right down to a single crawling word. Lyrics, on the other hand, must flow to the music. You cannot afford Joycean levels of overreading in lyrics. Besides, the words just plain don't make sense. So without some other control freak in the mixing room, what you get is stream-of-consciousness pomo ramblings that lack emotional omph.

Evidence? "The Beekeeper", the latest offering from Tori, is a case in point. According to Tori, a hexagonal garden theme is the underlying structure to the latest album "The Beekeeper". Knowing this adds absolutely no insight to the songs, it even detracts from my joy from finding my own interpretative line through the album. Standing at a good 80 minutes, it is a chore to listen-to straight through. Listening to music is meant to be joy-ride, not a punishing pilgrimmage. And so, after a few listens, I gleefully deleted all the songs that made my eyelids droop. No, I do not want to hear about Tori's Saab roaring through Ireland. No I don't have to suffer through the cringe-worthy pun "Original Sin-sinuality".

So I merrily zapped away, and I cut the album down to a very listenable 30 minutes of music. And listening to the revised album, I am reminded that when all-is-said-and-done, Tori is still an amazing musician. Buried in the middle of "The Beekeeper" is the heart-breaking "Ribbons Undone", surely one of the most beautiful paens written by a mother for her daughter. It is a slow balland, effortlessly, capturing a fleeting moment of motherhood.

Listening to "Ribbons Undone", I couldn't help but think of "Winter", a song on "Little Earthquakes". "Winter" is still one of her most poignant songs, a song about the emotional bond between a girl on her father. And I couldn't help but notice how the two songs bookend the 15 year transformation from the wide-eyed girl of "Winter" to the wordly mother of "Ribbons Undone". It is for moments such as these that rewards the musical devotion of all these years.