Alex Macpherson on From the Choirgirl Hotel

From the Choirgirl Hotel

From the Choirgirl Hotel

Alex Macpherson “My favourite album: Tori Amos – From the Choirgirl Hotelhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/aug/12/tori-amos-from-choirgirl-hotel


『ガーディアン』の”My favourite album”シリーズ。Alex Macpherson氏はトーリ・エイモスFrom the Choirgirl Hotelを採り上げている。俺もこのアルバムが彼女のキャリアにおいて重要度の高い作品だとは最初に聴いたときから思っていたのだった。
曰く、


Any artist who deals in catharsis risks having their output assessed solely through the prism of their biography. So it was throughout Tori Amos's career, with the coverage of 1998's From the Choirgirl Hotel focusing on the miscarriage she suffered before recording it.

It's certainly not irrelevant. Amos's lyrics were always too oblique to be as straightforwardly confessional as her reputation indicated; her preference for fragmented poetry, wordplay and private references seemed at times to convey an impulse to hide rather than reveal. References to her miscarriage appear throughout From the Choirgirl Hotel, but rarely in a simple way.

また、

From the Choirgirl Hotel is not a typical Amos album – that would be the more traditional singer-songwriter fare of Little Earthquakes. But it came in the centre of a stretch from 1996-99 during which she seemed to be pushing the form further out in every direction at once – more intense, more complex, more experimental – and, in pulling it off, becoming an even more powerful artist. Despite her largely unsung influence on today's singer-songwriters, both male and female, Amos's combination of conviction, catharsis and vision feels worlds away from the relatively timorous aesthetics of her followers, from Joanna Newsom to Bat for Lashes. There is still no one remotely like her.
トーリ・エイモスのバイオグラフィについては、例えばhttp://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20091211/1260507633で示したリンク先等を参照のこと。
ところで、私が書いた「岩崎夏海を巡ってlittle earthquakeが起こっているらしい」という文字列*1からいったいどれだけの人が「トーリ・エイモス」という固有名詞を呼び出したのだろうかと考えると、ちょっとは憂鬱になる。