Thrill 4-19: Is This Goodbye? {Toast}

There's a fine line between being overly sentimental and being genuinely touching.

I think that for me it has something to do with understatement. Consciously going for the emotional buttons in a big way tends to make me react against the attempt, whereas if an artist simply does their job and lets me choose how to react, it works much better.

Toast is an understated little song about fond memories that I find quite moving. Nothing more than piano and acoustic guitar, it says goodbye with a smile amongst the sadness. As I understand it, Tori is singing to (or about) her brother who died only a short time before the album The Beekeeper was completed, which I admit adds to the poignancy. It certainly seems to be a heartfelt song.

In my opinion it's far more effective than the similarly themed 1000 Oceans, which both lyrically and musically seemed to be urging me to feel something that wasn't quite there. Oceans is hardly a bad song, but by the standards of Tori Amos it's a little formulaic. Sometimes I'm happy to accept the formula and connect with the song, sometimes not.

The idea of this series of posts was to be about 'the thrill of the new'. It's a little hard to talk about newness with an album you've owned for about nine months, so instead I shall report that I have now listened to Toast a great many times, and not once has it failed to make me feel something.