- Pretty Good Year
- God
- Bells For Her
- Past The Mission
- Baker Baker
- The Wrong Band
- The Waitress
- Cornflake Girl
- Icicle
- Cloud On My Tongue
- Space Dog
- Yes, Anastasia
Beneath the Veil
Tori Amos’ Under the Pink (1994) is an album that doesn’t simply play - it unfolds, like a dream half-remembered yet deeply felt. It is the sound of an artist excavating the sacred and the profane within herself, turning the private language of emotion into something universal. If her debut Little Earthquakes was a confession, Under the Pink is a séance - haunting, surreal, and luminous, a communion between flesh and spirit.
Amos plays the piano as though it were breathing with her, its keys trembling with both grace and fury. Around her, the music feels like an echo of the subconscious: strings flutter, rhythms pulse like distant footsteps, melodies drift in and out of focus. The result is a soundscape that feels alive - restless, mercurial, and deeply human. It’s art that refuses to resolve neatly, instead lingering in the tension between beauty and pain.
Her lyrics, elliptical and intimate, invite the listener not to understand but to feel. They speak in riddles and reveries, weaving together myth, memory, and the minutiae of everyday emotion. Amos doesn’t so much tell stories as summon them; her words hang in the air like incense, meaning shifting with each breath.
What gives Under the Pink its enduring magnetism is its balance of control and abandon. Every note is deliberate, yet the album feels spontaneous, as if captured in a moment of revelation. It is both fiercely feminine and deeply universal - a portrait of vulnerability wielded as strength. Amos doesn’t whisper for sympathy; she dares the listener to witness transformation, to see pain not as ruin but as metamorphosis.
Three decades later, Under the Pink remains a touchstone of artistic courage. It resists simplicity, defies categorization, and rewards surrender. To listen is to step into a world where beauty bleeds, where silence has teeth, and where truth hides not in clarity, but in the shimmer of ambiguity.
Tori Amos didn’t just make an album - she conjured a mirror for the soul. Under the Pink reminds us that art’s deepest power lies not in explanation, but in its ability to let us glimpse, however briefly, the mystery within ourselves.
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My personal view:
Tori Amos' second album was a big hit, both commercially (helped by the unexpected chart success of the great single Cornflake Girl) and in terms of critical reviews. Personally I prefer the debut album, but this one is very good as well. Some of the other highlights for me are God, Past The Mission, Baker Baker, The Wrong Band, Clouds On My Tongue, and especially Bells For Her with its eerie prepared piano sound.