Archives for May 2009

“If I had a different sensibility, then you know I think I could, you know, really fulfill someone down there, where a lot of men in their lives don’t. And eating pussy is a metaphor, too – it’s about crawling in there, being with their juices, really being with them.” (Unknown, from Here. In My Head)

This has so many edges. Tart and prickly, raspberries are.

Raspberry Swirl is about flavor. Raining flavor. What does it look like? Depth. Sweet ginger. Sweat. Damp moss. Yummy candy. The South Pacific.

Ripe fruit.

The hilarity of Tori obliquely saying, “you have to lick it before you kick it.”

But where does it fit in this narrative? Already it is clear that we’ve lost something – a spark, a voice, a way home. Is she even a woman anymore? She is not your senorita, but she’s still not part of your patriarchal tribe.

Berdache, they called the bodies that contained the masculine and the feminine spirit at once.

She’s telling her Beenie, “I know he can’t do it for you. And you need it. And if he can’t – won’t – I will be there. Everybody knows I’m her friend. Everybody knows I’m her man.”

Yes, Tori. But have you forgotten how to be yourself?

“I see a black dove. I see its face clearly. The dove is transparent, like it is made of ice. I can see my hand through it.” (Die Zeit, November 11, 1999)

She is so small inside of her blanket fort, telling a fairytale to herself.

We are eavesdroppers. Fly, she coos. You don’t need a spaceship. The galaxy will guide you back to the source. Find the center. Find the spark.

Every time the song dilates for a chorus it never quite recedes back to its previous size. The world expands, the voice gets surer.

She will not be the devil, but she will lie with the snakes, her sisters.

Does she really feel that cold? She never let on how insane it was in that tiny, kinda scary house. The stars she is following, they have already died.

On the other side of the galaxy.

“I had to search out clues that maybe Eastern Europe and Turkey held, to fill the harrowing emptiness that had become my solar plexus, my womb. I had been drained, literally drained.” (Piece by Piece)

Cruel is that last remnant of the Vlad the Impaler record she meant to write. The vampire album born even before the bloodletting began.

She fed this one on blood – her blood, blood of the project that she couldn’t complete, and blood of the song itself. Can you taste it, metallic on your tongue? She cut this whole track with the band just to exsanguinate it, press it to vinyl and scratch it back in, build it again.

Cruel is a cannibal.

That monolithic, distorted bass. Vine twists around the need. But, even in high winds she cannot fly. Her operatic wails brushing against marimba, the static electricity. That final chorus, throbbing, an electrical storm.

She cannot float. She cannot sustain. She does not know why.

The spark is still out.

“Once you’ve felt life in your body, you can’t go back to having been a woman that’s never carried life. The other thing is feeling something dying inside you and you’re still alive.” (Q Magazine, May 1998)

It is so murky.

Tori is underwater, her keyboards shimmering uncertainly as they refract light back up at the surface.

Light in the dark. Addicted to nicotine patches. Hooked on the cure.

Say you don’t want it, this circus we’re in, but you don’t really mean it. Take the inverse of a common theme: don’t get off the cross, but stay in the tent. Can you manage to embrace the pain and insanity? Or, will you pray for overtime – for sudden death.

Either way, you best pray that those things below where the light can reach are underwater dancers and not something more sinister.

The spark lives at the center – your pilot light. Ignition. And if that’s gone, what is left? Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. You can’t sustain life. You can’t explode.

The clock still says 6:58.

The spark blows out in a blink of the colon.

“Baby, you listen to me like you’ve never listened to me in your life – calmly you are going to have to run for you life . . . he’s going to destroy your insides. I don’t care what you tell him, but get out of there now and call me as soon as you’re outside in your car.” (Dr. Marie Dobyns, per Tori, Piece by Piece)

In which we meet our protagonist. Or, at least, in which Tori does.

Before working on the Great Expectations soundtrack, choirgirl was slated to be a different album. Tori had already experienced the miscarriage that would inspire “Spark,” and was about to embark on the research journey that would inspire “Cruel.”

The rest of the album – the trickle that flows back across the disc from “Pandora’s Aquarium,” stemmed from a second, unexpected miscarriage Tori experienced while recording vocals for what would become “Finn” on the Great Expectations soundtrack.

In her autobiography Piece by Piece Tori recounts the harrowing journey, of not only the miscarriage, but nearly being vivisected by a sadistic doctor and barely escaping with her life and womb intact.

Almost brave. Almost pregnant. Almost in love. “Siren” became the seed of the album – an early touchtone of what it would become. The production aesthetic of “Spark.” A quote of piano from the eventual extended bridge of “i i e e e.” The loss and emptiness of “Playboy Mommy.”

In “Siren” she claims, “you don’t need the light to guide you though this.”

What she meant is that her spark was gone.