Tori Amos

I spent the last few days binging and - this will probably change again in future but - I mostly clicked hardest with anything that really spotlighted the interplay between Tori's voice and her piano playing.

I think that specific quality is one that doesn't get talked about much... Her piano playing is less remarkable considered in isolation than understood as this remarkable backdrop to her songs, the sense that these figure-eights she draws around the vocal melodies really accent the songs' emotional content, facial expressions you don't see but hear. It's really unusual for the pop song form, I think, the extent of chromatic density which is essentially there to closely complement the core melodic/narrative/thematic structure.

Take a song like "Doughnut Song": the way the piano rolls through the song like storm clouds, countervailing waves of light and darkness, the way she uses the lower register to really punctuate and emphasise the heavier moments ("and if I'm wasting all your time this time..." and then the left hand really digs in) and then the higher register to suggest wandering and tentativeness that leads off her questioning conclusions ("I guess I'm way beyond the pale....?") - this is one of several ways in which "Doughnut Song" is a sequel to "Honey", which has that same sense of storm clouds rolling in, and is similarly built around very delicate piano/guitar interplay.

Or on "Upside Down", the way the piano follows along with the middle-eight vocal ("I say 'the world is sick' / You say 'tell me what that makes us darlin'" etc.) but fills in all the bits in between the song's dialogues, like the notes are registering the impact, a bruise forming on the skin of the vocal lines.

Or on "Sister Janet", the way the central figure through the verses is played with increasing intensity, until she follows up "slipping the blade in easy" with "slipping the blade in the marmalade", and a sense of lightness suddenly enters with these higher notes, that leads directly into the chorus's reframing of the central riff as somehow optimistic and widescreen rather than claustrophobic and shadowed. And then she jumps up the register for the first half of the second verse to simultaneously suggest a ratcheting of intensity and an increased sense of vulnerability, a turning of the screw with ambiguous consequences.

And maybe the very specific thing about Boys for Pele which is so far out, and which maybe makes it her greatest album in the final analysis, is how it places this particular quality of her performances at the centre of almost every song. Whereas on From The Choirgirl Hotel, if she wants to do southern boogie skronk, she fucking gets the band in*, on "In The Springtime of his Voodoo" the centre is always always the piano (except when, bizarrely given the surrounding song, she switches over the harpsichord). The first minute and a half is in some ways one of the most astonishing things she ever did, the way she uses these exploratory, ruminative piano lines to trace out an idiom that is not even hers except by genetic extraction - and the pay-off when the crawling baseline and percussion come in is just massive.

* Not that this is a bad thing at all, and some days that aspect of FTCH (is part of what) makes it seem to me like her best album, but from a particular vantage point one could almost argue that simply blowing up your sonic palette is maybe the less radical gesture; the harder manoeuvre is to work out how to do anything with the one you've already got.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wVOpTTV5ds

Tori Amos will always be classic to me

wow i missed that booming tim post

and the pay-off when the crawling baseline and percussion come in is just massive.

you gotta owe! something sometimes!

Great post Tim

http://pitchfork.com/news/73081-tori-amos-announces-new-album-native-invader-announces-tour/?mbid=homepage-more-latest-and-video

http://pitchfork.com/news/pitchfork-announces-talk-with-tori-amos/

i would go if i was in NY :-/

New single is out.

http://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2017/07/27/539523176/listen-tori-amos-shares-cloud-riders-from-upcoming-album

Not bad? More excited for her shows than any new material, but this is better than expected

lmao "native invader"

This thread makes me happy.

is she pretending to be an indian again this time? because I like scarlet's walk but kind of hate that shit

Watched a recentish performance of hers and was elated when she played "Putting The Damage On"

anyone catching her on this tour? one of the best live acts in existence

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

holy shit this song rules

I didn't like Cloud Riders or Up the Creek much (the first one IMO being boring and the second a cool yet not fully realised idea), but yes, Reindeer King is gorgeous. Love every second of it.

I don't know WTF is up with the iMovie lyric videos, though.

this is so good

Good to hear her wax about Y Kant Tori Read

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

Nylon interview is also really good. Tori is such an eloquent speaker and totally genuine and empathetic. Legend

because I do not value my time I threw a couple clicks into the buzzfeed tithe, and immediately regretted it:

http://i.imgur.com/ZjEkkVb.png

(the worst thing? this is sponsored content by Tori's own team. also, American Doll Posse was a much better "which one is you?")

^ I got Raspberry Swirl :-/

I'm sure anyone that has wanted to hear Y Kant Tori Read has heard it by now?? but I just found out it is up on Spotify in a Remastered version.

Maybe you want to listen to it?

https://open.spotify.com/album/5pnAHJIW4UWmdlFnjyN0IT

Still so great.

new album's out - just started listening, first track is "raindeer king" and yeah it's an instant classic

second song a little middling
third track, "broken arrow," super great

oh thanks for the reminder, definitely want to hear this. not keen on her daughter's vocals tbh

in a recent interview Tori made a reference to how she wasn't acknowledged by an artist she admired for many years. Couldn't help but wonder if it was Kate Bush

I think her fans established that it was either Stevie Nicks or Joni Mitchell.

oh cool, thanks!

i believe I saw Bush say something complimentary about Amos around the last time she bothered to do any kind of press at all. maybe not.

i like this better than the last one, it's way too long and my attention drifts occasionally but, like, "reindeer king," "broken arrow," "cloud riders," and "up the creek" are all really wonderful songs

oh also, "bang"! "bang" is like my favorite tori song in years

This album is like if, after the 90s (or maybe Strange Little Girls / Scarlet's Walk) Tori had started transitioning to a "mature artist" instead of spending a decade messing with her formula.

I haven't come to grips with most of it yet but stylistically it's on point.

Reindeer King is so lovely, absolute classic.

This album is like if, after the 90s (or maybe Strange Little Girls / Scarlet's Walk)

it's def got a "long-delayed follow-up to scarlet's walk" aspect about it, though that may be me projecting bc "mary's eyes" is my fav tori closer since "gold dust"

feel like "reindeer king" is Tori's bid at 50 ft of snow KB

"reindeer king" is classic Tori

might sound cheesy but I started playing piano as a teenager because of Tori

yeah reindeer king is one of her best songs.

Yooooooo, how long has she been covering We Don't Need Another Hero??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7jio-XxVuA

ugh i wish i had seen her on this tour. the last tour too

Apparently that "We Don't Need Another Hero" was the first time ever she's done it. But according to setlist.fm she's already done over 50 different covers on this tour. Almost 120 (!!!) on the previous one.

Wow, that's a whole lot of effort on top of digging through her own repertoire.

a friend saw her in new orleans last night and was a tad disappointed at the amount of covers actually, though he said it was still good.

I saw her in New York and there were only about two covers (honestly, I preferred the Tuesday setlist, which I didn't see, to Wednesday's, which I did, but Kristin Hersh was playing Tuesday and I saw her instead)

Really hope I can her in Washington (I'm in Vancouver). Tori's covers are one of my favourite parts of her shows, absolutely love her hyper ballad, and dream of sheep, I'm on fire, hounds of love and Philadelphia covers. Course there's plenty more good ones :-)

Oops meant running up that hill not hounds

seeing her on friday, so excited. Haven't seen her since the strange little girls tou

Saw her in Washington last night. Energy level felt a little lower than some of the recent sets wherein she would quickly traverse from one original/cover to the next. Energy briefly picked up on apollo's frock, but that was 10 songs into the set. Honestly, I would have been happier with a covers set and she was better on the strange little girls tour, but I admire her decision to play how she feels every night and keep it spontaneous.

Highlights: Silver Springs, Running to Stand Still, Raspberry Swirl and Another Girls Paradise. Nice to hear a few LE tracks as well.

Night of hunters is a fucking good record