Tori Tuesday

Tori's back!

Did you know that Tori has written a book? Check it out!

An intimate, eye-opening look inside the life of one of the most unique and adored performers of contemporary rock music.
From her critically acclaimed 1992 debut, Little Earthquakes, to the recent hit, Scarlet’s Walk, Tori Amos has been a formidable force in contemporary music, with one of the most dedicated fan bases in the industry.
In Tori Amos: Piece by Piece, the singer herself takes readers beyond the mere facts, explaining the specifics of her creative process—how her songs go from ideas and melodies to recordings and passionately performed concert pieces. Written with acclaimed music journalist Ann Powers, Tori Amos: Piece by Piece is a firsthand account of the most intricate and intimate details of Amos’s life as both a private individual and a very public performing musician. In passionate and informative prose, Amos explains how her songs come to her and how she records and then performs them for audiences everywhere, all the while connecting with listeners across the world and maintaining her own family life (which includes raising a young daughter). But it is also much more, a verbal collage made by two strong female voices—and the voices of those closest to Amos—that calls upon genealogy, myth, and folklore to express Amos’s unique and fascinating personal history. In short, we see the pieces that make up—as Amos herself puts it—“the woman we call Tori.”

And another review:

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN MATT AND MATTHEW: As I told my old college roommate, the guy whose 40-or-50-plus collection of Tori Amos albums, singles, and imports intimidated me from listening to any of her music on my own until he moved out, at which time she quickly became the female singer/songwriter whose music I listened to the most, as I myself accumulated a 20-plus collection of Tori Amos detritus but continued to believe she peaked with the prescient Little Earthquakes – as I told him, I almost put down Piece by Piece after the second chapter never to pick it up again, already having read my fill of the type of mythological, spiritual, psychological, sexual, etc. mumbo jumbo her detractors have always dismissed her for believing, because I was enjoying Tori Amos’ and/or Ann Powers’ occasionally meandering prose (which was not as hard to read as this paragraph, probably) about as much as I enjoyed listening to her increasingly meandering late-career albums, which never have been bad but have been very long and never as poetic as, say, “Silent All These Years.” (“But what if I’m a mermaid with these jeans of his with her name still on it?” she sang.)
I almost stopped reading, because I wanted Amos to be in print what she never was in music: straightforward.
When I picked up the book again, I discovered what I always discover in Amos’ songs: art that only seems complicated on its surface, art that is accessible if I dare to meet it halfway. Admittedly, meeting Amos’ mélange of Native American, Greek, Christian, Freudian, etc. stories, myths, tenets, dreams, etc. halfway is difficult – hence, despite its practical advice-giving chapters about how to be a songwriter and survive in the music industry, Piece by Piece would be an impossible read for anyone not already versed in the Book of Amos.
But, for Amos’ adherents, this Portrait of the Artist: Her Thoughts. Her Conversations. (the book’s subtitle) provides more insight into Amos’ creative process – if not Amos, and creativity, themselves – than anything heretofore published. Although Amos discusses her upbringing as a preacher’s daughter, the book is not an autobiography. Although Amos stops the narrative to discuss specific songs, the book is not a VH1 Storytellers transcript. (And, if you don’t own The Beekeeper, the explanations of most of the songs won’t mean anything to you.)
The book, really, is about Amos’s creative process: the lore from which she draws inspiration, the husband and daughter who inspire her as well. This Portrait… is a portrait of one artist as a middle-aged woman, reflecting, in different chapters, upon the composition, collaboration, and performance of her art.
The writing style, as befits its blend of voices, at times ranges from embarrassingly chatty to dryly critical. Again, a fascination with Amos, coupled with a tolerance for independent scholarship, helps a reader slog through Powers’ paragraph-long attempts to synthesize a lifetime of self-exploration, like she does here:
“The leap came with Boys for Pele, a head-to-head encounter with the dismembered feminine. The claustrophobic, clear sound of that album reflects the moment when Amos stood at the lip of her own volcano and made a sacrifice of her illusions. … She also met a male essence that she’d been chasing, and avoiding, for years: the Dark Prince, the other muse for the fiery efforts of this period.” (85-86)
This kind of writing is either mysterious yet revealing, or else it’s fanciful and more than a little bit off-putting, depending on how much you love Amos that day.
But, what surprised me the most about the book, after I resumed reading it, is how much more it made me appreciate Amos. Learning how she wants the rhythms in her new music to reflect her own rhythms (a poor synopsis of the idea that comes the closest to what someone might call the book’s plot) made me want to run out to the store immediately to buy The Beekeeper and then run back home to immerse myself in it and learn from it – even though I haven’t yet.
Why not? Because, just as I didn’t love Piece by Piece, The Beekeeper sounds like something I’ll merely appreciate.
My old roommate and I – who I saw recently for the first time in what, four years? – now agree, I think, about Tori Amos: We want something different, and probably more, from her than she can give anymore. And it’s not fair of us to demand this, or anything, from the artist. It’s sad. Our lives have changed – but not along with Tori Amos’. And not even Piece by Piece, which accomplished its own aims so resoundingly, can rekindle our anticipation for those new Tori Amos songs that we fear will be good but will not quite speak to us like her earlier masterpieces did.
Piece by Piece, then, becomes a portrait of an artist we loved as young men and still remember fondly now that we’re a little older.
I’m really in the mood to hear Boys for Pele now.

My own review: In a nutshell, this book is totally far out, and will leave you knowing a lot more, or nothing more, about Tori than you ever have before!