by Jochen Markhorst
XVI The Sonic Light Being
I play the gumbo limbo spirituals I know all the Hindu rituals People tell me that I’m truly blessed Bougainvillea bloomin’ in the summer and spring Winter here is an unknown thing Down the flatlands - way down in Key West
When the enchanting Mrs Tori Amos performs a stunning cover of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” for BBC Radio 2’s Piano Room in February 2026, she makes up a little for having left Dylan out of her exceptional cover album Strange Little Girls (2001). The covers are still exciting enough, though. Her frenzied, dreamy, fierce, poetic and melancholic interpretations of songs such as “I Don’t Like Mondays”, Tom Waits’ “Time” and Neil Young’s “Heart Of Gold” are fascinating; her unsettling “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” is elevated to an oppressive anti-gun manifesto; and in the opener, the Velvet Underground’s “New Age”, the reckless Amos presents a complete rewriting of Lou Reed’s untouchable verses – Tori even altered the immortal lines And when you kissed Robert Mitchum / Gee, but I thought you’d never catch him (in her version: It seems to be my fancy / To make it with Frank and Nancy), yet she remains effortlessly compelling; it is a masterful cover.
The fact that she ignores Dylan’s songs is all the more striking when we read about Tori’s artistic sensibilities in the autobiography she wrote in 2005 in collaboration with Ann Powers:
“The song appears as light filament once I’ve cracked it. As long as I’ve been doing this, which is more than thirty-five years, I’ve never seen the same light creature in my life. Obviously, similar chord progressions follow similar light patterns, but try to imagine the best kaleidoscope ever—after the initial excitement, you start to focus on each element’s stunning original detail. For instance, the sound of the words with the sound of the chord progression combined with the rhythm manifests itself in a unique expression of the architecture of color-and-light. Some are dark. But their beauty astounds me.”
(Tori Amos, piece by piece: a portrait of the artist: her thoughts, her conversations, p. 140)
And a little later, she tells: “I listen to other songwriters and think they have translated their Sonic Light Being more concisely, so I study them,” because she wants to become a better interpreter of light into sound. Tori describes, using similar wording, the same process, the same synaesthetic experience of art that Dylan so often describes. As in the famous quote: “that thin, that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up,” as in:
“That ethereal twilight light, you know. It’s the sound of the street with the sunrays, the sun shining down at a particular time, on a particular type of building. A particular type of people walking on a particular type of street. It’s an outdoor sound that drifts even into open windows that you can hear (…) usually it’s the crack of dawn.”
(Ron Rosenbaum interview, Playboy, 1978)
Just as Tori Amos’s explanation of “the sound of the words” mirrors Dylan’s words in that same interview with Rosenbaum: “It’s the sound and the words. Words don’t interfere with it. They… they… punctuate it.” Synesthesia, then. As diagnosed in musicians such as Zappa, Franz Liszt (who, during rehearsals, would scold a distraught orchestra: “A bit more blue in this passage, please!”), Rimsky-Korsakov, Duke Ellington and Pharrell Williams, and as the phenomenon Billie Eilish has repeatedly put into explicit words, as here in 2019, in iHeart:
“I have synesthesia, so everything that I make I’m already thinking of what colour it is, and what texture it is, and what day of the week it is, and what number it is, and what shape, “Bury a Friend” is just dark, black, gray, brown—everything dark. “Xanny” is smooth and silk, maybe velvet, like if you could feel smoke.”
The corresponding sensitivity to the “colour” of a sound is readily apparent in Amos’s lyrics, but generally speaking, her lyrics seem to lean more towards confessional poetry and topical songs than Dylan’s – with the resulting implications for the importance of content versus the “colour” of the chosen words. Every now and then, however, the two coincide entirely:
Natal plum Black magic ti Mexican bush sage Gumbo limbo Golden shrimp Belize shrimp Senna
“Dātura” is the longest track on Amos’ fifth studio album To Venus and Back (1999) and presumably the only other song in Western music history in which the tree species gumbo limbo is mentioned by name. It’s a poetic name with a beautiful “colour”, but according to Tori, it was a happy coincidence. The song is a list song. Most of the lyrics consist of the names of 55 plants in Tori’s garden in Cornwall, catalogued by the gardener, and the gumbo limbo tree just so happens to be in her garden. Just as the bleeding heart which also makes an appearance in Dylan’s “Key West”, for example. But aside from the remarkable lyrics, it is a remarkable song in its own right; it has a particularly complex arrangement, the time signature switches from 6/8 to 7/8, and from 8/8 to 9/8, electronic noise clashes with Tori’s recognisable, melodious piano playing, the song is woven together from three very diverse sections and, above all, the ingenious drumming is fascinating.
And the drumming is precisely where the second, rather striking point of contact between Amos and Dylan lies: “Dātura” was partly created through improvisation with drummer Matt Chamberlain in Tori’s studio in Cornwall. Matt Chamberlain. The man who, some twenty years after this session with Amos, is Dylan’s drummer on Rough And Rowdy Ways and thus also on “Key West”. A fun fact that would make any statistician question their grasp of probability theory. Billions of songs, only two that mention “gumbo limbo”, 21 years apart, separated by an ocean and nearly 9,000 km (about 5,500 miles). Calculate the probability that the same drummer plays on both songs.
The ninth verse of “Key West” opens with the song’s third and most playful botanical catachresis, following fishtail ponds and bleedin’ heart disease: the “gumbo limbo spirituals”. Dylan’s appreciation for the euphony of gumbo limbo must surely have been instilled in him some sixty years earlier by Hank Williams, through Hank’s greatest hit:
Jambalaya and a crawfish pie and a fillet gumbo 'Cause tonight, I'm gonna see my ma cher amio Pick guitar, fill fruit jar and be gay-o Son of a gun, we'll have big fun on the bayou
… through the ever-popular “Jambalaya” (1952), that is. Admittedly, the Cajun dish fillet gumbo has nothing to do with the tree species (filé gumbo is a stew flavoured with filé powder—ground dried sassafras leaves), but it seems obvious that the word “gumbo” has been etched into Dylan’s mind since his adolescence, thanks to Hank Williams.
How Dylan’s meandering mind then arrives at the catachresis gumbo limbo spirituals is less obvious. Via “Jambalaya” to the Gullah Geechee spirituals such as “Kumbaya”, “Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll” perhaps, to the Creole songs of the Sea Islands. Or perhaps not. Either way: gumbo limbo spirituals sounds good. It is wild mercury and bright gold. It is a Sonic Light Being.
To be continued. Next up Key West part 17: It’s a game
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
- Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
- Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
- Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
- Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
- Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
- Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
- Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
- John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
- Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s looking for the fuse
- Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
- Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2nd Big Bang
- Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
- Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
- Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
- Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
- I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
- Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
- Bob Dylan’s 1971
- Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door
- It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry b/w Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Bob Dylan’s melancholy blues
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side A
- Bob Dylan takes Highway 61 – Seven mercurial songs