Getting just ahead of its 30-year anniversary, Tori Amos reissued her 1988 masterflop album Y Kant Tori Read. The album, long unavailable to most listeners except through bootlegs, appeared as a remastered release on iTunes and Amazon on September 1. Amos’s website and her Twitter haven’t made a peep about the release—but she did hint at it in an interview with HuffPost’s Noah Michelson just a couple of weeks ago. She said that she has “made peace with” the album, and that she was considering re-releasing it for its 30th anniversary. Who knew it would happen like this, just one week before her newest album release, Native Invader?
I’ve been a fan of Tori Amos for two decades, first discovering her music through her most avant garde and arguably her creative masterpiece Boys for Pele, released in 1997. Like many Amos fans, I have explored all of her music throughout the years, including Y Kant Tori Read, which I acquired in the late 90s as a bootleg album. I used to listen to it through my Discman during long bike rides. I remember thinking “this isn’t that bad” for a while, and then eventually tiring of it. Its re-release is an opportunity to reexamine the album with the benefit of hindsight, in terms of Tori Amos the Artist, her persona and her work that have followed.
Y Kant Tori Read is a case of being able to rather appropriately judge an album by its cover. The infamous artwork, which Amos has discussed bashfully and not without a little shame endlessly in interviews throughout her career, sexes up the musician in a pirate-themed bustier-and-sword costume, her hair defying gravity with the help of a can or two of Aqua Net. The Amos persona that would follow her self-recreation (more correctly and respectfully called a hard-won and more honest self-presentation) is heartbreakingly serious, but Y Kant Tori Read Amos was unlikely to be taken seriously because of the silly band name, the silly costume, and the silly depictions of a doodled, mulleted pirate-lady Amos chasing a dragon (or an adorable lizard?) on the bottom of the album cover. What exactly is going on here, anyway? Whatever it is, it’s a far cry from the artist we know today.
Track by track, Y Kant Tori Read is difficult to assess out of its time. If we’re judging the album by its cover, or at least taking a cue from it, then we should expect the music to be campy and kitschy. If we approach the album with that in mind, then it’s a little easier to take it for what it is. The album opener, “The Big Picture,” begins with an Amos her fans don’t know very well—a materialist—whining:
Someone smashed my window
Broke into my brand new car last night
Caught my boyfriend looking
At another slender pair of thighs
Gotta make more money
Gotta gotta get there faster than the rest
Knock ‘em off the ladder
If they even seem to stand a chance
Of course, the album goes on to describe “the big picture”—that these things don’t matter very much. Her complaining was tongue-in-cheek, ironic. “No one really owns the merchandise,” she sings. It’s a simple, straightforward message, and the song doesn’t probe anymore deeply than this. Today, when Real Housewives, Vanderpump Rules, Kardashians and Trumps drive the pop-culture zeitgeist, I worry that even such a simple satire may be lost on half the country. Just as it may have been in 1988.
Although the subject matter isn’t a stretch for Amos, the lack of nuance in many of the lyrics makes the album truly uncharacteristic of all of Amos’s music career. She followed Y Kant Tori Read with 1992’s Little Earthquakes, on which she relived a sexual assault by putting us tragicomically in her place—“You can laugh/It’s kind of funny/The things you think/At times like these/Like ‘I haven’t seen Barbados’/So I must get out of this”—and frees herself from a life of imposed constraints—“Years go by/And I’m here still waiting/For somebody else to understand...And I’ve been here/Silent all these years.” The sensibilities aren’t necessarily unrelated, but it’s clear from the opener of Y Kant Tori Read that Tori Amos the poet and pianist was bound and gagged by those who produced her. The best she could get away with, it seems, was surface-level irony. I wonder what she might have done with the same material without the constraints that were put upon her.
It Has To Be Said: Those Kate Bush Comparisons Were Warranted
Tori Amos (left) and Kate Bush
Fans of Kate Bush would say from the very beginning of Tori Amos’s career that Amos is a sort of Kate Bush impersonator. I actually discovered Bush only a couple of years ago, after having heard these unfavorable comparisons for decades. I had tried to listen to Bush several times and I could never get past the screeching voice of her groundbreaking song “Wuthering Heights” or the distinctive 1980s sound of her most-acclaimed albums Hounds of Love and The Dreaming. Eventually my ears adjusted to Bush’s sound, and as I explored more of her music and more of her place in music history, I came to understand why many people compare Tori Amos to Kate Bush. I imagine that anyone who followed Kate Bush through her piano-ballad 1970s career through her Fairlight-synth-and-big-hair 1980s career would have regarded the Tori Amos of Y Kant Tori Read as a big-budget second-rate imitation of Bush at her artistic apex. Whether Amos had any part in the decision or not, the styling of the two artists and the superficial similarities of their features—both were attractive young women with road faces, big lips, fluffy reddish/red hair—combined with piano-driven 80s-synth music makes rejection of comparisons disingenuous. If a Tori Amos fan can set aside for a few minutes what we know and love about her and watch Kate Bush’s 1986 video for “The Big Sky” followed by Tori Amos’s 1988 “The Big Picture,” it’s difficult to deny musical and stylistic similarities. (If you’re familiar with Bush’s 1980s-era music, the similarities become even more striking than these videos suggest.)
Yet, it is clear from the Amos’s subsequent work that Tori Amos is a singular artist and certainly not an impersonator of anyone. It’s quite possible to identify many artist influences, from Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro to Led Zeppelin, in Amos’s self-directed musical career, who to my ears seem to have had far greater influence than Bush did.
By the time she made Boys for Pele, Tori Amos’s primary influence was the musical imagination of Tori Amos. While she and Bush do have some undeniable superficially shared traits—appearances, pianos, distinctive voices, unconventional song structures and off-the-grid subject matter, self-production—substantively, these comparisons have not held up over time at all. Kate Bush is a competent pianist and a musical innovator; she is a genius of a sort, with a histrionic flair, who is strongly influenced by and who writes about performance art, literature, and so on. Kate Bush is also a dancer. Tori Amos is not a dancer.
I regard Bush as a Modernist fiction writer whose medium is music, and as a performance artist.
Amos, on the other hand, is far more than a competent pianist; she’s a veritable virtuoso. Bush’s music is sophisticated in its innovation more than anything, and Amos’s is sophisticated compositionally, and also in her piano playing and vocals. Amos’s voice at its best has far greater nuance than Bush’s, which is not as full and which has a Broadway performance quality—yet performing their own work on their own terms, these two artists create singular, unique work to which only they can really do justice.
Where Bush tells stories, Amos more often writes personal essays and confessional poetry with universal appeal in musical form. Bush is more Joyce and Woolf, Amos more Plath and Sexton. Bush is more Peter Gabriel and Bjork (the latter who has said many times she was influenced by Bush), Amos more Charles-Valentin Alkan and Joni Mitchell.
And while Bush has concerned herself with influences such as Emily Bronte, dance and mime, and a number of other explorations throughout her career, Amos has concerned herself largely with spirituality, religion and myth, personal growth and interpersonal relationships. Each artist has her own unique niche, and in my opinion the greatest fault of those behind Y Kant Tori Read is that Amos may have been robbed by her producers of her voice—as she said on her next album, which was her breakthrough album. Speaking of American Idol, Y Kant Tori Read essentially was a 1980s version of the miserable, music-by-numbers albums that Idol winners have been forced to make once they win.
Thinking about it in this way, that is a stark difference between Kate Bush and Tori Amos: Bush, famously, was scouted by Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, and subsequently signed to EMI records at age 16. Rather than being thrown into the music-making mill as is done to Idol winners and finalists, Bush was financed for three years to pursue artistic growth and development. Her record company paid her not to make music, but to take voice and music lessons, dance lessons, even mime classes. The product of this support was that Kate Bush was cultivated into a one-of-a-kind artistic talent who took the world (or at least the United Kingdom) by storm. Tori Amos was identified as a musical talent and turned into a product ready for the mass market. The result was Y Kant Tori Read.
But This Doesn’t Make Y Kant Tori Read a Total Failure, Either
As the story goes, Y Kant Tori Read was a humiliating failure of massive proportions, sending Tori Amos reeling into soul-searching and into a defiant attitude toward the music industry. The pressure of the album’s failure created a diamond: the artist Amos fans fell in love with four years later, when Amos released Little Earthquakes.
A couple of years ago, Rolling Stone listed Y Kant Tori Read among “20 Terrible Debut Albums by Great Artists.” The short album summary is on the nose:
An album that remains out of print to this day, it's a classic example of how major label trend-chasing can result in artists being stuck in niches where they don't fit. Amos's then-nascent songwriting ability is all but obscured by the maximalist production and Matt Sorum's crashing drums, with instantly dated electronics creating a mass of clutter.
This story is no doubt true to Tori Amos. Any creative person who puts her heart and soul into a work that is roundly rejected is bound to the feel extraordinary pain of this rejection, subjectively speaking. But objectively, the album wasn’t that much of a failure—at least not critically speaking.
Billboard actually recommended the album:
Classically trained pianist pounds the ivories on her pop-rock debut, belting out self-written material with a forceful, appealing voice. Unfortunately, provocative packaging sends the (inaccurate) message that this is just so much more bimbo music.
But that dreaded word, “bimbo,” has stuck with Amos forever, and forever as she has discussed the album in interviews, she says that in reviews she was reduced to a “bimbo.” It’s understandable that this pejorative would stick with an artist of the gravitas that Amos has proven she has throughout her astounding creative career—but it’s a case of a slight miscommunication. From a 1998 Rolling Stone article:
Billboard used the word bimbo in a review of Y Kant Tori Read's debut album, and the record stiffed. Amos did not leave her apartment for a week. "I cried constantly; I was on my knees," she says. "From child prodigy to musical joke in twenty years – how do you reconcile that? So I went back to the faerie world." And to happy hour at the Long Beach Sheraton.
That’s true, technically. But Billboard’s review warned that the pirate-wench costumery undermined the music—inaccurately. Which it did. Yet the one word, Bimbo, taken out of context, came to define the album’s history.
“The Big Picture” is an unfortunate opener to an album that is not without its duds. Even if we could get beyond the spelling of the track “Fayth,” it opens with music that could have been the theme song for an L.A. Law-type 80s primetime drama. This music is then interrupted by a quasi-rapping Amos, whose words would seem to imply that she’s a survivor of tough urban streets. I can’t imagine what listeners in 1988 may have thought, but with the benefit of hindsight, it’s difficult to hear this front from a girl who grew up in the affluent Washington, D.C. suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland. The vocals are strong, though, if you can overlook the actual purring. “Pirates” also features strong vocals, as does “Heart Attack at 23.” I don’t like either song very much, but both do remind us how remarkable it is that Tori Amos came into this world as a piano prodigy, a poet and a remarkable singer who would have been a strong contender on American Idol or The Voice had those shows been around during her coming of age. (Thankfully they were not. It does make me wonder how many would-be young artists’ true artistry may have been obscured by the assembly-line production of those shows.)
Y Kant Tori Read Features Some Actual Decent-to-Good Music Despite the Duds
“Cool On Your Island” is thematically similar to fan-favorite B-side “Cooling,” released in 1998. The song is a throughline that reveals Amos has always associated the word cool with the dying of a relationship. At some point, Amos began to play “Cool On Your Island” live during her concerts as one might suspect it was intended to be played, without the forced generic “island” beats heard on the album and instead as a heartfelt piano ballad. Amos’s recent live performances of the song breathe soul into the lyrics, which feel a bit cliched as featured in their originally produced format.
YKTR Shows Amos’s Potential To Be A Mainstream Pop Songwriter
Lyrically, “Cool On Your Island” isn’t one of Amos’s most poetic songs—not by a long shot. But it is one of her most straightforward tracks, and one that I can imagine any number of pop singers releasing back then or today. It’s a solid pop song, and it is one of several songs on Y Kant Tori Read that’s actually pretty timeless. Far less obtuse than Amos’s characteristic hits like “Silent All These Years” and “Spark,” this is a song that shows a different side of Tori Amos’s creative intelligence—that of a songwriter who is capable of writing mainstream lyrics and melodies, complete with the hooks that critics have for decades complained confound her, but who chose to go her own way.
Other songs on Y Kant Tori Read are likewise successful as well-written would-be singles that easily could have charted in the late 80s, and which could be reworked musically to chart today. The opening lines of “Fire On The Side” are a bit lacking in grace, but they are nevertheless visually evocative—”Purple sunset/Orange moon/I’m alone again”—but the melody that follows is gorgeous, and while sounding distinctly of its time, the piano-driven music is timelessly beautiful and emotionally affecting. The song, which profiles of the pain of a mistress, is a preview of the defiant empathy that would define Amos’s career. The piano-and-percussion outro of the song is utterly delicious.
“On The Boundary” is a highlight of the album that showcases the “powerhouse vocals” Billboard lauded. Amos is known for alternating soft, whispery vocals and soaring, stunning high notes. “On The Boundary’s” focus (along with other songs on the album—this one is my favorite of those) is on the powerful, full rock-belting that has been largely overlooked throughout her career, largely because her many other talents have overshadowed this aspect of her ability. This song in particular is an amalgamation of Amos’s ability to make something of (by her terms) dumbed-down, radio-friendly lyrics with powerful vocals and really great musicianship. Around the 2:50 mark, “On The Boundary” suddenly sounds like music that Robyn might have released five years ago—or that she might release tomorrow. The song is both of its time and timeless. And it’s notable that although Amos was famously forced inside of a box by her label when she made Y Kant Tori Read, she made the best of the materials at hand inside that box. She didn’t have the power until 1996 to produce her own records, but she nevertheless wrote every word and every note of her own, and she did her own playing and her own singing.
My favorite Y Kant Tori Read song belongs, in my opinion, in the “legitimate” Tori Amos canon. “Every night I wait,” she sings, “take me away/To your floating city/By my window at night/I see the light/To your floating city.” It’s a song that ties with the album’s pirates-and-fantasy theme, but it’s also a song that simply celebrates imagination—a highly overlooked aspect of Tori Amos’s career overall. As a B-side from the Little Earthquakes era, Amos released a song called “Flying Dutchman,” which I group in my mind as an “imagination song” with Floating City and a number of others, all the way to “Rose Dover” from Amos’s 2015 album Unrepentant Geraldines. “Floating City” is one of the most successful of these songs, musically, vocally and lyrically. It’s just a damned good song, and a fun one that helps to explain how Amos’s mind and writing work.
Will we be like Atlantis long ago
So sure that we’re advanced
With what we know
That our spirit
Never had time to grow
Y Kant Tori Read closes with Amos’s most Amos-y sounding song, “Etienne Trilogy.” The trilogy opens with a one-and-a-half-minute New Age-y instrumental that gives way to the piano ballad “Etienne.” The keyboard playing is distinctively Tori Amos piano, and the singing is distinctly the singing of the Tori Amos, the one we’ve known since 1992’s Little Earthquakes. The album should have opened with this song, which opens with these lines:
Maybe I’m a witch lost in time
Running through the fields of Scotland by your side
Kicked out of France, but I still believe
Taken to a land far across the sea
Etienne, Etienne, hear the West wind whisper my name
Etienne, Etienne, by the morning maybe we’ll remember who I am...
This song should have opened the album, and it’s a fitting preface to Amos’s entire career, a career that has been remarkably consistent in many ways including with Y Kant Tori Read.
Tori Amos has a famously close friendship with writer Neil Gaiman, and both of them in essence are fabulist philosophers. It’s truly stunning that at age 25, forced into a 1980s rock-bimbo box, Amos’s first album dealt with pirates and floating cities and culminated in her ruminating about the possibility of having been a Scottish witch in a past or parallel life and then, after having forged her own alternative-pop identity spanning everything from rock to electronica to her own incomprehensibly successful harpsichord-driven Southern Baroque folk-rock, decades later she made a classical album in which...she explored having been a pagan Irish warrior-poet in a past life. For all the ups and downs and musical exploration of her career, from her 20s through her 50s, Amos has retained a unique and fantastical point of view that explores the confluence of archetypal myth and personal identity. Taken for what it is, Y Kant Tori Read isn’t a great work of music, but it is the product of a great artist who seems to have come to us fully realized.
As we look forward to Tori Amos’s newest album, Native Invader (due on September 8), Y Kant Tori Read is a worthwhile look back at her humble and humbling beginnings. Far from being the embarrassment she has carried with her throughout her career, Amos’s recent embracing of Y Kant Tori Read reclaims and redeems the talent she has always possessed. Now anyone can listen for themselves and determine whether the reality of this famous failure lives up to the legend.
Tori Amos’s newest album still deals with myths, legends, and self-exploration—on her own terms.