Juarez

Amos: "I read an article about several hundred women in Juarez, Mexico, who had been taken out to the desert and brutally raped and murdered. When they didn't come home, their brothers would go and look for them, and many times they'd find nothing. Sometimes they'd find a hair barrette or a sock or something they knew was their sister's. The authorities haven't really done anything about it... they get into this serial-killer theory. I mean, how much serial can one man indulge in? So as the song started to develop, I really began taking the voice of the desert, singing in that perspective."

It was crucial for Amos to first understand the perspective of the song in order to figure out how it should sound. "'Juarez' I knew had to come from the voice of the desert," she told All Music in 1999. "Therefore, sonically, as we started stirring the pot, with everybody in there together, it wasn't working with me coming in on the piano. Finally, it was as the two or three hundred women were mutilated, the engineers looked at me, I looked at them, and it was like, "I've got to mutilate the piano." [Drummer] Matt Chamberlain, and Andy [Gray] the programmer, once the mutilating-of-the-piano concept was in, then they wanted the violence, the suppressed violence... I would talk about the picture of what had happened. It was a real thing."

Like her previous album, From The Choirgirl Hotel, To Venus And Back finds Amos venturing into electronic music but to pin down any of her tracks - especially "Juarez" - as being a particular genre is entirely missing the point. She explained: "When people talk about this track, they're comparing it to, I don't know, an 'electronica' track. But you're confusing your terms here, people. You're just confused, because it's a commentary on the real hardcore misogynistic stuff, done in a way that captures them with their pants down, literally, mutilating her."