Cellar Door, or why I like Tori Amos

There's a new Tori Amos album out now, called The Beekeeper. I've yet to purchase it, but I've listened to the single ("Sleeps with Butterflies") from Tori's website, and it's groovy. It's been described as being a lot more mellow than her previous stuff, which I agree with, but it's still beautiful.

So I've been trying to pinpoint exactly why I like Tori's music so much. I mean, no other artist comes close to how I feel about her. As I was driving home from work yesterday, I thought of way of explaining it: Cellar door.

Tolkien once said that, of all the combinations of words or phrases in the English language, "cellar door" is the most beautiful. And I quote:

Most English-speaking people...will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful.

He went on to use his affinity for the phrase "cellar door" to explain why he thought the Welsh language was so beautiful:

...In Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant.

If you replace "In Welsh" with "In Tori Amos' music", that'll pretty much sum up why I love her. The pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense.

Hrm. I guess that's not very profound after all, since you could use that to describe why anyone likes anything.