Tori Amos - Strange Little Girls [2LP Strange Little Girl Cover]

Strange Little Girls, Tori Amos's audacious covers album from 2001, comes to vinyl for the first time on this double LP, its sixteen tracks spread across four sides.

The premise was as simple as it was provocative. Amos took songs written and originally performed by men and sang them from the perspective of the women living inside those stories, creating a separate persona for each track. Produced by Amos herself at her Cornwall studio, the album sounds unlike anything else she has made, swinging between hushed intimacy and real menace.

The Stranglers' Strange Little Girl, chosen as the lead single, becomes moody and quietly hypnotic in her hands. Depeche Mode's Enjoy the Silence is pared back into a stark, spacious lament, Neil Young's Heart of Gold is dragged into noisy, distorted territory, and The Boomtown Rats' I Don't Like Mondays turns devastatingly still.

Side four adds a quartet of bonus recordings, including previously unreleased versions of songs by Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello, alongside two B-sides first heard on the Strange Little Girl single.

A quarter of a century later, the record stands as one of the boldest reinventions in her catalogue, and hearing it unfold across four sides makes its shape-shifting logic feel even more absorbing.