Welcome To England

This was the lead single from American singer-songwriter Tori Amos', tenth studio album, Abnormally Attracted to Sin.

In 1997 Tori Amos made the decision to uproot from the United States, where she had lived all her life to Cornwall to be with her English sound engineer fiancé, Mark Hawley. They married the following year. The central conceit of this song is an ode to both Amos' husband and her adopted country of England. Amos explained to Drowned In Sound that the "desired goal" of the song, was "to be positive about a man, and yet ambivalent about a place." she added: "I really wanted the story to be about a woman who left her life, and her family, and her job, to follow her love - to follow her heart. It could be leaving North Carolina to move to New York - it could be anything - or leaving Manchester to come to London. Then you come to realize that His world is becoming Your world, and yet maybe you've taken on so much of His world… but it isn't Your world, and you have to retain yourself in it." "And she just lost that," she continued. "Somehow. She lost parts of herself - whether she should have gone back more, or whether she… you know, sometimes when you leave a place, you cut those cords, and you think 'Okay, fresh start - roll my sleeves up...' and yet... there was something, or maybe many things, that you didn't really want to leave behind. That you do begin to miss. Sometimes it's the mountains. Sometimes it's the earth." "And I think that ultimately - in this story she's an American, and Yes, the parallels are very close - but it could be... I know so many people who've left, especially in the last two years because of jobs, and getting work," Amos added. "One of them had work [that was] going somewhere, that they'd had to leave. One of them has had to let go to move with the other, and so, "how to not lose yourself, when you don't fit into your lover's world" [is the message] - maybe that's a good thing, because I don't think you necessarily should."

This tune is an example of Amos' return to the autobiographical writing of her earlier work of the '90s compared to her concept albums of the 2000s.