Day 0727 - Little Earthquakes

Tori Amos "Little Earthquakes" (1992) - got it

Tori had been making music from a young age and circulated some demos with help from her father.  These demos eventually resulted in her being signed to release the synth-pop album "Y Cant Tori Read" under a band of the same name.

That band broke up and Tori submitted further demos that would eventually become "Little Earthquakes".

This album to my ears is the bridge from Kate Bush to Regina Spektor.  Moving between beauty and high theatre of "China" to the harsh simplicity of the acapella "Me and a gun" (recounting a sexual assault that Tori experienced).

The album is very piano heavy but with occasional bursts of loud guitar, or tasteful strings, as in personal favourite, the cabaret-esque "Leather".

Another one where my wife owns a copy so I unwittingly technically own it to (lucky me 😎)

Day 0387 - The Idiot

Iggy Pop "the Idiot" (1977)

 
Have been wanting to dig into Iggy's solo stuff a bit more. I've really enjoyed the Stooges albums on this list, Iggy's album with Josh Homme, and the other bits and pieces I've heard from him over the years.

Iggy had checked into a mental institution to help himself clean up.  He just wanted a second chance, but nobody in the industry wanted to give it to him... until David Bowie (who had produced/remixed the Stooges' "Raw Power") came along and whisked him off to Berlin to record music and lived life to the full.

This is a great collection of songs; Bowie's influence can definitely be heard on the album, in fact it almost feels like he has overridden Iggy's own sound (though he later suggested that Iggy was a willing guinea pig for his experiments), with less of the punkish abrasiveness of Iggy's earlier work and more of a cerebral arty sound in a not dissimilar vein to what Bowie was doing at the time. The album includes the original version of the song "China Girl", which Bowie obviously also released later on the 'Let's dance' album.

The album was named after Dostoyevsky's novel of the same name.