Errors-To: owner-ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu Reply-To: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu Sender: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu From: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu To: ecto-request@ns1.rutgers.edu Bcc: ecto-digest-outbound@ns1.rutgers.edu Subject: ecto #228 ecto, Number 228 Thursday, 30 April 1992 Today's Topics: *-----------------* concert tape track list? Re: Names to faces Re: Prices. ramblings yet more Wim Mertens First timer!! Odder Lots, Content-wise TORI STUFF MORE TORI STUFF ======================================================================== Subject: concert tape track list? From: klaus@inphobos.w.open.de (Cosmic Vagabond) Date: Wed, 29 Apr 92 23:09:03 GMT After missing the Tori Amos concerts in March, she gave us another chance, and we took it! We now have tickets for her performance in Frankfurt. :) The ticket says: ALTE OPER FRANKFURT Mozartsaal Little Earthquakes Another evening with Tori Amos Freitag 5.Jun.92 20.00h A question about the Albany & Philly concert tapes: Has someone already done a list of the songs on the concert tapes? If so, please post it. Otherwise I will listen to them again (no bad prospect) with paper and pencil. I've noticed that you can find ectophiles on the tapes easily. These are those people who start cheering after the first 2 chords of a song (ref: "Possessed" in Albany). :) _____ Klaus "cosmic vagabond" Kluge spiderdust, spiderdust! Bel klaus@inphobos.w.open.de hotchpotch for spellbound lusts Canto ======================================================================== From: Steve Fagg Subject: Re: Names to faces Date: Thu, 30 Apr 92 9:46:00 BST On Tue, 28 Apr 92 at 15:23:24 EDT golden@stipple.seas.upenn.edu (Stephen "Jokey" Golden) wrote: > > Greetings, > > > > Let's see how I can do in identifying the people in Greg's two pictures: > > > 3) man in pink/red jacket back to camera, closest to camera > > I don't know. Wild guess: Stephen Golden > > If I remember correctly, I was wearing a grey sweatshirt with my > Ecto t-shirt over it. My jacket was green/red/blue I think. I was > near Happy, so it could be me! I think actually that probably places you between Mark Caroll & Dave Steiner with only your left shoulder & upper arm showing. -- Regards Steve Fagg ( S.L.Fagg@bnr.co.uk +44-279-402437 ) BNR Europe Ltd., London Road, Harlow, Essex, CM17 9NA, UK *** "Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers, won't drown". *** ======================================================================== From: Steve Fagg Subject: Re: Prices. Date: Thu, 30 Apr 92 10:25:51 BST On Wed, 15 Apr 92 at 11:09:33 BST Stephen Thomas wrote: > Jessica, would it be > possible to find out what the prices and shipping costs for these things > would be for European Ectophiles? Has there been any progress on this? I want to get my order in ASAP! -- Regards Steve Fagg ( S.L.Fagg@bnr.co.uk +44-279-402437 ) BNR Europe Ltd., London Road, Harlow, Essex, CM17 9NA, UK *** "Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers, won't drown". *** ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 30 Apr 92 05:58:49 EDT From: woj@remus.rutgers.edu Subject: ramblings tlb@bsbbs.columbus.oh.us (Tracy Barber) sez: >To Woj: > OK. Tapes going to CO. Any idea when these will get duped? Any guess- > timation from the guy you're sending them to? i mailed them yesterday (monday night's tori amos show got in the way of getting them out any earlier). they should arrive by the weekend, but you never can tell. it was a *large* package, so i mailed it fourth class, which can take anywhere from a few days to a week. there are eight or nine sets of tapes/money in there already, so that's what doug i up against. > Further, have a hell of a time in Spain! i'll try! i'll be working in a tiny town called huelva, which is located about one hour west of seville at the mouth of the rio tinto river where christopher colombus set sail for america from. lots of good things going on while i'm there too: the colombus 500th anniversary, the world expo in seville. i hope to go to portugal for a weekend as well. and maybe cadiz to if i can get down there...now i just have to learn spanish! > Well, when you get back you'll tell us everything, eh? only the good stuff... Valerie Nozick sez: >and i hope people had a great time at the tori concert monday. i was thinking >of you (with large pangs of envy). will i ever learn my lesson? probably not. ;) >>anybody else catch her on letterman last night? >chalk up another missed opportunity to this damn play i'm working on. would >anyone care to transcribe the interview part of this for us poor people who >missed it? thanks ahead of time. not much to transcribe. letterman gushed, tori played, letterman thanked her and then, being late, they had to cut it short. i'll bring the tape up next weekend so you can see it. [regarding tori on abc] >it's no different from all the 'movie-of-the-week' things, really. rape, sex >appear all the time on network tv. christianity is the sunday morning fare. >it's just that they're presented in a more realistic light in tori's songs. exactly. in every other instance, the issue is controlled. sex is always portrayed as wild, romantic passion or in the context of staid marriage; rape is (until recently) pretty tame; and christianity is almost always a sacred institution, except for comic instances where the church becomes a parodied villian. these are all safe portrayals. but tori isn't. her depic- tions of these topics are not the same. >i'm not as cynical as you are, woj. thanks. :) >and if an artist is accepted (and actively >pushed) by emptv, then the network shouldn't have a problem with it. that means nothing to abc if we're talking about ratings or bad press or whatever promotional mishap you care to imagine might develop. >besides, abc is the station that showed 'justify my love' they did? well, i guess i wasn't paying attention... >so, those of us who know better will >just reap the benefits of a broadcasted tori concert and tori videos, and enjoy >the feeling of one upsmanship we'll get from knowing the whole story. mmmmm. whatever. i really hope that abc doesn't do anything. i just don't see it happening. then again, i may be out of touch with what tv is like these days. or perhaps, i may be just cynical... ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 30 Apr 92 13:10 GMT From: Merow!! the rape that Albert was referring to (in conncetion with TOri Amos).. was indeed done to a 14 year old..fortunately..her family won the law suit and was able to fly her out of the country for an abortion... dont know many more details but at least it worked out as best as something like that can work out... mew. (hows that mjm??? =)!!) C o u r t n e y ! ! ======================================================================== Subject: yet more Wim Mertens Date: Thu, 30 Apr 92 15:27:28 -0400 From: jeffy@syrinx.umd.edu Yeah, yeah, I know, I never shut up about him... The local Tower just got in 4 or 5 copies of Mertens' soundtrack to Peter Greenaway's film _The Belly of An Architecht_. It was first released in '87, but due to the number of copies Tower had, I guess the label has gotten a new pressing. 'Tis a great album; mostly piano and simple synth stuff. The rhythms are great (now _this_ is kiting music...;-) and the music is interesting and exciting. (For those of you who might be wondering why Greenaway's name is familiar, he directed _The Cook, the Thief..._) Jeff |Jeffrey C. Burka | "Show what you are / Be strong, be true | | | Time for you to / Be who you are." | |jeffy@syrinx.umd.edu | --Happy Rhodes | ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 30 Apr 92 14:58:50 -0500 From: kennel@herky.cs.uiowa.edu (Chris Kennel) Subject: First timer!! Yep, my first post. And I am......a "Happy" virgin. Never heard a note out of her yet. :( Sounds like I am really missing out. As soon as I round up some extra capital, I am definitely going to order the CD's. Just might add, I am a Madonna fan. But I am a bigger KaTe fan. :) This Wim Mertens, is he Dutch per chance?? If so, as I was browsing the magazine rack at the grocery store, I happened to see his name mentioned on the cover of.....Playgirl. I looked (ahem) because of the familiarity of the name. Anyway.... if anyone's interested...... You folks all sound like really neat people, and I am really enjoying the group so far (been on since beginning of April). Spaeter-- Chris ======================================================================== Date: 30 April 1992 15:23:12 CDT From: Subject: Odder Lots, Content-wise I forgot to mention that I, myself, am a casual Madonna fan. ABC did, indeed, show the "Justify My Love" video as part of their _Nightline_ on MTV's banning of it. This show also featured an interview with the Umbil- ical Girl herself. Something for the provisional government of the birthday list: I have been able to ascertain that Marvin Camras, reputed to be the father of magnetic recording, without whose invention much of what we do would not be done, was born on January 1, 1916, making him a Capricorn. I have not made any attempt to ascertain his natal day-of-the-week. I fell asleep on Arsenio Hall last night. Did the Sugarcubes appear? If so, how was it? To liken all the new wave of women singers to Kate is not the only mis- conception about them. Case in point: yesterday NPR had a promo for this morning's _Morning Edition_, touting a story on "gospel singer Diamanda Galas." The actual story was a much more accurate portrayal of DG's music, though it did note that her latest album played up "traditional spirituals and old blues." Mitch ======================================================================== Date: 30 Apr 92 16:25:00 EST From: jody_ferguson.asw.navairtestcen%pcgate@natc-fw.navy.mil Subject: TORI STUFF Hi all, While I realize some people here have had a bellyful of Tori Amos, I have just received two pieces of Tori info from a friend of mine who is the PD at the local radio station. I say "the" because there isn't much else around here. The first piece is the following article. If it gets cut off, contact me through e-mail and I will send you a copy. It's pretty long. If you are sick of Tori, you know about the PgDn key. For those who are left, here goes... (Washington Post Sunday, March 22, 1992) Finally, A Prodigy Finds Her Song Tori Amos, Back Home With a Haunting Album. By Richard Harrington, Washington Post Staff Writer NEW YORK -- When Tori Amos flew to New York from London recently to showcase songs from her "Little Earthquakes" album for an industry and media crowd, she included an a cappella song, "Me and a Gun." Sitting cross-legged on a piano bench, staring straight into that jury, Amos expressed with nearly emotionless but harrowing detail the jumbled thoughts of a young woman being raped in the back of a Cadillac Seville. "I sang `Holy Holy' as he buttoned down his pants...when there's a man on your back and you're pushed flat on your stomach it's not a classic Cadillac...me and a gun and a man on my back but I haven't seen Barbados so I must get out of this..." Things got so uncomfortably quiet you could have heard a pin drop. And perhaps a few jaws too, among those who might have remembered Amos from four years ago, when she served up a disastrous debut album, "Y Kant Tori Read." Its cover featured her with teased hair, leather duds and a push-up bra, holding a sword behind her head--Tori as Heavy Metal Babe! The new, improved, real Tori Amos was a frail, henna-haired, porcelain- skin beauty who seemed to have stepped out of a Botticelli painting. After a year in England, she was coming home with a clean slate, a new record, a planeload of sterling reviews, the impassioned backing of her record company and a foot ready to jam in the career door slammed shut a few years back. At 28, the Tori Amos coming home to America--to Potomac, where her father is pastor at the United Methodist Church on River Road--is already more than two decades into a quest that started when she was a piano prodigy (at 5, she was the youngest student ever accepted at the Peabody Conservatory) and included teen years spent playing in Georgetown piano bars. After a number of stylistic diversions and changes of address--she lived in Los Angeles for seven years before the London move--Amos seems to have found herself. "Little Earthquakes" showcases a gifted singer, songwriter and pianist with a penchant for spare, beautifully crafted, soul-baring songs in the tradition of Kate Bush, Laura Nyro and Elton John. In songs like "Silent All These Years," "Winter" and "Me and a Gun," she exorcises lovers and other authority figures and digs into familial plots rich in spiritual and sexual conflicts. Not surprisingly, Amos displays killer piano chops, a knack for melody that hints at both classical and pop underpinnings, and a tainted angel's voice that wouldn't be out of place in a confessional. In England, Amos's emotional nakedness has stopped people in her tracks.-- "Little Earthquakes" opened in the Top 20, selling 100,000 copies. The New York showcase led to some immediate commitments: Soon she'll be in Vogue, Interview and Rolling Stone (Entertainment Weekly had already picked her as a new star for '92) and on Thursday at 9 p.m., MTV will present an hour-long special on Amos. Her "Silent" video has been given the "breakthrough" status accorded only one video each month. Pretty good results for an artist who has yet to dent the American charts. "I'd tried to do a dance thing, I tried to do the rock thing, and at a certain point you go, `Well, what _is_ my thing?'" says Amos. "`Who am I? What am I all about?' And out of that searching and agony came `Little Earthquakes.'" "We're stretching boundaries with her," says Doug Morris, CEO of Atlantic Records. "These songs are very provocative. She's on her journey." It was Morris who weathered Amos's disastrous, formulaic debut album and who encouraged her to be as intense and personal as she needed to be in her future songwriting. Still, Morris admits, "I was shocked when I heard `Little Earthquakes' because it was _such_ a departure." Morris sensed it might be difficult to promote and market the album because it was so eclectic. How then to get people to hear what Amos had to say in a huge country with a fragmented music scene, rigid radio formats and, perhaps, memories of her ill-fated first album? Morris decided to send Amos to England, "where there's one major radio station and where the press blankets the entire country. Since Tori could really captivate people, she could work in small clubs, people would create a buzz and she would have a better chance of being accepted." "I needed a change," Amos admitted a few hours before her New York performance. "Even though I'd written the record, I was emotionally drained after living in Los Angeles for so long. I needed a new perspective on things, new sights, new sounds. And I needed to get that thing in your belly that says `I want to play now.'" The label arranged for a West London flat five minutes from its offices-- and close enough to ferry critics there for private performances. "The music press there has a lot of power," says Amos. "They can see something in London and in a couple of days everybody in the country knows about it." And embrace Amos they did, painting her as "an American eccentric, a boho who writes confessional songs undercut with a species of shock tactics that seem reassuringly British in inspiration," according to Q magazine. London also put some distance between the future and Amos's L.A. past, which included an album of dance tracks recorded with Narada Michael Walden (never released) and steady work in classy hotel lounges ("paying the rent, playing something for the martini drinkers to make deals over"). There also was a band--it included drummer Matt Sorum, now with Guns N' Roses--but, says Amos, "it didn't make a whole lot of appearances. We spent most of our time making demo tapes." But Amos was not focusing on her strengths. Songs were co-written and overproduced, her vocals often overwhelmed. She didn't even play the piano; instead, she would "tickle the synth." "Billboard called me a bimbo," Amos recalls in her soft but intense voice. "They didn't mean to be mean about it. They were actually quite accurate. That's the look I was sporting in those days and I was in better shape--I was pumping then. There was a part of me that really wanted to be a rock chick...and I _failed_at_it_. "And that's a bit hard, to go from prodigy to bimbo...though it saved me a lot of hair spray bills. But I had to crack before I was willing to strip....I could not have written `Little Earthquakes' without skinning my knees." When "Y Kant Tori Read" stiffed, Amos went back to the lounges but stopped writing. "If I had to whore around, why did I do it with this, the thing that I have so treasured?" Amos asked herself. She didn't even keep a piano where she lived. "And then one night I went to a friend's house--she had a piano--and as she sat away in the dark, I played for hours....There was a feeling of `Who am I without you? Am I _anything_ without you?' And then it was like--" She unlooses a radiant smile. That experience reawakened a sense of disciplined craft that was both disconcerting and liberating, as evidenced on "Little Earthquakes." "Everything is there because it wants to be," Amos says, pointing out that on her first album, "I wasn't talking about the `Me and a Gun' experience, I wasn't talking about my religious views, I wasn't talking about how I felt about myself much at _all_. "On the first album, I was trying to defend myself, trying to make myself not so vulnerable," she adds. "And what happened? I got completely _ripped_ to bits. So then you think, `What can happen to me? Get off on something for once in your life. You _used_ to get off when you were 4....'" Or even 2. Tori Amos--then Ellen Amos--was humming melodies before she was talking. An older brother and sister took piano lessons, and she's always be cheerfully underfoot, her mother recalls. "As soon as she could reach the keys, she'd toddle over and start picking out the melodies that they were playing," says Mary Ellen Amos. "She could play _everything_ she could hear--it was a complete ear gift." Piano Prodigy ------------- Amos's parents--her father is Edison Amos, pastor of Potomac United Methodist Church--were not musical and didn't really take notice until visitors expressed amazement at the toddler's skills. Some advised the Amoses that the longer their daughter followed the musical track of memory rather than reading, the more difficult it would be to train her. And so at age 5, she auditioned at the prestigious Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where the Amos family was living at the time. The youngest ever to audition, Amos in 1968 became Peabody's youngest- ever student, starting there at age 6, surrounded mostly by men and women in their late teens and early twenties. "So much that I got from that place had nothing to do with what they were teaching me," Amos suggests. "I was picking up on everything then. ...It was fascinating!" But Amos age and temperament proved a challenge to her teachers and her parents, with Amos rebelling against mechanics when memory seemed the easier path. "They didn't know how to teach that _kid_," says Amos. "To try and break a kid's ear so that they'll learn how to read--and you _have_ to read to be a classical pianist--the way that they went about it made me hate it....I was a disappointment, and at 7 it became very clear to me that we had different plans." Peabody's curriculum at the time was strictly classical, and though Amos studied there for five years--"she resisted but she stayed with it," her mother notes--things came to a head at 11 when she auditioned again and swung her Beethoven with a Beatles beat. Amos's scholarship was not renewed, though she continued private instruction when her father moved his ministry, first to Silver Spring, then Rockville, and eight years ago, to Potomac. At Eastern Junior High and Richard Montgomery High, Amos was involved in chorales and madrigal groups, and led the children's choir at her father's church. By her mid-teens, she was also a veteran of the Washington piano bar circuit thanks to her father's intervention. "At 14, I felt Tori was losing interest," says Ed Amos. "Music was her entire life and we wanted to help her however we could. She wanted a job and so I chose to direct her into a profession at a young age, which was not an easy decision for me to make." "My father wanted me to get a craft," says Tori Amos. Indeed, she was soon developing it in a series of Georgetown cabarets, first at Mr. Henry's and later at Mr. Smith's Tiffany Room. Both clubs were supported by a largely gay clientele, and Pastor Amos--clerical collar and all--would chaperone his daughter on weekend nights until the early hours. "You play to people and you don't judge them," he says. "You share your gift and talent." By now, Tori Amos's repertoire had grown to embrace the popular standards not only of her day, but of her parents'. She was learning the sturdy craftsmanship that allows songs to stand the test of time. "I wouldn't give up those years for anything," Amos says, while conceding that high school was a challenge. Still, she managed to be elected homecoming queen at Richard Montgomery ("just remember Laura Palmer was _also_ a homecoming queen"). Often she'd return from work after midnight, unwinding by writing songs at the basement piano. "I used to love going to sleep listening to her down there," says her mother Mary Ellen. There are cabinets full of songs and tapes in the basement. Seismic Change -------------- "Little Earthquakes" is very much a coming-of-age album. The first American single is "Silent All These Years," where longtime passivity in a relationship comes to an end in a cascade of sly and supple lyrics ("so you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts/ what's so amazing about really deep thoughts/ boy you best pray that I bleed real soon/ how's _that_ thought for you..."). Ed Amos, who seems to be his daughter's biggest fan--he'll be biting his tongue in the pulpit today, wanting to let his parishioners know about Thursday's MTV special--says "Silent" is "about the structure of a culture that has encrusted your soul to where you are not who you should be....There's no ephemeral writing from Tori, it's all out of experience or meaning. As a philosopher and theologian, I think there's a lot of great wisdom about life in her songs." There is also an undercurrent of spiritual confusion and conflict coursing through the album, including the struggle with authority of "Crucify" (I'm looking for a savior beneath these dirty sheets"). The spiritual and the physical circle each other throughout "Little Earthquakes." "They have to get equal time," says Amos. "Once I wouldn't talk about these things, but now...I'm giving no quarter. But I'm not into blame. I had Victorian parents, but loving and supportive; they have their beliefs and they happen to be a bit different from mine and it's okay." Then there's "Me and a Gun," the truly harrowing song about rape based on a Los Angeles experience that Amos had blocked out for many years. After a show at a hotel lounge, she agreed to drop off someone who'd been a regular customer and he attacked her--though amos was able to escape before a rape occurred. She discussed the incident with her mother--who flew out to comfort her--but never talked about it again. Then, while playing a London suburb, Amos killed some time by going to see "Thelma & Louise," and the film triggered the memory. Riding the underground to the show, Amos wrote "Me and a Gun" in her head, performing it that night a cappella. It has stayed that way. "I don't talk about the details because I can't, but it's freeing to sing that song," says Amos. "I have to go in a trance to sing it....It gets exhausting singing it. But there's so much going on that nobody talks about, and I just found that out with myself after so many years of not talking."  ======================================================================== Date: 30 Apr 92 16:25:00 EST From: jody_ferguson.asw.navairtestcen%pcgate@natc-fw.navy.mil Subject: MORE TORI STUFF The other literature I was sent is a press bio folder of Tori issued by Atlantic. Forgive me if someone else already posted this. Notice they call this her debut *solo* album, but don't mention Y Kant Tori Read. Very clever. Tori Amos --------- "I have so much in my closet to clean. For all these years, I felt like different people at a dinner party. When you've got the virgin and the whore sitting next to each other, they're likely to judge each other harshly--but it's never about good girl and bad girl, right and wrong, good and evil. You can't have your body without your shadow. I've stopped judging myself harshly. Now I can wear these different hats but, essentially, it's the same girl singing." Who is Tori Amos? A singer-songwriter who could play piano before she could talk. WHAT is Tori Amos? More than you bargained for. For the first few seconds of her debut solo album, "LITTLE EARTHQUAKES," you're thinking Kate Bush, maybe. Then out comes the knife. The veneer is torn away. Imagine biting into a pea pod and it turns out to be a chili. Better still, imagine you just picked up a hitchhiker in the middle of the night along the highway that runs past the forest. She seemed like such a nice girl, but now you're beginning to worry...That's Tori Amos. How did she get that way? Well, she began early. Tori was born in North Carolina. Her father is a Methodist preacher, her mother part Cherokee. She grew up in an atmosphere of love and discipline, an atmosphere that was spiritually alive yet hampered by a doctrine of sexual repression. "There were lots of do's and don't's," Tori recalls. "Love and lust shall never meet. And there was me, five years old, and I had these feelings. I had a crush on Jesus, and I got into trouble for wondering if he had a thing going with Mary Magdalene." And there was music. Lots of music. Her mother loved Fats Waller and Nat King Cole, her brother dug Hendrix, and Tori sang in the church choir. By the age of four, she had started playing piano scores and writing her own songs. At the age of five, she won a scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where the older kids were into the Doors. "I was working with musicians who were 17 or 18," Tori comments. "It was very exciting because, through them, I'd be exposed to all the new music. Then, all of a sudden, it stopped being fun. Something got lost, and it became deadly serious. It wasn't free expression anymore; it was going to be channeled into a career. I just didn't want to do what was expected of me." Tori began to balk at the discipline of academic life, and at age 11, she was booted out of the conservatory for playing by ear. "So much happened to me when I was a kid," she muses, "and, to some extent, all my songs come from there. Things that happen to me now seem to be connected to what went before. It's the same pain, with different names and places attached. Getting kicked out of the conservatory was so traumatic for me; it was like a bad relationship ending. At 11, it seemed like my life was over." For the next several years, accompanied by her father, Tori spent four or five nights a week playing old standards, Gershwin classics and the like, in bars and hotels across Washington D.C. and Baltimore. "When I was 15, my father stopped acting as chaperon," Tori remembers. "I found myself working with women who were in their late-twenties, and chatting to gay men all night, interrogating them about their sex lives. Then I'd go to junior high the next morning, and it was a totally different experience. I learned to create these different sides to deal with it all." In her late-teens, Tori moved to Los Angeles, vowing never to play the piano again. She had "not quite a nervous breakdown" at 20. "Then I faced up to the fact that, since around the age of seven, all I'd been doing was trying to please other people rather than myself." Wondering what to do next, Tori visited a friend's house where there was a big old piano, and she began to tentatively noodle on the keyboard. She started to discover her old voice, her old self. This was the reawakening, the seed that would grow into "LITTLE EARTHQUAKES." Continuing to play and write, Tori moved to England a few years later, finding a fertile ground in which to further develop her music. So this is Tori Amos today. She's decided that her life went wrong "when I stopped talking to the fairies, lost the magic, and gave in to everybody's wishes." Today, her songs--elegantly constructed yet torn apart inside by a trembling rage--are naked in their frank attempts to reconcile, or at least recognize, the disparities in her life. Her piano style, natural and artless, is subtly attuned to the ebb and clash of her conflicting emotions. Tori's cycle of oppression and self-liberation is the dynamo that drives "LITTLE EARTHQUAKES". The album deals with "all my fifty different personalities called back home and melted into one." For this stunning solo debut, Tori enlisted the aid of several producers, including Davitt Sigerson (The Bangles, David + David), while co-producing four of the tracks herself. Tori's songs quiver between innocence and experience, with a blade of irony in place--she delights in startling the listener with abrupt chord changes, juxtaposing images of Charles Manson and ice cream, purring winsomely about crucifixion and violation thinking about Carolina biscuits while a man with a gun is on her back... Underneath a deceptively calm surface, the gorgeously languid "China" seethes with the first awareness of a love slipping away. "Leather" toys unflinchingly with the theme of lust, while "Mother" draws imagery from _Hansel_and_Gretel_. "Little girls can be very sexual," says Tori. "But there's an innocence, a vulnerablity there, which cannot be abused." "Crucify" chillingly transmits its sense of visceral anxiety: "I got a bowling ball in my stomach/I got a desert in my mouth." Yet "LITTLE EARTHQUAKES" is never an ugly experience, but a sensual one. The roseate hues of "Girl" are there to be indulged, until the chorus line rips through: "She's been everybody else's girl/Maybe one day she'll be her own." The beautiful yet ominous "Silent All These Years" is a good starting point for understanding Tori Amos. She's a new name, but she's been fermenting and maturing for a long time. She's repossessed herself, and her music is unnerving, discomforting, yet absolutely compelling. "LITTLE EARTHQUAKES" documents the rumblings of a soul. -2/92- ======================================================================== The ecto archives are on hardees.rutgers.edu in ~ftp/pub/hr. There is a README file explaining what is where. Feel free to send me (or leave in the incoming directory, just let me know) things you'd like to have added. -- jessica (jessica@ns1.rutgers.edu)