Pretty Good Year - 2015 Remaster

This piano ballad from Tori Amos' second solo album finds her comforting a man who has given up on himself. It was inspired by a letter she received from a fan. She told The Baltimore Sun in 1994: "It was a picture of - he had drawn himself. It was a pencil drawing. Greg has kind of scrawny hair and glasses, and he's very skinny and he held this great big flower. Greg is 23, lives in the north of England, and his life is over, in his mind. I found this a reoccurrence in every country that I went. In that early 20 age, with so many of the guys - more than the girls, they were a bit more, 'Ah, things are just beginning to happen.' The guys, it was finished. The best parts of their life were done. The tragedy of that for me, just seeing that over and over again, got to me so much that I wrote 'Pretty Good Year.' You don't really know what my role is. Am I Lucy, or am I that eight bars of grunge that comes out near the end where I express, and then nothing, everything else is Greg's story? I found that kind of really fun. The emotion is coming from somebody else's story. And yet it touched me so that I could sing it."

In a 1994 Creem interview, Amos explained how the tune relates to her Little Earthquakes track "Winter." She said: "On 'Winter,' the father sang to me, 'When you gonna make up your mind? When you gonna love you as much as I do?' and in 'Pretty Good Year' on the new album, I sing to the boyfriend, 'What's it gonna take till my baby's alright?' There's no self pity in the song and yet it's a tragedy. It's a tragedy because I can't make him love himself. I can't do it. No matter how much I beat it into him, I can't do it for him. Funny how the tables have turned isn't it?"

This was one of two singles from the album to reach the Top 10 in the UK. The other was "Cornflake Girl," which peaked at #4.