[drugstore]

One of the unreleased songs that has always been very mysterious to me (and I'm sure most of you) is "To The Fair Motormaids of Japan." For some reason, I always thought a motormaid was like a meter maid. But I just looked it up, and it looks like it's a female motorcycle driver.

Then I started looking around and I found a book called "The Motor Maids of Palm and Pine."

AND THEN..I found this: http://www.onread.com/book/The-Motor...air-Japan-3625

Is this old news, or has someone found this already?

Either way, I think it's very interesting. May give some hint as to what the song is about.

Also, has anyone asked Tori about the song directly at a M&G before? What has she said?

[Binuilienzync]

Living up to your username?

Anyway, very, very interesting find. She has said stuff like, maybe she'll play it live (which she hasn't) and that if we haven't heard it yet is because the song sucks. (Yeah, I'm paraphrasing)

[DP5Ups8o]

I think the last time I heard her talk about it was during the ADP era so she hasn't forgotten it. I'm hopeful it will appear some day.

[osteoftex]

remember Snow Cherries From France?

[tinamasak]

Fuuuuuuuuuuu
I thought this thread was going to have new information. =\

That link doesn't work for me, BTW.

[inchaaruutaa]

The Book "The Motormaids in Fair Japan" can actually be accessed via Google Books. I haven't read it, but I might get around to it eventually.

[Ggskbpbz]

I have never heard about this! Hope we fans get to hear it one day.

[anfuckinggs]

I doubt we'll ever get it. It's been too long.

[Ocqljudq]

I've said it before, but I really believe she makes up song titles and then when fans beg her for them incessantly she SOMETIMES writes them after the fact. Snow Cherries From France, for instance, does not sound like something written in the era it was first mentioned in.

[welihiedginly]

imagine if tori had done some tacky cross promotion/relief donation because of the earthquake in japan.

[DP5Ups8o]

I've said it before, but I really believe she makes up song titles and then when fans beg her for them incessantly she SOMETIMES writes them after the fact. Snow Cherries From France, for instance, does not sound like something written in the era it was first mentioned in.

I did think that with "Zero Point" for a while. But on the subject of "Snow Cherries from France," apparently Neil Gaiman said pre-SW era that she sang it for him and it was "lovely." I think she probably had a fragment, similar to how she had the chorus to "Martha's Foolish Ginger" in 1996/97, but it wasn't finished.

Actually here's what she said about it

Okay, Snow Cherries from France took a long time to write, yes, about 7 years maybe. Um, I finally finished it this summer. And it's not that it was just finished as far as a song goes, but I couldn't seem to find the point of view to sing it. I went back and forth, depending on if I was mad at my husband or not, I mean, it kept changing. But then finally I found a place with it, that I began to understand what it was saying to me, and in the recording I changed some of the quotes that he had said originally, no, she says. And because of that, it all began to make sense. So her position in it changed from when I started to write it, and she's a little more involved. She's a little more up to shenanigans than I thought she originally was, and that's why it worked. I started writing this song in 1996 to '97. It's been a long time coming. I think it finally came together because I changed the narrator's point of view ever so slightly. That is, that she knew on some level that he was going to leave her. The previous angle was that she didn't think he would go. She came into it a lot more naive the first go 'round. And finally, once I kind of cracked who this woman was--how she thought, and how she felt--it came together. That is, that deep down, she knew he was a wanderer. And she took the risk anyway. Also I never would have picked "Miracle" to have started life in the Choirgirl era so I guess a lot of it really does come down to arrangements and production.

[Pjayjukr]

We may have already heard it (doubtfully, though) and don't even know it. If we had heard of a song called "Violet's Eyes," but never HEARD it, it wouldn't have made me think it was a Miracle/Almost Rosey hybrid.

We assume too that Melusine is Dolphin Song, correct? Song names change, songs themselves change, so it is possible the chorus or the melody has shown up somewhere if she still has it stuck in her head.

I would have loved to heard a little demo of it on A Piano.

[Yifnvmzp]

^ My money is on "Goodbye Pisces".

[vulikox]

I too doubt that we'll ever hear anything of this song (if it ever existed in any serious form). In any case the book is a very interesting find. I'm almost certain it inspired the song title. Too much of a coincidence otherwise. Though I dout if it had anything with the actual content of the song.
It reminds me of the lyrics to Pro Widow hiding in some Poe book.

[DP5Ups8o]

It's been my most anticipated of the unreleased ones mainly because of the wonderful title.

Songs we are aware of that are still in the vaults:

Berlin Wall (LE)
Learn to Fly (LE)
Lady Jane (UTP?)
To the Fair Motormaids of Japan (BFP)
Goodbye Girl's Electric Band (ADP/AATS)

Inside Job too if that's real. Plus a load of others she's never spoken about. For instance, Walk to Dublin came out of nowhere 11 years after it was recorded.

[LeaderBiz]

^ you forgot "oranges and see it crying"

[antonyandruleit]

It reminds me of the lyrics to Pro Widow hiding in some Poe book.

I never heard of that. Which Poe book was it?

[DP5Ups8o]

^ you forgot "oranges and see it crying"

You're right. THAT is my most anticipated

[anfuckinggs]

And well you forgot about the whole album Silver Crochet Moss.

[electmobile]

I never heard of that. Which Poe book was it?

http://classiclit.about.com/library/...poe-sphinx.htm

Near the close of exceedingly warm day, I was sitting, book in hand, at an open window, commanding, through a long vista of the river banks, a view of a distant hill, the face of which nearest my position had been denuded by what is termed a land-slide, of the principal portion of its trees. My thoughts had been long wandering from the volume before me to the gloom and desolation of the neighboring city. Uplifting my eyes from the page, they fell upon the naked face of the bill, and upon an object-upon some living monster of hideous conformation, which very rapidly made its way from the summit to the bottom, disappearing finally in the dense forest below. As this creature first came in sight, I doubted my own sanity-or at least the evidence of my own eyes; and many minutes passed before I succeeded in convincing myself that I was neither mad nor in a dream.