I Saw Tori Amos in Concert
She was wonderful, but I had a somewhat mixed experience.
Concert plusses:
- Tori has still "got it," both in terms of musical virtuosity and stage presence. She plays and sings amazingly well, and can really work a crowd.
- She moved me to tears more than once, and I cried my eyes out when she played Crucify.
- At one point she was playing a different keyboard with each hand (on either side of her), and she turned to face the audience while she played. It was weirdly athletic and intense, and there was something powerful (almost erotic?) about the scene.
- She played a cover of Kate Bush's Running Up that Hill as an encore which was a fun surprise.
- I got to see the show with good friends, outdoors on a fine summer evening, with chips and a soda over crushed ice, all of which were very gratifying.
Concert minuses:
- She did not play the hits (and very few old songs in general). Specifically, she played Crucify and Cornflake Girl, but no other singles off of the first four albums, which was a huge bummer. I was desperately hoping to hear Silent All These Years, or Precious Things, or Pretty Good Year, or Caught a Lite Sneeze, or Talula, or Raspberry Swirl, or or or or.
- When she did play old songs they were unusual arrangements or involved a lot of weird melismatic improvisations, and so were a little hard to follow. For example, she played a kind of bizarre and not-so-fun version of Hey Jupiter, but sometimes she played it up in a kind of intentionally hilarious way (i.e. it was delightful hearing her over-enunciate and hiss her way through the phrase "club sandwich" in Waitress).
- She's getting older and has had a lot of cosmetic surgery/work done, which, to be clear, is not itself a minus (or really any of my business). She just looked really different than she used to, and it made me a little sad for some reason? I think it's maybe that she used to write lyrics standing up for herself over her physical features like her "funny lip shape," but has since had those same lips "fixed," and from the outside it feels like maybe the world finally ground her down too? But that's a super uncharitable take, and she's probably perfectly happy with her new lips, or if she's unhappy with them its none of my business, and I should shut up about other peoples' faces.
- Relatedly, I am also no longer young, and no longer know most of the people that I knew or loved when I first loved Tori Amos's music, and my heart is swollen with loss and the accumulated weight of unchosen opportunities, and those people and that Tori Amos and that me and that time and that place have vanished into smoke (along with many other fine summer evenings) and are gone forever, and will never, ever, ever return.
To summarize my concert experience:
- Tori Amos is an amazing performer who may or may not play the songs you would like to hear.
- Time is a wolf that devours all.