IN TIMES OF DRAGONS.

Time for a double album by Tori Amos. This isn’t a review. At this stage in her career, many reviews come in two flavours.
   One: Delighted. I haven’t enjoyed an album of hers so much since I listened to ALBUM OF HERS I ENJOYED SO MUCH.
   Two: Disappointed. I haven’t enjoyed an album of hers since LAST ALBUM OF HERS I ENJOYED.
   By the presence of these typed words, go with the idea that I consider this double album a hit. Here, we have an artist looking to the future and how the fuck we got there. So, yes, there are references to the past on this sonic sprawl of a musical map. One of those references I found jaw-dropping, but we’ll get to that bit.
   Direct musical reference that jumps off the album and slaps you hard with candy-floss? SILENT ALL THESE YEARS. Tori sang that on her first…I keep reminding myself of this. Her second first album. There was a first first album, but we don’t talk about that in case we frighten the horses. Y KANT TORI READ was her first first album. It died foaming at the mouth, shot in the street and left for the coyotes to fight over. The winning coyote feasted on the remains and then died of dysentery.
   Her album dived, bombed, dive-bombed, sank, tanked, stiffed, corpsed, croaked, and came into foot-based contact with the bucket. There’s this thing in Hollywoodland. You walk into a place and people stare at you to see if you are famous. Then the same people try not to look as though they’ve recognised you, presuming you are famous.
   After that awkward moment, people go back to their drinks, meals, drugs, or whatever entertains them on their phones in the dying minutes of a society that’s about to replace phones with brain implants.
   In Tori’s case, she’d appear on the scene and people instantly recognised her as the girl whose album just dived, bombed, dive-bombed, sank, tanked, stiffed, corpsed, croaked, and came into foot-based contact with the bucket. Awkward moment is awkward.
   So we don’t talk about that album as her first. It’s a pre-career foray into pleasing the record company and no one else. Come to think of it, not even the record company – pointing at its watch, and eyeing the contract for those other albums in the works.
   For a long time, I didn’t buy the damned thing. Hell of a long time. I guess talking to someone else who was really into her music, I learned it wasn’t the end of the world if you listened to those early tunes. By the time I bought the album, somewhere along the way, I’d learned that CYNTHIA ROTHROCK IS CHINA O’BRIEN.
   Tori reeled from how shitty the music business can be. Some diseases it’s best to catch early in life. So she hired herself out to sing on the soundtrack of Cynthia’s martial arts movie. I’m guessing I saw the film seconds before I encountered Tori’s first album, Little Earthquakes. We don’t talk about the earlier album.
   Y KANT TORI READ. Why can’t Tori spell? Then she’d be Tori Spelling. What of this album? There are enough prototype songs on there. With a spot of music production wizardry, hell, they wouldn’t be too out of place on Tori’s first two albums: Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink. After listening to the pre-album album, I realised the world kept rolling through space.
   Of interest to see where she was heading, certainly. Everything around the album was forced through the soul-destroyer, pressed into the cookie-cutter, and slapped against the wall of popular culture to see what would stick. Not much. She was fucking buried under over-production. No one came to the funeral, so she clawed her way back out.
   Not today, Satan, not today. And so she bounced off the headstone, felt the pain of seeing a blurry career inscription there, and carried the fuck on. Carrying on brought the world Little Earthquakes. Two songs behind her, Tori sings Silent all these Years. And many albums later, in these times, IN TIMES OF DRAGONS, Tori references that song.
   It’s one of several references to the past as a reflecting wall, distorted in the heat-haze, showing us how the fuck we reached the future. Yes, there’s a harpsichord. And when you hear it on this release, you are legally obliged to think of BOYS FOR PELE. The harpsichord album. PELE was so much more than that. The first album she produced. PELE was so much more than that.
   Incidentally, Tori placed a reference going back to an earlier work long before all this. BOYS FOR PELE gave us HEY JUPITER. The line took my leather off the shelf is a direct reference to Little Earthquakes and the song LEATHER. Fight me, internet, but not too hard. Play the songs. Peace in our time. You believe me, now. Wasn’t so difficult, was it?
   So. No. She’s not new to referencing earlier albums.
   Tori has played the harpsichord since BOYS FOR PELE gave us a song about a PROFESSIONAL WIDOW. But the harpsichord reference here is deliberately throwing us back to that place in space-time. Y’know the place. Where she threw men into the volcano for reasons of peace and understanding. BOYS FOR PELE is so much more than that.
   IN TIMES OF DRAGONS. Harpsichording back to earlier times. The jaw-dropping reference, if you know, you know, but we’ll never really know…is a reference to an album, a band, the lead singer of that band. Holy fuck. What is going on here?
   This line, from the first track, SHUSH…
   Preamble. Before we hit the line, Tori asks CAN I LIVE THROUGH THIS? Okay. Let’s list the line. Courtney, thank you. The album referenced is Live Through This, by the band HOLE, fronted by Courtney Fucking Love. What was the feud about? Was there ever really a feud? If you know, you know. But we’ll never truly know.

YOKO ONO: Why the fuck do they all hate me so much?

COURTNEY FUCKING LOVE: Hold my fucking beer that I just pissed in. Wait. It’s someone else’s beer. Hold it anyway. I’ll come back and piss in it. Like an autograph. You’ll want to freeze that. For posterity and shit. I’ll come back and shit in the piss in the beer before you freeze it. Wait there.

Tori and Courtney had a feud. Or didn’t have one. If they’d never met, where was this feud? How could they feud with a door between them…how close did they come to meeting? And who was it all about? Trent Reznor? Was he the war-wounded neutral Swiss teddy bear these two fought over, with everyone discarding everyone else long before the non-dust settled, and tell-all tell-nothing songs written after the non-fact…just subtracted from the lore…
   I don’t know. The whole thing plays out like an alternative universe history, stuck in a feverish supervillain movie. Occasionally, the supervillain action is punctuated by intrusive superhero moments, but the villains soon triumph. We can rewind as much or as little as we like. All we can genuinely say is…there’s a persistent idea of a feud that involved those three people or none of those three people. Mr Reznor, that TRON album, though.
   But to reference an album by HOLE and to follow it up with a thank you to Queen Courtney. Yes, that’s jaw-dropping. The harpsichord callback. Many other ingredients here. A lot of looking at things way over yonder in that other country of the past. They record things differently there.
   That girl who wrote and sang SILENT ALL THESE YEARS. Where did she go? Across the world. What did she see? More things to write songs about.
   There’s rumbling, grumbling, from people who preferred her early work. “When she was angry.” You do know she’s angrier now, right? She sets fire to pianos by playing them, not soaking them in petrol. Anger is a scalpel in her hand. Before, in the early work, it was a flamethrower on her back. And I’m all for the flamethrower, believe me. But the scalpel is the tool of choice, now, when it comes to anger. And it is a delight to hear Tori wield it.
   I didn’t come here to review the album, or her other albums. Though I quickly revisited Little Earthquakes, BOYS FOR PELE, from the choirgirl hotel and Unrepentant Geraldines. And I heartily recommend you do the same. I always misremember from the choirgirl hotel as greetings from the choirgirl hotel. Can’t seem to shake that. (Phrasing from an earlier blog post that’s seared into my brain.)
   Underrated Geraldines. I underrate that one myself. It’s a hazy misty experience walking away from it. When I return to it, I remember the album while I’m there. Now choirgirl, documenting turmoil, stays with me long after the music stops. IN TIMES OF DRAGONS sent me back through a winding path that looks different now, from way over here in the future.
   The sparkles on the pathway are the same. But the path itself changed, with time’s perspective. What does the album imagery remind me of, in the accompanying booklet? The artwork of Dave McKean. I’ll just leave that thought on the part of the pathway blocked off by thorns, nature’s defence mechanism telling us to go around, and move on.
   What of my retrospective, in light of listening to the dragon-themed songs? I paid particular attention to BOYS FOR PELE and the song PROFESSIONAL WIDOW. And I still don’t know. We’ll never know.
   What we do know, though, is that Tori sings to and about Courtney Love this time around. The themes, the concept to the concept double album, these I leave you to discover, uncover, ponder, meander across, and wade through by yourself. What I really came here to talk about…was this. Technical issues.
   I took the CD from the cardboard, as I’ve done countless times when opening albums up to inspection. Love me some physical media. I had a decision ahead of me. Pop the disc into a machine that would play music. Or pop the disc into a machine plugged into my computer, and rip the CD to my hard drive.
   Just so you know. When I pay for a CD, I can legally make a back-up copy for my own emergency use. Tori isn’t done out of her royalty payment. I get to play the album without hunting around for it. If the CD pressing rots away, I have my back-up in the fantastical musical archive. Emergency thwarted. Inconvenience foiled. Some companies give you digital access to a copy through Amazon when you buy the disc anyway. Lose the Amazon account, though, and. Smell that? I love the smell of physical media in the morning.
   Which brings me to the fantastical musical archive known as Windows Media Player: it is not what it once was. I liked the best version best, and everything “updated” and “improved” after that has been, frankly, rubbish. Summary. I decided to rip both discs, one after the other.
   First, I turned the volume off. The music starts up during the ripping process. Didn’t want to hear the album ahead of hearing the album. I’d copy both discs, and then start playing.
   Well, I copied both discs over. (Or did I?) In the olden times, you’d copy the disc and all the information sat there. Album. Artist. Year of first publication. Titles of every track. You didn’t have to type nuthin’. Nuthin’, I tells ya. That’s all changed. Scoured away. You can’t search for it and match it all up from internet sources. Laboriously, you must type everythin’. Everythin’, I tells ya.
   I glanced at the track titles on the cardboard. Information, just waiting. First of the two album listings. Last track caught my eye. STRAWBERRY MOON. I wouldn’t look to the lyrics until I’d listened to the music. So there I am. The music is queued up and ready. I have to make the time to listen to it, and I do.
   Of course I enjoy the album. Double album. Concept. What am I looking for? Tori putting the word girl into yet another song. Anything else? Tori putting the word here into yet another song. She does...and she does.
   First disc. That last track, though. It builds like a full song, but it stops short abruptly, leaving me wanting more. I guess that’s her aim. Leave the listeners hungry and then dive on in, tackling the second disc. Right? It stays with me. STRAWBERRY MOON. Ominous. Lasts about 22 seconds.
   Then I am into the second album. Builds and builds. Theme. Musical styles. The piano. I came for the piano, and stayed for the harpsichord. After that, there was no walking away from Tori’s work. Harpsichord. Damn. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
   It is time to go back in and do all the typing for the musical archive. And I see that the first album is one track short. Technical difficulties. Wait. Which track is missing? If STRAWBERRY MOON is 22 seconds and there’s something missing, then the copying procedure cut out before ripping the whole album. I do some cross-referencing, and I find tracks with each duration listed.
   Okay. STRAWBERRY MOON never made it to the computer at all, and the 22 seconds I listened to…that slice came from a song called VEINS: it cut off at a pause in the lyrics that left me thinking this was an incredibly bold move for a song – just fucking stopping. Even by Tori’s standards, way out there. And she’s way out there. Obviously, I didn’t know it was a pause in the lyrics. To me, the whole thing stopped. Now I knew better.
   Time to fix this. I added the two full songs to the album. What I thought was the STRAWBERRY MOON, up close, proved to be VEINS. Not STRAWBERRY MOON at all. Then it was time to listen to STRAWBERRY MOON. And that’s when the album spoke to me. Throwing in a joke. For the hell of it.
   Out of the aether, and I do love me some aether, came the words: THAT IS NOT STRAWBERRY MOON! I know many a true word is spoken in jest, but, fucking hell…