MORE TORI STUFF

[jody_ferguson.asw.navairtestcen%pcgate@NATC-FW.NAVY.MIL]

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                                                                      
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"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-