Happy Birthday Scarlet. I couldn’t get you on release day because my roommate wasn’t free to take me to Walmart in Gambier-so I got you a week later. As I listened to Amber Waves for the first time, alone in my dorm room, I was admittedly unsure. Though beautiful, the shift in Tori’s songwriting from “weird Tori,” where things can be so cloaked in metaphor and symbolism that it can be hard to interpret meaning, to what we might call “Singer Songwriter Tori,” where lyrics are still stunning but much less opaque, was a hard pill for me to swallow at first. But much like my first listen of Juarez “sold” me on TVAB’s greatness to come, the last note of Amber was gloriously reassuring and still today for me transcendent. My favorite thing, more than maybe any other Tori record, are the background vocals; showcasing Tori’s vocal range with stunningly ethereal and continual lightness. You are a sprawling, evocative epic sonic novel, like your sister Boys For Pele. You came into the world at a time America was broken hearted and in need of healing. You remain that eternal holder of space for a country that remains broken. Crazy is the most meaningful song on the record for me. It’s my story of continual self discovery, reflection, realization-much of which was/is facilitated by my move to Colorado and her landscape. I have the Crazy Paper Tiger mask tattooed because of that and the lyric “paper tigers scare me and came alive, through the dawn, to the light”-that’s probably/definitely my favorite line from the whole record. The lyrics are also part of why I Can’t See New York was the absolute most perfect response to 9/11-so haunting, lush, and effortlessly embodying the searching we were doing individually and as a nation. You, Scarlet, are America laid bare through one woman’s journey, in the universal language of storytelling and song. Your imagery of mountains, plains, highways, roadside cafes, fallen towers, canyons, and a host of other signposts, never fades. Lost in a place called America, reading the skies, with Tori and the piano as our guides. I love you. Happy 20th.
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