Every Album I Love is, unsurprisingly, a series where I attempt to write about every album I love. I’ll explain why I love them, tell the stories of how I fell in love with them, and hope that you love them too.

There are concept albums, and there are covers albums, but rarely do the two meet. At bsst, covers albums might have a loose theme. More typically don’t have much to say beyond “here are some songs that I like”. Strange Little Girls, the 2001 covers album from Tori Amos, is different. The concept itself is fairly straightforward; songs originally written by men, about women, interpreted from a woman’s perspective. What stands out is how wholeheartedly Amos goes for the concept. Not only does she create a different character for each song, but she is dressed and made up as each for the artwork of the record. As I wrote a couple of years ago, a good cover version isn’t necessarily about improving on the original, but recontextualising it, understanding it in a different way. Rarely has that aim been so clear and explicitly stated as it was with Strange Little Girls.

The most famous (notorious?) song on the record is the version of Eminem’s ’97 Bonnie & Clyde. I can never decide whether it is the most or least interesting song on the record. The violence and misogyny of Eminem’s lyrics were already widely recognised and debated, so I was never clear that this version had anything new to add. On the other hand, Eminem was one of the most famous, successful musicians in the world at the time Strange Little Girls came out, and Amos’s version of his tale, which involves disposing his ex-wife’s dead body with his infant daughter in tow, does emphasise how deeply disturbing this particular track actually is.

’97 Bonnie and Clyde also stands out, along with Slayer’s ‘Raining Blood’ as the track on the album which differs most musically from the original, which is fortunate given the alternative would have been a Tori Amos rap track. Overall she does an excellent job of finding arrangements which work well for a dozen extremely different songs, and avoids carbon copying the originals.

It should be acknowledged that you don’t need to hear Tori Amos’s version of ’97 Bonnie & Clyde to recognise its misogyny. Some of the better known songs, where it is more subtle, benefit most from their reinterpretation here. Songs which I already knew very well, such as Enjoy The Silence, Happiness Is A Warm Gun & Heart of Gold effectively become different stories.

Retelling stories from a different perspective has a long history, of course. ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ by Jean Rhys, which tells the story of the first Mrs. Rochester, for example. She is portrayed in Jane Eyre as a madwoman, a wild beast kept in the attic. Wide Sargasso Sea tells her very humas story, and sheds an entirely different light on Jane Eyre, in the same way that Amos does with the songs on this record. These reinterpretations widen and deepen your understanding, revealing aspects you had not considered before. And once you start thinking about stories and songs from a different viewpoint, whether from the perspective of the subject rather than the writer, or that of a minor character rather than the main protagonist, you can never really stop and it helps you view art in an entirely new way.

The handful of songs on the album that I wasn’t familiar with before I heard Strange Little Girls, are a little less interesting to me. Despite being perfectly good songs in their own right, purely because I don’t know the originals, the covers only work on one level. In these cases, for me at least, a song is just a song.

The final track on Strange Little Girls is an exception to its own concept, a cover of the bisexual singer Joe Jackson’s song ‘Real Men’. After 11 songs which disect the attitude of men towards women, ‘Real Men’ asks the question “what is a man anyway?”. Does a man have to conform to macho stereotypes to be a real man, to be violent and unable to talk about his feelings? This was a song about toxic masculinity before that phrase was widely used. Whilst I say it’s an exception, more truthfully it acts a summary or conclusion to the album, pulling together its questions and themes, the way one might with an essay.

People sometimes refer to “real men”. I’ve never been 100% sure what they meant, but have always been certain that they did not mean me. Is it someone who’s practical, a handyman? A friend of mine once said she would never date a man who didn’t own their own toolkit. Needless to say I did not. Do they mean the strong silent type? (the Gary Cooper type as Tony Soprano used to refer to them). Again, not exactly me, although I oscillate between oversharing and having to be coaxed into talking about my feelings.

Whatever the people who use the phrase mean, it used to bother me that I wasn’t a ‘real man’ in some peoples eyes. But I came to realise that a real man is just any man, for better or worse. I may not fit every stereotype of what a man should be, but a man is what I am (although the label means less to me with each passing year).

Whilst these questions and more make it a fascinating concept, is Strange Little Girls an album I truly love? It turns 25 today, and I bought it shortly after it came out, which means I’ve owned it for over half my life. There are albums that I’ve listened to more in that time (many of them in fact), but there aren’t many that I’ve thought about as much. In a subtle way, it helped to change my perspective on art. It made me think about what it means to be a man, and evaulate my attitudes towards women. For those reasons it’s a record that will always hold a special place in my heart. I wouldn’t rank in my very favourite albums of all time, but it’s still a very enjoyable record whether or not you want to think deeply about it. Mostly though, I love Strange Little Girls for the very fact of its existence, and I think it’s a record everyone would benefit from listening to at least once.