Boys for Pele was recorded in rural Ireland and Louisiana and features 18 songs that incorporate harpsichord, clavichord, harmonium, gospel choirs, brass bands and full orchestras. Amos wrote all of the tracks, and for the first time, she served as sole producer for her own album. For Amos, the album was a step into a different direction, in terms of singing, songwriting, and recording, and is experimental in comparison to her previous work.
During the recording of her previous album, Under the Pink (1994), Amos's longtime professional and romantic relationship with Eric Rosse, who co-produced a considerable amount of her pre-Pele work, disintegrated. That loss, combined with a few subsequent encounters with men during the Under the Pink promotional tour, forced Amos to re-evaluate her relationship with men and masculinity. Amos explained, "In my relationships with men, I was always musician enough, but not woman enough, I always met men in my life as a musician, and there would be magic, adoration. But then it would wear off. All of us want to be adored, even for five minutes a day, and nothing these men gave me was ever enough."
The songs began appearing in fragments, often while on stage during the Under the Pink tour. After a trip to Hawaii during which Amos learned about legendary volcano goddess Pele, the album began taking shape; Amos conceived of the songs as representing stealing fire from the men in her life as well as a journey to finding her own fire as a woman. From there, Amos explained, the songs just came. "Sometimes the fury of it would make me step back, I began to live these songs as we separated. The vampire in me came out. You're an emotional vampire, with blood in the corner of your mouth, and you put on matching lipstick so no one knows."
During this time, Amos, who has openly discussed her experiences with psychedelic drugs, particularly in relation to Boys for Pele, did ceremonies with a South American shaman and experienced meeting the devil, leading her to write the track "Father Lucifer."
The album would ultimately consisted of 15 full-length songs and four short "interludes". As Amos was finding "parts and pieces of myself that I had never claimed" on this journey, the 14 primary songs represent the number of body parts of the Egyptian god Osiris that his wife, the goddess Isis, had to find to put his body back together in Egyptian mythology.
Boys for Pele was Amos' first self-produced album; she would continue producing her own albums ever since. Given that the album deals with the role of women in religion and relationships, and particularly in light of her breakup with Rosse, who had served as producer for her previous two albums, Amos felt that it was appropriate to take complete control over producing Boys for Pele, as a "bid for independence". Of producing the album herself, Amos said, "I was at the point I could not answer to anybody. I'd been answering my whole life to some patriarchal figure."
Two underlying currents run through Boys for Pele: exploring the role of women in both patriarchal religion and relationships, her viewpoint takes a particularly feminist slant on this album. "The feminine part of God has been circumcised out of all religions ... God is a patriarchal force, a very masculine energy, with the feminine having been subservient, either being the mother, the lover, the virgin, but never the equal, never to have the whole." "Muhammad My Friend", the eighth track on the album, best represents this aspect of the album's theme with the line, "It's time to tell the world/We both know it was a girl back in Bethlehem."
Amos derived the album's title from the Hawaiian volcano goddess, Pele, with the "boys" representing the men in her life. "First I wanted to sacrifice all these guys to the volcano goddess and roast them like marshmallows, then I decided they gave me a really wonderful gift," Amos said of the title. Amos herself has described the album as a novel, as a "story of the descent of a woman to gain her passion and gain her compassion," chronicling a woman's self-discovery in a male-dominated world, looking for fragments of herself and being suppressed. Songs such as "Blood Roses", "Caught a Lite Sneeze", "Hey Jupiter", "Doughnut Song" and "Putting the Damage On" deal directly with the aftermath of a break-up and a woman's reflection on the failed relationship.
"Blood Roses", which Amos had initially intended to serve as the opening track to the album, found the singer scorned over a failed relationship, belting out lines such as, "can't forget the things you never said" and "I've shaved every place where you've been boy". Regarding "Caught a Lite Sneeze", Amos says, "the whole current is doing anything so that you don't have to face yourself. Nothing is enough"; her previous relationships with men being the song's backbone with lines like, "boys on my left side, boys on my right side, boys in the middle and you're not here, I need a big loan from the girl zone."
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