Abnormally Attracted To Sin - Origins

Origins

Amos lifted Abnormally Attracted to Sin's title from a line spoken by a main character in the 1955 film Guys and Dolls.

The album itself was written and conceived in two stages: the first during Amos's 2007 world tour, while promoting American Doll Posse, followed by a spurt of writing and composing during a second phase in July 2008, when Amos reconnected with her former mentor Doug Morris while visiting California to promote a graphic-novel anthology, Comic Book Tattoo .

During her brief stay in California, Amos revisited some of the old homes and haunts she frequented as a twenty-something singer-songwriter in Los Angeles during the late '80s and that, coupled with some of her own reflections and conclusions as a wife, mother and maturing woman, led to another spontaneous creative spell, providing a catalyst for "a second batch of songs", as Amos puts it, which, when combined with the initial new songs written and composed during late-2007 and early-2008, would end up fleshing out the rest of the album.

Due to both financial limitations and disagreements over the project with her previous label, Epic Records, Amos abruptly left the label and the footage shot of her 2007 world-tour morphed into the vignettes or visualettes, as Amos coined them, that would be paired with the new album on an accompanying DVD, The Road Chronicles, as part of an "audio-visual project".

Postponing further work on the planned live DVD of her 2007 world-tour and using some of the complementary footage shot for the DVD to compile a series of vignettes, Amos turned and focused her attention on creating and presenting a multimedia project aimed at deconstructing her previous album's concept and exploring, once again, a more personal and confessional space in the singer-songwriter's life and career, using a juxtaposition between the visual and sonic mediums to broaden and emphasize the personal scope of the project.

"As you know with the archetypes from the last record," said Amos in May 2009, "I was really trying to find sides to myself that I hadn’t allowed myself. I don’t need to put on Pip’s garb to walk into that. That was a huge place to get to."

Amos's brief stay in L.A. during the summer of 2008 also afforded her the opportunity to revisit her old apartment, in which her debut solo-album, 1991's Little Earthquakes, was written, conceived and, in some instances, recorded. She also made a point of visiting the old church behind which the apartment was built. In past interviews, Amos has stated how songs such as Crucify and Precious Things were written while living behind the church, listening to endless sermons and worship-songs for hours at a time, alone, hurt and depressed behind her failure as a musician (1988's Y Kant Tori Read), and her role as a victim and survivor of physical and sexual assault. It was a threshold moment for Amos, providing her a time of respite, solace and a bit of reflection regarding her life and past.

Things were black and that’s before a whole second part of the record got written and developed when I came back to the states for Comic-Con . And I was on my home ground where I wrote Little Earthquakes and there was a metamorphosis that happened. I passed by that little house where I wrote it and I thought, I took on a lot back then — I can take this on. I can fight. But I had lost how to fight. I had to change everything to fight — all kinds of people had to change. The one thing that kept me going was the love that Tash and Mark had for me. I just saw that I was becoming totally devastated and beaten.