[AliceLover]

Originally Posted by Jyqm

I think this song really epitomizes everything I find boring and distasteful about the TOSOTM album.

For starters, it's one of the absolute worst of Stevie's non-melodies. The chorus is actually rather catchy and nice, but lord, the verses are death. It's like sitting through a bad Wagner opera (this song is almost as long, too...). Once again this seems to be a result of somebody giving Stevie a piece of music of music and her just slapping her words over it. Which means I've got to at least partially blame Rupert Hine for this; why didn't he write a melody for this song?

Up next, the lyrics are just beyond clunky and awful. I mean, this is just plain bad songwriting. Where to even start? I guess at the beginning: "Well, I heard she flew down to the Mountain City / He said, 'That's not what I heard / I hear she went higher.'" Ugh. I wish I could say things got better after this. There's so much potential, too: the metaphor of going back through the mirror is a good one, but Stevie does absolutely nothing with it.

And then of course there's the production. Once again, I can hear some decent music just begging to break out of this song, but I feel like I've got a terrible head cold. I imagine some people feel that the tinkling keys and such give this song a "magical" feel, but it's all done so blandly, any magic there ever was is just sucked right out of it. This song sounds utterly two-dimensional. There's hardly any sense of sonic space whatsoever. I can't hear different instruments cropping up around me, playing different roles, adding different sounds in different spaces. I just see the song laid out before me on a flat canvas, splashed over with whitewash to dull the colors, and then covered with a layer of gauze. And just when you think it can't get anymore BLAH, here comes f***ing Kenny G again with another saxerectomy. Cannonball Adderley must be spinning in his grave at the thought of this instrument being abused like this.

So I suppose I'm not an "Alice" fan.

The tinkling keys are much more apparant on the Live Versions (Chorus) and thats one of the reasons why I like it so much more live...you should take a listen sometime. If you want I could email you a good one.