| "I just have to giggle sometimes because these relationships are so overblown. You know the pudding that never stops growing? Like tapioca...you could forge houses in it." Even with her lust for life and funny puddings, Amos habitually deals with images as rippingly painful as "chickens get a taste of your meat," in the Boys song "Blood Roses." " 'Let go and love,' f--k that s--t! My heart is scarred. I have a tear running down the middle of it and I'm not ready to say, 'Let go and love.' " But the pain on her new album seems less like the pain of victimization that we witnessed on Under the Pink and more the growing-up pain of self awareness. "It's not a revenge record but a releasing record. I've bee angry at myself, too, for getting into certain situations with men. Anger is healthy, but out of balance if it doesn't have compassion." One of the girls on Boys is "Hey Jupiter," a song about the pain of separation that Amos says is very much about a real man. "I was at my lowest. I was at a hotel in Phoenix, and I realized that for once there wasn't a man I could turn to." The song contains lines from inside the sorrows of a breakup, |
words that encapsulate a lot of what the album represents: "So are you gay? / Are you blue? / Thought we both could use a friend to run to." But this is only part of the story. She also quotes from the driving, bitter bang of a song, "Professional Widow": " 'Give me peace, love, and a hard cock': because you can't have one without the other. For her to really say, 'Are you gay? / Are you blue?' that same person has had to say 'Give me peace, love, and a hard cock,' because if I hear peace and love one more time! That is so full of s--t!" Seething with a rage made visceral by the baroque but violent sounds of the harpsichord, "Professional Widow" has an anger and power that we've rarely, if ever, heard from her before. "Slag pit / Stag shit / Honey bring it close to my lips / Starf-cker, just like my daddy." Speaking about her furious girl, Amos says, "I really like her because she's dead honest. I've been a groupie and I wish I hadn't been, but I was and it happens. I can relate." "And now you're on the other side," I say. "No, I've been a groupie when I was on the other side, actually." |
