Re: "Kate ever said anything about Tori?"

[Norman Buchwald <jbuchwald@csun.edu>]

"URMILLER@cc.memphis.edu"@msuvx2.memphis.edu wrote:
>
>
>   I don't believe Kate has ever acknowledged Tori's heavy influence, but 
>here's my theory.  If you listen to tori's first album, "Y can't Tori 
>read", you find nothing but trite glammy trash.  With "Little 
>Earthquakes" you hear nothing but theft.  I think Tori got a hold of some 
>of Kate's early demos and based her entire direction on those.  If you 
>examine closely the structure of the changes in the piano parts,  you see 
>some direct plagerism.  Listen to song's like "Keeping me Waiting"' and 
>"Davy" and you find the very basis for Toris style entirely.  I think 
>Tori has taken the beautiful and original music of Kate Bush and created 
>her brand of grotesque, negative, icon attack.  She is a child and I hope 
>she stays "Under the Pink".  
>

Since someone had given me a copy of some of her demos three years 
before Little Earthquakes, I certainly do notice the similarity.  Right 
from "Crucify," and especially with "Winter. I immediately thought of   
"Keeping Me Waiting" and "Snowbowl," (or is it "Snowbound."  My friend's 
penmanship was not too clear when he labelled it.  But did Tori "steal"? 
 I don't know about that.

The story is that Tori stayed in a friend's apartment for a long time.  A 
lot of Tori's lyrics are unique in her leaps to connect images.  She at 
least "leaps" more often than Kate.  I think the derogatory comments are 
uncalled for.  Tori's a good artist in her own right.  I just wish she 
would admit Kate's influence, even if she admits it like Sarah Maclachlan 
did (When she said something like "I used to listen to Kate Bush.  But I 
got so intimidated, I had to stop listening to her.")  But I've learned 
in literature "All writers lie," especially the good ones.  I always see 
"Little Earthquakes" as her original album that has echoes of Kate Bush's 
early stuff, especially at the piano (her demos) and the richness of her 
lyrics especially on albums like Hounds Of Love, The Dreaming, and The 
Sensual World.  But your derogatory comments on Tori as "thief," well 
they sound reminiscent to some of my Tori Amos fan-friends who insist 
that those of us who think Tori benefited by incorporating some of Kate's 
stuff as living in a dreamworld.  (And they are hostile to Kate, boy are 
they!)

But yes.  While Tori did have a childhood similar to Kate (and it is 
documented in her biography, All These Years), where Tori played the 
piano a lot and wrote songs at a young age, she was not as lucky as Kate 
to have that earlier talent recognized.  Y Tori Can't Read was formed to 
make records, make bucks, and Tori depended on cashing in on the craze in 
American Pop Music and especially the scene of L.A. in the mid-to late 
eighties, the pop metal scene (a.k.a. Lone Justice and later Heart and 
'Til Tuesday).  And she failed miserably.  She was a laughing stock 
to the Hollywood elite.  If a Kate Bush demo inspired her, (and maybe 
reminded her of something she used to do as a child but forgot), I have 
nothing wrong with that.  After all, I think one day with artists like 
Tori Amos, Sarah Maclachlan, Jill Sibery, and others-- Kate will be 
inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and finally get the rewards in the 
States she long deserves.  I still have this dream that one day Kate and 
Tori would collaborate a single (only in dreamworld it looks like).

"But it hurts me.  It hurts me.  Honey. Honey."

     
                                                 Stormin' Norman

P.S.:  Tori's not that young.  At least in her late twenties, I believe. 
 But my memory escapes me.  I feel I should bring my Kate Bush and Tori 
Amos biographies and CD's and keep them here in the office now with the 
newsgroups I'm on.