FEATURE:
Bells for Her, Cornflake Girl
Tori Amos’ Under the Pink at Thirty
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ONE of the best albums…
in one of the best years for music, Tori Amos’ second studio album, Under the Pink, was released on 31st January, 1994. I think it is a perfect start to a truly historic and remarkable year. Following the successful 1992 debut, Little Earthquakes, Under the Pink showed even more sides to one of music’s true originals. It was prefaced by its first single, Cornflake Girl, on 10th January, I wanted to spend time with a classic album. Recorded between February and October 1993, a truly wonderful thing was released into the world in 1994. To mark thirty years of Tori Amos’ remarkable second album, I wanted to go deeper inside. I will bring in a couple of the many impassioned reviews. Amos produced the album alongside Eric Rosse. Including some of her best-known songs – among them, Pretty Good Year and God -, this is an album that is still being played and talked about to this day. It is baffling to see that there were a few mixed reviews for Under the Pink when it came out. Maybe a backlash against an album whose sound was very different to anything around in 1993/1994, it is almost impossible to fault the remarkable music. Even deeper cuts like Cloud on My Tongue are startling and brilliant. With Tori Amos being this singular songwriter who was not embraced by quite as many people as she should have been in 1994, some even think Under the Pink is underrated or forgotten. I would not say that…yet there is an argument to suggest Under the Pink is not as revisited and celebrated as much as other albums from 1994.
Maybe not as concise as Little Earthquakes – Under the Pink is fifty-six minutes long -, it moves away from tackling the patriarch towards female betrayal (the way women betray one another). If most diehard Tori Amos fans favour her debut to sophomore album, there are a lot of wonderful reviews and praise for a really important album. Taking Tori Amos fully to the mainstream. A distinct and established artist who would continue to release amazing album. She is still recording to this very day (her most recent album, Ocean to Ocean, was released in 2021). There are some articles about Under the Pink out there I want to bring in. I shall start with a 2012 feature from Spectrum Culture. They write why this stunning album deserves a second look:
“Tori Amos’ 1992 solo debut, Little Earthquakes, served as the first step in a revisionist negation of her beginnings with Y Kant Tori Read. That synth pop outfit offered occasional hints of how she might develop: “Heart Attack at 23” has a sweet piano intro and features Amos’ expressive phrasing. But the band’s pop veneer was too thick and both the music and the band experience chafed. While Little Earthquakes offers more musical depth and expressiveness than Y Kant Tori Read, her second solo album, Under the Pink, is where Amos truly defines her artistic voice.
In particular, her piano steps forward, enveloped in richer, orchestral arrangements and she perfects an oblique writing style that hints at the stories behind the songs rather than telling them outright. Where Little Earthquake’s “Me and a Gun” told a straight narrative with a powerful simplicity, the songs on Under the Pink are cloaked in metaphor, augmented by the music. On “Bells for Her,” the dark, hollow sound creates a sense of doom and inevitability. The lyrics acknowledge this, “Can’t stop what’s coming/ Can’t stop what’s on its way,” but otherwise the thread of the story is hard to unravel. In interviews, Amos has said that the song refers to a break with a good friend that never healed. Rather than explain that overt message, the arrangement conveys the feelings behind the story with a brittle vocal and chiming tones that are vulnerable with regret.
This use of masking has become central to Amos’ writing style. On the one hand, her voice is deeply expressive and the songs feel like private gems of personal experience. But even as she confesses or exposes herself, she cloaks the revelation in metaphors that soften the focus on the details. It’s never clear whether this is to give the songs a broader stage or to distance herself from conflict or pain. Outsiders perceive that disconnect as a kind of shallowness. They dismiss her as a less experimental version of Kate Bush and it’s true that both women are singer/songwriters with a history of classical piano. But fans appreciate that Amos hasn’t shielded her internal perspectives as much as Bush. They find a sense of depth in the layers of metaphor. They surrender themselves to the emotional truth of the songs and accept that the lyrics may never deliver clarity.
Aside from developing her artistic voice, Under the Pink explores themes that confront gender role and religious expectations. This is another aspect that alienates some listeners. Amos takes a strong feminist position in her writing, but rather than becoming strident, she generally finds ways to surprise. So, on a song like “Baker Baker,” she reverses the stereotypes. Instead of the man, she’s aloof and unable to commit and it’s costing her the relationship: “And he tells me I pushed him away/ That my heart’s been hard to find.” But even as she describes herself in that situation, her perspective is more nuanced. She’s torn and regretful about the loss even as she accepts the truth that she couldn’t have faked her way through that commitment. The track is overtly sentimental, with Amos’ tortured, emotional vocals and the orchestral accompaniment, but the song survives the schmaltz.
By contrast, “God” jolts the listener with casual blasphemy. Condescending to God, she compliments His daisies but scolds Him for His absence. The funky groove crosses Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle” with “One Thing Leads to Another” by the Fixx. Spiky shards of guitar chaos rip loose in the spaces around the choruses, like a guilty voice in Amos’ brain reacting to her heresy. This kind of feminist response to patriarchal Christianity becomes another common thread throughout her work. Unlike “Baker Baker,” the risk isn’t about her feelings; it’s about making her disdain public.
Much like her first solo album, Under the Pink establishes a soft-loud dynamic shift, alternating from song to song. But even the softer tunes have their jarring moments. The first track, “Pretty Good Year,” eases in gently. The delicate piano and Amos’ aching voice are wistful and the added strings increase the poignancy. Still, the piano hints at darkness every now and again by toying with the song’s key signature. Just as the tune seems to fade down to an open, twinkling piano line, angst spews out like a lanced wound: “What’s it gonna take,’til my baby’s all right?” This blindly grasping frustration is the heart of the song’s undercurrent of loss. Amos clearly chose her opening track carefully to lull the listener with pretty piano and strings only to disrupt complacency with that hot flash of tension. When the sweet sound returns, it can’t be fully trusted. This becomes Amos’ stage persona as well. Loose and flowing, attractive and talented, Amos nurtures hidden edges and darkness underneath which she allows to surface periodically for effect”.
Maybe Little Earthquakes is more instant in terms of its revelations and meanings. Under the Pink is a more complex album that requires you to immerse yourself in it. An affecting and moving album that lingers long in the memory, Dig! explored why this album has such a lasting and huge impact. A fascinating album where Tori Amos explored the inner world. Rather than what is happening on a surface level, she explores something deeper. Revealing, honest and personal, I am still blown away by Under the Pink:
“If the raw, confessional Little Earthquakes was a diary, Amos considered Under The Pink, which was released on 31 January 1994, to be closer to an impressionistic painting. Or, in another analogy she used, if she offered herself “naked” to the world in Little Earthquakes, Under The Pink involved putting on some clothes. That’s not to say her second album – which went on to hit the top spot in the UK charts and has sold more than two million copies – is not deeply personal. “If you ripped everybody’s skin off, we’re all pink, the way I see it,” Tori told Performing Songwriter in 1994. “And this is about what’s going on inside of that. That’s what I’m really interested in, not the outer world but the inner world.”
To tap into the inner world, Tori and Eric Rosse – her then producer and partner – headed to New Mexico to record the album, where they set up in an old hacienda they called The Fishhouse. “Thanks to Bösendorfer for making the best pianos in the world, for sending one special ‘girl’ out to us in the desert,” Amos wrote in the album credits.
“YOU HAVE TO GO THROUGH IT TO UNDERSTAND IT”
While Little Earthquakes found Amos wearing her heart on her sleeve, listeners might have to work harder to deduce the meaning of Under The Pink. In a liner note for the 2015 deluxe release, Noah Michelson writes about the songs’ “intimately coded and sonically experimental mazes”. As Amos explained to Keyboard magazine: “I had this whole thing going where I liked codes and going with your senses. It was a bit of a maze, and you as a listener had to work to find out where we were going. Little Earthquakes was a bit more voyeuristic. You could sit back and watch this girl go through this stuff. You can’t on Under The Pink; you have to go through it to understand it.”
Cornflake Girl – the album’s biggest hit – is a case in point. With its catchy chorus, the earwormy track might sound deceptively cheerful, but it was born from a conversation about female genital mutilation. “How women behave toward each other within the global culture of patriarchy is the discussion that the song Cornflake Girl wanted to take part in,” Amos wrote in her book Resistance. “My friend Karen Binns and I were talking about the idea of betrayal,” she explained in a liner note to Under The Pink’s reissue. “Raisin girls were the girls that wouldn’t let you down. Cornflake girls were the mean girls.” Released as Under The Pink’s first single, in 1994, and featuring gospel singer Merry Clayton on backing vocals, the track reached No.4 on the UK singles chart, establishing itself as one of the best Tori Amos songs in the process.
“YOU DON’T REALLY KNOW WHAT MY ROLE IS… I FOUND THAT REALLY FUN”
Amos’ second Top 10 hit in the UK, Pretty Good Year was another multi-layered song with enigmatic references to Lucy – the skeleton discovered in 1974 who became a household name – and Greg “who writes letters and burns his CDs”. Speaking to The Baltimore Sun in 1994, Amos recalled how the song was inspired by a missive from a fan in the UK: “It was a pencil drawing. Greg has kind of scrawny hair and glasses, and he’s very skinny and he held this great big flower. Greg is 23, lives in the North of England, and his life is over, in his mind. I found this a reoccurrence in every country that I went. In that early-20s age, with so many of the guys – more than the girls, they were a bit more, ‘Ah, things are just beginning to happen.’ The guys, it was finished. The best parts of their life were done. The tragedy of that for me, just seeing that over and over again, got to me so much that I wrote Pretty Good Year.”
It’s a song that starts demurely, with the cascading crystal-clear notes of Amos’ Bösendorfer piano, but transforms, as so many of Under The Pink’s songs do, into something angrier and more personal when Amos sings: “Well, hey/What’s it gonna take/’Til my baby’s all right?” “You don’t really know what my role is,” the artist mused. “Am I Lucy, or am I that eight bars of grunge that comes out near the end where I express, and then nothing, everything else is Greg’s story? I found that kind of really fun.”
“THOUGH I CAN’T CHANGE WHAT HAS HAPPENED, I CAN CHOOSE HOW TO REACT”
While her first album took on the patriarchy, Under The Pink turns its attention to the way women betray each other – not only in Cornflake Girl, but on songs such as The Waitress and Bells For Her. “So I want to kill this waitress,” begins the former, unequivocally. “She’s worked here a year longer than I.” Amos is too interesting an artist to ever be one-note, though; there’s humour in the almost-shrieked chorus: “But I believe in peace/I believe in peace, bitch.”
In Bells For Her, Amos reassesses a female friendship: “And now I speak to you, are you in there?/You have her face and her eyes/But you are not her.” In an interview with the Dutch music magazine OOR, Amos said the song marked “one of the most emotional moments on the record, because it handles the end of a friendship”. The track was, as Amos revealed to Creem, “written and recorded exactly as you hear it. The lyrics came in that moment. It was almost like a trance, how that song came.” It was also the only song on Under The Pink not to be recorded on the Bösendorfer, but instead “an old upright that Phil [Shenale, string arranger] and Eric [Rosse] demolished or made better, I’m not sure,” Amos noted in an album credit.
She explores female pleasure, too, in songs such as Icicle, another track with a seemingly-innocent opening that explodes into something else entirely: “And when they say, ‘Take of his body’/I think I’ll take from mine instead/Getting off, getting off/While they’re all downstairs/Singing prayers…” It’s not the only song on the album that sees the daughter of a Methodist minister return to challenging the religion of her childhood. Famously, the single God garnered plenty of controversy with its shrieking guitars and rat-filled video, but Amos’ lyrics are almost friendly when she sings: “God, sometimes you just don’t come through/Do you need a woman to look after you?”.
There are some reviews I want to highlight before I finish off. In 1994, Rolling Stone were perhaps not quite prepared for that mix of challenging and raw mixed with the more intimate. With very few artists around like Tori Amos in 1994, it must have been an unexpected and unusual experience tackling Under the Pink. You can see how this album has impacted artists in the years since. Many who have taken influence from Under the Pink:
“Under the Pink, Tori Amos‘ second solo album, continues the singer/songwriter’s exploration of her life’s journey from the confines of a strict religious upbringing to personal and artistic freedom. She is armed with an attention-grabbing mezzo-soprano and lyrics that can kill with a turn of phrase. And Amos is still unsatisfied. God, parents, boyfriends, girlfriends, herself: No one escapes judgment.
Once again, Amos accompanies herself on piano, with drums, bass and guitar assisting; the occasional string arrangement or synth is added for not-so-subtle effect. Amos’ piano, more often than not, is deceptively soft; her voice drips with bitter disappointment or fills with paranoid self-awareness, as on the opener “Pretty Good Year,” an apparent paean to idyllic childhood in which Greg, the young protagonist, “writes letters with his birthday pen/Sometimes he’s aware that they’re drawing him in.” Her acoustic bent is well served on the album: The piano is not hidden beneath grandiose group arrangements as it was on her previous outing Little Earthquakes (1992), and her quirky hesitations and sudden shrieks are more in tune with the emotional states of her characters. Under the Pink still doesn’t match Amos’ riveting, piano-only live performances, but it sure comes close.
Amos acts as narrator throughout the album’s 12 vignettes, switching from first person to third person and back. The strength of her convictions (or the terror of her lack of them) can be off-putting, but typically her lyrics are more intimate than intimidating. On “God,” one of the album’s (relative) rockers and its first single, she proclaims simply: “God, sometimes you just don’t come through/Do you need a woman to look after you?” “Bells for Her” has a vaguely yuletide air (the piano notes ring like chimes), but it is anything but cheery. Girlhood friends face the adult games of love, war and death with a strange, existential hope. There is fantasy violence (on “The Waitress,” Amos wants to murder a flirting, inattentive waitress); molestation and rape (“Icicle”); deception (“The Wrong Band”); and expectation and anxiety (“Baker Baker”).
Under the Pink is Amos’ honest reporting of a life fraught with turmoil and disappointment. Can it take her beyond her devoted cult to greater popularity? Possibly. The album is focused, the lyrics quirky and personable, the melodies eccentric enough to entice and simple enough to be catchy. Those qualities — and her emotional fearlessness — make Tori Amos a musical find to treasure”.
I will finish with AllMusic and their impressions of Under the Pink. On 31st January, 1994, Tori Amos followed up an album that was a success in the U.K. but less so in the U.S. Under the Pink reached twelve in the U.S. It went to number one in the U.S. Perhaps audiences here more embracing and understanding of Tori Amos’ sound and vision:
“Tori Amos' second full-length solo effort has often been considered a transitional album, a building on the success of Little Earthquakes that enabled her to pursue increasingly more adventurous releases in later years. As such, it has been unfairly neglected when in fact it has as good a claim as any to be one of the strongest, and maybe even the strongest, record she has put out. Able to appeal to a mass audience without being shoehorned into the incipient "adult album alternative" format that sprang to life in the mid-1990s, Amos combines some of her strongest melodies and lyrics with especially haunting and powerful arrangements to create an artistic success that stands on its own two feet. The best-known tracks are the two contemporaneous singles "God," a wicked critique of the deity armed with a stiff, heavy funk-rock arrangement, and "Cornflake Girl," a waltz-paced number with an unnerving whistle and stuttering vocal hook. While both memorable, they're actually among the weaker tracks when compared to some of the great numbers elsewhere on Under the Pink (other numbers that more openly misfire are "The Waitress," a strident and slightly bizarre rant at such a figure, and "Yes, Anastasia," which starts off nicely but runs a little too long).
Opening number "Pretty Good Year" captures nostalgia and drama perfectly, a simple piano with light strings suddenly exploding into full orchestration before calming again. "Bells for Her" and "Icicle" both showcase what Amos can do with prepared piano, and "Past the Mission," with Trent Reznor guesting on gentle, affecting backing vocals, shifts between loping country and a beautifully arranged chorus. The secret winner, though, would have to be "Baker Baker," just Amos and piano, detailing the story of a departed love and working its cooking metaphor in just the right way”.
Recorded in Taos, New Mexico in a hacienda and at Westlake Studios, Los Angeles, there was mixed fortunes for the singles on Under the Pink. Cornflake Girl went top five in the U.K. and was a worldwide success. God did not perform that well (though it hit number one on the US Alternative Airplay (Billboard) chart. Pretty Good Year went to seven in the U.K ., though it looked like it did not chart in the U.S. Past the Mission was top-forty in the U.K. The fact that Under the Pink was a commercial success and is still discussed and loved to this day proves that it has incredible nuance and importance. It has the unenviable task of standing alongside the best albums in 1994! Such a breathtaking work from an iconic songwriter. When it turns thirty on 31st January, I know there will be new inspection and consideration of Under the Pink. I think it definitely stands out as one of the very best albums from a…
PRETTY good year.