Pages tagged “tori amos”

The music and comic book worlds have converged once again to create Comic Book Tattoo, a 480-page compendium of 50 story arcs based on songs by Tori Amos. Several notable comic book artists collaborated in the four-color adaptation of Amos' discography, ranging from young illustrator Jason Levesque—who illustrated the cover, seen above (left)—to seasoned award-winning artist Ted McKeever.

Neil Gaiman—author of The Sandman comic saga—wrote the introduction to Comic Book Tattoo. Also a close friend to Amos, Gaiman has often compared her to his comic book character Delirium, while Amos herself references The Sandman in several of her songs. Coming out in late July, this anthology will bridge the gap between these two artistic icons.

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NeilGaiman.com

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Tori Amos, come on down! You're the next contestant on "Direct to Consumer Tactics!"

The songwriter will make several live sets from her current American Doll Posse tour available for fans to download via her Legs & Boots website. The first show, Amos' Monday evening set at Philadelphia's Tower Theater, is already up for consumption. The material comes either as 256k mp3s (take that, Radiohead!) at $9.99 or super hi-res FLAC files for $14.99. The mp3s will go up a few hours after each show, while the FLAC versions will pop up 4-6 days after that. Those who purchase the FLAC package will receive mp3 files to enjoy during the added wait time.

This move, of course, is not without precedent. Pearl Jam long ago made a business of bootlegging, while the Pixies offered similar "instant live" packages of their reunion tour concerts. Amos herself, meanwhile, offered double-CD bootlegs for six separate shows back in 2005.

Still, given the current record industry climate, every little move an artist makes toward independence these days will be more carefully scrutinized than ever before.

See Tori's tour schedule here.

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Paste: Tori Amos - Scattered Shots
Paste: Tori Amos, alter-egos announce fall tour

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Remember when Garth Brooks hosted Saturday Night Live while his alter-ego Chris Gaines performed as the musical guest? As cringe-inducing as the country music superstar's misguided creativity was, you have to concede an E for Effort -- Gaines had a pretty complex fake history, including his birth in Australia to a pair of Olympic swimmers.

In what should theoretically be at least twice as impressive, Tori Amos has attempted to embody five different characters, or "dolls," for her latest album American Doll Posse. Each was independently given writing and performance credits on the record, and each will take turns as "opening acts" for Amos on her upcoming U.S. tour, beginning Oct.9 in Albany, N.Y. The girls include Clyde ("wears her emotional wounds on her sleeve, but remains idealistic"), Pip ("confronts issues"), Santa ("a girl's girl") and Tori ("one of the hardest characters for Tori to get her head around") Although Amos rambles a bit on her website about facets of femininity and the Greek pantheon, their primary differences seem to be wig and makeup color, leaving one to wonder, "Wait, which one's Sporty again? I miss Ginger."

Perhaps it'll all make a bit more sense when Amos' site has the separate blogs up and running, or when somebody out there in Quizilla/OkCupid land creates a "Which American Doll Posse Girl R U?" test.

“Women are divided into the mother and the whore. It’s very black and white," Amos states on her website. "As a piano player, I understand black and white very well. And it’s just not acceptable outside of a keyboard.”

Quick, someone destroy all dominos, Ansel Adams photographs and upcoming Hives albums!

Check below for the tour schedule.

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Tori Amos on MySpace
Tori Amos Fanzine

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There’s a distinct thematic thread weaving through The Beekeeper, the latest opulent project from visionary keyboardist/vocalist Tori Amos. If only the scattered songstress could make up her mind exactly what it is. To begin with, she opens a rambling hourlong chat with a humble apology—all morning long, she’s been working furiously in her home studio, a 300-year-old barn on an estate in rural Cornwall, England. “Sometimes it takes me a minute to refocus, to gather my thoughts,” she explains. “Just so you know that and you don’t end up thinking, ‘Will she hurry up and talk?’ I’ve been mastering the record, and since November 2 [of last year], the album has taken a different turn, mainly because there were a couple of life-changing things that happened to me.”

Ask anyone who’s ever met the green-eyed, delicate-framed, flame-haired singer—Amos, 41, comes across as one of the sweetest, most environmentally concerned people on the planet. Sometimes awkwardly so. In 2002, when discussing her last effort Scarlet’s Walk—which explored her part-Cherokee heritage—she frequently broke into tears recalling all the Earth-revering Native American lessons our country has forgotten in two short centuries. The mother of a four-year-old daughter, Natashya, Amos cares so much it often hurts. So it’s no surprise when she gets choked up again over her recent painful epiphanies: “One was that we all had to face the reality of the next four years, and the choice. And then I lost my brother in a tragic car accident a couple of weeks ago.”

Bush’s re-election, Amos says, forced her hand, politically. She hastily added two new indictments to Beekeeper—“General Joy,” which references “a soldier girl and a willing coalition”; And a duet with Damien Rice, “The Power Of Orange Knickers,” which she intended as a statement “that violence isn’t the answer to everything, and using the idea of terrorism to get what you want—whoever you are—should be a thing of the past.”

Her sibling’s sudden passing at 50 hammered home the sheer brevity of life. “The idea of somebody being here one minute and gone the next is a reality to me right now, in a big way,” Amos murmurs. “So it could be a reality that all of us aren’t here one minute—as many past civilizations have come and gone, we could too. We all know the ice caps are melting. We all know the climate changes and these things that are happening.”

So is this the focus of the ambitious, 19-track Beekeeper? Well, not really. The mincing minuet “Jamaica Inn” invokes local U.K. pirate lore in the tale of a ship lured to its rocky doom by lantern-flashing smugglers. The Far Eastern-filigreed “Goodbye Pisces” sketches a turbulent moment in Amos’ marriage when, she confesses, “plates will definitely fly—if it weren’t such a passionate relationship, I guess we’d just be pen pals.” “Parasol,” with its bongo backbeat and gossamer chorus, is based on French pointilist Georges Seurat’s masterpiece “A Sunday On La Grand Jatte,” and the implied idea “that if a woman was thrown out of the house in Victorian days, all she could do was walk the streets and be a prostitute.” And the funky, reggae-tinged “Ireland” concerns, well, Ireland.

Naturally, Amos employed the concept of “beekeeper” as a much grander metaphor. “There’s a great tradition in Britain of beekeeping,” says the artist, who also maintains a residence in Florida (and yes, she flew home on Nov. 2 specifically to vote). “And whatever civilization is going on, right wing or left wing, the bees have got to pollinate. And this tradition has sustained through different religious wars and ideologies, which really affected me because it’s so intertwined with nature.”

Puzzled by the current U.S. “culture war,” and the simultaneous popularity of Mel Gibson’s The Passion Of The Christ and Dan Brown’s diametrically opposed The Da Vinci Code, Amos—also fuelled by Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels—set out to explore Christianity on Beekeeper, as well. The child of a Methodist minister, she used Old Testament language in songs like the Magdalene-honoring “Marys Of The Sea” and “Original Sinsuality.”

Amos isn’t pleased with Gibson’s passive portrayal of women in his film. But she understands its appeal. “Think about how people are reacting to the terrorists that are so committed to their religion,” she notes. “People [in America] were terrified by these people, and they needed something that felt like, ‘Well, this is our banner, and it’s older than yours!’ When you’ve been invaded, physically, psychologically, then you reach for what you can … it doesn’t have to make sense. So this time, as a daughter of the Church, I needed to … you know that saying, ‘If it’s too loud, turn it up?’ I needed to walk into the Christian ideology that’s controlling the country, where people are holding up Bibles and making decisions based on them.”

More career achievements from this singer who rose to multi-platinum prominence in 1992 with Little Earthquakes—an album that dealt unflinchingly with rape (Amos would go on to create anti-sexual-assault organization RAINN)—are mapped out in her new autobiography, Tori Amos—Piece By Piece, co-penned with Village Voice scribe Ann Powers. But sitting down at her trusty Bosendorfer piano, Amos swears, “is the only way I can really combat what’s going on, combat these turbulent times. By playing these pieces on my piano, I actually find peace.”

Tori Amos has yet to duplicate the mainstream success she found with the singles “God” and “Cornflake Girl” off 1994’s Under the Pink, but she maintains a devoted cult following nonetheless.

The concert DVD Welcome to Sunny Florida kicks off with interviews of obsessed fans, some of whom have seen her perform dozens, even hundreds, of times. Whatever it is—her complex feminism, her combination of fragility and strength, her majestic compositions—Amos has carved out a niche of her own. It’s more than a little interesting to note her continued success as so many beneficiaries of the alt-rock explosion of the early and mid ’90s are now working in record stores or vegan restaurants.

Welcome to Sunny Florida is shot documentary style, avoiding fancy camerawork for a more stripped-down approach that’s well-suited to Amos’ three-person live presentation. While drummer Matt Chamberlain and bassist Jon Evans are plenty impressive, and Amos’ songs certainly lend themselves to a more cinematic treatment, the focus here is rightfully on the singer, straddling a bench between her grand piano and keyboards. As if to drive home this documentary feel, the DVD captures Amos in several typically unseen concert moments, like when she takes a swig of bottled water, only to spit it out on the stage. Sadly, there’s nothing revelatory about the performance itself.

On the radio, "A Sorta Fairytale"—the first single off Tori Amos’s finest album in years—sounds overproduced and glossy, another too-well-fed visitor among all that overstuffed Top Forty fodder. As the second track on Scarlet’s Walk, it’s plaintive, yet anthemic, like the album as a whole: piano-driven rock that abounds in the colorful, cinematic sweeps and swells of good rock balladry, but never loses touch with the essential melancholia and vulnerability of the piano.

Despite her reputation as a starkly confessional songwriter, Amos has always written strong character-based pieces—think of Under the Pink (1994) with its stories of Congressional prostitutes and space dogs. Scarlet’s Walk expands on her talent for narrative, unfolding like a picaresque novel in which an unnamed narrator reflects on the lives and hopes of modern American women—a porn star ("Amber Waves"), a pair of renegade lovers ("A Sorta Fairytale"), a woman who’s packing up to save a friend from a no-good man ("Don’t Make Me Come To Vegas"), a woman who "Can’t See New York" for all the September debris. Amos eschews the sometimes Kabbalistic obscurity of her lyrics for evocative metaphor and wordplay: "Do you think just like that / you can divide this / you as yours / me as mine to before we were / us?" she asks on "Your Cloud." Each song fits into the album like a perfectly constructed chapter, moody and atmospheric. It winds up on the epic ballad "Gold Dust"—which brings to mind Little Earthquakes’ wrenching "Winter" with more gray hairs.

I was ready to write off Tori Amos as a talented songwriter and great pianist who’d reached her potential, once and for all, on her first four albums, and when I heard some idiot DJ announce her new album as a bid for widespread success by a "cult songwriter" (Little Earthquakes went platinum, but the solipsism of mainstream radio considers that a "cult success"), I felt none of the excitement I did as a teenager over Boys for Pele. But this record is packed with compelling, beautifully orchestrated moments; it’s nice to know that one icon of my adolescence, at least, can’t be counted out just yet.