"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:
“Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man’s yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!”
—Flora Tristan (1803–1844)
“A widow has two duties of a contradictory nature—she is a mother, and she ought to exert a father’s power.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)