It has been twenty years since Tori Amos released her breakthrough album
Little Earthquakes, becoming known as the fiery redhead at the piano. To mark the occasion, she produced
Gold Dust, a collaboration with the Metropole Orchestra of fourteen songs spanning her career with orchestral arrangements. The orchestra is conducted by Jules Buckley and Tori's long-time collaborator John Philip Shenale gave the songs new string arrangements.
The arrangement improves upon opening track "Flavor" with a richer sound than the original. The arrangement of "Precious Things" misses the mark, however. One of Tori's best loved songs, "Cloud On My Tongue," gets wonderful treatment with the orchestra and is very moving. It is the highlight of the album for me. I'm glad "Marianne" is included, as it is one of my all-time favorites. "Silent All These Years" is a natural choice for the album. "Jackie's Strength" is the only song representing
From The Choirgirl Hotel--unfortunately, as I can't stand that song! "Programmable Soda" (from
American Doll Posse) is a curious addition, as it is a bit of a throwaway, brief song. "Yes, Anastasia" lacks the lengthy piano introduction of the original. B-sides are represented with "Flying Dutchman" and "Snow Cherries From France."
Of the process of choosing which songs to include, Tori
says in an interview with
Rolling Stone, "I thought, 'We have to retain the essence of who these song-girls are.' But yet, we have to also think about how to create a narrative where they can live together. A lot of this was about picking songs that had different subject matter but could live in the world and feel as though they're a complete album." Of the title track (a solid choice, from
Scarlet's Walk), she explains, "I felt I needed something that could work as an album title and a flagship song that would explain what the work is, to hold all the other ones and to treat this like a memory box."
This release allows me to reflect on all of Tori's output, which is staggering in volume.
Says Tori in
The Observer, "Making thirteen albums in the past twenty years requires a particular discipline. There's a time to take a holiday and a time to take a pilgrimage and write."
I started listening to Tori's music when I was thirteen, around the time of the release of
Boys for Pele. Of course at that age there was a lot that Tori was singing about that was over my head but I knew I liked her music. I was somewhat baffled by
Pele for awhile; until the release of my all-time favorite Tori album--
From the Choirgirl Hotel--when I was sixteen, I listened the most to
Under the Pink.
Tori is very aware of the independent lives of her songs; it's like Jeff Tweedy sings in Wilco's "What Light": "If the whole world's singing your songs/And all your paintings have been hung/Just remember what was yours is everyone's from now on."
From the Choirgirl Hotel helped me through one of the most difficult years of my life, and I am grateful to Tori for that. As songs do, certain ones transport me back to a particular time and place, a particular frame of mind.
Songs can also take on new significance as time passes, which Tori acknowledges with
Gold Dust, describing it as "a collection of new recordings of where [the songs] are now and who they have become." She has long held Meet and Greets before her performances as her schedule allows, and listens to her fans' stories of how her songs have affected them. She has spoken about how this dialogue is important to her and how she knows people come to her shows because of their own relationships with the songs. She even speaks about her songs as though they were living, breathing beings. Repeatedly described as kooky as she rose to popularity in the '90s, she is a true artist who trusts in her muses (whom she thanks in the liner notes of
Gold Dust).
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| Tori & me at a Meet and Greet in Buffalo, NY, Oct. 2007 |
After 2001's
Strange Little Girls, an album of covers, I took a break from following her for awhile, eventually picking up
Scarlet's Walk and her compilation album
Tales of a Librarian and delving back in.
Rolling Stone ranked Tori in the top five best live performers of all time, and I have had the pleasure of seeing her in concert eight times so far--in 1998 (I am so glad to have caught a date on the Plugged tour!), 2005, and then twice each of the following tours: 2007, 2009, and 2011.
I have not rated any of Tori's albums fewer than three stars (even
Strange Little Girls,
The Beekeeper, and
American Doll Posse). Every release has at least a few gems. Many Tori fans would agree that output post-
To Venus and Back or post-
Scarlet's Walk doesn't usually measure up to her earlier work, but she continues to be incredibly creative.
Night of Hunters, in particular, was impressive. Tori has not ceased to be innovative.
Gold Dust rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
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Multiple generations of the Middlestein family populate Attenberg's
novel. Matriarch Edie's overeating threatens her life and creates a rift
between her and the rest of the family--particularly her husband of thirty
years, Richard, who has given up on her and moved out. Their daughter Robin
grapples with her feelings of resentment for her father and how to help save her
mother from eating herself to death. Robin's laid-back brother Benny is married
to high-strung, health-conscious Rachelle, who is planning their twin children's
extravagant b'nai mitzvah party while also worrying about Edie..jpg)
This is a new adult fiction book from a favorite author of mine who writes primarily young adult novels (I discovered her when I was a teenager). Most of her writing can be considered magical realism. She deftly incorporates mythological and mysterious elements into her stories. She also excels at sensory description.
I've read several books on introversion, and this is the best yet, fascinating and useful. In a society that idealizes and pushes extroversion ("the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight"), at least a third of the population are introverts. Cain lauds their hidden strengths. "Our reverence for alpha status blinds us to things that are good and smart and wise," she says.
Ellen Forney is a talented graphic memoirist (graphic memoirs being an intriguing genre that I dip into occasionally). This book is about Forney's experience with bipolar disorder. She chronicles what it is like for her to be manic and to be depressed, her diagnosis shortly before she turned thirty, the setbacks she faces, and tinkering with different medications. 
In this darkly comic debut novel that I read with the howling wind of Hurricane Sandy outside my window, Eli Schwartz is basically a deadbeat, a couple of years removed from high school, jobless, pudgy, often stoned and clad in a bathrobe. "People told me I was funny in high school," he says. "It was good for awhile, the attention, until I understood what it meant. It meant I wasn't other things: sexy, interesting, smart, ambitious. It meant I was going to have trouble getting laid. It might have even meant I was fat." 
It has been twenty years since Tori Amos released her breakthrough album Little Earthquakes, becoming known as the fiery redhead at the piano. To mark the occasion, she produced Gold Dust, a collaboration with the Metropole Orchestra of fourteen songs spanning her career with orchestral arrangements. The orchestra is conducted by Jules Buckley and Tori's long-time collaborator John Philip Shenale gave the songs new string arrangements.
Of the process of choosing which songs to include, Tori says in an interview with Rolling Stone, "I thought, 'We have to retain the essence of who these song-girls are.' But yet, we have to also think about how to create a narrative where they can live together. A lot of this was about picking songs that had different subject matter but could live in the world and feel as though they're a complete album." Of the title track (a solid choice, from Scarlet's Walk), she explains, "I felt I needed something that could work as an album title and a flagship song that would explain what the work is, to hold all the other ones and to treat this like a memory box."
Tori is very aware of the independent lives of her songs; it's like Jeff Tweedy sings in Wilco's "What Light": "If the whole world's singing your songs/And all your paintings have been hung/Just remember what was yours is everyone's from now on." From the Choirgirl Hotel helped me through one of the most difficult years of my life, and I am grateful to Tori for that. As songs do, certain ones transport me back to a particular time and place, a particular frame of mind. 
