1000 Oceans

The second single from Tori Amos' fifth studio album, this piano ballad was inspired by a dream the singer had early one morning. An old African woman came to her humming a melody and murmuring words in a language Amos couldn't decipher, but she understood the woman was searching for a lost love. When she woke up, she recorded the melody and got to work figuring out the lyrics. "Finally I understood when I got the phrase 'through the solar field.' It all completely aligned, because I knew we were following maps: I was hunting down what the song was trying to tell me," she explained in a 1999 interview with All Music. "You know, there's always galactic reference going on in this record. There's a scientific vocabulary going on in this record. 'Suede' is about seduction, but there's always a science reference, a physics reference, because that's the realm of Venus. So, I hung maps all over, and I knew I didn't have it right, coming up with things. Then finally I got that whatever dimensions the song had to cross to find the being that she was devoted to, whether it was her mother or her sister or her lover or her friend, nothing could stop her. That kind of resilience was a real anchor for the record."

The song took on a more personal meaning for Amos when her father-in-law died of cancer. Her husband, sound engineer Mark Hawley, was devastated by the loss and found solace in the ballad, which finds Amos crying a thousand oceans' worth of tears. Amos recalled in a 1999 interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit: "After Mark heard the song, he always came to me, sat down next to the piano and said, 'Please, play that song again.' And I played it to him. Through that we got in contact once again. I took him back from that other galaxy he was in a million miles away from me. So that dream was very special to me. It renewed the connection between Mark and me."

The lyrics reference Silbury Hill, a prehistoric man-made mound in Wiltshire, England. Dating back to 2400 BC, the mysterious monument is a popular tourist attraction that Amos and her husband have visited several times.