"Professional Widow" is a 1996 song written by singer-songwriter Tori Amos. It was originally a harpsichord-driven rock dirge included on her 1996 album Boys for Pele, but it gained international popularity after being remixed by house music producer Armand van Helden. The remixed single (marketed as "Armand's Star Trunk Funkin' Mix") hit number one on the UK single chart and the Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart in the U.S. The song was then further remixed by artist Mr. Roy, spawning an entirely new CD-single of remixes that again took to the charts. In October 1996, a mash-up was made by The Dirty Rotten Scoundrels of the Armand van Helden remix and Lisa Stansfield's "People Hold On".
The eponymous "professional widow" is widely rumoured to be Courtney Love, former wife of Kurt Cobain, whom Trent Reznor credits with destroying the 'friendship' (whatever its extent) between himself and Tori. In 1999, Reznor's band Nine Inch Nails released a single called "Starfuckers, Inc.", with "Starfucker" being a word that appears in "Professional Widow".
Lyrically the song borrows directly from the short story "The Sphinx" by Edgar Allan Poe. Specifically the lyric "what is termed a landslide of principal proportion" is taken from the line "what is termed a land-slide, of the principal portion of its trees"; and the lyric "prism perfect" from the line "in shape a perfect prism."
Read more about Professional Widow: Personnel (of Original Recording On Boys For Pele), Video, Covers, Remixes, Charts
Famous quotes containing the words professional and/or widow:
“I trust it will not be giving away professional secrets to say that many readers would be surprised, perhaps shocked, at the questions which some newspaper editors will put to a defenseless woman under the guise of flattery.”
—Kate Chopin (1851–1904)
“When you got to the table you couldn’t go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn’t really anything the matter with them. That is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)