Ice Magazine
September 2001
Updated September 26, 2001
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Ice Magazine
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The September 2001 (#174) issue of ICE Magazine has Tori on the cover and includes a full-length interview with her. This feature story is on pages 6-7, and has the title, "Tori Amos Covers All the Bases: New Album Features Dramatic Reinterpretations". You can see the cover to the this issue of ICE below, which was kindly scanned by Mike from Seattle. It shows Tori's "I Don't Like Mondays" character. The article also includes small color photos of Tori's Real Men, New Age, and Enjoy The Silence characters. Nick Raafe was the first to give me details about this issue, and thanks to the very kind KJnomadic, you can read the text of the article below. Be sure to check out the ICE web site. They include a page about Tori with part of the article.  TORI AMOS COVERS ALL THE BASES ....PERHAPS THE MOST ENDURING female singer/songwriter of the 90's, Tori Amos
has racked up a smattering of Grammy nominations, platinum-selling albums and
public praise since her start as a solo musician in 1991. The artist takes on
a new challenge September 18 - attempting her sixth straight million-selling
album - with Strange Little Girls (Atlantic.) By strict definition a covers
album , Amos reinterprets tunes written by male songsmiths ranging from John
Lennon to Eminem, and performs the tracks from a female perspective. The
result is a dozen-song assortment of radically revamped essentials, many of
which are barely recognizable from their original form.
While cover songs have always been a part of Amos's repertoire - from
her early rendering of Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You" to distinct takes on
Led Zeppelin's "Thank You" and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" - the
pianist's latest undertaking is a different affair altogether. For the most
part, Amos preserves the original lyrics of the songs at hand. But her sharp
vocal and instrumental divergences usually present the numbers in an entirely
new light - sometimes leaving the listener to ponder, "When is a cover
version not a cover version?"
The full song index, in order, with the original artists in parentheses:
"New Age" (The Velvet Underground), ""97' Bonnie and Clyde (Eminem), "Strange
Little Girls" (The Stranglers), "Enjoy the Silence" (Depeche Mode), "I'm Not
in Love" (10cc), " "Rattlesnakes" (Lloyd Cole and The Commotions), "Time"
(Tom Waits), "Heart of Gold" (Neil Young), "I Don't Like Mondays" (The
Boomtown Rats), "Happiness is a Warm Gun" (The Beatles), "Raining Blood"
(Slayer), and "real Men" (Joe Jackson).
Speaking via telephone from a beach house in England, Amos tells ICE,
"One of the real premises for the record was how men say things and what
women hear. To do that, I had to first be clear on what a man says." Amos
set a second parameter for her selections: "Also, they had to reflect our
time. There had to be some kind of resonance." Amos's updates of "Happiness
is a Warm Gun" and "I Don't Like Mondays," for example, revive the
contemporary gun-control argument, and became clear candidates for this album
following the shooting at Santana High School in San Diego this past March.
Amos called together a small crew of fellow musicians for the release,
which she refers to as her "laboratory of men" - drummer and co-producer Matt
Chamberlain, King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew and bassists Justin
Meldal-Johnsen and John Evans. Starting February 1, the assemblage holed up
in Amos's own Martian Studios in Cornwall, England, and completed the
endeavor in mid-July. The entire album was tracked live.
On the first cut, Amos aligns herself with the subject - a nude woman
wearing only a necklace and mulling over the future. "In New Age," she says,
"the character is really engulfed in this passion. And I think she's really
worried about what the new age is going to be, and she's determined not to
sit on the sidelines anymore as it develops. There's this igniting of
passion on the whole record."
She continues, "I wanted to have this balmy, undulating rhythm going
on... sort of stripped. And that's where the passion was coming from." Amos
actually used an early and subsequently altered version of the song's lyrics,
which she heard on a Velvet Underground bootleg from the late 60's.
On her rendition of Eminem's controversial "97' Bonnie and Clyde" -
which depicts the narrator's brutal murder of his own wife - Amos assumes the
role of the victim. As she notes, "To me it's the myth about domestic
violence, that a woman dies and a man is telling their little girl all sorts
of stuff. The woman, as she's dying, understands that her daughter will grow
up and become a strange little girl and divided forever."" To reenact the
song'' setting, Amos'' crew built a small box inside of which she recorded
the vocals - a reconstruction of the car's trunk that casts a new, eerie
shadow over the song.
"Happiness is a Warm Gun," the first track established for the release,
is also recreated in an innovative fashion. The cut opens with a re-reading
of a newspaper article written after John Lennon's assassination, which Amos
links to the original song's creation. "[Lennon] saw an ad for a gun," she
says, "and he was murdered by a gun years later. It started to strike me
that this was going to be a canvas, a backdrop for the fact that no changes
have really been made [in gun control] that are effective."
Other vocal samplings are included on the elongated track, which pushes
the 10-minute mark. Amos's own father, Dr. Edison M. Amos, speaks on the
right to bear arms, as does former President George Bush and his son George
W. "I figured if I was doing a Bush father and son, I needed to do an Amos
father and daughter," she remarks.
The following track, "I Don't Like Mondays," is a companion song to its
predecessor. This number also deals with gun-control issues and was
originally based off an infamous San Diego shooting in 1979. Amos says the
song "was sung from the point of view of the cop who went to the school that
day, because I couldn't hold the essence of the person who went and killed
everybody. I had to be able to hold something in a structure of women, or I
couldn't be in the chair for them." Amos says that she wanted to give the
song a "childlike effect... I didn't believe that this [convicted felon] was
a 'bad seed.' So I wanted to create it in this sort of shattered playground
world."
In regards to Tom Wait's "Time": "I thought about taking this to the
organ, but I stripped it back... It's from the point of view of Death, so I
felt like you need to feel like you are sitting on the piano stool. No
masks, no effects, it's right here, dry, with a little compression on the
vocals."
The tenor of Lloyd Cole's "Rattlesnakes" is wholly different; Amos
strove for a desert feel and used a "Rhodes delay back and forth to create
the tail of the rattlesnake." She tracked the song alone and calls it her
personal favorite, but refuses to name a few anonymous pals who added extra
overdubs to the cut.
As for 10cc's "I'm Not in Love," Amos says that she wanted it "to be almost
like an ancient Japanese dance, like a ritual dance. So I stripped the
keyboards off, and it became all about the vocal." Adrian Belew furthered
the experimentation by using a drill along with his guitar.
Amos opted for "Heart of Gold" as her Neil Young interpretation, even
though she personally favors other songs like "The Needle and the Damage
Done" and "Cinnamon Girl." She chose "Heart of Gold" specifically because
her view of the song differs greatly from the vision many men have relayed to
her. Some males have told Amos that they see the subject, an understanding
wife, as someone who can be cheated on without remorse; Amos presents the
subject as an ideal partner, one not to be mistreated. "It's probably very
difficult right now to find a heart of gold," she says.
The packaging and marketing campaign for Strange Little Girls features
a dozen strikingly different photographs of Amos; in some cases, she's barely
recognizable. With renowned photographer Thomas Schenk, Amos dressed up as
the characters she allies herself with and shot a corresponding image for
each one. Vicky Germaise, Senior VP of Marketing at Atlantic, tells ICE,
"She actually was so inspired that each of the 12 songs has a different girl
representing it, and they're wildly different characters." Four of these
images will act as alternate covers for the new CD: "Time," "Strange Little
Girls", "raining Blood", and "Happiness is a Warm Gun." (The photograph on
ICE's cover represents "I Don't Like Mondays.")
[The article includes the photos for "New Age", "Real Men", and "Enjoy the
Silence."]
Amos will appear on "The Late Show with David Letterman" on September
17, and perform solo across the U.S. from September 28 through November 21.
Amos does not say for certain whether or not the new material will be
included in her live sets, although she does promise, "Every night will be
different. I'm working off 10 years of records." |
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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 |
