When listening to Tori Amos it almost feels that you are joining her on a spiritual journey in which she alone knows the final destination and she will lead you blindfold past the final signpost whilst holding your heart carefully as she goes. Such is the timeless beauty of Scarlett’s Walk that it easily ranks in the top three studio releases by the enigmatic piano player.
Tori Amos’ seventh studio album, the criss-cross look at her native America after the events of September 11th 2001 is highlighted throughout the stunning musical landscapes that Tori builds for anyone taking the time to look beyond the surface of American life. The beauty in the songs is only matched by the sorrow the listener feels as the protagonist, Scarlett/Tori journeys across America and reports to the listener on what and who she encounters on her travels.
The split personality feel that Tori Amos uses so well in this album was further employed to a greater effect in the exceptional 2007 album American Doll Posse. However by using the voice of another woman, the thoughts are able to become displaced as if offering a separate commentary itself on how America viewed itself after the attacks on New York and Washington. By employing the use of Scarlett, Tori is able to bring the stories to life in a way that didn’t make the fan or listener think immediately of Tori’s personal life crashing into her songs as in her phenomenal debut solo album of Little Earthquakes or from 1998’s From the Choirgirl Hotel.
Tori uses the songs in such a way, that the undercurrent of innocence is easily corrupted from the start. The ethereal beauty of the start of Amber Waves has the knowing of pornography at its very heart, the destructive forces that blight gilded promises and trap young women into the dark world of illicit and potentially harmful films. Scarlett/ Tori reminisces of a friend who was at one time a promising ballet dancer but found herself doing lap dances before descending into the seedy world of back room pornography stores as one of its stars.
The rites of passage that Tori sings of is the antipathies of the boy’s own books of the start of the previous century. Tori seems to show the dichotomy between the aspiration of both centuries and between male and female gender possibilities without going becoiming vulgar. Where boys were encouraged to show their masculine dominance by copying and aping the behaviour of the heroes of the past, girls, especially in this form were just prized for their beauty. It is this beauty that is able to see the other side of man dominate and in some cases abuse women mentally as well as physically.
The album really gets going with the following songs, the enlightening A Sorta Fairytale, the brilliant Wednesday and Strange. A Sorta Fairytale is a song that stands out on an album littered with sensual and intelligent tracks. The song again suggests the mixed brain that is America, at its heart the old ways of the native American which Tori espouses so well in both this and the incredible Wampum Prayer. Tori touches on the split in American psyche as she sings the lines, “Down near Mexico Way, something about the open road. I knew he was looking for some Indian blood and find a little in you, find a little in me…” This open ended line leads the listener to wonder if the man is looking for a fight, to spill blood or in a pseudo sexual metaphor in which Tori’s own Native American heritage and that the man rather than spoiling for a fight in a possible fit of revenge is actually looking to have an encounter with someone of pure American blood-line.
Perhaps the best songs on the album are arguably the track mrs jesus and the searching, haunted, lonely, desperate voice of I Can’t See New York. Mrs jesus has the feel of British poet Carol Ann Duffy in her 1999 collection, The World’s Wife. In the book Carol Ann Duffy speculates of the lives of women attached to famous men throughout history such as Charles Darwin, Tiresias, Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway and Icarus and reports on them from a female perspective. Tori Amos/ Scarlett uses a similar imagery by using the song as a metaphor for the life of Mary Magdalene and whilst not as caustic or vociferous as Carol Ann Duffy’s observations on the male of the species, Tori uses the chance to ask for recognition in the life of Mary Magdalene. One of the telling lines in this beautiful song is the use of the meaning about changing gospels. It gives the split personality of America, from its politics, mainly Democrat on coastal areas and Republican in its heartlands to its rights of man/woman over the centuries, progressive in the north and in some parts of the south, chillingly staid.
I Can’t See New York is perhaps the most haunting, brutal in its imagery and undeniably brilliant in its perspective of the moments leading up the minute where America perhaps split itself in half once more. Not in a religious or political divide but in the way it became insular in its security but also treading the world stage as its alleged moral compass trying to damn any country that wasn’t with it.
Tori’s haunting vocals are simple, powerful and unsettling. The song deals with a plane coming into one of New York’s airports. Whether she is one of the planes that went into the Twin Towers is not for discussion. It is the thought that she has no idea what is going on. The confusion in her head is palpable and the loss of a visible sight line as the plane descends through the mist and clouds sends shudders down the spine. The girl sings throughout the song title in the lyrics which gives it an echo like effect and as she mentions right at the start of the song, “From here no lines are drawn…” which alludes to the boundaries that America had prized so highly as never having its mainland attacked by a foreign power. The song will resonate with anyone who lived through 9/11 in New York or flying over the city a couple of years later when the great blackout of the city caused panic.
One of the three great albums produced by Tori Amos and her various musicians in a very long career, astonishing, critical and perhaps one of the great introspectives of American life post 2001. Scarlett’s Walk is not just an album; it is part travelogue and part analysis of a United States of America that at its heart is still divided by opinion and by itself.
Ian D. Hall