Tag: Tori Amos

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Now this is cool: Image Comics will be releasing a graphic novel anthology with stories based on Tori Amos songs next summer! And Colleen Doran is illustrating one of the stories! (Her blog is where I heard about it.)

We went to Tori’s concert on Saturday at the Grove of Anaheim. The standing-room show was good, though there were some snafus getting to it, made worse by the fact that they opened the doors about 45 minutes late. So late, in fact, that they gave up on security checks and just started letting people in. By the time it started moving, the line snaked all the way along the side of the theater and down at least one side of the (rather spacious) parking lot.

Her current album, American Doll Posse, is based around a fictional quintet of singer/songwriters, each based on a different facet of her personality, and she performed as three different personas: Pip, Santa (no relation), and Tori. Which should have been more fun, but there was just a bit too much self-parody in the performance.

She brought a band again, which I think helps keep her from the slow-everything-down tendency she showed on the Originial Sinsuality tour (Katie calls it “elf disease,” after the way the elves of Lothlorien speak in the Lord of the Rings movies). Except for an endless vamp at the end of “Waitress,” this concert moved much more than the last two we’d seen.

It was good to hear stuff from Choirgirl Hotel again. It’s been notably missing from the last few concerts we’ve been to. And there was a surprising amount of stuff from her first two albums as well. (Full set list at Undented.)

I’ve seen Tori in concert 6 times: Once in 1999 at Irvine Meadows, when she toured on a double bill with Alanis Morissette, twice on the Scarlet’s Walk tour from 2002-2003 (Universal Amphitheater & the Pond), twice on the Original Sinsuality tour in 2005 (Royce Hall & the Greek), and this show at the Grove. My favorite was the Scarlet’s Walk tour. I reviewed the Universal show during the first few months of this blog, though I don’t seem to have written anything about the one at the Pond.

Update: The Beat has more on the comic project, including a title, Comic Book Tattoo and additional contributors.

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I was going to write a review of last night’s Tori Amos concert at the Greek Theater, but I realized I already wrote most of it about the Concert at Royce Hall back in April.

We got tickets for this one because it was a new tour, and we figured there was a chance it would be a different type of concert. Eventually it became clear from her newsletter that it was going to be the same type of show—just her, a piano, two organs and a synthesizer—but hey, we liked the last one, and we already had the tickets!

As it turned out, it was the same type of show, but a very different selection of songs. I tried to write down everything I remembered her playing last night, and compared it to the list from the last concert, and there are only 5 songs in common, all from the new album!

Some of the interesting bits: Continue reading →

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Two weeks ago (April 25, specifically) we went to a Tori Amos concert in LA. It was a vastly different experience from the others we’ve been to. You see, she started out as basically her and a piano, and each album has added more and more layers of instruments. It always reminds me of a scene in Death: The Time of Your Life (Neil Gaiman has been friends with Tori since she was working on Little Earthquakes) in which Foxglove’s manager(?) is explaining that as she gets more popular, they have to book bigger and bigger venues, and beyond a certain size just a girl and her guitar isn’t going to cut it: she needs to hire a band.

Well, the “Original Sinsuality” tour provided some clues going in: It was a short tour, the venues—in this case UCLA’s Royce Hall—were comparatively small (which is why the show sold out in 10 minutes), and it was named after a “quiet Tori” song. She dispensed with the band entirely. It was just Tori Amos, a grand piano, two kinds of organs and another keyboard I couldn’t quite identify. We heard songs you never hear in concert (“Yes Anastasia,” “Doughnut Song”) or wouldn’t expect to (“Toast”), even when she takes a break from the band and does a piano set.

So, onto a review: Continue reading →

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A few weeks ago I purchased Precious Things: The String Quartet Tribute to Tori Amos from Amazon. I was looking through my recommendations tonight and started finding all these string renditions of popular music, including…

The String Tribute to Nirvana.

This had me laughing, but then I looked further down on the page:

Buy this album with String Quartet Tribute Nine Inch Nails ~ Various Artists today!

WTF?!? Nine Inch Nails string tribute?
Hmm… I wonder if anyone has done a string album for The Who.

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Driving back from the Tori concert, fortified with Frappuccinos, we were trying to figure out the distribution of songs per album. Kelson commented that there were several from singles, and that she could probably release an album of just B-sides and have it sell well, which prompted us to start naming all the B-sides we could. At one point we were stuck, and then we came up with her version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I started singing the chorus, Tori-style, and a few seconds after I stopped, Kelson said, “You know, it just proves how out of it I am……right after you started, I was about to try to turn up the volume.”

I definitely need to sing more.