Track Listing

1. New Age
2. '97 Bonnie And Clyde
3. Strange Little Girl
4. Enjoy The Silence
5. Rattlesnakes
6. I'm Not In Love
7. Time
8. Heart Of Gold
9. I Don't Like Mondays
10. Happiness Is A Warm Gun
11. Raining Blood
12. Real Men

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28709 in Music
• Released on: 2001-09-17
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .22 pounds

Amazon.co.uk Review
Tori Amos's Strange Little Girls is a departure as she takes 12 songs written by men about women and delivers them from the female perspective. "Words are like guns" she says, "a person has to take responsibility for their words." So she turns Eminem's "'97 Bonnie & Clyde" into a song of dark misogyny, and reinterprets the Boomtown Rats' "I Don't Like Mondays" with quiet, melodious keyboards and a reflective voice. Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" has been completely recast as banshee rock, while The Stranglers' "Strange Little Girl" has a new post-punk power. Sometimes Amos's own compositions have a tendency to ramble, but these four-minute nuggets have concentrated her skills wonderfully. It's an ambitious record, but one that works. --Lucy O'Brien

Please note that there are four different covers of this album. You will be sent one at random when you purchase it.

CD Description
This is the follow up album to 1999's 'To Venus And Back' for the North Carolina born singer-songwriter. 'Strange Little Girls' is a collection of cover versions of songs written by men about women. Amos includes material originally performed by Neil Young and Eminem, amongst others.

Customer Reviews

Amos covers it up... with a nice yet distorting blanket
I might be a bit prejudiced when it comes to Tori Amos's music, but this album definately will increase the amount if respect I have for her. The whole concept of the album is rather unique: Tori asked 12 men in her life to pick 12 songs written solely by men about women for her to interpret. She looked behind the songs trying to filter out the women trapped inside of them. But without essentially altering the lyrics, this album shows how songs can have different layers. And each woman is a character, with a face, shown by Amos dressing up as them.

This is not a feminist album. It is an album that shows just another facet of each song. 'I'm Not In Love' may sound as a cliché choice but Amos rips it off its romantic meaning and makes it haunting and chilling it its nakedness and simplicity. 'Time' and 'Real Men' just shows Tori's unqiue pianostyle and respect for the orginals. 'Heart of Gold' is a distorting unearthy raw track sung by twins. 'Rattlesnakes' and 'I Don't Like Mondays' allow Tori to introduce a new toy: a Fender Rhodes. The songs sound like lullabies but ones with a deeper meaning. 'Happiness Is A Warm Gun' is a 10 minute protest to guns and violence (a central theme on the record) and what it can do, like words 'they can only do harm' to quote Depeche Mode's 'Enjoy the Silence'.

The title track, orginally by the Stranglers, is the most catchy tune of the album that shows Amos's musical diversity and creativeness. MOst haunting however is Eminem's ''96 Bonnie & Clyde'. It tells the story of a man murdering his wife and trying to explain this to his child. Amos places herself in the position of the woman lying in the trunk hearing the way her husband speaks to her child. It's better than the original.

fierce
This album is seriously, subtly, sexily, desolately ferocious.

Amos' vast talents as a songwriter & performer can lead to her skills as a producer being overlooked. Have a listen to this to find out what i mean. So much anger at the violence and cruelty of the way we let the world be run is crammed in to some of the softest, most intimate moments of the record.

It's a shame that people might dismiss it as "just a covers album". It couldn't be further from that, it's a masterpiece.

(You may have guessed I'm a fan... Still, I would certainly put this in my top 3 Tori albums, and I'm not just saying that!)

We may have been sceptical... But we should have known!
"Songs by men about men, sung by Tori from the point of view of that songs female character..."
I think it's safe to assume that the majority of Toriphiles out there had to sit back and take a long hard think about the details of the latest long-player from Tori Amos. After all, it's hardly the easiest thing to pull of. But before any of us had even heard this album, we all probably took into consideration all of the magnificant covers that Tori has done previously. ("Smells like teen spirit", "Imagine", "If 6 were 9" etc, etc...) and each one of them ended up as brilliant (if not better!) than the original. So really we probably all should have expected a project like this to emerge eventually. But this is much much more than an album of covers; For if Tori's last album "To Venus and Back" was the sound of Tori's inner spirits and moods, then "Strange Little Girls" is the sound of Tori possessed by her audio/lyrical (anti?)heroines. This album finally puts right all those 'male' songs by finally giving their women a voice. Previously over-produced numbers such as Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the silence" are treated to the classic 'Tori & Piano' treatment, with haunting results. Eminem is finally puts in his place by Tori letting Bonnie highlight Clydes actions so he realises what he is doing to their daughter, which is sure to make even the strongest of wills tremble and shudder. The Beatles and Neil Young also don't get of so lightly. But highlights of the album most certainly come in the shape of the beautiful renditions of "Rattlesnakes", "Time" and "I don't like Mondays" which all finally revive the classic Tori "Simplicity=Gorgeousness" fomula that made her first three albums so special. Thankfully, this album isn't a mass feminism statemant; it's simply one of the most talented, magnificant and unique female artists of the past 20 years finally putting turning the tables of her male predecessors so we can all sit back and see her point. After all, Tori is most likely the only artist capable of this without seeming pretentious or above-her-station. Tori is simply an artist music couldn't do without... Buy "Strange Little Girls" and you'll see my point too!