Glory of the 80's

On this electronic track, Tori Amos takes a trip back to 1985, where there's a party going on with a bunch of self-assured people that are living their best lives. That's the essence of the '80s as Amos remembers it. She was particularly inspired by "the honesty of the decadence of that decade," before political correctness and censorship hold in the '90s. She told the UK publication Attitude: "There's the line 'and then, just when it all seemed clear you go and disappear.' I knew a lot of great people in the '80s but at the time I didn't always understand them. Now, there's such a void in the art world, people with vision have physically passed on. It's also a stab at political correctness - you can't say this, you can't say that - now everybody has to be called a Spanish American, an African American and I mean, oh bloody, f--king hell!!! I understand the abuses that have happened and I absolutely think recompense should be paid, but you don't do it just on a surface level. Everybody thinks that the debt has been paid to the 'quote unquote' Indians who had their land taken away from them because we call them Native Americans. It's hard when everything is so eggshell, eggshell, eggshell. I do miss the '80s. It was great, knowing that friends were on one hand dialing a charity and on the other hand doing a line of blow - but not lying about it, being honest. None of us are this light and dark fantasy. What's dark to you may be light to me and vice versa."

This is the third single from Amos' fifth solo album, To Venus And Back, a two-disc release containing a studio album of new songs and an album of live tracks compiled from her Plugged '98 tour. Many of the tracks, like this one, take her further into the realm of electronica as opposed to her minimalist piano work on her earlier records.

Amos sings of having The Story Of O in the bucket seat of her wannabe Mustang. The Story Of O is a 1954 erotic novel by French author Pauline Réage.