Tori Amos
Hey Jupiter / Professional Widow

1. Hey Jupiter (The Dakota Version)
2. Sugar (Live)
3. Honey (Live)
4. Professional Widow (Merry Widow Version-Live)
5. Somewhere Over The Rainbow (Live)

"i go from day to day
i know where the cupboards are
i know where the car is parked
i know he isn't you"

In 1996, I wanted to suffer, I didn't like the idea of being happy, I found "joy" an inelegant expression, I must say, however, that I was not alone at all, especially in the musical field there were people like me who were hurting and terribly pleased by it.

Specifically, Myra Ellen Amos had released "Boys for Pele" that year, an album that, with its mournful atmosphere, oppressive minimalism, and lyrics steeped in profound despair, served as a guiding light for me in that philosophical quest that can be reduced to the expression: "Pain as an Existential End"...

Growing up, I abandoned (reluctantly) this path (and all its annexes...) to focus on more direct necessities, like a house, a job, (a family, not yet and I don’t know if that's a bad thing...) etc. etc., certainly "Boys for Pele" remained important to me from other points of view (musical-artistic primarily) and often emerges to remind me of the times when I felt better by feeling worse...

Anyway, speaking of music, in the same year Tori released the EP in question which can be comfortably defined as the end of a personal and sonic exploration journey that began in '94 with "Under the Pink."

Indeed, of the five songs on the record, two are offspring of the second album (one could say, illegitimate, as they appeared only as B-sides) and they are "Sugar" and "Honey" presented in live versions, the first as voice-piano, the second also accompanied by Steve Caton’s guitar.

Here a clarification is necessary, we are talking about female singer-songwriter music of the '90s (with all the existential-minimalist quirks that accompanied it), thus listening to these two tracks (for example) can be considered, as someone already told me, speaking of other things by Amos, “an interminable squeeze on the balls,” (from my perspective it was almost a drug) so if you detest the aforementioned characteristics and hate any type of vocalization, feel free to ignore it, no one will blame you (not everyone likes to harm themselves as I did).

Returning to the discussion of the record, "Sugar" and "Honey" soaked with Mitchell influences and almost folk references as they are, are (excluding the "depressurizing" Live-Cover of the Garlandian "Somewhere Over the Rainbow") the lightest moments of the EP, indeed the two songs taken from "Boys for Pele", "Hey Jupiter" and "Professional Widow", re-presented with different arrangements, represent not only the climax of the record but a sort of farewell to what Tori was leaving behind (the acoustic atmospheres of the second and third albums) to embrace future experimentation (and the subsequent '98 "From the Choirgirl Hotel" dominated by percussion was proof of this...).

The initial "Hey Jupiter", a beautiful "lullaby" revisited by including first timid electronic hints (and the only song on the record in studio version), I consider it the most intimate moment of Amos's career, and this sentiment is probably shared by the author, given that for some years she has been performing it as the concluding song of her concerts, an intimacy almost claustrophobic that does nothing to escape the discomfort that Myra Ellen wants to convey, even more oppressive is the live version of "Professional Widow" presented only with voice and organ and completely stripped of the original rhythmic base (try to imagine).

In conclusion, a little record dedicated to various aficionados (of Tori and '90s singer-songwriter music in general) that offers an excellent vision of what the author was (and represented) in those years and why not, also of what we were (at least I was...) and now excuse me if I leave you but I have to choose between Bath and Shower....