From: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org (precious-things-digest) To: precious-things-digest@smoe.org Subject: precious-things-digest V10 #37 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 Tuesday, February 22 2005 Volume 10 : Number 037 Today's Subjects: ----------------- new york times review [jeff albertson ] toronto star article [jeff albertson ] tori -- philly / san francisco sale information [jeff albertson ] tori / detroit sale information [jeff albertson ] tori / new york tickets [jeff albertson ] Tori on Carson Daly ["Lisa Zwick" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 09:03:11 -0500 From: jeff albertson Subject: new york times review 'The Beekeeper' Tori Amos Tori Amos has been settling down lately. She has cut back on her fluttery vocal leaps into the high register, her busy classical piano filigrees and her most abstruse verbal free-associations. On her new album, "The Beekeeper" (Epic), she offers something like a straightforward love song in "Sleeps With Butterflies," thinking about a lover who is flying off somewhere and promising, "You say the word you know I will find you/Or if you need some time I don't mind." Ms. Amos will never be a conventional songwriter. She established herself in the 1990's with musically intricate but startlingly blunt songs about a young woman's desires and traumas, gaining fans who have stayed with her as she moved from confession to character studies, from storytelling to abstraction. She still has a lot on her mind: lust, faith, motherhood, inconstancy, war, restlessness, death. And she has enough ambition to swirl them together in songs that spin dreamlike images and take musical detours at whim. "The Beekeeper" is a generous, even overstuffed album, 19 songs and 79 minutes long, with an elaborate scheme involving six "gardens" of songs inspired by the six-sided cells of a honeycomb. (Ms. Amos has no fear of preciousness.) The lyrics are still collages of impressions, though usually with enough clues to piece them together. But "The Beekeeper" is also her most down-to-earth album in years, because Ms. Amos has decided she doesn't have to pack every impulse into every song. Sometimes, now, a simple melody and a steady groove are enough. Along with her piano, Ms. Amos often plays Hammond organ on "The Beekeeper," and the combination leads her back toward soul music in songs like "Sweet the Sting" and "Witness." There is a sense of ease in the music that Ms. Amos has rarely shown before, and there are some glimmers of humor, where she plays with her voice in "Cars and Guitars" and "Hoochie Woman." When Ms. Amos does turn rhapsodic, usually as she thinks about politics and religion in songs like "General Joy" and "Original Sinsuality," there's still some breathing space. The most telling songs are the quietest ones, particularly "The Beekeeper" itself. Leaving the piano behind, Ms. Amos places her voice within an eerie, electronic production, singing about a reassuring angel of death who sings, "I promise that she will awake Tomorrow Somewhere." No less ambitious than before, Ms. Amos is finding ways to make her songs more approachable. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 09:17:47 -0500 From: jeff albertson Subject: toronto star article [ontarians, note the photo caption!] Feb. 21, 2005. 07:40 AM Changes, or, who's Tori now Once introspective singer takes wider view of the world Adapts songs on tour to mirror local current events VIT WAGNER POP MUSIC CRITIC [Photo] COLIN MCCONNELL/TORONTO STAR Caption: Her recently published memoir follows Tori Amos as she composes songs for her new CD The Beekeeper, which hits stores tomorrow. She is starting a tour that brings her to Toronto in August. If Tori Amos had been in Toronto last week for a concert, rather than a promotional tour to drum up interest in a new album and book, the show would have in some way mirrored her take on local events. In Tori Amos: Piece by Piece, a recently published memoir written with former New York Times pop music critic Ann Powers, the 41-year-old singer/songwriter talks about how her set lists and the general tone of her performances are tailored to each tour stop along the way. During the recent Toronto stop, for instance, Amos immersed herself in news stories about the Jonathan mistrial, the court case involving the murder of a 12-year-old boy. "I was reading about that in the paper this morning, so if I were performing tonight there would be a thread of that in there," says Amos, during an interview at the Four Seasons. "I do my research. It's my passion. I'm always reading about the place I'm going to. As I'm travelling on the bus, I immerse myself in the place I'm going to. I want to know what's gripping the city." Although it touches on Amos's upbringing in a devoutly Christian household in Maryland and other events of her life, the 350-page volume is an unconventional autobiography that is intended to offer readers a window into her creative process. Since successfully launching her solo career in 1992 with the confessional breakthrough Little Earthquakes, Amos has built a devoted following for her distinctive brand of keyboard-based, mystically inflected pop, while amassing sales of more than 12 million and spawning a legion of Lilith Fair progeny. The book is in some ways a complement to her eighth full-length disc, The Beekeeper, which arrives in stores tomorrow. "I made a decision to involve the book in my process," says Amos, who is about to embark on a tour that will bring her back to Toronto in August. "I decided to expose my process as I was writing The Beekeeper. Expose, as in give someone a backstage pass to understand what goes on. Naturally, it's going to have a piece of me in there. But while I can still remember my process, I like the idea of being able to talk about creativity, especially in the face of so much destruction." Amos, a classically trained pianist influenced by a formative passion for the music of Led Zeppelin, stresses she is no longer the 28-year-old behind Little Earthquakes, which famously included a song, "Me and a Gun," which dealt autobiographically with the harrowing subject of rape. A resident of England, where she lives with her husband and daughter, Amos says she is more inclined these days to look outward than inward, which affected the songwriting on both The Beekeeper and its 2002 predecessor, Starlet's Walk. The new album, an 18-song, 90-minute magnum opus divided into six, thematically linked sections that touch on familiar subjects such as Christianity while referring to recent events in her native land. "There is some subject matter I'm only beginning to cover," she says. "Maybe some of that has to do with living in England and beginning to see how the macrocosm affects the microcosm, rather than focusing on your own little world and your own little problems. "This leadership (in the U.S.) is very good at aligning itself with the mass consciousness. They have used the biblical parables, they have used the symbolism and they have used Christianity as a beacon, as a light. And they have become fishers of men. It's a very clever marketing campaign." Amos understands that songs informed by the writings of Gnostic Gospels scholar Elaine Pagels might not stir the music industry's blood with the same force as raw testimonials to abuse, but she takes comfort from the example set by some of her elders. "Neil Young is still creating. I find that exciting. There are quite a few others. Bruce Springsteen. Joni Mitchell. Songwriting is not attached to a period in your life. It's like breathing. It's what you do. I've been doing it for as long as I can remember. And I'll be doing it until I'm a granny or even until I'm dead." ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 14:46:06 -0500 From: jeff albertson Subject: tori -- philly / san francisco sale information from clearchannel : Tori Amos Monday, April 11, 2005 at 8:00 PM Verizon Hall at Kimmel Center Philadelphia, PA On Sale February 26, 2005 - 10:00AM Tickets: $45.00 Tori Amos Sunday, April 24, 2005 at 8:00 PM Davies Symphony Hall San Francisco, CA On Sale February 27, 2005 - 10:00AM The Original Sinsuality Tour Doors open 7:00 PM Reserved seats are $42.50 plus applicable service charges. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 16:35:22 -0500 (EST) From: Girolamo Frescobaldi Subject: Re: new york times review Thanks for having posted this, and all the other published items, "Jeff." I think it's worth noting that this one was written by Jon Pareles. Be seeing you, Richard Handal, H.G. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 17:58:59 -0500 From: jeff albertson Subject: tori / detroit sale information Tori Amos with Matt Nathanson Tori Amos / Matt Nathanson Thursday, April 14, 2005 Detroit Opera House Detroit, MI On Sale February 26, 2005 - 10:00AM Floor - $42.50 Sky Boxes - $42.50 Mezzanine - $32.50 Balcony - $32.50 woj ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 20:20:47 -0500 From: jeff albertson Subject: tori / new york tickets well, i'm a little leery of mentioning this, to be honest, since this looks to me like one of those ticket agencies which borders on legalized scalping, but ... if you go to the tickets.com page for tori , there is a link to their "premier ticket window" where, in the results from their search engine, is this page: http://ticketscom.razorgator.com/showticketsb.asp?performance=2538137&pbr=1 there, it appears, are a limited number of tickets to the new york city show at the hammerstein ballroom available for sale: Tori Amos Hammerstein Ballroom, New York, NY Friday, 4/8/2005, 7:00:00 PM How To buy: 1) Select desired seat and click on "Buy Ticket" button. (You can select quantity on next page). 2) Prices shown are PER TICKET. Prices are in USD. 3) If you have questions, call 1-800-523-0549. The state of New York regulates the sale of tickets for this venue (event location). If you are a resident of the state of New York, you cannot buy tickets to this event. We apologize for any inconvenience and urge you to contact your state representatives with any comments. Available Tickets Section Row Price Tickets Avail. 1ST MEZZ G.A. $125 7 FLOOR G.A. $157 9 obviously, compared to the advertised ticket prices for shows on this tour, those prices are quite a bit higher. based on the sale dates popping up through ticketmaster, etc., i would think that hammerstein tickets will be officially available through ticketmaster soon at more reasonable prices (well, barring ticketmaster's "dis-service" fees). additionally, it's unclear if this service actually has tickets in-hand or just the potential to acquire them for their customers. hence, my hesitation. but, if you're comfortable with all the caveats and don't mind paying more for tickets, there you go. woj ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 23:36:15 -0500 From: "Lisa Zwick" Subject: Tori on Carson Daly After waiting on several lines for two hours, I managed to see tori play. She played Sleeps with Butterflies for the show and then was nice enough to play Orange Knickers as a little extra treat for those of us who were there. She seemed a bit lost in her own world when she first came on, but she warmed up and was very friendly. It was actually an odd show. If not for Tori, I don't think they would have had a single person in the audience. The only two other guests were Anderson Cooper and some kid who wore the same football jersey for over 400 days in a row. But then again, with all the tori fans there, they probably couldn't handle having another popular guest at the same time. Anyway, they said the show will air next Tues. - -Lisa - ----------- sunday afternoon there was laughter in the air everybody had a kite and they were flying everywhere and all the trouble went away and it wasn't just a dream all the trouble went away and it wasn't just a dream ~Patty Griffin, "Kite" ------------------------------ End of precious-things-digest V10 #37 *************************************