If you let go of Tori’s concept and free-fall through Strange Little Girls it is bound to disappoint; aside from the mellow tone and the lack of organic piano this album is different than Tori’s normal work because she is so far removed from her subjects instead of being a part of them. “Strange Little Girl” is the appropriate entry-way because it is the most like her own work… told in third person but obviously implicating herself over the course of the song. The farther away from that mold you venture on this disc the more tenuous the connection to Tori becomes, until some of the songs are just out and out covers.
Ultimately i can’t help but think of this disc as a failure, because it doesn’t work as a record and doesn’t really do what Tori claims she had intended. However, there are places that Tori has taken these adopted girls of hers that they had never been before… places that expose the fallacy and security of the men who originally narrated them. None of these versions wholly precludes their original, but all of them follow the rule of covers: don’t touch a song unless you want to add your own voice. In this respect Tori was unfaltering, and i suppose the only thing i could blame her for is that the voice she added was not entire the one i had been expecting.