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Illinois
Entertainer Still Going Down...Honestly By John Everson Tori Amos is nursing a smoothie somewhere in Minneapolis. She’s doing a rare
day of interviews, back-to-back questions from prying minds at radio stations
and newspapers about her latest album, From the Choirgirl Hotel. As it happens,
Illinois Entertainer’s slot falls in line on her list shortly after Chicago’s
Q101-FM. She sounds tired. The road has been a near constant home since her short “preview”
concert series that landed in Chicago at Park West in April. That show, a
small-venue treat for those lucky enough to garner tickets, was simulcast
around the world via the Internet. Since then, “Spark” from Choirgirl has
garnered substantial radio play, Rolling Stone featured her in a fairyland
cover shoot (June 25 issue), she’s whipped through a 40-date tour in Europe and
then returned to the states over the summer to pack larger venues like Rosemont
Horizon in July. It’s quite a different life than the one an unknown
singer-songwriter-pianist was living in 1991 when she stopped at Chicago’s cozy
Schuba’s to promote her then-unknown debut solo album Little Earthquakes. Amos
had hibernated for a couple years following the debacle of her hairspray-heavy
synth-pop combo Y Kant Tori Read in 1988. Little Earthquakes was 180 degrees
from that one-off album flop, but it was a coin toss whether the fickle public
would care to hear the piano ramblings of soul poetry Amos had begun spinning
any more than the paint-by-numbers pop songs of Y Kant Tori Read. Well, Amos won that coin toss, but neither she nor her label guessed that in
early 1991. In his Q101 interview just a few minutes before Amos talked to IE,
Robert Chase recounted his DJ experience after first hearing the emotional
powerhouse of Little Earthquakes and his call to Atlantic Records to tell them
he was going to play it on the air. “You’re kidding!” was essentially her label’s response. Who, after all, was going to play a girl and a piano on the radio alongside
Poison or Nirvana? That was the attitude Amos was up against all around the
dial in the early ‘90s. Remember, at the time, there were no Jewels, Alanises
or Natalie Imbruglias. And Sarah McLachlan was still Canada’s best kept secret.
“When I was playing Schuba’s, I really didn’t
know where it was all going,” Amos admits. “After
Y Kant Tori Read I had a huge dose of what it’s like to be on the precipice and
then Zola Budd comes and knocks you off. Bloody hell. I had no idea that Little
Earthquakes would get heard. It was such a dose of humility.” That early humility is something Amos says she must continually remind
herself of as her albums now rack up platinum sales and the audiences have
risen from a humble 75 to sweaty crowds in the thousands. “You’re always having to check in with yourself
because this business can be a real seductress,” she says. “It can. And you have to remember why you’re doing what
you’re doing.” Part of the reason Amos has succeeded as a girl-and-her-piano act is because
of her Prince-like hybrid of the sacred and the profane. This is no Carole
King. When she bucks and rocks atop her piano bench and drawls out a loaded
line like “boy you best pray that I bleed real soon” from Little Earthquakes or
“if you want inside her, well, boy you better make her raspberry swirl” from
Choirgirl, she evokes erotic abandon as much as musical rapture. And how many
other artists talk candidly about giving God a blowjob? But the first
attraction to Amos was in the deeply personal struggles in her lyrics. She
talked of rape and emotional betrayal with a raw honesty that compelled and
attracted like a car wreck cranes heads. Ultimately, Little Earthquakes broke
through because of its intense honesty. “I think I’m honest on all the records,”
Amos offers. “I think that Little Earthquakes made
such an impression because it was the first time you heard that from me—it’s
like a virgin experience. It’s like the first time that she goes down on you
and you think ‘Oh my god it’s the most amazing thing.’ And then she’s still
doing it two years later and you go ‘oh yeah, that’s my wife.’” Certainly Amos has worked to stave off any public jading of her lyrical
head. If her honesty hasn’t changed, her musical direction has continually
evolved. Under the Pink found her concentrating on the relationships of women
and adding some real crunch (“God”) to her repertoire. Her last disc, Boys for
Pele, brought in harpsichords and trumpets in an attempt to expand her palette
further. While the latter disc came off as muddled, From The Choirgirl Hotel at
last stops dabbing a toe into the waters beyond the vocal-piano format and finds
Amos jumping in full-time with a full rock band - the first time she’s
consistently collaborated in that format since Y Kant Tori Read. The result is
her most energetic and accessible record to date. “As I was writing the music, I knew that the
songs were requiring that I cut them live and the engineers, Mark [Hawley] and
Marcel [van Limbeek], convinced me to do that. They said ‘you’re never going to
get the pocket you want unless you cut live. It’s never going to happen.’ So
that changed the way I approached this record. For the most part, the other
records were built around the piano and the piano-vocal performances because I
didn’t want the piano held hostage to a drummer...drummers have a lot of power,
because they decide on the pulls and pushes of the tune.” As it turned out, former flame and early Amos producer Eric Rosse ended up
turning her on to the drummer who would anchor the varied soundscapes of
Choirgirl without dragging her and her piano down to drown. “I talked with Eric and he said, ‘Matt
Chamberlin, I’ve just worked with him, I really believe the two of you will
have a language all your own.’ So Matt flew in and we played some of the
material that I’d written last summer. I knew immediately that this was right.”
As her April and July Chicago area shows proved, the resulting fleshed-out
band atmosphere is a huge and welcome step forward for Amos’ sometimes tenuous
tunes. “I am enjoying the interplay with the band,”
she admits, though she doesn’t promise whether or not she’ll keep it together
after this current tour. “It’s hard to know where
anything’s going. I could tell you that I think I know, but sitting here right
now, what’s today? Friday? I don’t know. This tour is really where all our
focus is, and we’re recording it. So I might put out a live record because the
people that come to the shows have been asking me to do this for a long time.
They have a lot of shitty bootlegs out there. And I’m thinking of touring with
it. I don’t know if it’s the right time.” Perhaps the most exciting about the band collaboration for Amos is the live
reinterpretation of some of her older material in the new format. “A lot of the old songs are shifting,”
Amos explains. “It’s really groovy working on songs
from the other records. Because this record, it’s very clear what it is. The
rhythm was built into the structure. We play the songs pretty much as they are
on the record. With a lot of the other songs, the rhythm was not fleshed out on
the albums. So there are a lot more surprises coming from the older material
than from the new. With the new songs, it’s more like, can we deliver what the
record has? That’s always the challenge of a night. Can we go beneath that
little space in the back of the spine and just crawl inside there like a snake
and ignite you?” While there were reports that Amos’ voice was tiring early on in the tour,
she says that’s under control now, thanks to a visit to the local herbalist. “I got into Chinese medicine. I have these
elixirs on the road that are pretty potent stuff. Loads of Echinacea, Golden
Seal and Siberian Ginseng. They help my throat a lot. They do for you what
prescription drugs can’t.” She admits that some of her early vocal strain may have come from the
unusual (for her) stress of belting over a band. “It takes a lot of power to do it. It takes a
lot of strength. But I think having done 40 shows in Europe that I’ve got a
good pace now.” If Amos is in a stride today, it’s due in large part to past pains. A song
about her own rape by a fan in [before] the Y Kant Tori Read days launched her
solo career, and following her breakup with Rosse, she got involved with her
current studio maven, Mark Hawley. The loss of their child in a miscarriage at
the end of the Boys for Pele tour and the subsequent deepening of their relationship
(they married this year, though Amos steers away from talking about their
private life) are the two can openers to the sometimes oblique lyrics of
heartache and celebration in Choirgirl. And while Amos avoids talking about her
marriage, she opened herself up to potentially difficult and constant
questioning about the effects of the miscarriage at the outset of the Choirgirl
tour. She says it was necessary as a writer and a performer to speak to the
meaning behind her words. “I think as a writer, if you’re going to put
work out that’s based around something, for you not to say what it’s based
around is like... you know, are we playing telepathic mystery record? When I
sing things like ‘she’s convinced she could hold back a glacier but she couldn’t
keep baby alive.’ I think that’s really clear. To not be honest about
it...well, it would drive me insane to do hundreds of interviews and backpedal
about it.” Amos says the pain of dealing with the miscarriage had its effect on her
relationship with Hawley, as well as on the making of her record. “We shared something...” she says,
breaking off to think a moment. “They say something
like that can push you away or make you feel like you really understand each
other. I think the latter happened with us. I don’t talk much about our
relationship in public but...there was a sense of depth, a little place that we
could go and make mudpies there and we didn’t have tickets there before.” Ultimately, she says, learning to understand and live with sorrow is a part
of life. A part that has shaped all of Amos’ records. “I really accepted my feelings on this. And they
change, you know, sometimes. It’s been a year and a half since I lost the baby.
And the record isn’t just about that, it’s about how my views on the life force
changed. I don’t find this record depressing, really. There are moments of
sadness for me on it. I really spent time with sorrow on this record and I
said, I really realize that sorrow goes to raves every Friday night. And that
she looks at life differently because she understands tears. But that doesn’t
mean that she doesn’t have a dirty little laugh. She has all that. But she just
sees life from a different angle. That’s really what this record was all about.”
The honesty that has led Amos to talk about her rape, to form a rape and
incest survivors hotline (R.A.I.N.N.) and to sing about her lost child has
drawn a fanatical devotion to the singer from her fans over the past seven
years. When Amos played Park West last spring, she was nearly pelted to the
floor with offerings of lip gloss from the audience when she couldn’t find her
own—just one example of how intensely her fans know her. (When was the last
time you went to a concert prepared with lip gloss because you knew the lead
singer liked the stuff?) “They always keep one lip gloss hidden now in
the piano for me, so I don’t do that again,” she laughs. “That was dangerous, wasn’t it? Jesus.” The “Chicago Lip Gloss” incident is just one indication of the worship level
of her fans. A Washington Post article recently noted that there are more than
4,000 web sites devoted to things Amos. Some of them are updated more
frequently and show more design innovations than Microsoft’s or Netscape’s.
Tori has won a lot of hardcore fans. “I don’t have a computer, but people tell me
about the web sites, yeah,” she says, pointing out though that she plays
for hardcore and newbie fans alike. “What I try to
say is, tonight, we’re playing to 5000 people in Minneapolis. Out of that there
will probably be 100 hardcore people there. You know, for the most part,
everybody has a few nutcases. But these kids are very intelligent. It’s not
like they’re...” she pauses. “It’s very
tricky. I don’t want to offend anybody else’s fans, but for the most part I
really find that these people, you can have an intelligent conversation with
them. I think at my shows you’ll find a serious art crowd. Sometimes there are
people that might show up a lot. But the ones that show up for every show are
not necessarily the weirdest ones, you know? They just jump on a leg for 10
shows. They all have friends and they connect and they know each other from the
Internet. It’s not a big deal. They’ll [come after a show and] say ‘hey Tori,
just thought you’d want this today and they give you something like a book they
thought you might like. It doesn’t feel I’m being assaulted. At the shows, it
just seems like a really into music crowd. Really into music.” If there were any complaints from those rabid fans at her recent shows, it
was the distance the introduction of the full backing band created between
their “saint” and themselves. “It is a plugged show,” she shrugs. “It’s a completely different tone. You can’t expect a
monologue to be the same as a big theatre production. It’s a totally different
show. It’s not just me up there playing. But hopefully you feel that Bachnalian,
Dionesyian energy seeping through and that we’re working everybody into this
primal sort of place. That’s what this show is really about. It’s about that
ancient kundalini energy where your body is moving and you’re watching your
hips do all these wonderful things and your heart doesn’t feel so ashamed.” When Amos sings, shame is definitely not the emotion she’s promoting.
Honesty, yes. Free expression, yes. Finding—and using—your inner voice, yes. Shame just doesn’t belong in this girl’s choir. DISCOGRAPHY: Y Kant Tori Read (Atlantic) 1988 Amos’ debut disc is one of the most highly collectible pieces of vinyl on
the market these days, but at the time of its release, it was largely ignored.
A revisit finds that Amos’ trademark breathy delivery was already in evidence
and these slap-bass, synth-heavy bits of radio-ready drama are actually quite
palatable, in a pop tarts sweet way. Don’t look for any lyrical depth here, but Amos proved early that she had a
way with a hook, and if her sensitive-but-edgy singer-songwriter phase plays
out, she can always get a job writing tasty fluff for Belinda Carlisle. Tori Amos (Atlantic) 1991 From the first notes of Little Earthquakes it was apparent that this was a
fresh voice and major talent on the rise. With operatic vocal slide attacks,
furious piano pounding, and breathy, whispery clutches of emotion, the demons
are loosed and conquered on every song. “Crucify” leads it off with Amos’
then-shocking but now-familiar thematic trend of wrestling with religion, and “Silent
All These Years” soon follows, setting the standard for all future songs about
personal growth and “finding one’s voice.” But for many the ultimate eye-opener
was a song that also appeared a few months earlier on an EP—“Me And A Gun,” a
harrowing a capella depiction of rape from the point of view of the victim. Tori Amos (Atlantic) 1994 Amos sounds more confident and a little less confessional on her second solo
disc, concentrating more on other people’s relationships than on her own. “Pretty
Good Year” is lifted from a fan letter and “God,” with it’s drunken guitar
scratches and brazen lyrics (“God sometimes you just don’t come through/do you
need a woman to look after you?”) proves that despite her usual piano, Amos can
actually rock—with bite. “Cornflake Girl” seconds that emotion with a spaghetti
Western background whistle and a shuffling piano-drum interplay. “Baker Baker”
still stands as one of her most poignant compositions, and “Icicle” is likely
the only song in modern music that sensitively depicts a masturbatory
experience upstairs while the Bible’s being read downstairs. Tori Amos (Atlantic) 1996 Tori Amos’ third solo album found the singer-songwriter at something of a
crossroads, reaching out for new sonic ideas...but maybe not enough of them. “Caught
A Lite Sneeze” fits into the “Crucify,” “God,” “Cornflake Girl” songbook. On
several songs, Amos trades in her Bosendorfer ivories for a harpsichord which
makes “Blood Roses” sound like 19th century classical music. And “Professional
Widow” uses the harpsichord for power chords, a decidedly daring and
surprisingly successful, move. On several songs throughout the album, a horn or
other orchestral instrument is brought in for background, but often, as on the
otherwise perfect soliloquy “Father Lucifer,” they seem more intrusive than
fully integrated with Amos and her piano. Tori Amos (Atlantic) 1998 Choirgirl leaves behind the “preciousness” of solo piano and voice
compositions to feature a full band on nearly every track. The result is a
12-song tour de force of the singer-songwriter’s top strengths: Amos delivers
palpable emotion on a hotplate of piano, guitars and scintillating rhythm,
tossing off intermingled religious and sexual references like parade confetti.
While on Pele, some of the non-piano instrumentation sounded false - jewelry clipped
onto her piano attacks after the fact - on Choirgirl Hotel the strings, guitars
and percussion act as a unified whole (the harpsichords and trumpets are
thankfully left behind). “Spark” melds a classical piano solo with powerchord
fury, “Raspberry Swirl” centers the disc with an astounding burst of danceclub
noise and “She’s Your Cocaine” offers a distortion happy strip and strut bar
grind. Two of Amos’ finest ballads turn up here as well: “Jackie’s Strength” is
a mellifluous tapestry of tragedy, teenage memory and the warm buzz of
orchestral strings and “Northern Lad” unfolds into a gorgeous bittersweet piece
with the impact of Under the Pink’s “Baker Baker.” |