Eating Toast with Tori

Leaf 172 – Art Inspired

 

Tori Amos - Under the Pink (1994)

Tori Amos’s ‘Under the Pink’ (1994) was one of those albums which I played over and over when it first came out. That and her first album, ‘Little Earthquakes’ (1992), were among my favourites – along with other contemporary albums by Pearl Jam, REM, INXS, U2, Crowded House, Suede, and James. These were the bands who defined my teenage years during the 1990s. I must have bought the single, ‘Cornflake Girl’, before I bought the album. It featured the song, ‘Sister Janet’, as its b-side. The lyrics of ‘Cornflake Girl’ reminded me of my own primary school; in the playground of which, aged around five years old, we all wanted to be in the Bee Gang. Eventually I got to be in the Bee Gang, and was supremely disappointed to find out that there was little more to being in the Bee Gang than simply being able to say you were in the Bee Gang. An early bathetic awakening of sorts in the manifold mysteries of human life exposed for the fraud-like shams which they always essentially are, perhaps? – Hence, the cryptic lyrics of Amos’s songs appealed to me. One critic in the NME at the time described listening to ‘Under the Pink’ as like “being locked inside a semantic castle.” Enchanting, obscure, dark and light, sinister and yet playful – it seemed to me to glint like a poetic mirror ball slowly turning in my mind. One line from ‘Sister Janet’ though always pops into my mind whenever I am making breakfast and always makes me smile, because I still don’t fully fathom what it might actually mean …

 

 

TOAST

 

Every morning –

I hum in my head

a Tori Amos tune,

while slipping a buttered

blade in the marmalade.