you for a while

Music and Lyrics by: Tori Amos

Instrumentation: Vocals, Prepared Upright Piano

Brief Summary: Bells for Her is almost written in a a sort of Virginia Wolfe-esque stream of consciousness way. On an album about betrayal among women, Tori writes of a relationship between herself and a female friend that just wouldn’t work despite the fact that they were two great people. And no matter how much they tried they couldn’t get together…but somewhere deep inside they still love each other. So they are stuck in this place of zero resolution…i.e. “I can’t stop whats coming…”

Tori’s Comments: (from the Under the Pink songbook) “Sometimes but not very often I journey to this place of bells I know I’m there when I see blue floodlights and I have no hunger for anything, husks of wedding dresses, horse carts, silver liberty churches-anything that I associate with bells remains unharvested until when I journey to this dimension of bells where I here them like they never tasted before.”

Fan Comments/Interpretations: Fans take Tori’s explanation and expand it a little. Some say that Bells for Her represents a person who feels betrayed when the friend they shared such intimacy with starts getting too wrapped up in someone else to the point where she loses the part of herself that made their friendship work. Others are more general and view the song from the perspective of someone who is looking back at a friendship with fond memories but deeply saddened that both parties have changed so much as to render any further communication impossible.

China2Ny’s Comments: I tried to write a poem to a friend with some of the same symbology used in Bells for Her. I don’t know if it worked.