Songfacts®:

• The trees bear witness to Tori Amos' grief in the first single from her 16th studio album, Ocean To Ocean. The singer-songwriter temporarily lost her creative ability when faced with the gravity of the coronavirus pandemic and America's tumultuous political landscape leading up to the 2020 presidential election. Amos, who moved to Cornwall, England, in the '90s, desperately needed a way to cope with her emotions during UK's third lockdown. She found it in nature.
  
  "Nature was a huge part," she told The Independent. "Seeing how nature copes with things, watching her and then realizing what she copes with in a day, how she is still there for us..."
• Amos had already written a batch of songs for the album, which was supposed to be released prior to the presidential election and coincide with two North American tours. But pandemic had other plans. In January 2021, just in time to watch in horror as an angry mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, Amos was forced into lockdown with the rest of the UK. Suddenly, the songs she had slated for the album didn't ring true anymore.
  
  "It became clear to me that the songs I was writing pre-election just weren't resonating with me any more," she told NME. "So I threw them all out and started again. The songs I had didn't have the energy I needed to get out of my despondency at that point. The third lockdown really took me to a tough place mentally."
• Amos - who shook up the status quo of pop music with her soul-baring solo debut, Little Earthquakes, in 1992 - had been taking her music on the road since she was 13 years old, so losing her outlet for performing live and connecting with audiences was particularly difficult.
• On Ocean To Ocean, Amos uses her songs to help others cope with loss. "We have all had moments that can knock us down," Amos explained in a press release. "This record sits with you where you are, especially if you are in a place of loss. I am fascinated when someone has gone through a tragedy, and how they work through their grief. That is where the gold is. When somebody is actually at that place, thinking 'I'm done,' how do you reach that person? Sometimes it's not about a pill, or a double shot of tequila. It's about sitting in the muck together. I'm going to meet you in the muck."
• Amos typically splits her time between her homes in Bude, Cornwall and Sewall's Point, Florida. The album cover, which features the singer gazing across the ocean with an outstretched hand, depicts her pain over being separated from her friends and family in the States. Her metaphorical boat was foundering, she told The Independent. "I wasn't alone, I knew that, but I couldn't even send out a little rescue boat to another boat in the distance in that locked-down place," she said.