Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
Tori Amos’s third album Boys for Pele, released in January 1996, represented a particularly prolific period for the singer and pianist. The sprawling opus included 18 tracks, and a dozen more songs appeared on B sides from the album’s singles or the bonus disc on a 2016 deluxe edition. One striking outtake first released on the “Talula” single was “Alamo,” an Amos solo performance much like several songs on Boys for Pele. The song was elevated, however, by the addition of a bassline by Meters legend George Porter Jr., who participated in album sessions in his hometown New Orleans, on the version that appeared on the 20th anniversary reissue.
Most of Boys for Pele was made in Ireland, but as Amos revealed in a 1996 SPIN cover story, “At first I was going to record everything in the South. There’s a hiddenness about the South, and I wanted to go back there.” Despite that theme, “Alamo” doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the Alamo Mission that became enshrined in American history during the Texas Revolution—the lyric is instead addressed to somebody nicknamed Alamo.
In an interview promoting the reissue, Amos noted “Alamo” as a song that fans have often told her should have been on the album. “They’ll just come to a meet-and-greet and say ‘Y’know, I really think you got that wrong,’ and I think that’s fair enough. I get a lot of things wrong in that some of my favorite songs become the B sides,” she said. “But you have to make these decisions at the time. And I think that has become a big request, ‘Alamo,’ and a special love of some people.”
A 2003 concert in Columbus, Ohio, featured a rare full-band arrangement of “Alamo,” with bassist Jon Evans and drummer Matt Chamberlain. Towards the end of the song, Amos even added some new lyrics that weren’t on the studio version (“Jack of diamonds, I feel you inside”) that seem to build on the playing card theme of the song’s third verse (“Got yourself dealt a hand with two queen of spades”).
In 2017, Amos played “Alamo” as a medley with a cover of Sade’s “Smooth Operator,” of all things.
Three more essential Tori Amos deep cuts:
“Precious Things”
Atlantic Records rejected the initial set of songs Amos demoed for her debut solo album in 1990, though it contained songs like “Crucify” and “Winter” that would ultimately appear on 1992’s Little Earthquakes. Going back to the drawing board with collaborator and then-boyfriend Eric Rosse, Amos wrote more songs including the thunderous “Precious Things,” which today remains the song Amos has performed live more than any other.
“Yes, Anastasia”
Tori Amos was a child piano prodigy, studying at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore for seven years before she began to take a greater interest in making pop and rock music. Her classical training came through most clearly on “Yes, Anastasia,” the complex nine-minute song that closes Under the Pink. “That’s my big epic. A lot of Debussy influence on the first half, and the Russian composers on the second half,” she told Beat Magazine in a 1994 interview.
“l i e e”
1998’s From the Choirgirl Hotel was the first of many Amos albums with Chamberlain on drums. And their musical chemistry was immediately evident on songs like “I i e e,” a cathartic song Amos wrote after suffering a miscarriage.
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