Album · Tori Amos
Boys for Pele by Tori Amos
Boys for Pele is an album by Tori Amos, released in 1996. 2 songs from it have charted on rock radio countdowns, with 23 countdown appearances in total. The biggest is “Caught A Lite Sneeze”, on 22 lists with a best position of #41.
Boys for Pele, Tori Amos's third album, came out on Atlantic in January 1996, and it's the sound of a pianist kicking over the furniture and building a stranger room around herself. For the first time she produced alone, and she wrote every one of its 18 songs, recording them in rural Ireland and in Louisiana. The palette is wild: harpsichord and clavichord, a wheezing harmonium, gospel singers, brass-band blare and whole orchestras, all bent around that voice.
It's knotty, experimental and about as far from radio bait as she had ever strayed, with the jittery "Caught A Lite Sneeze", out three weeks ahead of the album, and the snarling "Professional Widow" as the closest things to hooks. None of that scared anyone off: it opened at number two in both America and Britain, the highest any of her albums has charted in the US.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs from Boys for Pele on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Years |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Caught A Lite Sneeze | 22 | #41 | – | 1996–2023 | |
| 2 | Professional Widow | 1 | #98 | – | 1996 |
Only songs that appear on at least one countdown are listed. Release data from MusicBrainz.