Tori Amos has a long history of personifying her music, treating her songs as if they’re discrete, sentient beings. On her fourth album, 1998’s From the Choirgirl Hotel, the singer-songwriter imagines a place—the titular hotel—where her songs could live, granting them life separate from the commercial packaging of a pop album.
It’s no wonder that Amos would embrace this type of escapist worldbuilding. Her solo debut, Little Earthquakes, confronts traumas like sexual assault and religious oppression, and From the Choirgirl Hotel was recorded after she suffered a miscarriage, a topic addressed most directly by the album’s arresting lead single, “Spark.”
While, at the time, From the Choirgirl Hotel represented a deeper entrenchment of Amos’s themes and worldview—namely in her increasingly grim and cryptic exploration of the connections between womanhood and suffering—it also features her most forward-minded production to date, with elements of trip-hop and industrial rock transporting her piano-based aesthetic to some place foreign and elusive.
Whereas Amos’s previous album, 1996’s Boys for Pele, is expansive, unwieldy, and baroque, From the Choirgirl Hotel is a relatively compact set of a dozen tracks that feel distant from the classical embellishments that inspired the artist’s earlier music. Instead, it embodies an almost alien quality, rendering familiar traumas with an otherworldly pallor, forcing us to observe our widely accepted notions of gender, family, and love from a distance and, in doing so, to confront our collective cruelty.
And yet, the music is as inviting and entrancing as ever, from the raucous piano beat of “Raspberry Swirl” to the protean slurring of the verses and choruses of “Pandora’s Aquarium.” To celebrate the 25th anniversary of From the Choirgirl Hotel’s release, we’ve ranked all 12 songs on the album. Eric Mason
12. “She’s Your Cocaine”
Whereas 1996’s “Professional Widow” does more to interrogate the gender norms that might motivate relationship strife, “She’s Your Cocaine” deigns to jab at a rival for being an emasculating nag. “She’s Your Cocaine” is a brazen and convincing attempt at masculinist rock, but its overwhelming bitterness, from its jarring, incessant melody to its brutal lyrics to its noisy production, means we miss out on the nuance and melodiousness that characterize Amos’s best songs. Mason
11. “Pandora’s Aquarium”
Like much of Amos’s music, “Pandora’s Aquarium” explores the “original sin” logic that informs much of the misogyny that she’s encountered and observed. The song uses the myth of Pandora’s box as a jumping-off point to deride the type of man who sees women only as objects or roadblocks: “Line me up in single file/With all your grievances.” Sonically, “Pandora’s Aquarium” features spacious, serene verses in which nuns collect shells, free from the world of men, and a dulcet chorus in which Amos snaps out of her aquatic fantasy to address a man who stares luridly at her. At the album’s close, Amos doesn’t find a kinder world, so instead she chooses to take refuge by immersing herself in the feminine. Mason
10. “Liquid Diamonds”
References to water abound on “Liquid Diamonds,” suggesting fertility, amniotic fluid, and purification: “There’s a sea secret in me…I must be flowing liquid diamonds.” Amos’s expressive vocals are doused in reverb one moment and then dry and upfront in the next, often within the same line. The six-plus-minute track is one of the album’s more leftfield offerings, with skeletal drums and an unexpected chord structure that hint at the more amorphous industrial-rock experiments of 1999’s To Venus and Back. Sal Cinquemani
9. “Playboy Mommy”
The second of two tracks on From the Choirgirl Hotel that frankly address Amos’s miscarriage, the intimate “Playboy Mommy” is a song about mutual rejection: a woman’s body rejecting a fetus, and a fetus rejecting its mother. Despite that thorny proposition, it’s the album’s most straightforward track, both musically and lyrically: “I never was the fantasy/Of what you want or wanted me to be,” Amos admits, backed by steel guitar that lends the song an unexpected country lilt on an album famous for its embrace of rock and electronic influences. Cinquemani
8. “Jackie’s Strength”
While much of From the Choirgirl Hotel is murky and open to interpretation, “Jackie’s Strength” offers a vivid narrative of women’s collective grief. In it, Amos jumps between formative moments in her life, from childhood sleepovers to marriage, all the while returning to JFK’s assassination and the image of Amos’s mother praying for the newly widowed first lady. She further entangles her notion of womanhood with pain through mentions of anorexia and virginity, scrutinizing the looming threat of marriage as a sort of death knell. But the current of nostalgia that runs through the song, accompanied by Amos’s tender vocal delivery and a romantic combination of piano and strings, makes the song more wistful than resentful and centers its theme of solidarity among women rather than the feeling of isolation that characterizes the rest of the album. Mason
7. “Northern Lad”
In retrospect, “Northern Lad” represents an intermediate step in Amos’s balladry, starting in 1992 with the deservedly sentimental “Winter” and culminating at the turn of the millennium with “1000 Oceans,” in which Amos deploys the otherwise overused image of an ocean of tears with heart-wrenching effectiveness. Bookended by the biting “She’s Your Cocaine” and the bizarre “Hotel,” “Northern Lad” stands out as earnest in its theatricality. Unlike much of From the Choirgirl Hotel, the production here foregrounds Amos’s piano and raw vocals. Mason
6. “Hotel”
Don’t let references to the vampiric tricksters from Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere or the fabled King Solomon’s Mines fool you. Lyrically, the quasi-title track from Amos’s fourth album is a rather straightforward song about knocking a former lover off of his pedestal. Cryptic lines like “You say he’s the biggest thing there’ll be this year” and “You were wild, where are you now?” drop just enough crumbs to make one wonder which, if any, ’90s rock star she might be singing about. But it’s the track’s shifty time signatures and sonic collage of spacey, The Man-Machine-style electronics, wild piano runs, and squealing guitars, paired with some of Amos’s most complex, unrestrained vocal arrangements, that make “Hotel” an electronic-rock tour-de-force. Cinquemani
5. “Black Dove (January)”
On an album packed with electric guitars and electronic flourishes, Amos’s signature piano ballads stand in stark relief. The first, the dynamic “Black Dove (January),” opens with a muted piano melody as Amos spins a haunting scene of a “tiny, kinda scary house by the woods” but erupts periodically into a full-band arrangement, complete with a virtuosic piano solo. The song’s tonal shifts, from delicate to unbridled, mirror the protagonist’s disassociation and attempts to escape from her profound trauma. Cinquemani
4. “Raspberry Swirl”
“Raspberry Swirl,” Amos’s uncharacteristically danceable and downright invigorating rebuke of romantically inadequate men, shows the singer fully embracing her piano as a percussion instrument. Her piano slots in where we might expect programmed drums, creating an original, naturalistic texture for a song otherwise fit for nightclubs. The piano ostinati under the chorus create a swirling effect that’s both dizzying and electrifying as Amos delivers her manifesto: “Things are getting desperate/When all the boys can’t be men.” While the song’s thumping beat makes it an outlier in Amos’s discography, the fed-up wingwoman at its center is a role that Amos was born to fill. Mason
3. “Iieee”
One of the most tightly constructed, breakneck tracks on the album, “i i e e e” is cinematic in its scope and lofty in its imagery while also not wasting an opportunity to introduce a new production detail or high-drama vocal affect. Its seemingly nonsensical title evokes a breakdown of language in the form of a screech, which portends Amos’s cathartic performance. “We scream in cathedrals/Why can’t it be beautiful?” she cries out before being encircled by distorted electric guitars, her tone darkening as she snarls, “Just say ‘yes’/You little arsonist.” She quickly flips between anguish and anger as if cycling through the stages of grief, never offering us a moment to settle into the comfort of just one emotion and instead displaying the destabilizing effect of loss. Mason
2. “Cruel”
On “Cruel,” Amos could just as easily be singing from her own perspective as she could from God’s, lambasting inhumanity in all corners of personal and public life. “Dance with the Sufis/Celebrate your Top 10 in the charts of pain,” she sings with an audible smirk, mocking the notion that suffering is hierarchical. Even when she sneers, “Flaunt all she’s got in our old neighborhood/I’m sure she’ll make a few friends,” she implicitly criticizes the unkind eye with which she looks at another woman. Aside from being a deliciously twisted self-excoriation, “Cruel” infuses trip-hop sonics, like a churning bass reminiscent of Björk’s similarly turbulent “Enjoy,” with Amos’s experimentation with the sounds of words, like when she stutters over “Cock-cock-cock your mane.” “Cruel” is Amos at her angstiest, making it a fitting counterbalance to the album’s despairing, shame-ridden id. Mason
1. “Spark”
A sorta sister song to 1992’s “Crucify,” “Spark” finds Amos’s faith shaken and her womanhood in question in the wake of her miscarriage. “If the divine master plan is perfection/Maybe next I’ll give Judas a try,” she quips, subtly but pointedly backed by the refrain from “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The track is crisp and stark, and Amos’s vocals are, at first, distant and cold, EQ’ed as if they’re coming from a baby monitor, before she launches into a full-throated belt during the bridge. The song feels like a failed attempt at exorcising guilt, grief, and self-doubt, but as both an introduction to Choirgirl Hotel and a declaration of female autonomy, it’s a triumph. Cinquemani
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Lovely read and a great trip down memory lane
Some of my faves are on this album. and the album artwork for the CD is her best ever.
That ranking is flipped on its head!
I kind of agree. I think Playboy Mommy is the best song on the entire thing. Also, this may be nitpicky but Black Dove is not played on a piano.
Yes, Playboy Mommy is the best song!
This album cemented my love for Tori and for Matt Chamberlain’s drumming. The tour for this album was monumental. I think “She’s Your Cocaine” should be in the top 5, bumping Black Dove. When I return to this album I choose those first four and “She’s Your Cocaine.” Recently, watching the Sparks documentary, I wondered if Tori was channeling Sparks in the latter song. This album is still in my blood.
One of my favorite albums as a teenager. I would put Liquid Diamonds near the top as well as She’s Your Cocaine. Playboy Mommy is probably the one track I would skip over