Content warning: this episode briefly discusses DV and suicide. Please take care while listening.
“So what if you find you like to tango alone?" Tori Amos asks in the final moments of “Birthday Baby," the closing track of her 15th solo album Ocean to Ocean, released on October 21, 2021. An ode to the unexpected ways we collectively learned to both mourn and celebrate during the years-long isolation of the COVID-19 crisis, the song vacillates between a rousing eleven o'clock musical number and something a David Lynch character might sob inconsolably to while draped over a diner jukebox.
This juxtaposition is the essence of Tori, who has been masterfully weaving the familiar, strange, tender, and unsettling for over 30 years. What immediately distinguished Ocean to Ocean upon release from Amos’ previous records, though, was its timeliness, an album written and recorded during the most hopeless heights of a global pandemic, released into a world that had barely begun to scratch the surface of its shared trauma.
Never one to shy away from documenting her own emotional turbulence, Tori allowed Ocean to Ocean to wear its melancholy on its sleeve. It’s a record inspired and consumed by loss – loss of connection to others, loss of the self, loss of Tori's beloved mother Mary – and the process of trying to piece together both who we were before the storm and who we might become on the day after. The result is a tight, cohesive collection of songs that expertly articulates and somehow finds meaning in the deepest recesses of despair.
Ocean to Ocean is ultimately both a technical triumph -- Tori recorded virtually from her home studio in Cornwall, England with longtime collaborators Matt Chamberlain, Jon Evans, and John Philip Shenale (quite literally oceans apart) -- and a triumph of the spirit, Tori finding the artistic and emotional strength to recontextualize a year of losses into a record of rebirth.
So, stay with Joey, Kristen, and Matt as they unravel the gorgeous, generous fishing net that is Ocean to Ocean.
"Get Out of that Pain," a conversation between Joey and Tori for BOMB magazine: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2020/05/06/tori-amos-resistance
Tiny Desk Concert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SufUZu4h_m8
JV playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7zhxFp9ESB5WH9YuWY4Rpe?si=bedb114b0215415e
KK playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2rFV8OAbjkRUsAx1sXBrFc?si=2b8a0878dcf6471c
MM playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3Cf1JxCjkBhExAKP5ug4IC?si=ae970433a23e4377