The Tori Thread

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I ought to check out this latest CD of hers,since I like a lot of what Beth has introduced me to.

I'd be interested to hear your opinion of it Dave, as a musician. I'm full of admiration for what she's done with some of the carols on this album, reworking them with her own melodies and lyrics blended in, in what seems to me a seamless and convincing fashion. I think it's really clever, but I'm not a musician, of course. I'd love to know what you think.

One of my favourite things on the record is the way she's combined two carols, Lo How A Rose Ere Blooming and The Holly and the Ivy, to create a new narrative that brims with both Christian and pagan symbolism, each amplifying the meaning of the other:



I also love the third strand of meaning she brings into this track with the voice of her daughter Natashya, who's now 9 years old. Tori is quite obviously linking the poetry of the rose about to bloom with her daughter growing up, a bittersweet moment for a mother. The emotion in her voice as she sings those lines is one I recognise all too well. What a beautiful thing to do for her child, who won't understand what her mother is expressing right now, but will when she's grown up a bit and listens to it again.

There is a noticeable self-regarding streak in all her stuff,though. Something you get with certain artists-Keith Jarrett is another-part of you thinks 'what an arrogant twat', another part is totally fascinated and beguiled. A bit like the kid who was brilliant at everything at school.Or Mozart in the 'Amadeus' mindset. Is that true greatness?

It's interesting that you mention Jarrett, I listened to a concert of his broadcast on Radio 3 some years ago and was struck by the way his clearly very devoted audience would break out into applause and cheers whenever he did something particularly clever on the piano, just the way Tori fans do at her concerts!

I guess it must be hard to avoid the trap of overweening arrogance and egomania when you come into this world insanely gifted. Most of us will never have that problem.

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In a perfect world we should just enjoy the work for what it is and shouldn't really be influenced one way or the other by the person creating the work. But unfortunately its not a perfect world and it is very hard to seperate the two.

It definitely is, I can think of other artists whose work I love, but I have to really try not to think about aspects of their personas that don't exactly elicit admiration.

As Daniel and Beth have remarked about Tori I find myself in the same position with Paul McCartney. Much as i actually still enjoy his music (despite its inconsistancy in recent years),my pleasure is marred somewhat by his smarmy public image and the rubbish he talks.

Ah, it's interesting to hear you say that Rob because I've always felt that way about McCartney. Love his gift for melody, but always something mask-like in his persona that I instinctively distrusted. I remember Jane Asher in an interview in the 80s hinting that he wasn't quite the lovable chap he seemed, and I can well believe it.

However, I'm sure I've probably told you this story before, I'm impressed by a personal anecdote about him from my ex-boss, who as a teenager in the late 60s lived in St. John's Wood, near Abbey Road. She and some of her friends spotted McCartney coming from the studio one day and ran up to him for autographs, then realised nobody had a pen. They asked him to hang on a minute, ran back to their block of flats to get a pen, and he was still there politely waiting for them when they came back.

Unfortunately for Tori Amos she's not nearly as important as she likes to think she is. But maybe some of her OTT fans have fueled and encouraged the illusion and should be held responsible too?

Oh undoubtedly, the unquestioning adulation heaped on her by some fans is extraordinary and weird. That kind of fandom is deeply unhealthy for both the fan and the artist, I've thought so since I saw the same thing happening back in the mid-80s in the Kate Bush fan scene. In that case it was compounded by critical adulation, which is something Tori is never going to be troubled with, and to my mind it contributed greatly to Kate's artistic decline after the release of Hounds of Love. Unquestioning praise is death to an artist's creativity and objectivity.

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Anyway, to distract myself from the depressing knowledge that my favourite musician is a giant egomaniacal deluded loon, here's something else I love from her new album, IMO the best thing she's written since Scarlet's Walk:






I *cannot* get enough of this song right now. I love that she really has written a secular winter's carol here, something that commemorates the light-into-darkness-into-light cycle that human beings have been marking for thousands of years. And the way, with the lines 'wrapped in ribbons of gold for the whole world' she calls back to mind the Nativity. Her placing of the Christian myth of 'the son' in the wider context of ancient pagan myths of 'the sun' is one of her great achievements on this record, and she does it so concisely and beautifully that the wish-I-was-a-writer in me can't help but be bowled over.

The fact that this song is apparently from the Light Princess musical she's been writing for the past few years has led to speculation amongst fans that this is where her true creativity has been going since Scarlet's Walk. An intriguing thought.

[d.a.walker]

A major thing that now annoys me with Tori is that on her recent few albums her singing has become predictable and lazy. She's always irked me slightly with the way she can sing certain words (e.g. cla-he-houds = clouds), but she seems to be now dangerously caught in that habit excessively. I listened to LE the other day and just adored every second of it, her voice is just so expressively genuine and unforced, sure she has her moments but there is so much emotion behind it it's easy to forgive her. But on Abhorrably Attracted To Spin, she is like nails down a blackboard.

Her winter album works because she has a framework that allows her injection of artistic vision while working within the confines of songs she knows well and mean something special to her. Almost like there is a passion to be found once again that hasn't been smothered in ridiculous concepts and images. The album also has 12 tracks. Not the 20+ hell to get through deluded epics she seems to think is worth making. It worked on Scarlet, but then she spent a long time working on it, but the rest were a chore. For me 8-12 is the perfect length for an album.

But I think MWG is going to be a one off from a singer who has complete control over her image and output. When she had a 'boss' there was control, look at the Atlantic era, only Pele really had more than 12 tracks, and the quality of her work was excellent and disciplined. Now she's chucking anything and everything onto a disc. Cindy Palmano defined Tori visually so perfectly, Tori just captures the vanity. And she could have gone with a really nice simple cover for MWG instead of looking like Joan Rivers stunt double levitating like a zombie out of the Evil Dead!!

I probably won't buy MWG mainly as I don't care much for Christmas in any capacity, though I have been given a couple of seasonal albums in the past, namely Aimee Mann and Shawn Colvin, both of which were nice, but limited, diversions from their more interesting solo careers. I just hope that maybe Tori gets a revelation for Christmas that if she stops trying so hard and just tries to be Tori, she might reel back in me and the lots of other lost fans.

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Had the album playing today whilst putting the Christmas tree up, it was a lovely accompaniment. I was struck again by how solemn and melancholy it is though, not at all the 'typical' seasonal record - thank goodness.

PS 22 in New York (the schoolkids who have performed many of Tori's songs in arrangements by their music teacher Greg, a member of @forums - I think I've posted one of their videos somewhere in this thread) recently put up a version of Winter's Carol, which Tori has seen. In a recent interview she mentioned how appropriate it was, as in the musical the song will be sung by children in a choral arrangement. I must say since hearing Winter's Carol I'm becoming more and more intrigued by this musical.

PS 22 version, complete with the weird hand gestures and overwrought facial expressions apparently expected of choirs in America:





He does such good work with his choir, this guy. The gestures are off-putting to my British taste, but seeing kids enjoying singing so much is good for the heart. I particularly love that the little boys in this choir clearly have no problems at all with expressing emotions through singing - give it a couple of years and they'll have been socially conditioned into seeing such things as 'sissy', no doubt.

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Just a little thing, but I was surprised and touched to hear the beautiful opening piano improv from Tori's 'Not The Red Baron' being used to accompany the trailer for the BBC's upcoming 'Battle of Britain - First Light' programme, obviously it's been chosen because of the title but it's really an appropriate and lovely choice musically as well. A fan managed to catch it and upload it on the new board at unforumzed:

http://www.unforumzed.com/showthread.ph ... ter/page16


So nice to hear one of my fave Tori songs used in this way, the elegiac quality of the opening seems all too appropriate for the subject.

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Not that anyone but me probably cares now ( ), but it looks as if Tori is returning to her roots for her next project. She's been talking recently about the piano coming back to centre stage in the stuff she's writing now, and her recent solo tour in the summer saw the return of some great piano improvs, which is good news for those of us who love that side of her. She's going to perform a concert with the Metropole Orchestra in Amsterdam in a week or so, the first time she's ever played live with an orchestra, and it will be filmed for possible DVD release. However, someone from the orchestra has let slip on Twitter that she's also going to be recording with them next week over a period of several days. She's hinted that her next album is going to be piano and strings only, so it's all looking quite hopeful.

As yet there's no indication if the album will be new material, incidentally. Given that she's performing songs from her back catalogue with the orchestra, some are speculating the album could be piano/orchestral reworkings of older material.

Her musical 'The Light Princess' is all done and has got the green light to go ahead, it's scheduled to open at the National Theatre in spring 2012.

[d.a.walker]

I've really lost touch with Tori

Didn't quite realise how so until I was doing a major cd storage revamp the other week and discovered I hadn't even unpacked her albums/singles since moving last year.

Having been burnt by TBK, ADP and AATS and not even bothering to buy the xmas album, I'd really gone off her and only occasionally dipped into FTCH and LE on my iPod.

Which is sad considering the lengths I went to all those years ago in the early 90's to get all those damn CD singles!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think to get me back in her camp she needs to be Tori, not the army of pseudo-Tori's, the characters she's used to hide behind herself. She needs to get back to the grit. I can't relate to someone who has to invent versions of herself to convey something. And she needs to stop the bloody botox!

Strings and pianos sound beautiful, I just hope it become the sum of it's parts and isn't another photocopy...

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I think maybe she is coming back to herself a bit now, Dan - it was noticeable during the solo tour in the summer, she just seemed more like Tori and less like Fori in terms of her performing. The one thing that surprised everyone was how the piano was really BACK, you know? Proper improvs, her playing was just beautiful and like it used to be, not the dull style she adopted during the band tours. She seemed very energised and happy. Then she did some interviews in late summer where she talked about how she's writing for the piano again, not the band, and mentioned the involvement of an orchestra or strings with more classical arrangements on the next album.

Vocally she seemed to have improved too - her voice will never again be what it used to be, all the band tours have seen to that, but I think she's learning to accept it and work with it. She's slowly figuring out how to sing with this voice now, and her confidence seems to be coming back a bit as a result. This performance of Curtain Call from Paris in July is a good example of what I mean:





The voice is obviously fragile now, but she gives the song a delicate performance to match and it just works so much better than the way she's been performing over the last five years. She can still be intense when the song needs it, but in a different way to how she used to be. It's a beautiful performance and yet again highlights how gorgeous her songs are played live solo compared to the studio versions with band. What I love about this clip too is how personally INVOLVED she is - this is what I mean by more Tori than Fori, I feel like I'm watching Tori Amos at 47 years old, not the stylised version of herself she's presented for the last few years. Look at her face when she sings the 'this is not business, it's more like spiritual' lines. You can't tell me that's not some personal real emotion going on there.

Anyway, I'm hopeful for the next album. I loved the last one unreservedly, Midwinter Graces is a lovely, lovely album and I think it was probably going back to approaching arrangements from an orchestral/classical perspective for that record that brought her to where she is now. Back to a sense of who she really is as a musician, and out of this terrible phase of trying to be something she's not.

The show in Amsterdam last night with the orchestra was apparently fabulous, by the way. Lots of glowing reviews from those who were there. I'm loving the youtube clips. I have to just post this one because .... holy fuck. Excuse my French, but I actually cried watching this, it's so great - Yes Anastasia, live with orchestra:




I wouldn't have believed she could do this song at all at this point, in this context, never mind doing it so well. I felt so obscurely proud of her, watching it and knowing how much she's been struggling in the last several years. This is what she was trained to do, it's like getting a little glimpse of the concert pianist she was meant to be.

[d.a.walker]

The Yes Anastasia clip is everything I loved originally about Tori, the piano and orchestra. Simply stunning! You know I'd love to see her do Flying Dutchman live like that!

Now an album of piano epics, well, I'd be running back to her waving a white flag!!!!

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She did Flying Dutchman too! It was one of the highlights of the gig, along with Anastasia and Marianne. A couple of the newer tracks that I like were also wonderful, Girl Disappearing and Our New Year. I think most of the clips are up on youtube now Dan, I won't post them all here in case it slows up the board.

As far as we know there will be a recording of these orchestra versions, with vocals done in the studio. I'm really looking forward to that. Four songs from Midwinter Graces were included in the concert, so the speculation is that the orchestral versions may be released as some kind of accompaniment to that album, in time for the festive season - maybe a deluxe version with the new cd included. Which would be awesome.

I'm so excited now for the next album. It probably won't be out till after The Light Princess makes its debut in 2012, but hopefully it will be worth the wait.

[d.a.walker]

Here's an interesting topic for discussion...

Tori has been vocal of her regret for switching Honey to The Wrong Band on UTP, do you think UTP should have Honey instead of The Wrong Band? How would it change UTP? Or did she actually make the right choice to switch at the last minute?

For me, as beautifully dark as Honey is, The Wrong Band feels like an injection of brightness much like Happy Phantom on LE and Mr Zebra on BFP. Honey certainly wouldn't sit right for me between Baker Baker and The Waitress. But, like a lot of Tori's bees, Honey deserved better than it's b-side status.

That's what I think, I think

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The Wrong Band is such an under-rated song, it's one of my favourites from UTP so I definitely think it should be there. I don't see why she couldn't have put Honey on the record too. Why does it have to be either/or, and not both?

They both have a darkness to them, but The Wrong Band is imaginative in a way that Honey isn't, IMO. I love how Tori makes The Wrong Band sound like a song from a musical even though the subject is a prostitute whose life is being threatened by a powerful politician. It takes some imagination to do that! I love the structure of it, the switch from jaunty showtune into the poignant bridge, the lyrics, her vocal .... I just think it's a fabulous little song that's been unfairly pushed aside because of the story of how Honey got kicked off the record for it.

Honey is a gorgeous song, but a pretty straight ahead standard Tori ballad. If one song had to be a b-side, I agree it should be Honey. She made the right decision.

[d.a.walker]

In the nice book that comes with A Piano, Tori actually states she feels TWB is of B-side quality!

I like it on UTP, and maybe she could have put Honey on as well as, but I've been puzzling myself working out where it could slot into the album It's quite hard to pinpoint where it could go, where it would work in context to the other tracks.

I was thinking maybe between Cloud On My Tongue and Space Dog...

Another example of interesting Tori hypocrisy is regarding the track Sugar, which she dismissed as a studio knock off of little value recorded simply to pad out a set of songs for the label, which has become one of her most featured B-sides when playing live!

I often wonder if she actually listens to what she's saying when she actually speaks. The crap she spouted around the release of Abnormally Attracted To The Bin was ghastly

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I've never heard that comment about Sugar, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was true. Tori sometimes came up with great songs more or less instantaneously - 'Thoughts' for instance, one of my favourite b-sides, which was just an improv before doing another take of 'Girl' when they were recording the first album, or more impressively things like 'Marianne' and 'Not The Red Baron' which were written in one take straight to tape. That beautiful long build-up to NTRB is Tori just playing for the engineers so they could get sound levels sorted.

Totally agree about the interviews around the time of AATS - I was kind of horrified by the portrait of Tori that emerged, to be honest. But I think something changed when she made Midwinter Graces, personally. She's seemed much more like her old self since that album, musically and in herself. I think she's gone through a really strange phase these past few years since she got into her 40s, but she's coming through it.