“It floored me”: Tori Amos on the singer with the voice of a siren
One of the most accomplished piano players and songwriters of her generation, Tori Amos is a truly unique voice in alternative rock and pop music. After a brief stint fronting her 1980s synthpop act, Y Kant Tori Read, Amos forged a solo career for herself through her singular approach to crafting intelligent and complex songs that incorporated baroque arrangements, releasing a string of critically and commercially adored records.
Her third solo record, 1996’s Boys For Pele, was seen as her artistic breakthrough, where she began to show greater signs of adventurousness, with inspirations drawn from songwriters like Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell for her decision to employ unconventional styles and structures. It may have been met with mixed reception at the time of its release, with some contemporary reviewers criticising it for being too impenetrable in its approach, but in the years since its release, it has gone through a significant reappraisal.
Among her other records from the 1990s are the more ballad-driven Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink, and the more eclectic follow-up to Boys For Pele in From the Choirgirl Hotel. This stylistic variation on show across her early catalogue is what has made her such a standout artist, often mentioned in the same breath as other forward-thinking female songwriters of the same era such as Fiona Apple, Regina Spektor and PJ Harvey, and regularly cited as an influential figure to future generations of songwriters as well.
However, some of her earliest musical loves stem from rather different origins to what she has become known for. While she has generally been dismissive of her earliest releases, such as the eponymous debut album from her synthpop group, Amos revealed in a 2021 feature with Pitchfork that it was early experiences of being stunned by the vocals of other pop singers that steered her towards wanting to change her musical approach.
Speaking of her experience of hearing the Eurythmics’ song, ‘Sweet Dreams’ for the first time, she recalled being entranced by the voice from “that siren Annie Lennox,” praising the captivating manner in which she performed the song in the music video. “I didn’t know what to do with myself,” Amos confessed. “It was the way she utilised her instrument and how she told the story with the visuals […] I couldn’t believe it, watching her walk in this pasture, dressed as this androgynous goddess-god. It floored me and showed me the possibility of performance and storytelling.”
Amos would continue to heap praise on Lennox and her performance on the track, and the way that she managed to tell a story through both audio and visual elements. “I know certain artists have been very visual,” she explained. “Joni Mitchell has been a great painter as well as a great musician and would marry the two in how we could experience her art on both those levels. But this new medium was fascinating.” She would finish with the most definitive statement about the lasting impression the track had made on her, claiming: “I had never seen anybody like that in my life.”
While a considerable amount of her solo material was removed from the domain within which Lennox and the Eurythmics operated in the 1980s, it’s clear to see how Amos attempted to take the world-building elements of the track and instil it as one of the major features of her own output. It’s a timeless pop classic and one that Amos no doubt still reflects upon as being a major turning point in her artistic vision.
