All My CDs, pt 1: Under the Pink

In the dozen or so years since I started buying CDs, I’ve amassed a genuine collection. I hardly have the time any more to listen to all of them on a regular basis, so there are some that I haven’t heard in years - even a few that I’ve never listened to since the day I bought them. I don’t want to be the kind of music-lover who owns, but never listens to, the albums on her shelf. I think of this collection not as a record of my past tastes, but a thing to be enjoyed in its entirety for the rest of my life. To that end, I’ve decided to renew my appreciation for these albums.

Here’s how it’s going to happen. One by one, starting with the one on the top left of this shelf, I’m going to listen to and review each and every CD I own. They’ll go in the order they’re currently shelved in, which is roughly alphabetical, but maybe not strictly. And until each one has been listened to and reviewed, I won’t buy any new CDs. Sound fair?

Okay, let’s begin.

Under The Pink - Tori Amos

In February of 2007, I was 19, a late bloomer, and recently rejected for the first time by someone I had fallen hard for. In his words, he “really valued my friendship” - a platitude often meant insincerely, but in this case apparently true. He and I remain very close friends to this day. Still, to say that it depressed me would have been an understatement. I was devastated.

At the time I had been listening to Pandora internet radio, and my favorite personalized station had been built around the collaboration between Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet known as The Juliet Letters. The similar music that Pandora’s algorithms chose for me often had distinctive singers accompanied by string or piano with an acoustic, artsy style, and one of the songs that frequently came up was Tori Amos’s Baker Baker. Its lovelorn lyrics and melancholy melody echoed my inner state in the wake of that heartbreak, and I bought the album so I could listen to it more often. My young self was instantly enamored with this artist I had heard so much about.

Seven years later, the album is still adept at plucking my tenderest heartstrings. For me music, more so than many other art forms, is the language of the heart where it diverges from the mind. Tori Amos, with her emotive voice and often extra-rational words, is particularly fluent in that language. My experience of Under the Pink as an album has evolved since that first listening, but remains as strong. Having weathered several breakups since then, including the breaking of my engagement less than a month before the wedding, Baker Baker has a few more bittersweet memories attached to it. It inhabits a space in the healing process somewhere between regret and acceptance - the mind is still searching for a way back, while the heart knows that time can only move forward.

Most of the album is similarly artful and melancholy, with thoughtful but largely figurative language that takes some attention and imagination to really appreciate. The topics, once parsed, are far-ranging and occasionally taboo-breaching, as with Icicle, which brazenly addresses the uncomfortable subject of children’s’ sexuality and is even so bold as to juxtapose it with religious imagery. The sinister Bells for Her carefully avoids facing its true subject directly, but its fearful-sounding piano and ominous  vocal tone betrays its reference to the intimate danger that inspires such silence in its victims. “I said you don’t need my voice ‘cause you have your own...”

Other songs are less contemplative than disruptive. Then, as now, God is a bit too discordant for my taste, and I’m uncommonly tolerant of discord. This Waitress also gets my goat, even though (perhaps because?) I understand how belief in peace does not necessarily quench the desire to kill. Cornflake Girl is more to my liking when I’m in the mood for something with a beat. I’m still not sure what a cornflake girl is, but still suspect that I never was one either. Plus it’s fun to sing “You bet your life it is!” at the top of your voice on the highway.

Pretty Good Year seems to tie the whole thing together, and makes an appropriate first track, somehow encompassing a multitude of complimentary moods in a relatively short and light-filled space. In contrast Yes Anastasia, the concluding track, is a sprawling ten-minute opus exploring a world of mostly-dark themes. If I had to choose a favorite (and cultural convention says that I must) then this would be it, if only because of its length. I never really want a good song to end, and this one takes a satisfyingly long time to build its first tentative notes into a rousing and energetic climax.

Even after all these years there are several songs whose meanings elude me, though I enjoy them as much as the rest of the album. The Wrong Band, Cloud on My Tongue, and Space Dog are as enjoyable as they are incomprehensible, and serve to remind me that art need not be fully accessible to be appreciated. Somewhere between the voice and the instruments, the words and their sound, lies a magical, ineffable connection to the transcendent. Perhaps, with more years and more listenings, I will start to get a feeling of what these songs mean for me. Until then, I will simply enjoy them as beautiful nonsense.

Next time: Little Earthquakes