‘To Venus And Back’: A Guide To Every Song On Tori Amos’ Classic Album

Juárez

Juárez is a populous city in Mexico. Sadly, it became well-known for the appalling series of abductions, sexual assaults and murders of women in the city, with Amnesty International estimating that more than 370 girls and young women were killed there between 1993 and 2005.

“I had read articles about them and then we came close to the border on tour one night, not far from Juarez,” Amos said of the inspiration for this song. “I watched as we drove one side of the border, remembering the words of the sisters who had lost their sisters to the desert, and the brothers who have lost their sisters who would go out and find a ribbon or a fragment and know that their sister is buried somewhere in the desert. In that song I sing ‘No angel came’.” Juarez is one of To Venus And Back’s most abstract tracks, its lyrics almost buried, as if Amos can barely vocalise the mass horror.

Concertina

“Do you ever feel like you walk in a room, and you don’t know why, but you’re just so uncomfortable you’re crawling out of your skin, even though nobody’s touched you, physically?” Amos asked in 1999. “That’s in Concertina.” To emphasise the theme of not-quite-belonging, Concertina juxtaposes Amos’ piano with electronic drums.

Still one of Amos’ favourite songs to play live, Concertina was the fourth and final single released from To Venus And Back. The CD single also featured her beautiful cover of Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat.

Glory Of The 80’s

The cover of Y Kant Tori Read, the self-titled 1988 album by Amos’ first band, proves that she was certainly present in the 80s. Amos, whatever her feelings for the music on Y Kant Tori Read, had a soft spot for the samurai-sword-clasping, bustier-garbed Tori on the front. “I wish that the LP would sound the way the cover looks,” she mused in 1992. In the video for Glory Of The 80’s she seems to pay homage to her style then, playing with gothic make-up and plenty of hairspray.

The track itself was a comment on how the 90s was so tied up in its own knots, trying not to offend; Amos compared the decade she was now in to the 80s, which felt less self-conscious. “It’s hard when everything is so eggshell, eggshell, eggshell [now],” she said in 1999. “I do miss the 80s. It was great, knowing that friends were on one hand dialling a charity and on the other hand doing a line of blow – but not lying about it, being honest.”

Lust

Continuing the album’s hedonistic mood is Lust, central to the theme of To Venus And Back. “If you’re gonna approach the Venus realm,” Amos said in 1999, “[then] seduction lives there, obsession lives there, trustworthy lust lives there, decadence lives there, control lives there.”

Amos wrote Lust in her first burst of creativity for the album. “When the title was in place, the songs just seemed to storm through the door and say, ‘Sit down.’” she said. “It was an onslaught.”

Suede

Amos has often said that her songs have their own life force. On from the choirgirl hotel, she conceived that the songs lived at that titular hotel, having their own existence outside of her. She is always interested in how songs grow and change over time, and how they will sometimes call back to their creator.

Suede is one of these. In its original album form it’s an understated, chant-like slice of electronica. But it transformed into something altogether different on Amos’s 2011 tour, as she explained. “Suede had grabbed me by the arm,” she said in 2012. “She said, ‘You need me, narratively. I bring something that very few of the songs bring. I can bring a pivot. I can take this into a dark place.’” The result was a stunning new live interpretation with The Apollon Musagète Quartett on strings.

Josephine

“Not tonight, Josephine” is one of history’s most famous phrases. Supposedly spoken by Napoleon Bonaparte when declining sex with his second wife, Joséphine, there’s no evidence that he actually said those words. More likely is that it was a slice of English propaganda, an invention to imply that the great enemy across the channel was impotent or unmanly.

Amos takes this contested phrase and creates a slow musical march, reimagining “not tonight Josephine” as a lament. In Amos’ song, the phrase is one of sorrow: Napoleon is melancholy that the war has taken him from his wife. Amos has also said that the song is about Napoleon’s hubris, with the lines “In the army’s strength/Therein lies the denouement”. “Although you have the strongest army in the world, you lose,” she has said. “And you lose because of the narcissism that’s of the moment, the ego.”

Riot Poof

The themes of Riot Poof are multilayered; they overlap and are uncomfortable to dig into. The world “poof”, as a homophobic slur, interested Amos; she said that this song was “for all the jocks out there who need to deal with their secret sexuality”, stating that she found it hard to understand “the unbelievable judgment that men have against men who desire to be with other men”. By combining the word with “riot”, she wanted to express her solidarity with LGBTQ+ rights, as a witness to “the unleashing of the gay community”. Nevertheless, the word has so often been used as an insult that it is still hard to hear Amos vocalising it.

Another theme in this song is about “one part of my family that is the conqueror and the other part who were being conquered”, as Amos said in 1999. She spoke of the difficulty of seeing yourself as both victim and perpetrator, and of how it can be easier to claim a victim identity. She referred to the experience of her first miscarriage, an experience detailed in songs on her previous album, from the choirgirl hotel, and trying to overcome that sense of powerless victimhood. This directly inspired Riot Poof and other songs on To Venus And Back. “I understood the life force you can get from [this painful experience],” she said. “So I could go to Venus, to make passionate records there.”

Dātura

The most experimental track on To Venus And Back, Dātura doesn’t have traditional lyrics. Instead, Amos narrates fantastical (and sometimes hallucinogenic) flora, while shouting “Get out of my garden”. “I was in a mood that day,” Amos has said of the track’s beginning. “We were supposed to be cutting something else, and it wasn’t coming together… And I just had this thing about my garden. I got a list from my gardener about everything that was in my garden that was still alive.” The track has several phases, bisected by bubbling electronica, and is made even more unstable by shifting time signatures.

In its second half, the song moves into the repeated phrase “dividing Canaan”, in reference to the Biblical story in which the land of Canaan is allocated, by Joshua on God’s instructions, between 12 tribes of Israel. Amos has said that this loops back to Bliss and its reflection on patriarchal control. “There’s a real delineation about who owns the goods here,” she said. “Who has the entitlement of a woman’s body, of the Earth’s body, of the body of the Garden?”

Spring Haze

Amos has claimed that the inspiration for Spring Haze came during a terrifying flight. This explains the references to weather, clouds, circling unrest and a “single -engine Cessna” (an aircraft). In this song, Amos seems to mentally prepare herself to “get creamed” in a crash.

Yet, as with all the best Tori Amos songs, the surface level is not the only (or even the best) way to understand Spring Haze. Appropriately enough, this song is hazy and difficult to grasp. Spring Haze could also be understood as being about the dynamics between two people, both avoiding difficult topics, yet knowing that the undiscussed issues will eventually lead to catastrophe.

1000 Oceans

Almost in retreat from the ambiguities of the previous three songs on the album, 1000 Oceans feels plainer in its quiet love beauty. It gained especial meaning when Amos’ husband, Mark Hawley – also one of her engineers – lost his father. The song brought him comfort. “He would say to me, ‘Can you play that little song about the oceans?’ Amos said. “And that seemed to be sort of a way that we would talk about his dad when no other words could work.”

1000 Oceans is a tender conclusion to the studio half of To Venus And Back. As Amos herself said of the album, there was no single concept, and it could not be easily pigeonholed. “No one event shaped this record,” she said at the time of release. “I just let my observations take over. I sort of became a camera orbiting around Venus’ heart. You have to keep taking adventures and exposing yourself.”

Find out where ‘To Venus And Back’ ranks among the best Tori Amos albums.