It happened yesterday evening: someone broke into my brain, stole all the yellow warning signs and wired up every synapse to its own Marshall amp. Then snuck away to a mixing desk and unmuted the channel group. Boom! My head explodes and suddenly I’m cowering under Tori’s piano. Arms and legs flaying to my left, the meeting of Dionysus and his ancient feminine side.

Tori writes about Payoff: the tiny part of a song, say from 2 to 10 seconds, which is the core accomplishment of every song, what everything has been constructed to achieve. A moment that the listener can internalise and recall at will any time in the future.

I’ve listened to the album From the Choirgirl Hotel many times before last night, but yesterday it felt like a completely different album, the original version had been taken away and replaced by this one. I never really got into it until last night. Okay, so I was reading her book and listening to the album at the same time. So maybe they fed off each other in my head. Or maybe it was the Chianti. Many piano-based songwriters are intimidated by the piano, or they end up pussy-footing around it. Take Coldplay. Please. Do. Far away if possible. Tori’s relationship with her piano is astonishingly intimate. Her husband recognises this. They need time together, alone. Sometimes the resulting songs are brutal. Physically and emotionally. Spark is one of these. Listen to the piano. Pummelling, beautiful and frightening all at the same time, it screams at the listener. No one else plays piano like she does, particularly on this album, and it could become my favourite. Just because of how I felt living with it last night.