Unrepentant Geraldines

Album: Unrepentant Geraldines (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • The title track of Tori Amos' fourteenth studio album, this was inspired by an etching the singer owns by the 19th century Irish artist Daniel Maclise. She explained to Uncut magazine: "It's of this woman called Geraldine, looking all penitent, like Titian's paintings of Mary Magdalene. And it got me thinking about why wayward women in art have to be penitent. I'm sure Geraldine was one helluva gal! She would have been fun to hang out with. Why does the heart have a problem with female hedonism? Why can't we have unrepentant Geraldines?"
  • After working with the idea for a few days, the song started to shift away from the woman in the etching. "I began really seeing that it wasn't about just one person called Geraldine," Amos explained in a 2014 Spotify commentary. "It was that any, any woman can be this person who has to stand by what she believes in at a certain point."
  • Unrepentant Geraldines was Amos' first album to enter the Top 10 of the US albums chart since 2009's Abnormally Attracted To Sin.

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