A New Tori Amos Track, For Free

I was a diehard Tori Amos fan for several years and a handful of albums, but I’m sad to report that I’ve drifted away from her work these past half-decade or so — I’m not actually sure why that was, except that maybe it was a combination of less $$$ to spend on music and a detour towards the heavy stuff I’d mostly steered clear of during college. Still, though, I count Little Earthquakes as one of my prized possessions and repeatedly annoy friends & family by telling them the story of how, the one time I met her, Ms. Amos sang “Jeremy” to me after I told her my name. (Yes, and now I’ve annoyed you with it, too.)

So, given my time in the wilderness post- roughly Boys For Pele (and yeah, Marc, I still need to watch the DVD you sent), I’m glad some of her music’s drifted back into my own little orbit. This time, it’s because she’s giving away the MP3, ringtone, and video for the song “Maybe California”, off soon-to-be-out album Abnormally Attracted to Sin. Go here, put in your info (hey, y’all, ain’t a thing completely free, right?), and download away.

Now, for the song itself: yes, it is good. It’s melancholy and sweet, although not so much in a typical Amos fashion as in maybe a Sarah McLachlan-esque fashion. It’s beautiful and swoon-y and warm-yet-distant, pleading but not in the utterly broken way as the Little Earthquakes tracks; maybe that’s the solidity speaking that comes with age speaking, though, where the death of a love doesn’t necessarily shatter you like it did when you were a kid. Of course, the fact that the song starts with the narrator trying to talk a woman — a mother, in fact, which fits nicely with that whole Mother’s Day thing that’s coming up — off a ledge shows that maybe the damage still gets done, even if it’s a slower collapse.

In the end, it’s not about the crash but about the getting-back-up-again. Which, when you think about it, is definitely the important part of the end of a relationship. I dunno if that sends a weird message for Mother’s Day or what, but hell, it’s still a good song.