Yes, Anastasia - 2015 Remaster

This dramatic, 9-minute epic from Tori Amos' second solo album was inspired by Anastasia Romanov - the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia - and Anna Anderson, the woman who impersonated her. In 1918, Anastasia and her family were executed by Bolshevik revolutionaries. Rumors surfaced that Anastasia and her brother survived the massacre and, a few years later, a woman named Anna Anderson claimed to be the long-lost grand duchess. For decades, Anderson fought a losing legal battle to prove her "true" identity. She died of pneumonia in 1984, still claiming she was Anastasia.

According to Amos, the idea for the song came directly from the ghost of Anderson/Anastasia, who visited her while she was suffering a horrible bout of food poisoning on a tour stop in Virginia, where Anderson lived when she died. The singer told B-Side magazine in 1994: "She comes and goes, 'You've got to write my tune.' I go, 'Ohhh, now's not really a good time.' She says, 'No, you've got to understand something from this, there's something here that you've got to come to terms with.' And that night came, 'We'll see how brave you are,' and that was really about the whole record. That came just about before everything. And whenever I sing that chorus, 'We'll see how brave you are,' it means so many different things to me. It's part of my self, my spirit self saying to the rest of myself, 'If you really want a challenge, just deal with yourself.'"

In a 1994 interview with Keyboard magazine, Amos explained how the track came together: "The first part of 'Yes, Anastasia' is a good example of free form. 'Anastasia' was written how you hear it. I wrote that whole first half with a tape recorder: The second half was written first, and then I was just noodling, just stream of consciousness with my ghetto blaster on. It took me six weeks to learn the first half of 'Anastasia' from that tape, because it was all about free form. I'm much better when I've never done something before, because when I try to do it the second time, I'm recreating instead of creating. That changes everything. I usually don't get it together enough to finish a work like that; it's like I've got too much pesto on my noodles. I'll only get a couple of measures, and then it gets all jumbled. Then I start screaming and hating myself. It's just bratty prodigy behavior, because I get in my own way a lot. Sometimes I don't have the discipline of a more formulated person. Bridges have always been my strength, but sometimes the rest of the song is like pissing in the wind: The land masses on either side of the bridge ain't so great. I've got my Coleman stove and my little jacuzzi on the bridge, because sometimes there ain't nothin' on the other side."