Origin
During the recording of her previous album, Under the Pink (1994), Amos' longtime professional and romantic relationship with Eric Rosse, who co-produced a considerable amount of her pre-Pele work, disintegrated. That loss, combined with a few subsequent encounters with men during the Under the Pink promotional tour, forced Amos to re-evaluate her relationship with men and masculinity. Amos explained, "In my relationships with men, I was always musician enough, but not woman enough, I always met men in my life as a musician, and there would be magic, adoration. But then it would wear off. All of us want to be adored, even for five minutes a day, and nothing these men gave me was ever enough."
Songs began appearing in fragments, often while on stage during the Under the Pink tour. After a trip to Hawaii and learning about legendary volcano goddess Pele, the album began taking shape and the songs represented stealing fire from the men in her life as well as a journey to finding her own fire as a woman. From there, Amos explained, the songs just came. "Sometimes the fury of it would make me step back, I began to live these songs as we separated. The vampire in me came out. You're an emotional vampire, with blood in the corner of your mouth, and you put on matching lipstick so no one knows."
Along this journey, Amos, who has openly discussed her experiences with hallucinogenic drugs, particularly in relation to Boys for Pele, took drugs with a South American shaman and claimed to visit the devil. Such experiences led her to write the track "Father Lucifer."
The album would ultimately consist of 14 full-length songs and four short "interludes". As Amos was finding "parts and pieces of myself that I had never claimed" on this journey, the 14 primary songs represent the number of body parts of the Egyptian god Osiris that his wife, the goddess Isis, had to find to put his body back together in Egyptian mythology. The arrangement of the songs on the album reflects the progression Amos intended to achieve on the double vinyl LP of the album; each of the four sides of the album on vinyl would open with an interlude track that leads into the rest of the three or four songs on each side. The vinyl release is the only occurrence when the interludes ("Beauty Queen," "Mr. Zebra," "Way Down," and "Agent Orange") are not numbered and when "Beauty Queen" and "Horses" are not combined into one track.
Read more about this topic: Boys For Pele
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