Tori Amos

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

^ it's her best since from the choirgirl

somehow i forgot night of hunters in my tori top 5 - what a record, clearly she still has it.

Happy belated birthday

POLLing the Damage On - ILM Artist Poll #91 - Tori Amos (voting open until 9 September 2018)

forgotten to link this here until now but here it is for posterity

New album, Ocean to Ocean, apparently to be announced soon?

https://i.imgur.com/8SyRjps.jpg

01 Addition of Light Divided
02 Speaking with Trees
03 Devil's Bane
04 Swim to New York State
05 Spies
06 Ocean to Ocean
07 Flowers Burn to Gold
08 Metal Water Wood
09 29 Years
10 How Glass is Made
11 Birthday Baby

The cover is horrendous per usual but the unusually short tracklisting + the appearance of musicians other than the Amos Family Band (Matt Chamberlain, Jon Evans and John Philip Shenale are apparently all credited) make it sound somewhat interesting. Bracing myself for the track(s) that deal with her mother's death, her way of dealing with grief lyrically always fucks me up.

Tried to send this Facebook post on to an ILXor and discovered they’d deleted their account, so posting it here instead:

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10220578352989813&id=1263695503

The gist: “Strange Little Girls” is 20 years old

hm this seems good

Yeah, this is good and I'm glad she's still at it.

where my other tori heads at

Listened once so far and enjoyed it quite a bit, probably way more than anything else she has released in the past 15+ years? I liked bits and pieces from the last two albums but this one just sounds much better (I suppose this is because of guest musicians contributing as well, instead of just the Amos family band and their shared Macbook) and there are no clunky genre pastiche tracks or overwrought concepts.

Would you describe it as ... back to basics?

it's not really a return to her peak form or anything but it would be pretty easy to make the case that it's still her best in a long time, it's pretty solid

Yeah, I don't think it's up there with the best of her albums, but it's good. Love some of the textures, like on "Metal Water Wood". I actually dug some of the Native Invader tracks quite a bit so I'd put this on the same level

saw her on wednesday, my first time in person (i owned the welcome to sunny florida dvd as a kid), her band rn is jon evans on bass and ash soan on drums and that's it, and they sound really incredible, all the improv was gorgeous and i got surprised a lot by the set ("spring haze"!!!), kept thinking if she made an album with just these two guys it would fucking rule (evans was carving soundscapes with his bass like he was playing in talk talk or something), idk if that'll ever happen though

triggered a desire to listen to every tori amos song for the first time since the ilx poll. been having a really great time, even though her last three albums are all the same album (some songs that rise to the occasion of her earlier work, plus many songs that are just fine)

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

― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Wednesday, September 13, 2017 8:42 AM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

still the high-water mark of her late period

Coincidentally, I was curious about Tori recently – a video came on; I realized that I've never really "heard her stuff"; and it struck me that she seems like an artist I could either become obsessed with, or have no taste at all for. (An initial Wikipedia dive was pretty intimidating... I didn't realize she has so many albums.)

it is so much goddamn music

always makes me so happy to see a tori thread update from ivy

Scarlet's Walk vinyl / reissue is out; heard bad things about the black vinyl pressings, waiting for a red vinyl amazon one to show up which is supposed to be better, but have been re-listening to it on streaming. Two things: The reissue, on streaming, sounds a little muffled, or bass-heavy; but I also am suffering from some hearing loss over the past year and it's possibly related to that (the new Mitski album sounds similar to me, like the highs are missing). 2) this is kind of the last Tori album I loved or even thought was any good until Geraldines and the following (which I still don't think measure up) but somehow I never paid that much attention to the actual lyrics of a lot of it, so color me surprised to read the lyrics to Taxi Ride and find out she was not singing "just another dead fly to you".

“Taxi Ride” is such an interesting song I think. Trying to capture the experience of being both suspicious of / irritated by someone but also thankful for them feels very Tori, so many of her songs describe these sorts of emotionally ambivalent relationships but rarely with such specificity (although being Tori it’s not like the lyrics are consistently clear).

Under The Pink = 30 years old today.

It's interesting, I was drinking at a coffee shop over the holidays and they had on a playlist and "God" came on. Removed from the context of me saying "today I am going to listen to Under The Pink", it is a crazy fucking song. Caton's guitar has none of the "atonal, but catchy" appeal of a Marc Ribot solo, it's just a squall of irritation; the piano writing is Tori at her most elegantly "guitaristic"; the verses are grand but fragmented and the "bridge" is brief but also the climax? It's so wild to think that this song was even picked as a single, let alone charted... and I'm sitting there thinking "and this is Track 2. This comes after the insanity of 'Pretty Good Year' and before 'Bells For Her'. This might be the strangest album to ever go platinum"

I listened to this album about 200 times before I turned 16 and so its features feel like my own, but I just realised really that the extreme-placid photo shoots and the easy-colour design of the packaging likely perfumed this album extremely, disguised it visually as "something pretty", drove it like a Trojan My Little Pony into my brain to surprise-infect me with its brilliant craziness

This album terrified my younger brother. He was 13! I asked my mom if we could listen in the car and he said "I don't like that album" and my mom said why not? and he started crying! At 13! My younger brother was not usually a crybaby but he was crying. "Mom it's about her wanting to kill waitresses and touching herself and eating babies and stuff it is so horrible." That's right! Cry you fucker! Listen to this and cry your heart out

This is such a nice sounding album too - the step up in production from Little Earthquakes is so huge.

Although I got both albums not much later in 1995, I think my listening was not yet sufficiently developed to really appreciate how much production quality was improving for so many bands and artists during the early 90s. Was this something that people actively noticed at the time? In my head now it would be like watching layers of grime being wiped off your windows.

I mean, my family only got a CD player around this same time. My immersion in these albums occurred at the same time I was introduced to the glory of 44.1 kHz, so I didn't really have a basis for comparison

Until recently , this was my favorite album of hers. At the time I thought Boys For Pele was a disappointment, but I’ve since realized it’s the best and I wasn’t worthy when it was released.

Now I’m wondering if Choirgirl Hotel is also good. That’s where I got off the bus.

it is. it's not AS good but it's very strong.

under the pink just dazzled me yet again! magnificent, otherworldly.

in the mid-90s my best friend was in the peace corps in diffa, niger, which is at the ass end of the ass end of countries not so far from what used to be lake chad but also 820 miles over impossibly slow roads to niamey, the capital

he had no books and was more or less dependent on me to send him anything related to then-current western culture. (so naturally i sent him THE EIGER SANCTION by TREVANIAN, which had long been made into a truly awful movie featuring clint eastwood, george kennedy and jack cassidy)

but i also sent him mixtapes, one of which included the jawbox cover of 'cornflake girl' (which is great)

a few years later i met one of his fellow peace corps volunteers, named Pcarolyn (but the P was silent). she asked me if i was the person who'd sent the jawbox cover of 'cornflake girl' to michael; i said yes, and she said 'i didn't like that'

anyway that was 25 years ago and i'm told she's since dropped the ~ silent P ~ but also she was super nice and now this story is all i can think about when i consider 'under the pink'

LOL

Under The Ink

Yeah, I think Under the Pink just edges Little Earthquakes as her best album. Like Cow_Art I was disappointed in Boys for Pele, but unlike them I've never gotten into it and indeed it's where I got off the bus.

Little Earthquakes had three producers working on it at different times, which I think helps to account for its fairly nondescript sound. Under the Pink was a real step up in production values.

I don't think Tori Amos really figured out a "signature sound" until Choirgirl. I can't pick between which is "my favourite" of the first three, but I am pretty sure Choirgirl is "her best" in terms of realisation and execution. Those first three albums sound like albums of prototypes, buying plots of land and doing some surveying. Surveyor-Tori might be my favourite mode of hers, as a listener. Sometimes it gets too safe ("China"), or zany ("Leather", "Mr. Zebra"), or theatre kid ("The Wrong Band", "Happy Phantom"), or annoying ("In The Springtime Of His Voodoo"), or fake-rawk ("Professional Widow"), or uncomfortable ("Me And A Gun"), but the risks feel riskier and the rewards feel greater.

I was reading about Under The Pink on wiki yesterday and seeing that there were song rankings ("God" is her 3rd best song! "Cornflake Girl" is #1!) and I was puzzling over my own ranking. When I try and draw one up, I find I'm listing the more "complete" songs and overlooking the deformed experiments. It doesn't feel right.

Like if I had to pick a Tori song to play at a party it'd def be "Cornflake Girl" or "Crucify", but if I had to take one song with me to the afterlife it'd be "Yes, Anastasia" (or "Mother", or "Here. In My Head")

got an angry snatch
girls you know what i mean

I put "Past the Mission" on a mixtape once, hoping to impress a girl. One of her friends later told me that she hated Tori Amos. Alas.

the piano work on Yes Anastasia is insane

so glad to have seen her once, sat front row. she fully rollicks on the piano.

got an angry snatch
girls you know what I mean

See... if "Voodoo" was just the body of the song I'd have a different feeling about it, because it's amazing, but that first minute of snarling always made me annoyed. But then again, maybe I'd think less of the song without it, who knows, it's definitely a beautiful strangething

so glad to have seen her once, sat front row. she fully rollicks on the piano.

Literally have never once seen her, which is crazy to consider

I put "Past the Mission" on a mixtape once, hoping to impress a girl. One of her friends later told me that she hated Tori Amos. Alas.

― Washington Post Malone (Ye Mad Puffin)

kind of riffing off this (nothing about you YMP) and thinking about my complicated feelings about amos as a cultural icon in this era

i had this sense in 1994 that amos was sort of a synecdoche for an entire gender, "me and a gun", that really kind of... i think overshadowed her early career. like #metoo if people just focused it all on one woman, one song. and honestly, that was how i, a fairly confused young person who thought of themselves as a "man" and wanted to understand What It Was Like Being A Woman, approached her music.

it was actually when boys for pele came out that i realized with some embarrassment that it was... kind of shitty to view someone like that. _boys for pele_ was _weird_, and to some extent amos herself was (unsurprisingly!) _weird_. "weird", that i understood. amos wasn't "every woman", she was _a_ woman.

and the thing was, like a lot of gen x shit, i think there was a lot of stuff people were trying to do back then that just wound up not going anywhere. not, like, because people _did it wrong_ or anything like that. she did these songs and they _were_ powerful, passionate songs, and people paid it lip service and nothing changed except that things got worse. the reason i was looking for a synecdoche was because i believed strongly that the way men viewed women, men treated women, needed to change, and listening to women was how you did that. and i failed at that for a couple of reasons... i wasn't ever a man, but that wasn't the major reason. the major reason was that i wasn't in a place where i could understand and acknowledge women as _individuals_. which is a problem that also underlaid my inability to understand _myself_ as a woman.

anyway as much as people seem to love those first couple records i really treasure that amos did find a distinctive individual voice. it doesn't seem like she was in an environment that made that sort of thing easy.

-

when i listen to something like "god" it makes me think of, i don't know, 1994. post-nirvana, labels were just throwing anything at the wall and seeing what would stick. sure, let's sign royal trux to a major label, why not? i get the sense that a lot of the label a&r people heard nirvana as the latest variety of electronic noise. and responded by saying "hey let's throw a lot of obnoxious noise on our songs, the kids seem to like that". (i don't think the guitar on "god" is "obnoxious noise", at least not in the sense that my hypothetical label people would have.) in that context "god" as a lead single makes sense!

god i love god

Agree but "Crucify" remains my sentimental favorite