This came out in 2002 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
“I’m lost here … in a place called America,” claims Tori Amos on her new album Scarlet’s Walk. Don’t believe her.
To be fair, I’ll concede she’s away from home — Scarlet’s Walk is a concept-album/musical novel/travelogue in which Amos casts herself as Scarlet, a woman wandering across post-9/11 America in search of herself. But if you think Amos is roaming around aimlessly here, you’re kidding yourself. As always, she seems to have an innate sense of direction, letting her ’70s piano-pop instincts guide her as she moves through various emotional states and spins earthy, compelling short stories about porn starlets, plane-crash widows and other disenfranchised, alienated casualties of modern society. And as they drive all night and chow down in roadside diners while searching for love and meaning in their lives, Tori leads us on a scenic journey through her own private land of hope and dreams — and offers us perhaps the most compelling and least forced album of her career.
