Song Analysis

Another Girl’s Paradise

Thursday 22 September 2011, by Cécile Desbrun

(Coming soon! In the meantime, read Tori’s quotes about the song)

"She’s on this idea of women, now. And, when I think being around all these women who have all these different kind of... perceptions of each other and, you could say, some of them are intimidated by each other and some of them are envious and some of them... really kind of like the other one, but are afraid of being rejected, so they don’t know how to approach them. And there’s all that going on. So busy, like bees.

And she makes her way into the warmth of Florida. She takes her time, she’s driving now. She’s on her own. And she’s thinking about women and women and women’s relationships with each other and what it brings up. And so, she sort of um, goes to the land for this one. This one place that’s where a lot of people come to soak in, to feel sensual and warm and healed and delicious. So she’s in Florida and goes to another land where people go to feel delicious - another paradise.

And she finds that there’s room enough for both of them, that they’re both very different. And Desire is very much a part of all this. And at the end of the day, Desire will do what she does best, which is make you desire that which is not yours. She moves on to Hawaii and then comes back to Florida, not feeling like she needs to betray one or the other, that she can value both of them, that there’s room enough for both of them.

I think there’s healing all along the way, in different parets of this. But that’s really for the reader and the listener to sense, because it’s in the music, a lot of that. Those are clues, but it takes you, I think, to her real feelings. The music is always the place where the clues are." (Scarlet Stories CD)

New Orleans is warm and balmy with the smell of honeysuckle in the air. But Scarlet is grappling with covetousness in ’Another Girl’s Paradise.’ Her travels take her through Florida and to Hawaii, before she returns to Miami. "All the time she’s having a conversation with Desire. And she realises that very few of us can genuinely wish each other good in a selfless way." (Scarlet’s Walk bio)

"We’re taught to win and we’re taught to take. And we’re not taught that it can be a win-win. And that’s why on ’Sweet Sangria,’ it keeps coming back to: Why does someone have to lose? And in ’Another Girl’s Paradise,’ it really tries to go into that, even with women. Why does one woman feel that, if she doesn’t get the guy, she’s lost? These are just core questions we have to ask ourselves." (Pulse November 2002)

She wrote the song "Another Girl’s Paradise" in Florida. (Florida Union-Times February 21, 2003)