The thrill of the new: No.4

Why oh why do I put myself through all that preparation when it doesn't work? Maybe because the experience is all the better when it defies expectations...

The arrival of a new Tori Amos album is quite different for me than music from any other artist. That's because she has earned a unique distinction: I will buy her music without having listened to it beforehand. But, paradoxically, I do far more searching for titbits of news, information and music samples for Tori than for anyone else. I have websites I scour on a daily basis for updates, as if I can't bear the thought of information being out there that I haven't heard yet.

So, I've known about her latest album, "The Beekeeper", for something approaching six months. I can also tell you exactly what portions of the album I'd heard before purchasing the disc:

• Truncated versions of "Sleeps With Butterflies" and "Cars and Guitars" (basically one verse and one chorus) which appeared on a website that polls people on what they like. Apparently it's used by the music industry to gauge reaction to possible singles. I probably listened to these about 5 times in total.
• One listen to the whole of "Sleeps With Butterflies" when it appeared as the first single on her official website.
• One listen to "Hoochie Woman" courtesy of a webcast from a French radio station.
• One listen to "Sweet the Sting" when it appeared on the official website.
• One listen to "Jamaica Inn" when it appeared on the official website.
• Hearing samples of "Sweet the Sting", "The Power of Orange Knickers", "Jamaica Inn", "Sleeps with Butterflies", "Cars and Guitars" and "Witness" which currently appear on the front of the official website. I heard these on two occasions.
• 30 second samples of all the songs from one of the 'shop' sites, it might have been Amazon but I think they all have the same samples anyway.

If you think this information is excessive, or obsessive, then it's worth mentioning that I was acutely aware of a fine line between my thirst for information and my desire to not ruin the experience of hearing the album as a whole. Towards the end I was feeling I might have overdone it and deliberately avoided a chance to hear the song "Parasol".

I also read all the lyrics, although I certainly wouldn't say I studied them intently other than for "Sleeps with Butterflies" once it was the single. I've also read a range of reviews from professional critics and fellow fans.

The reason I'm setting all this out is as a prelude to the discoveries I've made now that I have listened to the whole album. Which boils down to: you cannot possibly understand music other than by listening to it.

It's something I've known for a long time, but it still surprises me how emphatically it gets confirmed again and again. The Beekeeper has taught me several lessons which I'm hoping I might actually remember if I write them down.

LESSON ONE: Sound quality is quite important, and most streaming audio is inadequate - at least through my relatively small computer speakers. This doesn't affect all music equally, but I especially noticed the difference with the song "The Power of Orange Knickers" - the samples I heard sounded particularly bland and flat and, while it isn't a very creative song in sonic terms, it sounds a lot better on CD. Any well produced CD will sound more rounded and three-dimensional than what my tinny speakers can manage.

LESSON TWO: Small samples of a piece of music can give highly misleading impressions. To be fair, for the songs I hadn't heard the samples were a reasonably good guide as to what I ultimately liked on my initial full listens - "Mother Revolution" was instantly attractive in both forms, for example. But I'm acutely aware that the pleasant, sweet sample of "Marys of the Sea" I heard was utterly different to the powerful force that assaulted me in the full song. I suppose the more complex the song, the more misleading a sample can be - "Marys of the Sea" has two radically different tempos, as well as different moods within one of those tempos.

LESSON THREE: Lyrics do not make anything like the same sense divorced from their context. Reading cannot tell you which notes will be emphasised by their length or pitch. It cannot tell you when the grammatical sense will deliberately be separated from the musical rhythm, so that the end of a line and the end of a phrase are not in the same place. It cannot tell you which lines will lodge in your brain and say "sing me".

I was quite frightened that I would be disappointed by The Beekeeper after hearing those first two samples. Chopin's music was famously described (if you accept the translation) as "guns buried in flowers", and I've adopted that phrase on numerous occasions to describe Tori Amos' music. I was worried that this time, there would be plenty of flowers but no guns. Those fears weren't totally allayed by the rest of my sampling, although I did notice that the lyrics of "Sleeps with Butterflies" were not all made from sunshine. Now that the album is here, however, there are plenty of guns. They've been placed among flowers that are more beautiful than ever, and they've been decorated, but I'm quite sure that if the right target comes along they would roar into action.

I'm well aware that all of the above (apart perhaps from the last paragraph) says very little about what I actually think of this album. I'm concentrating on the process of discovery - the "thrill of the new" experience in general. Partly this is because I doubt I can adequately cover a 19-song, 80-minute album (in fact 20 songs and 88 minutes counting the song "Garlands" which appears on the limited edition's DVD) in the space of a single post. There may well be another 20 posts involved before I'm through. What I wanted to capture before I forgot is the sensation of the process of hearing something for the first time - a fragment, then a song, then an entire album.

That process will never cease to excite me so long as new music is being created.