Thrill 4-8: You Really Could Have Had Me {Mother Revolution}

My reaction to this song has been extremely unusual.

The first time I listened to The Beekeeper, this was the song that I instantly fell in love with. I got to the end of a 79-minute album, had about 5 minutes before I had to go do something else, and I had absolutely no hesitation in going back and playing this one again.

And then, it all went a little bit sour. Not a lot, just a little bit. You see, I had a reaction that I had never had to a Tori Amos song before. I started feeling that this song was better than her performance of it.

It's something I've often felt about other 'lesser' artists, that they've come up with a good idea but not been able to see it through. If I ever became a performer, there's quite a lengthy list of songs I'd really like to cover - some well-known, some obscure - because I think the original artist didn't do their own creation justice.

I honestly was surprised to feel this way about a Tori Amos song. Much of her work is so uniquely hers that's it quite hard to imagine anyone else having a crack at it and not embarrassing themselves.

The Scarlet's Walk album was an interesting departure in that (at least initially) many of the songs seemed like they were deliberately using particular styles so that they sounded like something you had heard before, only not quite. I can no longer recall what most of the songs reminded me of, although I remember a review referring to I Can't See New York as a sort of 70s arena rock, and Gold Dust definitely sounded like film music. There's a bit of the same conscious use of styles on The Beekeeper. The most obvious examples are the strongly gospel-flavoured songs, but that's a very different direction to the Scarlet's Walk styles. Whereas I think Mother Revolution could have fitted on Scarlet's Walk rather well.

Ahem, yes, that last line was my actual point. But I think in this instance she's identified the stylistic archetype without quite mastering the idiom she was going for.

I've started loving Mother Revolution again for what it is and I'm gradually getting over my feelings of disappointment, but I still can't quite shake the sensation that what I really want to hear is an ever so slightly slower version by a black female blues singer with a dark edge to her voice that Tori lacks. THAT would have been a song I could fall utterly in love with.