i have been a tori amos fan since way back in the day (a.k.a. 1991), and each new album gets my hope up for another little earthquakes or under the pink. i have been a neil gaiman fan since a couple of years after he started writing sandman for dc comics (a.k.a. 1990), and each new book gets my hope up for another good omens or neverwhere.
tori has a new album coming out soon, neil has a new book coming out soon. neil heard tori’s new album, and posted his thoughts about it to inkwell.vue. reproduced here:
#992 of 1008: Neil Gaiman (neilgaiman) Mon 23 Apr ’01 (01:19 PM)
Okay. I’ve heard the twelve tracks of STRANGE LITTLE GIRLS. I’ll post something coherent later.
For now, let me just say that whatever you’re expecting, it’s not what you expect; whatever you’re imagining, it’s not what you imagine.
And I *knew* what to expect — and it wasn’t what I expected.
And yes, it’s astonishing, and powerful, and scary, and cool. And if I’m good, maybe tonight I’ll get to hear it again.
Neil
(And yes, if anyone wants to repost this anywhere, feel free — I’d hate to see people arguing over paraphases of what I might have said.)
#998 of 1008: Neil Gaiman (neilgaiman) Mon 23 Apr ’01 (06:21 PM)
More on Strange Little Girls.
Sat up with Marcel, listening to the b-sides (all lovely, and in each case I could see why it wasn’t an album track — although one of them might be a single in its own right), and then he played me four or five of the album tracks again.
It got better. And I was blown away the first time.
I don’t really want to say anything specific and tangible about this album, because it’s not my place to talk about it — it’s Tori’s and she’ll talk about it when the time’s right. And you’ll hear it then, too.
But I will say that it feels in many ways like her first album as a grown-up — as a mother, maybe; and that it’s both her most accessible album (there’s one track which made me think of nothing so much as a great lost track from Little Earthquakes) and also — especially in the sequence of the last four or five songs, her most painful.
There are a couple of songs that are real singles. There’s one song that will be a basement remix before you can say ‘stains’ . And there’s one mammorth of a song that isn’t yet finished, but even in the unfinished version it ‘s audacious and wild. She does things with her voice I’ve not heard before. And the arrangements and musicianship are astonishing.
And, as I said before, it’s not what you expect – *whatever* you expect.
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