u/AmericanLymie

PLEASE FORGIVE this non-Tori-specific post, but here's my rationale: I love Tori's writing and I love Shakespeare's writing and I relate them to one another because I don't know of any other writer who presents the near-totality of human experience in the way they both do. The intimately personal, the political, the mystical, the existential, fearies, tragedy and comedy all occur simultaneously in their work, all treated as equally present and real.

OK, that said, I don't love Shakespeare as an academic who is interested in dry studies, but as living literature, and I love the Folger Shakespeare Library's podcast.

I am sharing this episode because it features an interview with and actor and writer who discusses Shakespeare in the way I relate to Tori and his descriptions of Shakespeare's role in "saving my life" sounds to me exactly how people talk about Tori's role in their lives. I think some of you may appreciate this interview.

In short, Jacob Ming-Trent grew up poor, sometimes homeless, and he didn't finish high school. He nevertheless became involved in acting and he always connected with Shakespeare as "an urban poet" who he feels was doing the same thing Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls did, depicting the turmoil of urban lives through poetry.

He says that Shakespeare's writing just makes sense to him and his relationship with it not only saved his life but led him to understand the human relationships he has had that also saved his life, and toward the end of the conversation he describes how going to a theatre to watch live performances offers an unparalleled kind of human communion both with the people onstage and with the people in the audience you experience that communion with. I know those of us who "get" Tori can relate to this perspective and I have actually never heard this exact phenomenon described by fans of other musicians, so I figured I would share here. This is a great conversation worth listening to.

This is kiiiind of a small thing in the big picture, but Sunny keeps saying "When they go low, we need to go to the Earth's crust."

She means the core, right?

Not the crust. The crust is literally the ground we are standing on.

At least the mantle, Sunny. We need to go to the mantle, minimally.

This drives me crazy every time she says it and it is actually the title of Brian's podcast today so I had to finally express my annoyance. 😭😭😭

Bill Maher keeps telling us that he has not changed *at all* over time.

He donated $1 million to the Democratic party in 2012 and again $1 million to a Democratic senate majority super PAC in 2018.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Maher said:

“In 2012 I did this, but this is different. That was for my country. I thought it was very important that the first black president get a second term, and all the money in the country was going to the Republicans.”

“This time it’s a little more personal. I’m worried about this country and really what’s going to happen to it on a very existential level, including my own ass. I got a lot of messages from people yesterday saying ‘good for you,’ and I just want to say for the ones who are rich who said that: Not enough. Not enough to say that to me.”

--

A couple of observations:

Today, Maher tends to be on the white-Republican bandwagon of "stop making everything about identity! Identity is woke!" whereas he clearly stated that he invested a million dollars into getting Barack Obama elected because Obama is Black. This is a change in Bill Maher, a man who says he has not changed.

In 2018, Maher donated a million dollars to save his "own ass" because he had been such a vocal critic of Trump and made himself an enemy of the Republican party by 2018.

He effectively admitted he was afraid for himself two years into Trump's first administration. This notably was two years before COVID and two years before Black Lives Matter reached the height of its influence, which are two of the events that gave Maher an opportunity to scurry rightward and become a vocal advocate against vaccines and other aspects of public health, to gravitate toward his friend RFK Jr., and to regard all forms of social equality as "woke." (I really hate that people stopped calling it 'wokeness,' at least, instead of just 'woke,' but it does help to determine who consumes Republican MAGA media to note who does that and Maher is one of those people.)

SO: Bill Maher insists he has not changed at all, but we see that he did a 180° turnaround on identity politics after having given a million dollars to support electing a Black president and clearly stating he gave the second million out of personal fear before he opted into a public-health disinformation campaign during COVID.

Maher was a major environmentalist for decades. Now be is not. He said this to his right-wing friend Tim Allen on his podcast: “So as long as there’s 6,000 flights a day, me doing one more? I’m sorry, I’m not going to be on Greta [Thunberg]‘s sailboat, OK? Because I hear getting the s*** off that thing is a mess.”

It's probably worth noting that Maher continues to ca Elon Musk, a card-waggling white supremacist and misogynist of the Nth degree, and Peter Thiel, a certifiably insane person, geniuses, and Thiel has during multiple public interviews and private lectures said that Greta Thunberg is the literal Antichrist who has come to destroy humanity, and Maher and hardly anyone else uses Thunberg's environmentalism as a semi-regular punchline.

Bill Maher is 70 years old and he constantly refers back to his college days when he says he couldn't "get laid" and he seems to have an adolescent ego at age 70 that makes him prone to being changed in an instant by being put into close proximity with bad-boy influences like Trump, Musk, Thiel, and RFK. I wonder if that's what he means by saying he has not changed. What he supports politically has changed completely. He went from telling his audience that Trump was waging a coup against the US for the better part of a decade to dining with him and telling us Trump is a really nice and hilarious guy and we should give him more of a chance to do what's best for us, particularly on his anti-woke crusade that Maher once gave a million dollars to support.

Here is a link to the company that supplies paid actors to his show as audience members. They list the show as a client, along with Ellen Degeneres, The Real, Dancing with the Stars, and others.

The site includes a form to apply to be a paid audience clapper and a payroll portal! WOO!

I just got a press release with the subject line "Park Hills Circle (FFO Tori Amos, Kate Bush) Release New Single 'Unspoke'" and subsequently learned "FFO" means "for fans of." 😄

Anyway, I have no real knowledge of this artist but I listened to her song and it's nice sounding--I haven't paid attention to the lyrics--and figured I would share the info because I've never received an announcement of any musical artist before that compared them with Tori! Here's the announcement in case anyone is interested in discovering a new artist:

--

Chicago’s Park Hills Circle captures the quiet power of renewal on her softly sun-kissed second single “Spring Is Here,” an enchantingly dreamy folk reverie that traces the path from heartbreak to self-acceptance with warmth, grace, and a sense of gentle forward motion. - Atwood Magazine  

PARK HILLS CIRCLE’s upcoming debut album, All of a Sudden, out July 10th via Pravda Records, celebrates the thriving that comes from hard-won healing and growth— a surfacing to the light. Park Hills Circle is the genre-expansive project of Alaskan-Irish artist Maris O’Tierney, currently based in Chicago. Today, Park Hills Circle releases her latest single “Unspoke.” Cocooned in warm synth waves, “Unspoke” gently ascends from a state of depression to a revelatory sense of hope, carried by ethereal vocals [I can’t tell you why I feel more alive these days / after a certain number of miles, your breath catches up to you]. 

Maris explains: “Unspoke” emerged on a sleepless night in the wake of a heavy Chicago thunderstorm. While I was finding the daily rhythms of making my own home, after a period of living with my twin sister, I also found myself disoriented by dark depression. Looking for comfort, I took out my classical guitar, and the warm tone of the nylon strings shifted something. Words came to me after days of inner silence, and I experienced my surroundings in a surreal way: “...heat wave / we watch until the self fades / I took all the hands off the kitchen clock; / could we learn to tell time with our memory?..” When I finally fell asleep, I dreamt of my first home, the coastline of Alaska. I was a whale, swimming upward from cold ocean depths to shimmering warm sunlight above, surfacing for air: “... I can’t tell you why / I feel more alive these days / after a certain number of miles, your breath catches up to you…” Writing the rest of the song guided me through the following days. Arranging the chorus vocal harmonies felt like a gentle cushion, a feeling I wanted to create for listeners, too. The lyrics helped remind me of who I am: reflecting on the fearlessness and wonder of my childhood self; the compassion of friends who loved me even at my (and often their) lowest point; and the strength of my Irish ancestors who sang as a ritual to heal. My original guitar part informed the full arrangement of “Unspoke”, though it’s not present on the final recorded version; I intentionally peeled back that element to reveal the spectrum of light in my collaborator Aaron Otheim’s synths and piano.”

All of a Sudden holds many seasons, equal parts tender and tenacious. Its sonic world is multifaceted, from atmospheric to folk-pop, with a few jazz inflections. Maris, a classically trained guitarist and soprano (voice/opera), composes ethereal, traveling fingerstyle motifs and arranges nuanced, nested vocal harmonies. This palette is imbued with the places where she grew up: the ancient mysticism and storytelling of seaside Ireland, and the freedom and scope of mountainous Alaska.

All of a Sudden is a record of transition. Maris collaborated with her twin sister, violinist and poet Bryce, for nearly a decade in the duo Maeve & Quinn, performing, recording, and touring from their shared home in Chicago. Following Bryce’s move to Colorado, a new musical channel opened for Maris, arising from rhythms of living alone, caring for mental health, and finding trust in a romantic partnership. Maris gravitated toward her roots in classical guitar, soprano art songs and opera melodies, and experimented with arrangements on loop pedal and piano. New songs and collaborators coalesced from this imaginative space, forming the project of Park Hills Circle.

Maris recorded All of a Sudden at Chicago’s Bim Bom Studios with engineer Michael MacDonald. Her collaborations with Aaron Otheim (synths/piano) and Dustin Laurenzi (saxophone) are integral to the album’s multidimensional sound. Aaron’s shared musical sensibility and grounding in nature (his Pacific Northwest to Maris’ Alaska and Ireland) lends itself to a rich synth landscape, from dark oceanic depths to shimmering aurora heights. Dustin brings his improvisational ethos to lyrical extensions of Maris’ vocal lines, as well as textured chordal work that enhances the rhythm section of fellow jazz musicians Quin Kirchner (percussion) and Matt Ulery (bass).

The lyrics and instrumentation of All of a Sudden convey the nonlinear way we process our experiences and understand our memories over time — how growth shows us what we hold to be sacred and true. The songs are adaptive, moving deftly between styles and genres to fit the shifting emotions; not seeking to resolve emotional and relational complexities, but to hold and feel through them. The insistent guitar riff and climbing vocal lines on “Company We Keep” embody the tensions of an unraveling relationship [For all the times you chose a way out / I chose a way through]. “Clearing” inhabits a space between, its sweeping vocal chorus and saxophone outro giving voice to a keener sense-of-self when facing a beloved [I need a clearing / I need you to do more of the revealing].

The lilting, jazz-inflected vocal melody of “Spring is Here”, set to a rolling guitar motif, affirms a resilience and abundance in returning to self-love [You couldn’t see past the in between…now I’m drinking full the hours of my own company]. The album’s title track - and its closer - “All of a Sudden” further uplifts this sense of sacred, steady return [On my own, I know I’m home again], with lush fingerstyle guitar carrying on toward hopeful possibility [I still have the grief you gave me / but it’s not all I kept].

I am still seeing people complain that Tori's lyrics are "too literal," too "on the nose," not poetic or abstract enough.

The album is full of overt lyrics that are part of the narrative throughline, but I am listening to Blue Lotus, which has invaded my brain at a deep level, and the lyrics involve Tori speaking to a waterlily and burning into hazel and a thousand souls flying over steeples. I don't quite understand how when she writes like this she can be accused of writing literally.

Likewise, the closing track opens with "crazy mountains, medicine woman, 23 23 peaks" and it culminates in her pleading with dragon queens to change her back from a "half woman, half dragon thing."

I feel like objections to her being "too literal" are likely due to her explicitly using the terms "democracy," "free speech" and telling her daughter she loves her, as opposed to using abstract metaphors, but it seems to me that that is not so much an issue of her not being poetic enough and rather an issue of people preferring Tori to take them away from grounded everyday reality into a place where everything is ill defined and open to intepretation—is that it?

(I do understand that anytime she sincerely expresses love for family some people always interpret that as sentimental and Hallmark-y. I understand that even though I don't fully agree with it and although her music has always included sentimental songs as relate to her family, and so this is really not a change in her writing.)

I was disappointed by her writing on The Beekeeper because a lot of the songs use direct and metaphorical clichés like "bull in a China shop" and that felt strangely unimaginative, but that changed with future albums and I realized that she not only changes her music with every album but also her writing style, even if it's subtle sometimes. She's so intentional with everything she does that I try to work out why she makes the choices she does instead of determining that after decades of astonishing work, she just suddenly degraded.

I think that her interest in telling an album-long narrative made of fragments that add up to something greater than any individual song require that she write more literal lyrics at times to ensure the point is not overlooked entirely. For example, someone here wrote that they think the poltical theme is just a cover story for a deeply personal album about aging, and I do disagree with that, and I think that being *so* explicit about democracy and Thiel and billionaires is actually necessary so that we do not overlook her deep concern about this by determining the album is only a self-indulgent Tori being stuck in her emotions as an aging woman, as she is otherwise destined to be interpreted. I think the album deals with more than one layer of meaning simultaneously as do all her albums and to do that she has to make it disjointed in some ways, long playing, and "on the nose" at times. If she removed the explicit references to political concerns, critics and fans alike would say "it's her menopause-made-me-a-dragon statement," and I think if there's an overarching statment it's more along the lines of "as above, so below; we can run and hide for only so long, but we have to come to terms with the hardships in our lives and accept painful change so that we can move beyond it." But lyrics like the ones I opened with from Blue Lotus and other songs demonstrate that she has not lost her gift for evocative and mystical poetry. She is an adept and versatile writer who uses different writing styles to accomplish different aims.

Hi! I hope this is an appropriate question/discussion for this subreddit.

I followed a couple of agents on Instagram whose podcast I listen to and Meta's algorithm of course has recommended others and I have followed a few others. Some of the 'vibes' given off by the way some post are a bit off putting to me and I wonder if I am alone in this. My feelings are of course subjective.

The agents I initially followed post a lot of info for authors, which consist of a mix of information about how the publishing business works, motivational posts, tips for submission, etc.

Seeing updates from other agents, it is now clear that the bread-and-butter basis of agents who build online social media followings is tips about query-letter formulation. This topic seems exhaustively addressed to me for what is ultimately five or six short paragraphs written according to a strict formula in most cases, but the letter is the way to persuade gatekeepers to open the gate and let a stranger in and so I get that. Still, some agents seem to be completely focused on query letters to the full exclusion of ever addressing the writing and I see a lot of writers online seem to obsess over query letters now to the point that what I see practically suggests that any book-length manuscript is publishable if only you can create the ✨perfect✨ one-page letter to sell it. Does anyone else perceive that this is an imbalanced emphasis on query letter writing?

More to the point, I followed an agent a week or so ago who posts very 'curated' slides with tips for querying that all end with 'write this special word in the comments and I will DM you my magic formula for getting published.' OK, they don't use the words "magic formula," but stop just short of that. After seeing several of these, I looked up that agent expecting to find that they are some kind of scammer but they are listed as a legit agent on QueryTracker (although some recent commenters say they feel like the agent's friendly and inviting persona is very misleading given a tendency to ghost, etc.).

I guess my ultimate point beyond the is-it-all-really-solely-about-the-PERFECT-query-letter question is that the way some agents present themselves online feels...overly curated/branded/packaged in such a way that it ends up feeling not very human, not very authentic, and in some cases makes me feel like they are effectively presenting themselves more like online influencers for the sake of gaining followers, and I frankly don't really understand how this works in the interests of literary agents who, if they are good agents, probably already are in demand. I appreciate tips and insights and encouragement and all that good stuff. I get a little put off by scripted videos, branded slides, etc., because these feel like they've been created by a corporate entity to entice some kind of transaction from the audience, and I don't know what sort of transaction a legitimate literary agents is trying to conduct via social media given that their business involves largely fending off aspiring writers in as cordial a way as possible.

It also feels like the cultivation of aspiring writers as an online audience while ignoring and rejecting most emails are working a bit at odds in some ways, and so the attracting-to-repel strategy baffles me a bit.

I realize this post presents several different and only tangentially related thoughts but I am curious whether anyone else has had similar reactions...

Or in other words, do you consider Tori's work alongside other musicians'/singers'/artists' work, or does it have a distinct position to you?

To me, Tori's body of work is (in this order) spiritually guiding, artistically inspiring, and philosophically intriguing. So, Tori's "genres" to me are 1) spiritual; 2) fine arts; and 3) philosophy.

Most other music to me is...music in a conventional sense. It's what I listen to to be entertained, to feel good, to pass time, to add life to a room as background music. Tori's music is contemplative to me.

I know a lot of people who don't really listen to Tori would consider her or expect her to be in the "self-help" category. That seems to be a lot of the old stereotype and reason for dismissal but her music to me is nothing like the self-help gurus I have heard hawking their books. However, introspection, self-betterment and spiritual grounding are common themes.

I also regard Tori's music as literature that is enriched by musical qualities, and I do regard Kate Bush similarly in that basic regard and she is really the only other musician I think of in these terms. But even so, despite all the comparisons people make, while I recognize that their song structures sometimes are comparable, Tori to me is an essayist and an abstract confessional poet, while Kate is more of a short-story writer. They both have crossed over; a minority of Tori's songs are works of fiction with a created protagonist (Little Amsterdam, etc.) but most are not—most narrative ones are more fictionalized memoirs that serve essayistic purposes; while most of Kate's music I am familiar with really is akin to short stories about characters (again, with many exceptions).

Other songwriters whose writing I admire a lot still don't really strike me as literary. For example, I really admire Fiona Apple's writing for its wordplay and cleverness, but almost all of her music still falls into categories of standard radio-ready romance—romantic hardships, falling in love, breaking up, resenting a romantic partner, etc.—and while she did go beyond this with her latest album she still doesn't create what I would consider to be literature that stands up to deep thematic analysis and that adds up to something more profound and illuminating as a whole body of work—something that can be argued as comparable to Shakespeare's body of work and stand up to rebuttals.

Sooo...is Tori's music like other music to you, just perhaps music that you prefer, or do you regard it as something else entirely?

"Amos tackles her allegory with dramatic relish. This version of politically charged music resembles a fable or fairytale, not the chants and slogans of a demo."

I think this line is useful to understanding the nature of the album and most of Tori's work, if anyone is seeking resolution on whether the dragons are meant to be good or bad, or if anything else is.

Album-Tori was taught by the blue lotus to understand that events that have haunted and hounded her *can* be friends. She can stop running from them and become acquainted with them on their own terms, and she does, and it's freeing—a thousand souls over steeples.

It's not a full resolution. She can't outrun what haunts her. She can get to know them and ally with them in some way that is mutually freeing. She does the same thing throughout her body of work, from sitting down and drinking tea with Lucifer resulting in floating, to ten days of hell in Satan's cell resulting in her climbing out, to Cactus Practice and other metaphysical experiences, often through a psychoactive substance/plant medicine.

The hauntings are still hauntings and to others that is probably scary and dark but once she is able to relate to them directly, she comes to a point of understanding and integration instead of trying to run or hide or fight. I think the dragons are pretty similar to that—not all good, not all bad, but powerful enough to terrify and it's necessary to integrate with the dragon to heal. And the exchange with the daughter is the same principle: whatever secret is in their lineage, Tori was always afraid to admit it because she didn't want her daughter to have to live with it—but her daughter always had it in her veins and denying it only brought tension and self-destructive shame, so accepting it was necessary to find resolution. In all cases, with supernatural, familial, and other situations, "the only way out is through," and I think that's at the heart of the album. It's also compatible with Tori's ethos of "You must out-create; it's the only way." Creation typically involves destroying something to assemble it into something new.

I think I somehow integrated this lesson from Tori subconsciously a long time ago because I once went to a psychic with a coworker for kicks, and the psychic told my coworker that "you have two demons attached to you" and it freaked her out. (Even realizing the psychic was trying to upsell a cleaning...) I saw her without knowing what she had told my friend and the psychic told me I had a demon attached to me (only one! Go me!) and that my creativity would be blocked until I had it cleared away. I told the psychic that I don't really have a big circle of friends, and if the demon chose me and wants to be friends enough to stick to me, then I should at least give it a shot. She had no idea what to say. 🤭

I feel this discovery is significant enough to share with everyone!

I know Tori likes Tolkien but I don't know what he wrote about dragons.

I did watch Game of Thrones and so I know Danerys was "the dragon queen," and I know that George R. R. Martin's stories do include "times of dragons," or eras during which dragons come into being and then times when they are no longer extant or at least active.

I am sure Tori's references are not closely tied to anyone's specific stories, but I am curious if "dragon queen" and eras of dragons are specific to Martin's writing or if they may be fantasy tropes.

Just wondering out of curiosity.

I am an absolute dinosaur in that I still pay to download music from iTunes to my phone. I do this because I've been doing it since I had an iPod, and virtually all of my music of the past 20 years has been transferred from phone to phone, and I commute to work on foot, so listening to music through my phone is most convenient.

Black is the New Black is not available via iTunes, which bums me out. However, I just realized that the long-elusive Forest of Glass now is available to be downloaded via iTunes, which is was not for a very long time...

And it all makes me wonder how and why music distributors determine to put out an album on virtually all platforms, but this song only on this platform, that song only on that one, this song on six of eight platforms, and this one only within one postal code of Mozambique. Like...whyyyy? I understand why they do it on different physical releases so that people will be forced to buy multiple versions (Hello, Taylor Swift. I see you.), but restricting them from a certain type of format that a person uses exclusively seems to be counterproductive. I can't buy a vinyl LP and get the song from that onto my phone, which is virtually the only way I listen to music.

So how are these calculations made?

I know there will be no remedy for this problem, but I'm dying to know how the businesspeople determine these tactics.

P.S. If you are one of the people who does make these decisions, THANK YOU for posting the instrumental version of Dragons to iTunes, and THANK YOU for finally making Forest of Glass available. I love Forest of Glass soooo much and it drove me insane that the only way I could listen to it for years was through a CD, which I was only able to play in my old car.

My MCAS is usually pretty well controlled these days. Most of my symptoms are annoying rather than life affecting thanks to treatments that have been working.

About three weeks ago I traveled for work by plane just for a couple of days and I was extremely fatigued when I returned home. I made it to work for a couple of days but crashed and was in bed all weekend. I then developed a mild cough and some mild sinus issues and realized I may be sick instead of just exhausted.

I mentioned this to my allergist/immunologist last week when I got my Xolair shots and he listened through his stethoscope and said I probably have a mild respiratory infection, probably viral, but he gave me a 'z pack' prescription and told me to fill it if I am still coughing in a couple of days to make sure it doesn't turn into a bacterial infection.

I filled the Rx two days ago and I took the first two pills night before last. No reaction. It was fine. Last night, I took a pill right before I went to bed and I woke up at 10:30 with fluid coming up my esophagus into my mouth that burned my throat and my mouth. I ran to the bathroom and gagged/threw up a little bit, and then I sat up for about a half hour drinking water. My abdomen is extremely swollen with a feeling of uncomfortable pressure. I went back to bed. Hours later, I began to feel chilly despite the room being 70 degrees and being under two heavy blankets. Then I was shivering and shaking violently. I eventually willed myself to get up and put heavier clothes and blankets on and I took a Tylenol. After a while, I warmed up and then became very hot and clammy, as happens when a fever goes down.

Was this a fever or was it MCAS? I suspect it's some kind of cytokine flare-up or something and not a fever because it happened suddenly, not long after I took the antibiotic, and I have not had a fever or felt feverish in the several weeks I have felt mildly ill. I read that azithromycin is particularly irritating to the gastrointestinal system and I have pretty bad GERD that seems to be related to my MCAS.

I am still a little shaky, and I feel hot and clammy. My stomach is still swollen. I made it to work and I regret it because today is my birthday and everyone is bombarding me with excited messages and asking me what I am going to do tonight and I am so frustrated because I feel terrible.

If this is an MCAS reaction, does anyone have any remedies that can help at all? I'm drinking a lot of water. I took my antihistamines this morning as always. I don't know what else I can do.

I know better than to go with my immediate impressions of any Tori song or album because almost without exception, I have been initially confounded or simply disappointed by sounds of songs and then later, having become accustomed to what they are doing, have a great appreciation for them. A couple of examples have been Battle of Trees and Cloud Riders, which I found too boring to listen to all the way through initially and then in short order came to love deeply.

I didn't feel exactly that way about Stronger Together, but I didn't have a very strong reaction one way or another. I thought, "This is...nice," along the lines of "Promise," and I lumped it into one of the "Tori & Tash mother-daughter" songs, which I have a certain appreciation for but it is a distinctly different type of appreciation than I have for songs I really love--more of a supportive "good for them!" than a "this moves me" type of response.

After we had the three singles (Hush, Gasoline Girls, Stronger Together), I realized that I already had a better appreciation for Stronger Together as it played after the other two because it offered an uplifting and more hopeful feeling after some emotionally challenging stuff.

Now, in the context of the full album, this song is *not* in the same class as "Promise" for me. It does of course operate on the mother-daughter-supportive-relationship level. But it's preceded by Blue Lotus, this album's alchemical-transfiguration song (in my mind along the lines of Bang and Metal, Water, Wood) and it precedes the emotionally devastating 23 Peaks, and I find the placement of the song to add a huge amount of hope, a different level of soulfulness, to the climax and resolution of the album. Blue Lotus takes me elsewhere and 23 Peaks sends me elsewhere, and Stronger Together is grounded in the here and now. Tori journeys inward in Blue Lotus and outward in 23 Peaks, and in Stronger Together she finds and shares and lends strength to her daughter in a way that sounds bright and even triumphant. I feel like interjecting a "triumph" and a peaceful emotional resolution before 23 Peaks makes 23 Peaks much less bleak and it helps me to interpret it more as a natural and necessary progression than a loss. Tori also sings in it that "we can face all of this together," which implies a future in which she will take action, not a finite ending.

1. "If the aim was to out-bonkers Joanna Newsom and Kate Bush while creating a compelling album, Amos has more than succeeded."

>!NOH!<

1. "It adds up to one of the most purposeful full-length statements in her quarter-century career."

>!NI!<

1. "Folks will either freak out over this album or abhor its very existence, and that is exactly what makes it so good."

>!UG!<

1. "The power and import of the record is undeniable."

>!SLG!<

1. "As usual, her melodies stubbornly refuse to turn into hooks, preferring to twirl into new territory. But her approach suits the material..."

>!SW!<

1. "She's been de-emphasizing hysterics for a while now, and here she mostly sings prettily, but still powerfully."

>!TB!<

1. "Amos clearly is talented...But there's a fine line between precocious and precious, and even when she's "fucking the piano"...Amos has always seemed very conscious of her charms."

>!BFP!<

1. "Amos sounds so tranquil she could almost be floating, but the stateliness...keeps the songs grounded."

>!MG!<

1. "Amos’s best album in recent memory for the way it manages to combine the strengths of her early music while incorporating newfound restraint and perspective."

>!O2O!<

NOTE: I didn't word the opening well and I can't edit it. Each of the above quotes is from a DIFFERENT album review. Nine different albums are reflected above.