Boys for Pele - WikiHQ

Boys for Pele is the third studio album by American singer-songwriter and pianist Tori Amos. Preceded by the first single, "Caught a Lite Sneeze", by three weeks, the album was released on January 22, 1996, in the United Kingdom, on January 23 in the United States, and on January 29 in Australia. Despite the album being Amos's least radio friendly material to date, Boys for Pele debuted at number two on both the US Billboard 200 and the UK Albums Chart, making it her biggest simultaneous transatlantic debut, her first Billboard top 10 debut, and the highest-charting US debut of her career to date.

Boys for Pele was recorded in rural Ireland and Louisiana and features 18 songs that incorporate harpsichord, clavichord, harmonium, gospel choirs, brass bands and full orchestras. Amos wrote all of the tracks, and for the first time, she served as sole producer for her own album. For Amos, the album was a step into a different direction, in terms of singing, songwriting, and recording, and is experimental in comparison to her previous work.

Background

During the recording of her previous album, Under the Pink (1994), Amos's longtime professional and romantic relationship with Eric Rosse, who co-produced a considerable amount of her pre-Pele work, disintegrated. That loss, combined with a few subsequent encounters with men during the Under the Pink promotional tour, forced Amos to re-evaluate her relationship with men and masculinity.

Songs began appearing in fragments, often while on stage during the Under the Pink tour. From there, Amos explained, the songs just came. "Sometimes the fury of it would make me step back, I began to live these songs as we separated. The vampire in me came out. You're an emotional vampire, with blood in the corner of your mouth, and you put on matching lipstick so no one knows."

The album would ultimately consist of 15 full-length songs and four short "interludes". As Amos was finding "parts and pieces of myself that I had never claimed" on this journey, the 14 primary songs represent the number of body parts of the Egyptian god Osiris that his wife, the goddess Isis, had to find to put his body back together in Egyptian mythology. The arrangement of the songs on the album reflects the progression Amos intended to achieve on the double vinyl LP of the album; each of the four sides of the album on vinyl would open with an interlude track that leads into the rest of the three or four songs on each side. The vinyl release is the only version of the album in which the interludes ("Beauty Queen", "Mr. Zebra", "Way Down", and "Agent Orange") are not numbered.

Production

Boys for Pele is Amos' first self-produced album; she would continue producing her own albums ever since. Given that the album deals with the role of women in religion and relationships, and particularly in light of her breakup with Rosse, who had served as producer for her previous two albums, Amos felt that it was appropriate to take complete control over producing Boys for Pele, as a "bid for independence". "Muhammad My Friend", the eighth track on the album, best represents this aspect of the album's theme with the line, "It's time to tell the world/We both know it was a girl back in Bethlehem."

Amos derived the album's title from the Hawaiian volcano goddess, Pele, with the "boys" representing the men in her life. "First I wanted to sacrifice all these guys to the volcano goddess and roast them like marshmallows, then I decided they gave me a really wonderful gift," chronicling a woman's self-discovery in a male-dominated world, her previous relationships with men being the song's backbone with lines like, "boys on my left side, boys on my right side, boys in the middle and you're not here, I need a big loan from the girl zone."

Recording

Amos had initially planned to record the entire album in the American South because "there's a hiddenness about the South, and I wanted to go back there because it was similar to how I felt in my relationships with men," Given her religious upbringing, Amos was drawn to record in a church, not in anger, but "with the intention of wholeness and of bringing a fragmented woman back to freedom."

Amos chose to record the album in a church because it was about searching for an energy current,

about claiming the passionate aspect of womanhood that the church teaches is wrong, "the idea of speaking my truth, no censorship, in a place that did not honor anyone's truth unless it was the church's truth,"

Amos' sound engineer came up with the idea of enclosing Amos by herself in a sound-deadening box, so that her normal body movement would not be caught by the microphones surrounding the piano and harpsichord. Only her arms protruded from the box. This technique allowed for more spaciousness in the sound, more of the room acoustics.

Promotion

In late 1995, Atlantic released a promotional-only CD in Germany and America simply titled Tori Amos, under catalog number PRCD-6535-2. "New Music from Tori Amos ..." appeared on the front cover, and upon opening the jewel case, "... is coming soon" appears on the back of the insert. The release is a 9-track promotional compilation of Amos's singles from her first two solo albums, meant for radio stations to play to generate interest in the forthcoming album. The track "Precious Things" is mislabeled as "These Precious Things" on both the CD and the back cover, while "Crucify (Remix)" is listed when in fact the album version of the song is included.

The album's first single, "Caught a Lite Sneeze", was released commercially and to radio stations on January 2, 1996, three weeks prior to the album's release.

Amos's marketing team made use of the internet to market and promote Boys for Pele. Some reviews provided links to the Atlantic homepage or to Amos's homepage to listen to audio clips from the album, while others provided telephone numbers to call to listen to audio clips. "Caught a Lite Sneeze" was notable in being one of the first singles to have its worldwide release on the internet as a free download.

Critical reception

Critics overall praised the album's expanded instrumentation, and the acoustics that recording the album in a church afforded, but otherwise reaction to the album was polarized, particularly with regard to the lyrics. Boys for Pele is more lyrically dense than Amos's two previous albums, taking poetic obscurity to new heights. Some critics praised its ultra-personal lyrics and "ozone-layer lyrics" described as unfathomable, impenetrable, and personally opaque. One scathing review suggested skipping the album, instead reading something "a little bit more intelligible—like maybe Gravity's Rainbow written in Greek",

One reviewer observed that Amos' unfettered creativity due to serving as her own producer cost the album its accessibility.

Accolades

The album was nominated for a Grammy in 1996 for Best Alternative Album, losing to Beck's Odelay.

Despite receiving mixed reviews upon its release, Boys for Pele has gone on to become a strong-selling album and to be cited as having been critically underrated. In 2008, The Guardian listed Boys for Pele on its list of 1,000 Albums To Hear Before You Die.

{|class="wikitable"

! Source

! Accolade

! Rank

| rowspan="2"|Spin

| Best Albums of 1996

| style="text-align:center;"| 13

| Best Albums of 1996

| style="text-align:center;"| 4

Commercial performance

The album debuted at number two on the Billboard 200, selling 102,000 copies in its first week, going on to achieve RIAA Gold certification in the US by early March. The album debuted at number two in the UK as well, followed by BPI Gold certification in March. By May, US sales were already nearing Platinum certification status when "Talula", the album's second US single, which also appeared in the film Twister, was released and accompanied by a sticker that read, "From Tori's new album Boys for Pele – 900,000 and climbing!". Dance remixes of "Professional Widow" were released in July and by the end of the month the single reached number one on the Billboard Hot Dance Music/Club Play charts in the US, as well as topping the charts in Italy and the United Kingdom. The successful releases of "Talula" and subsequently "Professional Widow" surged albums sales enough that Boys for Pele achieved RIAA Platinum certification in August, the day after the US release of the Hey Jupiter EP. Interest in the album resurfaced when Amos sang vocals on "Blue Skies", another club and dance hit by dance music artist BT that reached number one on the Hot Dance/Club Play chart exactly one year after the release of Boys for Pele.

Boys for Pele remained on the Billboard 200 for 29 weeks throughout 1996, before falling off the chart in mid September. According to Billboard, the album ranked number 100 on the Year-End Album Charts of 1996 in the U.S. in December. To date, Boys for Pele is Amos's third-best selling album in the U.S.

In early 2016, Tori Amos announced via Twitter that the album is slated for a deluxe reissue later in the year, following the deluxe re-releases of her first two albums in 2015.

Reissues

Boys for Pele was reissued in the United States in June 1996. This reissue replaced the original version of "Talula" with the "Tornado Mix". In February 1997, the album was reissued in the United Kingdom following the success of "Professional Widow". This 'Special Edition' inserted the full 8-minute Armand's Star Trunk Funkin' Mix of "Professional Widow" between the original version and "Mr. Zebra" and replaced the original version of "Talula" with the Tornado Mix version. Due to time restrictions, the U.K. reissue removed the song "In the Springtime of His Voodoo".

A double-CD 20th Anniversary Deluxe edition of Boys for Pele was released on November 11, 2016 by Rhino Records. This edition restored the album back to its original track list and had a bonus CD with twenty-one tracks, four of which were previously unreleased.

Record Collector magazine praised the reissue, stating that the bonus material "will be difficult for fans to resist".

Track listing

Personnel

Tori Amos – vocals, Bösendorfer piano, harmonium organ, clavichord, Harpsichord, producer
George Porter Jr. – bass
Steve Caton – Guitar, electric guitar, Mandolin, swells
Manu Katché – Drums
Marcel van Limbeek – Delgany Church Bells
James Watson – Trumpet, brass conductor
The Black Dyke Mills Band – brass
The Sinfonia of London – strings
John Philip Shenale – string arrangement
Peter Willison – string orchestrator and conductor
Alan Friedman – drum programming
Clarence J. Johnson III – soprano Sax, tenor Sax
Mino Cinelu – percussion
Darryl Lewis – percussion
Mark Mullins – Trombone, Horns
Craig Klein – Sousaphone
Michael Deegan – Bagpipes
Bernard Quinn – bagpipes
Nancy Shanks – additional vocals
Mark Hawley – recording and mix engineer
Marcel van Limbeek – recording and mixing engineer
Rob van Tuin – assistant recording and mixing engineer
Bob Clearmountain – mixing
Bob Ludwig – mastering
Cindy Palmano – artwork, photography, art direction
Paddy Cramsie – graphic design
Paul Chessell – graphic design

Charts

Weekly charts

{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center"

! scope="col"| Chart (1996)

! scope="col"| Peak position

! scope="row"| European Albums (Eurotipsheet)

|align="center"| 11

! scope="row"|Irish Albums (IFPI)

| style="text-align:center;"|4

! scope="row"| US Cash Box Top 200 Albums

|align="center"| 5

Year-end charts

{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center"

! scope="col"| Chart (1996)

! scope="col"| Position

! scope="row"| US Billboard 200

| 100

Singles

{|class="wikitable"

!rowspan="2"| Year

!rowspan="2"| Song

!colspan="5"| Peak positions

!style="font-size:85%;line-height:1.3;width:4em;vertical-align:top"| US Billboard Hot 100

!style="font-size:85%;line-height:1.3;width:4em;vertical-align:top"| US Modern Rock Tracks

| rowspan="5"| 1996

| "Caught a Lite Sneeze"

| style="text-align:center;"|60

| style="text-align:center;"|13