Tori Amos

i am so glad i am going back home on friday, because among other things i'm going to reclaim the tori cds i left there that i've been inspired to listen to again (mostly thanks to this thread).

'pancake' reminds me of something, too. i can't work out what style she's aiming for with it. it's one of the better moments of the album anyway.

i think part of the problem would have been heightened expectation - as far as i'm concerned pele through to venus was an extraordinary creative flowering for tori, and scarlet's walk falls some way short of that peak.

tim and jody, what do you think of strange little girls? i really, really, like it. her cover of '97 bonnie & clyde' is chilling. the concept actually vaguely makes sense!

haha and the beekeeper : the red shoes (that's pretty harsh on the red shoes though)

i like about half of it. it would have made a very cool EP. she should have left off "happiness is a warm gun," "heart of gold," i'm not in love," and "enjoy the silence." sort of on the fence about "i don't like mondays."

"real men" is too good to be stuck way back there at the end.

i like the way she chose ultra-canonical males to deconstruct so completely.

Introducing Norway's answer to Tori Amos - Ingrid Olava.

any Tori fans around - give it a listen, and a verdict:

MIC Norway: Ingrid Olava

Ingrid Olava

01/16/2008

The first single has been released form what is set be one of the most talked about records of the year, Ingrid Olava's debut Juliet Wishes

Album released by EMI Norway in early March.

listen: MySpace.com - Ingrid Olava - - Pop / Indie / Jazz - www.myspace.com/ingridolava

Heard her new album today. What the fuck happened to this woman. Don't even get me started on this.

we didn't.

Hmm?

(I mean, come on. Anonymous bullying? Is your dick THAT small?)

I can't listen to anything before Scarlett's Walk thanks to some personal associations, and conveniently enough I hate everything since Scarlett's Walk.

"sorta fairytale" still fucks me up but good.

blimey.

Well, it wasn't this morning, but that's btw.

I'm saying "we didn't get you started", but by all means continue.

(xpost)

Scarlet's Walk is her best album. Shhh, it's a secret.

Haven't heard anything since, though.

i saw her live last night for the first time in years - forgot what a terrific performer she is, and was also reminded that 'cool on your island', 'putting the damage on' and 'leather' are incredible songs. have also met her in person twice in two weeks, it was kind of weird not to be overawed.

the new album's not bad, as expected you have to wearily trudge through 94938343 songs to pick out the good ones but i'm definitely feeling 'give', 'strong black vine', 'that guy' and 'fast horse' at least.

but your momma ain't new york, she is pure tennessee

Actually I think I'd like Starling without the horrible guitars :(

bahahaha Hoos I have the same deal except w/'To Venus & Back.' Actually I will still rock Choirgirl every once in a while but mostly we've grown in our own different directions, she and I.

She should just make album covers.

this album is better than the last two but only marginally

She should just make album covers.

She should just make albums and leave out the embarrassing concepts, covers and about half of the AOR-leaning tracks.

she's only had about 4 decent album covers in her career. pele, choirgirl, strange little girls, american doll posse.

cover versions, though: more of these. she covered 'smooth operator' at the gig on mon! it was great.

i guess little earthquakes, under the pink, venus and scarlet's walk are boring covers rather than bad, kind of like "ehh, at least she looks prettyish". beekeeper and the new one are awful though

and there's her version of "ring my bell" of course.

i guess little earthquakes, under the pink, venus and scarlet's walk are boring covers rather than bad

Clearly though, Under the Pink is her best album cover. Someone back me up on this.

yeap retty much!

i love the miss 80's ethereality-ness of it

guys remember how good "fat slut" was??

like a glimmer of hope

why is mr. zebra so beautiful, ramzi?

cuz it's like

she just stepped over to the piano

and it just came out

http://i38.tinypic.com/34dhrp3.jpg

Why, Tori? Why?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2Ldt2b-SC8

Y Kant Tori Spelling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLCMC1yDRGE

Are you still friends with Shannon Doherty?

http://www.slate.com/id/2267815/

"It wasn't until a year and a half later, on a tour of Japan, that Tori Amos and "Winter" started playing a role in my wrestling career. "

Revive.

I'm a big fan. That said: why did she stop writing the literate, brilliant, approaching-on-overwritten lyrics found on "Little Earthquakes" and settle into the oblique mumbo-jumbo of "Boys for Pele" onward? Any theories?

well, i mean she didn't settle there. from the choirgirl hotel gets pretty lucid (funnily enough, i think of boys for pele as a record about processing trauma, thus the oblique mumbo-jumbo, but choirgirl is most lucid when it is literally addressing traumatic things).

mm although Pele has some disticntly *non* mumbo jumbo ish stuff too
"I think you're a queer and i shaved every place where you been boy" springs to mind.

I def like the mumbo-jumbo, sometimes it's totally fun, when she sings "met him in a guess world" or the "crackerjacks / tidal wave / pope's rubber robe" etc.

But I noticed when listening to "Little Earthquakes" b-sides last week-- I only get Tori on maybe once every two years, her music mixes up some teenage regretful nostalgia cocktails-- I noticed that the oblique style was already there on the b-sides. But on those b-sides, the lyrics seemed to be in a demo form, placeholders for things yet to be finished. I started to see some parallels between the oblique lyrics on "Boys" and the unfinished lyrics on "Upside Down" or whatevs, and I thought that maybe she might've, well, stopped labouring?

I chatted bout it last night and other theories surfaced from other fans and former fans at the table; a popular one re: the shift in tone was that she sought distance from her obsessive fanbase. I disagreed, as she seemed still to deal with subject matter that was as personal as it comes.

mm yeah the mumbo jumbo only encourages em! there's endless theories online over what "tuna, rubber, little blubber in my igloo yeah" could possibly mean for example.

I think "Marianne" is set up deliberately as a stream of consciousness of childhood impressions free of narrative - think of it as being like a scene from Tree of Life. (not all of Tori's mumbo jumbo fits this explanation, but it does here)

Whereas when Tori wants to be straightforward or story-teller on that album - "Doughnut Song" or "Little Amsterdam" spring to mind - she seems able to to inhabit those roles quite easily.

Her most literate, lucid lyrics (which is obv not the same thing as "best" necessarily) are actually on Scarlet's Walk which strikes me as being a bit like Rickie Lee Jones lyrically.

e.g. the lyrics to "Taxi Ride":

lily is dancing on the table
we've all been pushed too far
i guess on days like this
you know who your friends are
just another dead fag to you that's all
just another light missing
on a long taxi ride
taxi ride

and i'm down to your last cigarette and
this "we are one" crap as you're invading
this thing you call love - she smiles
way too much but
i'm glad you're on my side, sure
i'm glad you're on my side still

you think you deserve a trust fund
just because you want one
sure you talk the talk when you need to
i fear the whole world is starting to
believe you
just another dead fag to you that's all
just another light missing in a long taxi line
taxi line

and i"m down to your last cigarette and
this "we are one" crap as you're invading
this thing you call love - she smiles
way too much but
i'm glad you're on my side, sure
i'm glad you're on my side still

lily is dancing on the table
we've all been pushed too far today
even a glamorous bitch can be in need
this is where you know
the honey from the killer bees
i'm glad you're on my side sure
i'm glad you're on my side sure
i'm glad you're on my side still

got a long taxi ride
got a long taxi ride

I think "Marianne" is set up deliberately as a stream of consciousness of childhood impressions free of narrative

haha i was going to write s.thing incoherent abt 'boys for pele' being her attempt at an 'the waves' style take on biography/'the_self'. its def my fave tori album for that reason

even w/ 'little earthquakes' theres an extent to which the most arresting lyrics are opaque and fragmented, for me theres a sense in which the deeply personal is only communicable in slices of imagery or ideas that dont always cohere or reconcile

^^^^ absolutely OTM.

And often it's the juxtaposition of absolute directness with absolute opacity which most strongly underscores this (and, I suspect, most frustrates the casual listener).

^ Whoa, I never made that connection. I'll re-read/re-listen and think about that.

Hrmmm. Maybe it's just frustrating to listen in hindsight to the stylistic heterogeneity that marks her first two records (and their b-sides). "Flying Dutchman" suggests an entirely different songwriter-- not to mention "Mother", or "Crucify", which again sound highly removed from other tracks on the same record and all tracks to come. There's something I guess I miss about the diversity of her early output, even if "Boys" and "Choirgirl" are my favourite of her LPs

i can see that. i think i already posted this in the p4k poll thread but i rarely listen to tori albums straight through, even when i was 'discovering' her it was via .mp3s so my sense for this isnt that great tbh

but i do think 'boys for pele' has a very modernist approach w/its lyrics that i love a lot

Man, if you could've discovered her as it happened, it was a gauge-fest. Proto-emo kids everywhere penniless from purchasing UK imports. I dumped $30 on a bootleg CD collection of b-sides. First exposure to rarer-than-rare tracks was their appearance in piano scorebooks, etc. Heady.

even w/ 'little earthquakes' theres an extent to which the most arresting lyrics are opaque and fragmented, for me theres a sense in which the deeply personal is only communicable in slices of imagery or ideas that dont always cohere or reconcile

yeah exactly! scattered thoughts on this -

1) this jumps off something tim f posted years ago - what tori often communicates isn't so much confession as the difficulty of piecing together a confession, partly due to the desire to keep things hidden - hence veering into what sounds like oblique/nonsense to the listener but is in fact a mix of private in-jokes and wordplay. confessionalism is a contradictory and complex business, basically.

2) few other singer-songwriters have as great a sense for how words sound together as tori - and for how these phonetics can convey meaning where the actual literal meaning of the words doesn't. when playa fly sampled "horses" for a rap song and noz posted cryptically about how tori is harder than your favourite rapper, it kind of made me realise how appropriate that was given her sense of language - a song like "horses" exemplifies this, it's entirely built on rolling internal rhymes and half-rhymes and assonance and alliteration, and it's the ebbs and flows of the language that make the song so hypnotic and dreamlike. this kind of stuff is what huge swathes of to venus and back rely on too, and the combination of ornate language and out-there production really makes that album for me. on songs like "concertina" and "lust" she does just enough to give the listener a sense of what the song is broadly "about", and then the application of so many odd metaphors to the situation is kind of...sensory overload in a great way even when you have no idea what individual lines "mean".

3) i'm not sure about dividing her songwriting into a time when it was straightforward and a time when it was cryptic - in 1996-99 she was still writing songs as straightforward as "hey jupiter", "1000 oceans" and "northern lad", prior to that she wrote songs as cryptic as "space dog". and as lamp says even her most straightforward examples of "classic" songwriting are couched in opaque or unexpected terms - "what if i'm a mermaid in these jeans of his", "cincinnati - i like the word" etc etc.

"tinie tempurah"!

A friend of mine is rather pleased with the coinage "tinie tempeh".

But yes lex is OTM as one might expect.

"Upside Down" is a fantastic song incidentally.

Esp:

"I say "the world is sick"
You say, "tell me what that makes us darlin'"
you see, you always find my faults
faster than you find your own
You say "the world is getting rid of her demons"
I say "baby what have you been smoking"
well I dreamed, I dreamed, I dreamed
I loved a black boy... my daddy would scream..."

People always describe her early lyrics as "diaristic" but really they were dialogues.

britney's "everytime" always reminded me of "upside down". i think a few early songs - "china", "upside down" and especially "cool on your island" point to an alternative universe in which tori's slogging it out on the LA circuit led to a long and lucrative career as pop songwriter rather than artist in her own right.

it's prob worth thinking about the different varieties of opacity that tori uses, too: phonetic wordplay ("and milkwood, and silkwood, and you would if i would, but you never would"), unexpected metaphors ("slipping the blade in the marmalade"), the introduction of unexplained characters kind of like she's creating her own mythology ("i'm hiding it well, sister ernestine"), fucking around with grammar and structure ("a hot kachina who wants into mine"), using words in contexts that make no immediate sense ("in a bath of glitter and a tiny shiver she crawls through your java sea") and so on.