Sharing secrets on the sofa: I told her of the baku, and the fox and the monk. She played me the new album, told me its secrets and its stories, “Lust” and “Bliss,” apologizing for a rawness of the mix (which I believed but could not hear), and I settled back and listened.

The curious wine made me expansive. I imagined the story I would write about it: I would tell the tale of each song through descriptions of twelve imaginary albums.

It is a greatest hits album, I told her, from an alternate universe.

Of course it is, she said.

I think that night may have lasted a thousand years, one for every ocean, and at the end of it I slept on the sofa, rag-doll floppy from the fine red wine, dreaming of the glory of the eighties and wondering why I had never noticed it at the time.

Traveling still now: passing a sudden thunderstorm in the hills of New Mexico; then the stately Californian windmill fields and hills signal that the train is leaving the real America and entering the world of the imagination.

And I meant to tell you about my Happy Phantom dream, and how she smiled and said, “I know I’m dead, but why are they making such a fuss about it!” and to talk about the way that she smiled. But we’re pulling into Los Angeles now, and it’s time to stop writing.

And I’m drunk on a curious wine I tasted several months ago, having traveled to Venus and back.

The introduction for Tori Amos’s To Venus and Back tour book, 1999.

Flood: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition, They Might Be Giants

Not to put too fine a point on it, I was, in my mind, already too old for music to matter, too old for an album to change me and definitely too old to buy singles. I was twenty-eight, driving to Gatwick airport when I heard “Birdhouse in Your Soul” on the radio, and it changed my life. And this is the odd thing: I didn’t listen to music radio. Then, as now, it was Radio 4, or cassette tapes. But I was listening to music radio as I drove, and “Birdhouse in Your Soul” came on, and I made a mental note and remembered the name of the band—They Might Be Giants, just like the film, where George C. Scott thinks he is Sherlock Holmes (the title comes from a conversation about Don Quixote, who fought a windmill thinking it was a giant—and what if he was right?).

When I got to London I went straight to a record shop, and bought everything they had by They Might Be Giants (Lincoln, and They Might Be Giants). They didn’t have “Birdhouse in Your Soul.” Flood had not come out yet.

What I loved about They Might Be Giants was that they made stories. The words were put together in a way that left holes I needed to fill in order to know what was going on. I became, whether I liked it or not, a part of the songs.