- The worldwide COVID19 pandemic has ripped the creative arts industry into shreds. No artist, whether it be stage, screen, recording studio or corner bar has been left untouched by the savageness of the impact lockdowns, isolation orders and the toll the virus has taken on everyone physically, emotionally and mentally. Tori Amos has been open about the effect these last near two years have had on her psyche – and not just the effects of the pandemic but the extraordinary savaging of the democratic process in her homeland of the USA by one of the pandemic's greatest allies, the forty-fifth President of that so-called democracy and his unhinged followers and enablers.
Ocean to Ocean was born out of those twin devastations – a savage third lockdown in the UK, where Amos lives with her sound engineer husband Mark Hawley and her now young adult daughter, Tash Hawley and the insurrection at the US Capitol building in Washington D.C. on January 6th, 2021. Amos is an artist who deeply unpacks the world around her in her music, as well as the side projects she has on the go – a musical (The Light Princess), writing two memoirs, the most recent Resistance: A Songwriter’s Story of Hope, Change, and Courage coming out at the height of the first phase of the pandemic last year and collaborations with equally eclectic creatives like Neil Gaiman. This latest full-length album may have been born out of a place of anguish and loss but it drips with melodies that can ease the stress and tension the world is experiencing, something Amos acknowledges is her task, to accept the discombobulation that has happened and use it as the fuel to create a balm for the bruised and battered.
Opening with a lush sonic sweep that perhaps hasn’t been used by Amos since her 2007 American Doll Posse album, Addition Of Light Divided throbs with life and an energy that will launch the listeners into a track of deep personal resonances for Amos, Speaking with Trees, the first single off the album. Equally full of energy and light, lyrically it is a typically cryptic weaving of words by Amos, honouring her late mother who died in 2019. The connection between Amos and her family, particularly her mother, who suffered a stroke in 2016 and much of the content of her last album Native Invader is informed by that experience and Amos’s heritage as a born and raised North Carolinian. For the second single Spies Amos takes a fun, rollicking track that speaks to her daughter and Amos herself “being terrorised” by various nocturnal animals and creepy-crawlies that seemed to infest their Cornish home during that long third lockdown.
Amos has spoken of being deeply influenced by the area in which she has lived for just over twenty years. The myths and legends of Cornwall are some of the most mysterious and compelling in the British Isles and Amos has used this connection to create songs like Devil’s Bane and How Glass Is Made and if not directly, the influence of this spirituality is definitely there. Another angle Amos takes is to spread her musical canvas wider and in some enticing areas. On 29 Years there is the subtle hint of a reggae-based rhythm and Metal Water Wood has a lot of an early '80's angular pop that doesn’t let go, as lyrically it takes aim at how to deal with the world as it gives you knockdown after knockdown.
Amos’s primary instrument is the piano, Flowers Burn to Gold thus stands out for its simplicity as a song with its performer and her instrument, in an album that has a great wall of sound approach in the songs either side of it. The feel of the album is as wide as the title, and given that said album was also created with musical collaborators as far away from Cornwall as Boston, Massachusetts and Los Angeles, California it seems appropriate that it ends with Birthday Baby a song that is epic in its musical scope.
This pandemic hasn’t been kind, especially if you are an exceptional creative like Tori Amos. She has said that she told herself “You need to write yourself out of this private little hell” and thank the Maker she did. Ocean to Ocean is one of her very best and will stand the test of time when these two years of torment are but a distant, somewhat jagged-edge memory.
- Blair Martin.