Tori Amos

I owe lex a great deal for promoting From the Choirgirl Hotel at The Guardian three years ago. It's not great but it's inventive and astonishing enough to have sent me scurrying backwards to see what else I missed.

This is quite a common thing I imagine, but to me it always seemed like with, Tori's first four albums, each one would feel radically different to the album before, and then the next album would come out and would make the differences you'd perceived previously seem minor or less important. So in an odd way my sense of what kind of album Boys For Pele ~is~ was almost more shaped by hearing From The Choirgirl Hotel than by the actual album.

it's 100% a trend of ignoring of female singer-songwriters. unless you're lucky/connected enough to be canonized to the degree of a st. vincent or angel olsen, or perhaps country enough to find luck down that route, no one is going to write about you. nobody. maybe it's that everyone just begrudgingly covered them 15 years ago (the general disdain for lilith fair these days suggests as much), or maybe it's PR or musical trends or who even knows what. but it's not that she's ignored in the critical conversation -- most mainstream sites will post her album updates with the rest of 'em -- so much that all the acts she influenced are. the people influenced by the theatrical stuff get lumped in with amanda palmer and her fans as Places The Music Press Just Don't Want To Go, and as far as piano pop it's complete radio silence -- charlotte martin just released an album that's pretty good that literally no one, NO ONE, nowhere, is covering. (which includes me, but who would I even pitch?)

as for "inspiring a rabid, protective fanbase" that might be part selection bias -- in lieu of getting massive press coverage, those rabid, protective fans and their rabid, protective purchasing power are the only way you are going to be able to sustain a career. if you don't have them, you just get forgotten, as many artists have. (this is why a lot of acts in this vein are sustained partly/entirely by Kickstarter or similar ventures. in some cases that's their sole release channel, even.)

I'm not even sure why Angel Olsen gets critical attention tbh.

There's an Austin City Limits show recorded around the time of From The Choirgirl Hotel that's worth tracking down.

Incredibly, I thought the new one was the first Amos album since "Scarlet's Walk" in 2002, and then I realized it was her seventh!

We used to have a 'classic alternative' station here for almost a year, and if their playlists were anything to go on re: the new canon, Tori (along w/Hole & Belly) were totally absent.

Man, I'd say I hear Amos 10 times what I hear from Belly or Hole, but I don't hear the latter at all. Or veruca salt. I do hear down by the water by PJ Harvey.

"Incredibly, I thought the new one was the first Amos album since "Scarlet's Walk" in 2002, and then I realized it was her seventh!"

well you aren't missing all that much in between to be honest. I'm a fan but I don't really listen to any of those records. they're...alright at times. maybe the new one will be good? I kind of want to see her theater thing in London this year.

"american doll posse" is by far the best of her post-"scarlet's walk" albums. i feel like it got praise when it was released (at least from the people who still cared), but since it's ensconced between relative duds in her discography it doesn't get mentioned much anymore.

Not familiar enough with "American Doll Posse" to go deep with it, was at first turned off by lead track "Yo George", and grammatically frustrated by the first single "Big Wheel" ("I am an M-I-L-F"), but like-to-love a lot of it, especially moved by the transformation of this

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

into this ;_;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS9f_XQqVi0

feel weird about posting such a famous clip, but hey! for the casual fans in the room ;)

american doll posse was one of those massive cross-media concept albums, which turned a lot of people off (personally I thought that part was quite well-executed, but I'm pretty much alone there)

"Smokey Joe" and "Dragon" were the best tracks on that album, of course they were the bonus tracks.

they were? I'm pretty sure they were on my regular copy, it's just a long-ass album

(also, the downside of half the blogs and supplemental materials being hosted on outside sides like myspace etc means about half of it is missing, possibly forever)

Well they were on all the copies of the album but the "official" last song is "The Dark Side of the Sun" (which sounds like it should be amazing but isn't) then you get that "Posse Bonus" interlude and then those two tracks.

I skipped around through her past ten years of recordings this afternoon, listened to about 20 songs.

- super impressed by her voice on these latter day recordings, she (and her engineers) have figured it out, a perfect bone-dry sound, rich and expressive. I don't know whether it's her own efforts or that she's married to one of her engineers, but somewhere somebody spent a long and loving time with her voice and a pile of microphones and cracked the code.

- very turned off by all the revisionism: the remixing/fragmenting of her work on "Librarian", the remixing/remastering/rerecording/fragmenting on "Piano", the re-recordings on "Gold Dust" (though I prefer the new version of "Winter" to the original), the re-composing of older work on "Graces".

- overall, I was exceptionally bored by all the original songs. "Boring" is not a word I like in music crit because much of my favourite music is boring by traditional standards, but these songs are featureless.

But after I kind of gave up about it and walked away, I started remembering my first experience in listening to "Pele" and feeling the same sort of sensation of featurelessness. Songs ending abruptly and armed with no clear hooks. It was BB's "blunt force repetition" that made me fall in love with that record and-- spurred by katherine's comment about the impermanence of Tori records as digital content-- made me think that maybe, skipping around from Youtube to Youtube, I'm trying to digest this music with twitchy 2014 ears instead of immersing myself in it the way I did in the 90s, and that is doing Tori no favours? Anyway I'm changing my tactic

huh -- "boring" is not the word I'd use to describe a lot of the later material except maybe beekeeper or scarlet's walk. "embarrassing," maybe, at its worst, but even the embarrassing tracks have this kind of balls-to-the-wall commitment to them

Agreed., esp. for American Doll Posse.

at first i was going to say i feel comfortable calling "the beekeeper" boring, but really there's a lot there that actively grated on me (i don't think i hate any song in her oeuvre quite as much as i hate "ireland"). i tried pretty hard to love this album but i just can't take the lite-FM vibe that permeates so much of it.

idk, has anyone itt heard enough of her later work to form a POX from, say "the beekeeper" to present day? (while i think "scarlet's walk" sounds more like her later stuff than her earlier stuff, "the beekeeper" seems to be where both critical approval and sales start to decline). i'm interested in compiling my own, but i haven't listened to "abnormally attracted to sin" or "midwinter graces" more than once and i'd want to relisten to them first.

- very turned off by all the revisionism: the remixing/fragmenting of her work on "Librarian", the remixing/remastering/rerecording/fragmenting on "Piano", the re-recordings on "Gold Dust" (though I prefer the new version of "Winter" to the original), the re-composing of older work on "Graces".

what's disappointing is that this sort of revisionism has always been integral to tori's work - she's always given her songs radical reworkings live. her skills in reinterpreting others' work have always been amazing but she really applies it to her own as well. but gold dust and those remasters just seemed dry and pointless, like she was tooling around with her back catalogue because she had nothing else to do. she can still pull it off live though (that tour with the octet was great).

i think her voice has gotten much much worse in the past decade, she doesn't sound comfortable unless she's either at the top or the bottom of her range now? and i'm not into that glassy dead-eyed tone that was all over night of hunters.

american doll posse is definitely the closest she's come to a "return to form" since scarlet's walk - think it's telling that she was able to tap into a measure of what once made her great via an elaborate dressing-up strategy, ie when she could duck under the dead-eyed stepford couture image she's created for herself.

post-scarlet POX...all but one off ADP

big wheel
bouncing off clouds
code red
smokey joe
teenage hustling
dragon
beauty of speed
shattering sea
body and soul
father's son

bouncing off clouds
teenage hustling
beauty of speed
body and soul
smokey joe
give
[one of police me, fire to your plain, that guy, or welcome to england -- different ones of these are going to stick for different people]
starling
curtain call
flavor (gold dust version)

new single, "trouble's lament."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EAVmVijVw4

genuinely surprised by not only how much i like this but how unaffected, breezy and natural-sounding it is. in a very low-key way that won't blow anyone away, but it does strike me that this rectifies in a stroke a lot of what's been cringeworthy with tori since 2002.

i mean, this could be off scarlet's walk - actually the song it brings to mind is "tombigbee", which was one of the extra tracks floating around that album

It is pretty nice, isn't it? Apropo of not much, it made me wonder what kind of music Joanna Newsom might be making in 20 years.

I think it bodes well for the record! I am trying to make it to one of the concerts

Agree with Lex.

into this.

Best thing she's released in years. Cautiously optimistic for the album.

i like this song a lot.

i'm having a really sympathetic re-listen of The Beekeeper right now. probably tori at her happiest and most candid, and even though the sonic palette she's chosen is not one i'm super-into, SHE is super-into it, and i'm loving how happy she sounds as she plays with it! she is having a blast on "witness" in particular. i started my listen trying to pull songs for the late-era POX i've been meaning to do, but i've discovered that even the songs i don't particularly like have something that redeems them: a hook, a turn of phrase, an unexpected sentiment.

the track on here that most resembles early tori is "the beekeeper," and it's my favorite track on the album. she wrote it about a point when her mother was very ill, and it starts off abstracted in that tori way and then becomes surprisingly concrete and plaintive. there are a couple songs on here that are very concrete for tori ("ribbons undone" is straight-up "you guys i love my daughter so much"), but this is where it works the best: she builds up this edifice of myth and metaphor and then drops it for the reality of her mother in a hospital bed. the chorus is eerie:

don't be afraid
i promise that she will awake tomorrow
somewhere

my second favorite track is "barons of suburbia" just for the way the music builds and builds to that triumphant "she is risen" at the end.

THIS IS GOOD.

lyrics have been posted thnx :P
what next?

akhiyan nu khuaab vakha gaii an sanu choothay laray laa gaii an
ishq da rola paa k tu saday dil nu q thukra gaii an
ki dasiay tainu asii hal-e-dil asii sooli utay tngay an na din langda na chain hnda asi dar dar rulday firday an
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni
muk gaii muhabbat muk gaiyan aasan pr nai mukdi ay jind mar janii
pau phar k asi tainu rok lainday jy chalda sada koii zor hnda
asii tery pichay q ruldy jy teray jya koii hor hnda
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni
try ish ny jogi kita ay tery ishq ny rogi kita ay chaihay da ni kuj dunia to teray ishq abhogii kita ay
ahy duniya walay pagal ny jiray aashiq nu samjhaundy ny jirii aag na bujhdii samandran to onu fookan maar bujha gy ny
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni
aashiqan dy seenay ich jira dard ni jany o hi aashiq ya fir janay rab ni

Man, she really needs to do something about her art direction tho.

um this album is actually good!!! i was not expecting it or daring to hope for it

good on a kinda scarlet's walk level rather than PEAK TORI (obvvv) but most impressively, good in the sense that i'm properly enjoying it and she seems to have consciously purged herself of a LOT of the things that have made the past decade so trying

I woke up with "America" in my head this morning, man, what a great song. There are others too. At least six and maybe eight of these songs are imo the best of her Scarlet's-onward era

the chorus of the title track gives me actual "crucify" feelings

also TWO barbed songs about her husband?

Ooh! You like that chorus! Interesting, I don't at all. Most of the "I have a band" moments on this record remind me too much of St. Vincent, all squareness and no emotion. The only dud imo is "The Giant's Rolling Pin", what is the name for that kind of cute songwriting? It drives me nuts

It's tough with the domestica "fractured postcards from a life of contentment" songs to separate "Tori-as-artist" from "Tori-as-person". Esp. that duet with Tash <3 <3 omg

oh that one is horribly side-eye worthy but even on this album's worst moment she seems to have...idk, a bit of levity? it's not awful because it's self-serious and overthought (but still dull), it's just overly zany

there are actually a ton of nice production details on this as well, just little things about how the arrangements pop

the "unrepentant geraldines" chorus feels like the most effectively direct songwriting tori's done in...two decades. it's almost like a back-to-basics declaration

Huh! I will give the title track a few more plays. "Zany" is the word I was looking for, yeah

i actually can't believe that the duet with tash is so lovely. i love that a) you can't tell whether they're interrupting each other or finishing each other's sentences, b) unlike whatever happened on night of hunters, they actually have mother-daughter chemistry rather than piano teacher-pupil non-chemistry

the coda of the title track about the vicar's wife is what needed to be chopped really

Struggling to think of a better parent-child duet tbh, it really flies high

I adore "Trouble's Lament."

AHHH more Tash on this album?? she was my favorite thing about Night of Hunters!