Content warning: this episode discusses pregnancy and child loss. Please take care while listening.

On this week's episode, we book a round trip ticket To Venus and Back. Tori's surprisingly prompt follow -up to 1998's From the Choirgirl Hotel. After an epic world tour, Tori had implied that she'd be taking a break from recording for a while and planned to release a live album with a few new bonus tracks. As Tori's want to do, those bonus tracks developed into a full -blown 11 -track album with a bonus live disc that was released on September 21st, 1999, my 17th birthday. Thank you very much.

To Venus and Back is deeply beloved by fans and for good reason. It shows Tori and her band, Matt Chamberlain on drums, Jon Evans on bass, and Steve Caton on guitars at the height of their ensemble powers, and Tori at her most sonically experimental. As Tori herself once instructed, if it's too loud, turn it up. And that's precisely what she does on To Venus and Back.

The songs feel like an organic extension of the Choirgirl sound, but to say they sounded all similar to one another would be listener malpractice. Venus occupies a sonic space that is truly unlike anything Tori has done up to that point or has done since. The mixing, the engineering, the drum looping, the vocal distortions, the manipulation of the Bosendorfer, the introduction of new and strange synthesizer samples.

Every singular moment is its own dynamic piece of a dark, twisty, truly otherworldly puzzle that Tori has constructed with this record. It's cliche to say it was ahead of its time in 1999, but given how fresh and bold and immersive it sounds in the year of Our Lord 2024, no one would argue that Tori truly wrote, performed, and produced a collection of songs that pushed not only her own boundaries, but the boundaries of her listeners.

Perhaps Tori summed it up best herself in the lyric from Spring Haze when she instructs us that quote, the only way out is to go so far in. So join us as we break the terror of the urban spell.

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