Tori Amos - 1000 Oceans 'Official video'

What this video is

Released September 1999 as the second single from To Venus and Back, '1000 Oceans' arrived at the peak of Tori Amos's commercial and critical visibility following the breakthrough of From the Choirgirl Hotel (1998). The album earned a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album and sold a million copies in the US. The video's glass-booth-in-the-city concept visually externalizes Amos's lyrical themes of…

Why it matters

A landmark late-90s art-rock video that prioritized symbolic visual metaphor over conventional performance or narrative, distinguishing Amos from contemporaries in the female singer-songwriter space. The glass-booth staging anticipates the 'isolation spectacle' trope later common in 2000s art-pop…

The director

French-born multimedia artist, filmmaker, and photographer. Began career directing music videos in the late 1980s and 1990s for artists including Tori Amos, a-ha, Shawn Colvin, and Isaac Hayes. Operated through his production company Serial Dreamer, based in…