Tori Amos

“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.

Once upon a time I bought a Tori Amos album even though I didn’t really love her, and it became my favorite album of all time.

Once upon a time I bought a Tori Amos album and decided to write an essay for every song on it live on my blog during my first listen.

Eleven years past the former and seven and a half after the latter, today I’ll combine the two to celebrate the eleventh birthday of Tori Amos’s modern-day classic from the choirgirl hotel, which I first heard on a Tuesday eleven years ago today.

Check CK every hour of today for the latest choirgirl fix.