"Too Literal" Lyrics

I am still seeing people complain that Tori's lyrics are "too literal," too "on the nose," not poetic or abstract enough.

The album is full of overt lyrics that are part of the narrative throughline, but I am listening to Blue Lotus, which has invaded my brain at a deep level, and the lyrics involve Tori speaking to a waterlily and burning into hazel and a thousand souls flying over steeples. I don't quite understand how when she writes like this she can be accused of writing literally.

Likewise, the closing track opens with "crazy mountains, medicine woman, 23 23 peaks" and it culminates in her pleading with dragon queens to change her back from a "half woman, half dragon thing."

I feel like objections to her being "too literal" are likely due to her explicitly using the terms "democracy," "free speech" and telling her daughter she loves her, as opposed to using abstract metaphors, but it seems to me that that is not so much an issue of her not being poetic enough and rather an issue of people preferring Tori to take them away from grounded everyday reality into a place where everything is ill defined and open to intepretation—is that it?

(I do understand that anytime she sincerely expresses love for family some people always interpret that as sentimental and Hallmark-y. I understand that even though I don't fully agree with it and although her music has always included sentimental songs as relate to her family, and so this is really not a change in her writing.)

I was disappointed by her writing on The Beekeeper because a lot of the songs use direct and metaphorical clichés like "bull in a China shop" and that felt strangely unimaginative, but that changed with future albums and I realized that she not only changes her music with every album but also her writing style, even if it's subtle sometimes. She's so intentional with everything she does that I try to work out why she makes the choices she does instead of determining that after decades of astonishing work, she just suddenly degraded.

I think that her interest in telling an album-long narrative made of fragments that add up to something greater than any individual song require that she write more literal lyrics at times to ensure the point is not overlooked entirely. For example, someone here wrote that they think the poltical theme is just a cover story for a deeply personal album about aging, and I do disagree with that, and I think that being *so* explicit about democracy and Thiel and billionaires is actually necessary so that we do not overlook her deep concern about this by determining the album is only a self-indulgent Tori being stuck in her emotions as an aging woman, as she is otherwise destined to be interpreted. I think the album deals with more than one layer of meaning simultaneously as do all her albums and to do that she has to make it disjointed in some ways, long playing, and "on the nose" at times. If she removed the explicit references to political concerns, critics and fans alike would say "it's her menopause-made-me-a-dragon statement," and I think if there's an overarching statment it's more along the lines of "as above, so below; we can run and hide for only so long, but we have to come to terms with the hardships in our lives and accept painful change so that we can move beyond it." But lyrics like the ones I opened with from Blue Lotus and other songs demonstrate that she has not lost her gift for evocative and mystical poetry. She is an adept and versatile writer who uses different writing styles to accomplish different aims.