My heart breaks for Tori Amos when­ever I hear this song. For two rea­sons. The first should be obvi­ous to any­one who pays the min­i­mum amount of atten­tion to lyrics. Yes, it’s biographical.

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The sec­ond rea­son prob­a­bly requires some expla­na­tion. I was tempted to file this post in the ‘Classic tracks’ cat­e­gory, but I have to admit that at this point it doesn’t look like she’ll enter the hall of fame. I still root for her because she was one of my heroes in the 90s, along with Peter Gabriel, Sinéad O’Connor, Sting, Beck and other great singer-songwriters I was reli­giously lis­ten­ing to in my teens. Most of them held onto their cult sta­tus quite suc­cess­fully, so I’ve got noth­ing to be ashamed of when talk­ing about their influ­ence on my life. But not Tori Amos.

She’s been really hard to like for the past decade, so much so that it’s begun to under­mine her legacy as a com­poser and per­former. These days, she’s very much frowned upon, and not with­out rea­son. This beau­ti­ful woman, who once was the lov­able eccen­tric char­ac­ter breath­ing life into the most unusual lyrics, has become a car­i­ca­ture of the com­mon mis­con­cep­tion about the term ‘singer-songwriter’. And that’s not good.

She was always prone to over­act the parts she wrote to her­self, but most of the time the play itself was superb. Her early albums, espe­cially ‘Boys for Pele’, were exquis­ite col­lec­tions of very diverse and orig­i­nal songs, that could sup­port such a larger-than-life alt-pop per­sona. But as the qual­ity of Tori’s writ­ing started to decline after the Atlantic years, this per­sona got more and more annoy­ing. I have to admit that, despite hav­ing been a real fan, I can­not stand what she does any­more. Her act lacks sub­stance. And that’s the sec­ond reason.

I’m really sorry for writ­ing all this. ‘Playboy Mommy’ still moves me every time. I’d like to praise her as one of the best. But she’s not anymore.