Ocean to Ocean Tori Amos

• 1 Addition of Light Divided 04:05
• 2 Speaking With Trees 03:55
• 3 Devil's Bane 04:32
• 4 Swim to New York State 04:20
• 5 Spies 05:59
• 6 Ocean to Ocean 03:30
• 7 Flowers Burn to Gold 03:41
• 8 Metal Water Wood 04:00
• 9 29 Years 04:47
• 10 How Glass is Made 03:56
• 11 Birthday Baby 04:44
• Total Runtime 47:29

Info for Ocean to Ocean

Tori Amos was never going to enjoy a lockdown. She’s been playing live since she was thirteen years old. She splits her life between Cornwall, Florida, and the road. Her songs are written with the act of traveling and observing. Her last studio record, 2017’s Native Invader, pulled together four impossibly disparate strands – a Tennessee road trip, stories inspired by her ancestors, the ascension of Donald Trump and the slow loss of her mother to a stroke - with an energy and cohesion that made your skin bristle. But without live music, travel, and much at all to observe, Amos had a difficult pandemic; holed up in Cornwall, she hit a place of personal crisis familiar to anyone who suffered during the third UK lockdown – the one in winter, that seemed to go on forever…

Against all odds, that crisis resulted in Ocean to Ocean, released via Decca Records/Universal Music Canada, the country's leading music company on October 29th 2021, Amos’ most personal work in years - an album bursting with warmth and connection, with deep roots in her earliest song writing. She descended to an emotional state lower than she had been to for a long time - but the depths became creative, forcing a return to the kind of introspection she recognized from her debut album Little Earthquakes.

“This is a record about your losses, and how you cope with them,” she says. “Thankfully when you’ve lived long enough, you can recognize you’re not feeling like the mom you want to be, the wife you want to be, the artist you want to be. I realized that to shift this, you have to write from the place where you are. I was in my own private hell, so I told myself, then that’s where you write from - you’ve done it before…”

Written between March and summer this year Ocean to Ocean is a universal story of going to rock bottom and renewing yourself all over again.

In Cornwall she was surrounded by those she loved – her husband Mark and adult daughter Tash and her boyfriend. For a record written within limited surroundings, two things are remarkable – its rich stylistic variation, from tango to wide-screen romance, and the big-heartedness of songs, which run almost like a series of love letters to family both present and absent. It is, in one sense, her most Cornish record yet: the artwork says it all, with Amos shot on the cliffs, and in the caves on the county’s south west shores.

“If you processed troubling things by traveling, that was taken off the table,” she says. “My pattern has been to jump on a plane and go to the States. I would travel just to have new experiences. I had to find a chair instead, and ‘travel’ like I did when I was five – in my head.”

A sense of dislocation, both geographical and emotional, is there in the title track, whose drama takes place on the shores of the UK and the US. It is a song of kinship and love, about holding on to one another through destructive times with a melancholy urgency we’ve heard in Amos’ work from the start.

“I made a commitment to try and look at things in a way that get me to empowerment,” Tori says. “But what is power? Sometimes you are not ready to stand up yet – you have to start from sitting on the ground. We have all had moments that can knock us down. This record sits with you where you are, especially if you are in a place of loss. I am fascinated when someone has gone through a tragedy, and how they work through their grief. That is where the gold is. When somebody is actually at that place, thinking ‘I’m done’, how do you reach that person? It’s not about a pill, or a double shot of tequila. It’s about sitting in the muck together. I’m going to meet you in the muck.”

Tori Amos

Tori Amos
Tori Amos has an extraordinary fan base. It’s not unusual to hear her listeners explain how a song changed their life, through its ability to alter perspective and heal. Or even that a song might have saved their life. Since the release of her debut Little Earthquakes 20 years ago in 1992, where she smashed apart boundaries with her piano rock and raw, confessional poetry, Amos continues to be adored, picking up new fans along the way, romanced by her messages of empowerment, tenderness, acerbic assertiveness, and that utterly unique sound.

Even before her commercial breakthrough at 28, the enigmatic sides of her personality were being realised: years of classical training at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, singing in clubs and bars from the age of 13 and, then, fronting synthpop band Y Kant Tori Read. A taste for pushing limitations and stretching her talent and imagination had already been planted.

Although her signature remains swelling, filigreed piano rock, she has experimented with different musical styles and instruments over the last twenty years, from the baroque dusk of Boys for Pele (1996), the electronic experimentalism of From the Choirgirl Hotel (1998) and To Venus and Back (1999) to her return to the classical world with the classically inspired song cycle Night of Hunters (2011). She managed to achieve the rarely possible with a successful concept album (American Doll Posse, 2007) and an acclaimed Christmas record (Midwinter Graces, 2009) while retaining her artistic integrity. Gold Dust is her 13th studio album, a varied selection of works from her songbook all newly arranged for vocals, piano and orchestra, recorded with the Metropole Orchestra for Deutsche Grammophon/Mercury Classics.

Amos, never one to shy away from the reality of life in her lyrics, has tackled the breadth of life's subjects over the last two decades. Although her writing is confessional and she has famously put her own experiences, both positive and harrowing, into song, the way she does it leaves the door open for the listener to join in.

Each of the 12 albums Amos has released so far have been layered with symbols, history and dimensions, that make them stand out as true works of art. The Beekeeper (2005) circles around topics of death, loss and adultery; Scarlet's Walk (2002) maps and re-calibrates the American psyche after 9/11 seen through a prism of the writer's Cherokee roots; Abnormally Attracted to Sin (2009) is accompanied by a set of short films, each a visualisation of one of the albums songs, whilst Boys for Pele, her first self-produced album, is a virile feminist totem through which she binned the patriarchy and snatched back her independence.

In interviews Amos has spoken of the way she sees herself as a vehicle for a higher musical power or muse. Perhaps it is this unusual humility that has kept her creative force safe for twenty years.

This album contains no booklet.