The April 2005 issue of Spin Magazine in the U.S. includes an interview with Tori and a review of The Beekeeper. They only give the album a grade of C, but the interview is worth reading.

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Thanks to Andrea Watson and Tracy for telling me about this article and review. You can read both below!

Tori Interview

Larger Earthquakes

On a new album and in a new book, Tori Amos reacts to the tragedies and triumphs that recently rocked her world
by Laura Sinagra

For Tori Amos, the piano-pumping songstress who named her daughter Lothlorien after one of Tolkien's elf kingdoms, gone are the days of provocative pig suckling and throwing bad boys into volcanoes. In February she released her relatively demure eighth album, The Beekeeper , as well as her mystical guide to the artistic process, Piece by Piece (written with rock critic Ann Powers). Calling from her castle in England, Amos talked about surviving a less than pretty good year and getting even more in touch with her feminine side.

Spin: You're sending wildflower seeds with some of the copies of The Beekeeper .

Well, we're all trying to figure out what our relationship to the earth is, whether you were affected by hurricanes in Florida or the tsunami. When I started this (album), there were physical storms happening, as well as emotional storms for me. The idea for Beekeeper came after listening to politicians talk about the Bible and thinking about something so old being very current because people are still arguing about it. As a minister's daughter, I felt it was time that I go into the teachings that I was brought up with and maybe turn them around a bit.

Spin: Have you outgrown the characterization of "angry young woman"?

I certainly still get angry, but I don't walk around being angry because I'm under somebody else's control. It's like in "The Power of Orange Knickers" (from The Beekeeper ): "Who is this terrorist?" It's very easy to point your finger at the guy with the turban. Or if you're the guy with the turban, it's easy to point your finger at the guy with the Army uniform. But sometimes it's harder to point the finger at someone in your own family or your boyfriend or your friends.

Spin: Are you one of the "woman who have walked the dark walk" that you describe in your book?

Yes, I'm one of those women who walked it! And yet, being only 41, I don't know what's ahead. I lost a brother this year, and it has been difficult. It was such a shock because he died in an automobile accident. I don't think that there is an acceptance yet. I put some of it in the music, and that's how I'm always able to work through emotions.

Review of The Beekeeper

Tori Amos: The Beekeeper
Review by: Caryn Ganz
Grade: C

In 1994, the bummed,skatepunk mall-rat of Green Day's Dookie and the ethereal anti-Cornflake Girl of Tori Amos' Under The Pink entered the pop mainstream. A decade later, Green Day are still fighting that kids' battle, railing against the authority figures that keep them down. But Amos, once one of rock's great universalizing storytellers, has chosen to lead her fans down the path of her owm epic narcissism. The post 9/11 treatise Scarlet's Walk was a personalized journey across America, but The Beekeeper provides only rough coordinates for a journey through Amos' increasingly unreadable psyche-a trip only the most devoted Amosian scholar would dare navigate,even with a guidebook as obsessively detailed as her recent bio, Piece by Piece.

While Amos has yet to run out of tales about strange girls, none of these 19 tracks comes close to capturing the clarity of Pink's "God" or the deep creepiness of her Eminem cover "97 Bonnie & Clyde". She continues to invoke imagery that's beautiful {"flaxen hair blowing in the breeze / It is time for the geese to head south"} and baffling {"how was I to know/ The pirates have come/ Between Rebecca's/ Beneath your firmaments"}. But her musical palette-from the gentle adult contemporary shuffle of "Sweet the Sting" to the lame boogie-woogie of "Hoochie Woman"-is paradoxically flat. Brief vocal contributions from The London Community Gospel Choir and Irish singer/songwriter Damien Rice let some air into the sonic vacuum, but only a few songs {the swirling "Sleeps with Butterflies" and the gorgeously lilting"Parasol"} flirt with her previous brilliance.

Green Day's unambiguous American Idol featured a "Jesus of Suburbia," and in her baroque way Amos offers us the "Barons of Suburbia." It's unclear whether they stole her faith in government or her inner flame. Perhaps they made off with her songwriting mojo, too.