Tori always makes references to Neil Gaiman and his work on her albums. They are close friends and their shared interests in mythology and cultures obviously dovetail. A little trivia many people are never taught: Although we think of ourselves as primarily Judeo-Christian, our daily lives are imbued with pagan artifacts, including many of our holidays and our timekeeping. January, for example, is named for Janus, the two-faced god who simultaneously looks into the past and the future. What does this have to do with anything?
Sunday = "sun day," the day dedicated to the Sun
Monday = "moon day"
Tuesday = "Tiw's day," dedicated to the Norse god of war
Thursday = "Thor's day," and you know who Thor is
Friday = "Frigg's day," Frigg being the Norse goddess and wife of popular and powerul gos Odin
Saturday = "Saturn day," dedicated to the god Saturn, who is also the planet Saturn
So what's Wednesday? It's "Woden's day," and Woden is actually another pronunciation for Odin, one of the most revered Norse gods.
Tori's Wednesday relates directly and tangentially to Neil Gaiman's character Mr. Wednesday, who is an antagonist in Gaiman's novel American Gods. (The novel is now a hit TV show as of 2017, and Wednesday is the primary god character.)
The old gods (pagan/pre-Christian gods from Europe, Africa et al) in American Gods have arrived in the US and are engaged in a war of relevance with new American gods, such as Media, Technology, etc. The old gods, invluding Wednesday, Anansi, a leprechaun, have mischievous personalities--and this plus their supernatural aspects are represented in Tori's song, Wednesday. When she sings at the end of the song, "can't someone help me; I think that I'm lost here, lost in a place called America," it's a definite nod to the book, in which the old gods, including history, tradition, mystical knowledge, etc., are being lost to our consumerist/materialist/disposable culture. And of course that is only one more layer that inform's Tori's incredible Scarlet tapestry, an album that is at once told from the perspectives of Tori herself, a character called Scarlet, American Indian nations, American history and the spirit of the land as a sentient being--all distinct and at once connected.
"If there is a horizontal line that runs from the map of your body straight through the land, shooting up right through my heat, will this horizontal line when asked know how to find where you end, where I begin?" <---It's about that.
Tori always makes references to Neil Gaiman and his work on her albums. They are close friends and their shared interests in mythology and cultures obviously dovetail. A little trivia many people are never taught: Although we think of ourselves as primarily Judeo-Christian, our daily lives are imbued with pagan artifacts, including many of our holidays and our timekeeping. January, for example, is named for Janus, the two-faced god who simultaneously looks into the past and the future. What does this have to do with anything?
Sunday = "sun day," the day dedicated to the Sun Monday = "moon day" Tuesday = "Tiw's day," dedicated to the Norse god of war Thursday = "Thor's day," and you know who Thor is Friday = "Frigg's day," Frigg being the Norse goddess and wife of popular and powerul gos Odin Saturday = "Saturn day," dedicated to the god Saturn, who is also the planet Saturn
So what's Wednesday? It's "Woden's day," and Woden is actually another pronunciation for Odin, one of the most revered Norse gods.
Tori's Wednesday relates directly and tangentially to Neil Gaiman's character Mr. Wednesday, who is an antagonist in Gaiman's novel American Gods. (The novel is now a hit TV show as of 2017, and Wednesday is the primary god character.)
The old gods (pagan/pre-Christian gods from Europe, Africa et al) in American Gods have arrived in the US and are engaged in a war of relevance with new American gods, such as Media, Technology, etc. The old gods, invluding Wednesday, Anansi, a leprechaun, have mischievous personalities--and this plus their supernatural aspects are represented in Tori's song, Wednesday. When she sings at the end of the song, "can't someone help me; I think that I'm lost here, lost in a place called America," it's a definite nod to the book, in which the old gods, including history, tradition, mystical knowledge, etc., are being lost to our consumerist/materialist/disposable culture. And of course that is only one more layer that inform's Tori's incredible Scarlet tapestry, an album that is at once told from the perspectives of Tori herself, a character called Scarlet, American Indian nations, American history and the spirit of the land as a sentient being--all distinct and at once connected.
"If there is a horizontal line that runs from the map of your body straight through the land, shooting up right through my heat, will this horizontal line when asked know how to find where you end, where I begin?" <---It's about that.