Cruelty

As the priestess of the piano turns sixty, we count down her all-time best. Tori Amos is the kind of artist who saves lives. Starting out as a classically trained lounge pianist, she burst onto the American alt-rock scene with her revelatory debut album Little Earthquakes (1992). This starkly explored the issues of sexuality, religion, upbringing and female identity which would become common threads in the tapestry of her career; which would inspire academic studies and graphic novels alike; and which would establish Tori Amos as our greatest living songwriter. Exhibiting a voracious approach to genre, she has mastered many in her time. Industrial rock, classical crossover, gospel, electronic and folk are just a few of the myriad textures in her palette, all united by one linking thread: the piano. A famously virtuosic instrumentalist, she's customarily found at the bench of a nine-foot-long Bösendorfer, but has also had flings with Wurlitzers, harpsichords and organs over t...

'Love Profusion' is the most annoyingly normal song on Madonna's most innovative album. 2003's American Life is a startlingly original work of post-9/11 folktronica, Mirwais Ahmadzaï's stuttering vocal treatment and sparse electroclash textures melding guitars and synths to produce an aggressively left-field pop album. The lyrical concepts are some of Madonna's best, investigating the intersection of the personal, political and cultural in a world tarnished by the horrors of 9/11 and saturated with materialism. Interspersing critiques of a fame-hungry culture with love letters to Guy Ritchie (the marginally less awful of her two husbands), American Life rejects the stereotypes that 1980s 'Material Girl' Madonna had sought to cultivate, and aims to answer the question of what 'the American Dream' actually is these days. The fourth and final single, 'Love Profusion', advocates cutting out all the noise, and instead focusing on the on...