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August/September 2001

Updated August 12, 2001

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Jerilyn Klingerg, Jennifer Bell and Lisa Jennings were the first to tell me that Tori is featured in the August/September 2001 issue of Blender Magazine in the U.S. (with Gwen Stefani on the cover.) The title of the mag actually LOOKS like it's "Maxim Blender" or something like that because it's really "Maxim presents Blender". The have a review of "Strange Little Girls" by J.D. Considine , which was the very first SLG review to appear publicly. They also have a really nice article on Tori with the title "In the piano room with Tori Amos". The article includes a 2 page photo shoot of Tori in her home recording studio. (This is the first series of photos we have seen this year of Tori not in charater for SLG!) Peter (Burning Ocean) scanned the photos and Tammy kindly sent me the article, and you can find all of it below.


Blender PhotoBlender PhotoBlender Photo
Click on any photo to see it larger.

Here is the "Strange Little Girls" album review that appeared in Blender Magazine. Thanks to Peter (Burning Ocean) foe sending this to us! It was written by J.D. Considine :

    TORI AMOS
    STRANGE LITTLE GIRLS ***** (4 stars out of 5)
    Atlantic

    Eccentric but insightful cover tunes

    Ever since her moody piano rendition of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" turned up on 1992's Crucify EP, singer-songwriter Amos has won audience approval for her habit of reinventing other people's songs live. But Strange Little Girls takes the whole business to another level entirely. Working both on her own and with her band, she tunes a dozen famous tunes into sly gender critiques. Eminem's "97 Bonnie & Clyde" is delivered in a whisper so softit makes the lyrics' violence scream, while Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" is given a punky, "Now I Wanna Be Your Dog" arrangement that neatly skewers the song's folky sanctimony. Girls isn't as pop-friendly as 1998's From the Choirgirl Hotel, but Amos' take on Depeche Mode's starkly beautiful "Enjoy the Silence" is irresistible.


The Tori article that appeared with the photos above consists of 9 boxes with info pointing to certain items in her studio:

In the piano room with Tori Amos
Hey, it's all, like, ginger in here. What's up with that?

Eight hours from London by windy country roads sits Cornwall, the remotest county in England. It's here that flame-haired songstress Tori Amos has made her home, in a 300-year-old farmhouse with her husband, Mark Hawley, and their daughter, Natashya. And it's also here that Amos has built a cozy recording studio consisting of one small room full of faders and mixers, and one large room full of keyboards. This "piano room" is where Amos has just recorded her 6th album, a haunting all-covers affair titled Strange Little Girls. The 12 songs were originally written by men_ the Beatles, Eminem and Neil Young among them-but Amos has reworked and reoccupied them from the female subject's point of view. For Amos, such conceptual daring comes easier far from the madding crowd. "I like being away from the record company," she says breezily. "for me to really create, I have to be away from people who are chasin' it"

DAVID QUANTICK

In the boxes:

WATER

(line pointing to a bottle of water)
Water figures somewhat terrifyingly on the new album, which offers a version of Eminem's "97' Bonnie and Clyde," told from the vantage point of a mother who is murdered and then dumped in the ocean. " I was attracted to the wife, who was faceless and nameless. Everyone's grooving to this tune, and nobody seemed to care about her," Amos says.

TORI'S MIND (line pointing to the reflection of her on the piano )
Normally, songs come from inside her head, but Strange Little Girls offers just the interpretations. " I was nursing Tash in Florida, and I was hearing a lot of male artists on alternative radio. And some of them really hated women," Amos says. " I thought about my daughter and what these guys were thinking about women. I wanted to build some kind of bridge, and I figured that was the only way to get into the heads of these men.

SOUNDPROOFING (pointing to some square waffles on the wall)
"Those are the icicles," Amos says of the small ziggurats that soundproof the studio. The Sound proofing enables Amos and Mark to work in contemplative silence. It also keeps out the noise of the neighbors cattle. They are, witnesses report, the loudest cows in the world.

HARPSICHORD(...to her harpsichord)
" I like to be away from where the latest whatever is," Amos say, and you can't get less state of the art than a harpsichord. It's not easy, though. "You need to have a harpsichord technician. The guy who does the piano does that. He goes on the road and takes it apart every day." The harp tech will be delighted to learn that Amos "was thinking about doing Iggy Pop's 'I'm Sick of You' on the harpsichord!"

ANTIQUE COUCH
A beautiful rococo thing for relaxing between takes. " I lost my shirt on this," Amos says sadly. "They told me it was 19th-century, from Russia. "It is 19th-century, but....."

GUITARS
Amos doesn't use a lot of guitars, but when she does, she makes them count. On this album, she makes Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" rock like the Stooges in a burning roller coaster. These guitars, however, are resting.

BOOM MICROPHONE
Operated by Marcel, the nudist engineer-"he has a penchant for taking pictures of himself naked," sighs Amos-and used for recording the rich acoustic sound of the grand piano, as well as the equally rich acoustic sound of Amos's voice.

THE GRAND PIANO
Amos's main instrument is a huge Bose grand piano. "How big do you think this piano is?" she roars. "Inches? C'mon! Give me inches!" 60, we guess. " A hundred and nine!" she bellows.

THE FENDER RHODES
A classic jazz instrument that, in Amos's hands, make strange new music. "The Rhodes is what we did 'Rattlesnakes" and "I don't Like Mondays' on, beams Amos, referring to the Lloyd Cole and the Commotions track and the venerable Boomtown Rats single, both on Strange Little Girls.

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Please give me feedback, comments, or suggestions about A Dent In The Tori Amos Net Universe. Email me (Mikewhy) at mikewhy@iglou.com