From: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org (precious-things-digest) To: precious-things-digest@smoe.org Subject: precious-things-digest V3 #186 Reply-To: precious-things@smoe.org Sender: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "precious-things-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. precious-things-digest Monday, May 18 1998 Volume 03 : Number 186 Today's Subjects: ----------------- i wonder if tori borrowed the fat lady from the second tool album for the inside of the ftch ha ha [Lit] Pleas for a Boot [MM62 ] Re: Boston tix date WRONG [Khloegirl ] TM RAINN video...same one? [Cynthia Lawson ] chicago tribune [Joni Doe24 ] Chicago Tribue article [Phoenix ] Tori's Father ["K. Robertson" ] Could Tori Read? ["K. Robertson" ] Washinton Post article [The Spiece Family ] Re: Tori's Father [Fireheart ] Re: Curve [Aaron R West ] Re: Could Tori Read? [Fireheart ] Re: Could Tori Read? ["Sonya Harway" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 16 May 1998 21:49:18 -0700 From: Little Queen Subject: i wonder if tori borrowed the fat lady from the second tool album for the inside of the ftch ha ha hullo all, i am joining the masses and typing up the review of "from the choirgirl hotel" that appeared in my local paper. enjoy (this appeared in The Monterey County Herald on sunday, may 10) 'Choirgirl Hotel' Tori Amos Atlantic Tori Amos is the sort of artist who, to achieve brilliance in her work, requires trauma. Something to bring about a catharsis. Yet when tori's life goes through intense change, the results go well beyond feigning poses. This was evident on her remarkable debut, "Little Earthquakes," and the equally remarkable "From The Choirgirl Hotel." On her past two albums, 1996's "Boys For Pele" and 1994's "Under The Pink," Tori had little to say and seemed only to be going through the motions. Here, in "Choirgirl Hotel's" strongest moments, Tori accomplishes both. Masterful stabs at commercialism (without sacrificing integrity) such as "Raspberry Swirl," the sprawling "Liquid Diamonds" and, especially, the dirty "She's Your Cocaine" are high-water marks for the preformer. is it just me or is this a retarded review? she had *nothing* to say on pele or pink??? ha ha oh well everyone is entitled to their ignorance and bad taste *l* take care, good people ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~rain~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * moon....big white moon....white as milk moon....youre all i can see from my window, here in the dark. your light falls silver and white across the walls of my cell. the night-tide surges strong in me. so strong i can feel the grip of their drugs loosen. they fancy themselves high priests. their gods have names like Thorazine and Lithium and Shock Therapy. but their gods are new and weak and cannot hope to contain me much longer. for i am the handiwork of far more powerful, far more ancient dieties. very soon my blood will learn the secret of the inhibiting factors the white-coated shamans pump into my veins. and then things will be very different, my beautiful moon..... my big moon........white as milk moon......red as blood moon..... ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 02:35:57 EDT From: MM62 Subject: Pleas for a Boot PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, i've e-mailed several people looking for a boot recording of the 4-18 ft. lauderdale show and have had no luck. this was a very important show for me and i really really have to find a copy. i'm willing to trade from my extensive collection of rarities or pay costs. please e-mail. thanx ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 01:45:53 EDT From: Khloegirl Subject: Re: Boston tix date WRONG Call ticketmaster. They have been confirming for a week now that tickets don't go on sale until June. If I didn't live in Boston I sure as Hell would have at least called the Fleet Center first. I can't deal with the hostility on this list any longer. - -K. We scream in cathedrals Why can't it be beautiful Why does there gotta be a sacrifice ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 09:13:39 -0500 From: Cynthia Lawson Subject: TM RAINN video...same one? Hello everyone, I just checked out the TicketMaster web site (being in Colombia I have no reason to call it the TicketMonster or other nics!), and I saw the RAINN video for sale. I watched this video a couple of days ago, taped from HBO Ole (Giovanni, I still want your copy! :) ), and if my memory serves me right, she was wearing something red, no? And TM shows the video cover with her wearing blue. Are we talking about the same concert?? It is so amazing, I wouldn´t want to end up with a different one... And for those wondering about the ITSOHV remixes...they are absolutely amazing. That is, if 1)you love Tori 2)you love techno/dance/trance music 3)you don't mind listening to 8 and a half minute versions of an original 3 or 4 minute song. take care. y gracias! xx C. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 10:38:47 EDT From: Joni Doe24 Subject: chicago tribune there is a very lengthy article on tori in the chicago tribune, sunday's art section. it is an interview/review. it is a good review (*gasp*) and an informative article, if you arent on this list. chrissy ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 15:45:45 -0500 (CDT) From: Phoenix Subject: Chicago Tribue article It's also available at www.chicago.tribune.com...it's pretty good =) Phoenix ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 15:05:07 From: "K. Robertson" Subject: Tori's Father Okay.....another question. What religion or whatever was Tori's father? I have an article from 1994 pulled up in front of me that says he was a Potomac preacher, I have another article from a Columbia House mag that said he was a Baptist minister, and I have an article from Time mag that says he was a Methodist minister. I always thought it was Methodist. Am I wrong? Or maybe, is there different names for the word methodist? help!! I'm getting confused! Lyn ***************************************************************** ripples come and ripples go and ripples back to me ***************************************************************** ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 14:54:51 From: "K. Robertson" Subject: Could Tori Read? I was just at the Dent and I was looking at the articles on Tori when i came across one in the 'Best From 1977-1995' section. It said the following: "Amos, who has played the piano since the age of 3 and read music before she could read words, cut her first single this fall, 'Walking With You' on one side and 'Baltimore' on the other." So, my question to you all is, could Tori read music when she was little? I thought that she couldn't read music because in the "All These Years" biography, it said that Tori bribed her brothers and sisters to play the pieces she had to learn so that she could learn them. Is the other article wrong? Lyn ********************************************************* if you want inside her well, boy you gotta make her raspberry swirl.... ********************************************************* ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 15:44:59 -0400 From: The Spiece Family Subject: Washinton Post article Here is the Washington Post Article in Today's Paper! ENJOY!!! :) Tori hugs, Phyllis http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-05/17/084l-051798-idx.html Tori Amos, Local Legend At 34, the Singer Deals With Love, Loss and a New Band By Richard Harrington Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, May 17, 1998; Page G01 Eighteen years ago, when Tori Amos was a 16-year-old playing in Georgetown piano bars, she told The Washington Post, "I want to be a legend." At the time all the Maryland-bred singer had to her name was a self-pressed single on which she earnestly sang the praises of "Baltimore." Today, a copy of the record -- 10 of which are thought to exist -- would fetch hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Amos's last three albums have gone platinum, and it's likely that her brand-new "from the choirgirl hotel," which entered the Billboard charts this week at No. 5, will do the same. Devoted Toriphiles have set up approximately 4,000 Web shrines devoted to the singer. Amos's recent return to Washington -- she prefaced her first-ever band tour with a warm-up date at the 9:30 club -- was attended by several changes. "Choirgirl hotel" marks the first time Amos has recorded in the studio with a band, and the current tour -- which includes an MCI Center concert Aug. 11 -- is the first time she has played arenas. Other changes are more personal. The 9:30 club date was also the first time she has performed in Washington without her parents in the audience; retired Methodist minister Edison and wife Mary Ellen Amos recently moved from Rockville to Florida. And last February she married her longtime sound man, Mark Hawley, in a secret ceremony in England, where she has lived for much of the past six years. Nonetheless, pictures from the wedding soon appeared in the British tabloids, suggesting a very mystical Renaissance-style ceremony and celebration. "We thought we kept it quiet," Amos says with a sigh. "That side of my life is really private, though I feel exposed on a lot of other levels." On the Internet, for instance, where her lyrics and interviews are endlessly dissected and analyzed, and Toriphiles share communal epiphanies. "I think I made my bed for myself," Amos admits, "writing the kind of songs that strike a nerve, even with people who hate my work." Indeed, both Toriphiles and Toriphobes are passionate on the subject. The former thrive on Amos's decidedly idiosyncratic approach to writing and performing, appreciate the emotional intimacy of her songs, perhaps even share her skepticism toward religion. The latter dismiss Amos for her quirky musical affectations, deride her mystic gambols among what she calls "the fairies and mermaids" and decry her often elusive, sometimes impenetrable lyrics. "You know, sometimes when somebody's tearing me to shreds, they're not even talking about the music," Amos says. "It's that you're talking about secrets, things that shouldn't be talked about, bringing up questions that [tick] people off, or making people feel like 'Wow, I have these questions, too.' People either align with it or want to stamp on me like a cockroach." "I'm really non-confrontational as a person, except with myself," Amos insists. "Until we get into certain issues. Like Christianity, for example." The media, Amos says, usually depict her as the minister's daughter who is hostile toward religion. She says that she's always trying to correct, or at least clarify, that impression. "I'm just committed to uncovering the dark side of Christianity," she explains. According to Amos, "women have been sexually suppressed through the institution of Christianity," which she calls a patriarchic, paternalistic system threatened by the power of "a sexual, spiritual female." As she put it on her debut album's "Icicle," "I think the Good Book is missing a few pages." Amos, who attended church four times a week until she was 21, concedes that her longstanding critiques of what she calls the hypocrisy of organized religion were -- and continue to be -- the source of spirited debate with her father. "I'm looking for a balanced way of living with these questions I have," Amos says. "My relationship with the Christian God right now is very much about 'See you on Friday for margaritas, I have hundreds of more questions.' Of course I believe in the great spirit, the divine, but as a Christian deity, He knows His gig but He doesn't know what it's like to be a red-headed girl in this body that has a lot of questions and not many answers." In December 1996 Amos miscarried a baby girl at three months. That loss and an attendant sense of sorrow and helplessness inform several of the songs on "choirgirl hotel," including the first single, "Spark," where Amos sings "she's convinced she could hold back a glacier/ but she couldn't keep baby alive." "You know, I love my mother and I adore my father, but that isn't the same feeling I had being a mother," Amos says softly. "My mother always told me until you feel motherhood, you'll never understand. It's not something you feel as a kid for your parents and you don't feel that for a lover, it's just not the same. She said it's protecting and giving and giving . . . and I never felt like I would do anything for another life like that before." It's nothing new for Amos to channel her pain into creativity. She turned a rape into a cathartic song, "Me and a Gun," and eventually helped found the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network to foster awareness of violence against women and children. "There's immense joy in my life right now because of the songs," says Amos. "I may not be creating human babies but I'm co-creating song babies. The love doesn't go away, so I have a feeling of love that I haven't felt before, not just for this being, but for life. How do you get through your loss and then find the beauty in life again -- that's really what this record was about. It became about living again, about seeing life in a way with new eyes." Though she's only 34, Amos can look at the professional life of a musician with near-ancient eyes. After all, she was playing the piano by ear before she could talk. As a 5-year-old prodigy, she became the youngest student ever admitted to Baltimore's Peabody Institute. Her music studies there lasted until age 11, by which time her passion for rock and her resistance to authority (no less oppressive in the conservatory than in the church) led to her being expelled. At 13 she began playing in Georgetown's gay piano bars. Her father drove her to those gigs and sat quietly in the back as Ellen (her given name) began to meld her pianistic proficiency and preternaturally assured vocals with her first original songs. Cradling a bottle of Evian in the restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel -- only a block from where she maintained a long residency at the Marbury House's Lion's Gate Taverne -- Amos recalls "Married Man," a song written in her early teens. " 'I'm too young for a man but I'm too old for a boy/ so can't we just pretend that I'm older than I am?/ but then, only little girls pretend . . . Married man, stop pulling me closer/ married man, I could be your daughter/ you know you have the best of both worlds.' " "That makes me cry when I think about it," Amos says. So would the frustrations of trying to penetrate the record industry in the '80s, though from the start one could find hints of ambition unlikely to be diminished by rejection. For instance, at Richard Montgomery High School, where she was homecoming queen, Amos had written a paper titled "You Too Can Have a Career in Music," in which she promised, "Nothing can stop me. I know what I can do and I believe in myself." So did her father -- he wrote to various labels on church stationery, but his letters went as unanswered as his daughter's prayers. In the mid-'80s, Amos -- who by then was calling herself Tori -- moved to Los Angeles, formed a band, played all over the city and eventually snagged a contract with Atlantic Records. Her 1988 debut, "Y Kant Tori Read" -- the band's name and a reference to Amos's problems with Peabody instructors over her refusal to read music -- became one of rock's notorious disasters. Luckily for Amos, more people have probably heard about "Y Kant Tori Read" than ever actually heard it (10,000 copies were pressed, with less than half actually sold). That album presented a very different Tori Amos -- a big-haired, leather-wearing, scimitar-wielding rock chick making what Billboard immediately dismissed as "bimbo music." "I was trying to make myself into something they felt they could package," Amos says of the experience. "I tried to write songs for the market and some of them still have pieces of me in them, but I was doing it for the wrong reasons at that point. I got away from the fact that I wanted to be a french fry -- and I'm not a french fry, I'm an oyster." The pearls, as it turned out, would have to be cultivated overseas. The "Y Kant" debacle led Amos to reconsider herself on a long sojourn, made at the suggestion of her label head, in England, which has long been a haven to eccentric originals. It was there that Amos recorded 1992's "Little Earthquakes," a collection of piano-graced confessional purgatives that eventually sold more than 3 million copies worldwide and helped set the stage for Fiona Apple, Paula Cole and Alanis Morissette (who called the album "a shocking revelation"). In England, Amos reinvented herself as "a girl and her piano," offering intimate, provocative and at times unrelentingly frank ruminations on love, sex, family and religion. As Amos herself put it in "Girl," "She's been everybody else's girl/ maybe one day she'll be her own." Once she was, Amos began to build a network of devoted fans through constant touring here and overseas. Her albums -- including "Under the Pink" and "Boys for Pele" -- grafted on additional studio textures, but in concert it was always just Amos and her oversize Bosendorfer grand. "Playing by myself for so many years, doing so many shows, I thought maybe I was hiding behind myself at the piano," Amos says. "I felt like it was time to bring in real players, real rhythm. It's such a magical thing when a group of people can groove together, and I wanted to plug in to this ancient place where the banshees go. There can be beauty and ballads there, but it can also grab you by the throat." "I want the mermaids to show up with black leather boots, to bring the life force out of them." ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 19:02:46 -0400 (EDT) From: Fireheart Subject: Re: Tori's Father I believe he is a Methodist Minister, Tori has said that quite a lot in interviews. Carrie-Ellen Batcheller HPs \||/ UNH Babcock Hall Box 2110 | @___oo Durham NH 03824 /\ /\ / (__,,,,| ) /^\) ^\/ _) web pages: ) /^\/ _) http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/9523 ) _ / / _) Lifestories: /9523/lifestories.html /\ )/\/ || | )_) Tori Amos trade list: /9523/tori.html < > |(,,) )__) || / \)___)\ "Poor little Earth she tried so hard | \____( )___) )___ to change our ways, sometimes she \______(_______;;; __;;; must get sick of this place" --"Floating City", Tori Amos ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 19:14:46 -0400 From: Aaron R West Subject: Re: Curve > I've only listened to 1 Curve album, Doppleganger, but it's among one of my favorite all time albums. I can see where you make the comparison, but I have to disagree. The only song on Choirgirl that resembles Curve, to me anyway, is 'Raspberry Swirl', but just barely. Swirl is about as upbeat as some of Curve's songs, but it seems more like a Rave song to me. I wouldn't define Curve's music as Rave, but upbeat alternative/dance. > > > Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 17:45:19 -0700 > From: Lavina Elaine Lee > Subject: Re: Beth Gibbons?? > > I can see why you'd say that...but Beth Gibbons is VERY different. Like > apples and oranges. Tori is very sonorous. Beth is...well...she's Beth > Gibbons. > Actually, I noticed that Tori's new sound, not her voice, but the music in > general, sounds a lot like old Curve albums. Has anyone ever heard of Curve?? > ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 19:05:56 -0400 (EDT) From: Fireheart Subject: Re: Could Tori Read? Tori has always played by ear, but I think she may have learned to read music a bit as she got older. One of the reasons she got kicked out of Peabody was because she couldn't read, and refused to read music. The other reason was because she didn't like to strictly play classical pieces. She recognized their value, and she could play them, but she wanted to go beyond them. Peabody was a conservative institution then. I've heard they've improved though. Carrie-Ellen Batcheller HPs \||/ UNH Babcock Hall Box 2110 | @___oo Durham NH 03824 /\ /\ / (__,,,,| ) /^\) ^\/ _) web pages: ) /^\/ _) http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/9523 ) _ / / _) Lifestories: /9523/lifestories.html /\ )/\/ || | )_) Tori Amos trade list: /9523/tori.html < > |(,,) )__) || / \)___)\ "Poor little Earth she tried so hard | \____( )___) )___ to change our ways, sometimes she \______(_______;;; __;;; must get sick of this place" --"Floating City", Tori Amos ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 19:10:38 PDT From: "Sonya Harway" Subject: Re: Could Tori Read? At Sun, 17 May 1998 14:54:51 kroberts@connect.ab.ca wrote: >So, my question to you all is, could Tori read music when she was little? To my knowledge, Tori could read music, but she would have rather heard the songs and learn them by ear. As a musician, I myself know that sometimes this is much easier. In my case, I do a lot of listening to my parents classical music CDs and learning from there, but I believe little Myra Ellen knew how but just didn't want to. ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ------------------------------ End of precious-things-digest V3 #186 *************************************