About two and a half weeks before the release of From the Choirgirl Hotel, Amos embarked on her first tour with a band: the Plugged ’98 tour. The band consisted of guitarist Steve Caton and drummer Matt Chamberlain, who had both performed on From the Choirgirl Hotel, alongside new bassist Jon Evans — an absolutely top shelf player who still plays with her today. The tour lasted until the end of 1998, at which point she returned to the studio with said band to work on a new release.
After her previous record, Amos’s relationship with Atlantic records had begun to sour. She still had three albums left on her contract, but she felt they had stopped promoting her work. They also refused to let her move to another label, so she felt stuck. She planned to withhold new material until she could fulfill her contract and find a new label, so she set out to make a b-sides record and her first proper live record, documenting the Plugged ’98 tour. However, inspiration struck, and she ended up being unable to resist recording new material for Atlantic.
She told Best in 1999: ‘At the start, the idea was one cd live and one cd of rare and unreleased tracks. In the end, it’s a new album that goes with the live. Artistically, this began to make sense because the live disc is a collection of songs throughout the years. These are the best performances of the last tour. There are bootlegs circulating, but they don’t give a faithful image of my music. Then I wanted to add B-sides, for all those who had troubles trying to find rare tracks, but new songs came. I added them and the engineers told me: ‘These songs have a particular sound; if you mix them with b-sides, it’s like mixing characters from two different movies.’ It was quite hazardous.’
She expanded on this to the Dallas Observer: ‘In actuality, we were sitting there putting the live record together, thinking we were going to record maybe three songs with the band. They were all booked to fly in. Matt [Chamberlain] was coming in April 1. In February, we were [sorting through the songs] like an NBA playoff: 120 shows, a ranking system of one through four — one being the worst — finding what are our strongest performances, and playing them off against each other. At the time, I was writing stuff, thinking I was gonna pick three songs [to put on the album], and having the B-sides sent in from all reaches of the land. And we were going to remix everything, because it needed a bit of a tart-up, especially the B-sides. Some of them were done very quickly, and not with the best care.
‘As I played these new songs to my producers, what they said to me was, theoretically speaking, this will sound like a random hodgepodge of bits and pieces, because sonically, the new work lives in a world by itself. I just looked at them and said, ‘N-n-n-no. What are you guys saying?’ And they said, ‘This is a record unto itself, and you really can’t break it up. It doesn’t work geometrically.’ I called up Matt and said, ‘You’re not recording three. See ya tomorrow.’ And he goes, ‘Let’s go!” [laughs] So all the guys came in, and we made a new record. I didn’t have lyrics to a second verse, and we were cutting it, and they were all there, tuned up and ready to go. I’m tearing my hair out, and books on the floor. I don’t know how it all happened, but it came together, and it wanted to be what it was. So there it is.’
She managed to get the double album To Venus and Back out just 9 months after the end of the Plugged ’98 tour. She told Wall of Sound about the speed of the process: ‘This is the fastest one we’ve ever done. Sometimes it just takes you longer to do something; you can’t hear it or see it, and you’re kind of half-present. But we were very tweaked, and we were very present, and this record was demanding us to be very present. She was so seductive none of us could sleep — none of us wanted to. It was like some Dyonisian frenzy. We didn’t want to stop. It was a fierce calm.’ She told VH1: ‘When the title was in place, the songs just seemed to storm through the door and say, ‘sit down.’ It was an onslaught. A few of them came at the same time.’
Her fifth studio album occupies the first disc, Venus: Orbiting. It was her shortest and tightest album of the ‘90s, clocking in at just under 48min. Venus Live: Still Orbiting nearly fills up the entire second disc with material from the Plugged ’98 tour. Put the two discs together, and there’s over two hours of material, making it difficult to accuse this project of being a mere contractual obligation. It may have started that way, but it quickly grew beyond that. It further explores both the electronic and live band-oriented directions of From the Choirgirl Hotel — but while that album alternated between the two styles song-by-song, To Venus and Back is a bit more segregated. The studio side mostly focuses on more electronic material, while the live album showcases the band.
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Venus: Orbiting
Amos told USA Today about the genesis of the title: ‘My friend Natalie looked at me at one point and said, ‘You know you would go to Venus, or that you’ve been there.’ If you’re gonna approach the Venus realm, seduction lives there, obsession lives there, trustworthy lust lives there, decadence lives there, control lives there.’ This was reflected in the studio album’s themes: ‘What I didn’t get before I got married is that marriage can come with trust, and lust can come out of trust. Of course that affects the new record, because I see passion differently.’ However, this isn’t an album about marriage: ‘After the Plugged tour… I didn’t need to be someone’s daughter, wife, or mother… The record is just about being a woman and waking up every day.’ She told Dallas Obeserver: ‘Kind of right now, the way that I see the new album is like there’s this satellite orbiting around Venus’ heart, and that these songs, for me, were just different fragments that were being filmed. Little short films.’
She described the sonics of the studio material to CNN as ‘a bit more galactic’. Indeed, it is suitably her spaciest record — her most thorough exploration of electronica and trip-hop to date — but with an unusual twist. Andy Gray of dance duo Amoeba Assassin returned from From the Choirgirl Hotel to contribute some drum programming to three songs, but his role is surprisingly reduced here. Most of the record uses heavily processed live drums instead of a drum machine, often placing different drum and percussion parts in the left, right, and center channels. The bass playing is also live, but often processed with numerous pedal effects. The live rhythm section gives the record a looseness that many electronic albums lack. Amos’s piano is still prominent, but the parts are often simpler to leave more room in the arrangements. She leans more heavily on the synthesizer this time around. Thankfully, only a few of the synth sounds feel particularly dated.
Despite the speed of the process, the engineering job is the best I’ve heard from Hawley and van Limbeek. She told VH1: ‘A lot of things were designed — effects were designed — by hand. We were playing with eq’s and compression, using compression as an instrument, taking it to new levels for me. It was not just about any cheesy programs. That wasn’t acceptable. If we were using a program, it had to be right for the character.’ The production here is filled with loads of ear-catching details and textures. The aesthetic and vibe are very focused, despite the songs once again being quite stylistically diverse — it’s clean, shiny, a bit chilly and monochromatic. It’s a truly amazing sounding record that benefits from a headphones listen.
Let’s get something out of the way — there’s not a single song here that can match the best moments of her first four records on the songwriting front. This has led some to accuse the album of being a mere collection of From the Choirgirl Hotel b-sides. However, To Venus and Back is really a sound design piece, focused on textural depth and mood. It no longer feels as if the vocals and lyrics are meant to be the main event, as the vocals are placed further back in the mix and are often drenched in effects.
Watching live performances of these songs from 1999 make it clear that the production is a double-edged sword. Hearing some of this material without all the processing and with really upfront vocals makes it hit in a whole different way, with her usual level of emotion. The album takes are colder — even verging on sterile at times — but this allows the album to feel like new territory. Her previous work was so intimate that it’s interesting to hear her put up a wall and create some distance with the production. And that’s true of the subject matter, as well — while she still tackles some heavy stuff here, it doesn’t feel quite as personal as her earlier work most of the time. Even when she explores personal themes here, it’s done in a more distanced way. It’s a transitional record in that regard — her 2000s work is largely much more externalized than her ’90s music, and you can hear the songwriting heading in that direction here.
The lyrics often dictate the sound design choices. The production is used as text painting throughout, which is something you don’t often hear on a pop record. ‘Josephine’ is the perfect example of this. It’s the one almost entirely acoustic song here (sans a bit of electric guitar playing from Caton), but it still received a creative production treatment. The lyrics are a fictional letter from Napoleon to his ex-wife, sent from the front. The drums and upright bass are hard-panned to the right, while the piano and guitar are hard-panned to the left. This seems to illustrate the distance between the two former lovers — the drums play a military march, placing Napoleon on the right side, while Josephine resides with the more tender piano on the left. The lyrics are a letter which bridges the gap between them, and thus the vocals are placed in the center.
‘Josephine’ is the shortest song here, but it’s not an outlier in its brevity. The songs here are mostly very short and tight, with less ideas and far less dynamics than her previous record. More than half of the songs are under four minutes (by contrast, only two songs on Choirgirl were under four minutes, and just barely). The rest are under the five minute mark, with one exception — the album’s 8.5min climax, ‘Dātura’, which is the most experimental track in her catalog thus far. It’s not exactly a song in the traditional sense, but it’s easily my favorite track here, really embodying everything that works about this record.
It’s divided into two very distinct halves, opening with a band segment which alternates between 13/8 and 14/8. Chamberlain deftly navigates the time signature changes with an intricate loose acoustic drum kit groove. Subtle synths sit behind a rolling piano part. She lists the names of plants which remained living in her greenhouse after a die-off while stutter-edited backing vocals repeatedly intone ‘Get out of my garden’. What follows seems to be a chorus, but it only appears once. Hard-panned double-tracked acoustic drums with processed drums down the center and distorted piano accompany the song’s most intense lyric: ‘Is there room in my heart for you to follow your heart and not need more blood from the tip of your star?’ The opening section then returns.
She somehow turns a list of plants into a commentary on relationships, division, and masculinity. She told Attitude: ‘I’m talking about the times when lines have been crossed by men. Men can be dangerous, like in the song “Datura” about how sometimes they can bring you gold and sometimes they can be the bearer of poison. The plant datura is a hallucinogen and it’s like men. If you get the right amount you’ll walk into the garden and become a woman, but if too much seeps in in the wrong way and at the wrong time — it’ll kill you.’
The mood suddenly becomes spooky in the second half — a wine glass synth plays a tritone while a distorted drum machine lightly taps away in the left channel. There’s mostly just one lyric in the second half — ‘Dividing Canaan’ — which gets insistently repeated for four minutes while the music gradually builds from sparse spookiness into something quite warm and beautiful, eventually exploding into a light-basked climax when the rhythm section enters. Chamberlain’s acoustic drums occupy the right channel, acting as a foil to the electronic drums in the left channel and once again creating a dichotomy to illustrate the division she is singing about. The division in the song’s structure also reflects this. Once again, the production engages in text painting.
‘Dātura’ is framed by two other excellent songs. ‘Riot Poof’ is one of the album’s most energetic tracks. It’s got some of the most detailed production on the album, filled with distinctly 90s fifth-harmonized synth sounds (which are dated in a way I absolutely love). The chorus is quite appealing, but it only appears twice, leaving you wanting more. She told Pulse: ‘“Riot Poof” is for all the jocks out there who need to deal with their secret sexuality.’ She expanded on that to Attitude: ‘It’s like I’m the tooth fairy, the homo fairy and this is my present to all the homophobes. I’m leaving it under all their pillows…’
Or, from an All Music zine: ‘Sometimes it really is a sexual riot, a frenzy. It’s a real male frenzy, that whole song. But the idea of the unbelievable judgment that men have against men who desire to be with other men… But women wanting to be with women is quite yummy to anybody. If you think about it, the idea of men who love watching women being together, there’s an erotica. That’s “on the birth of the search/white trash, my native son.” I’m singing “Riot Poof” from the concept of the mother, the all-inclusive mother, having borne men who want to be with men, having borne men who want to “break the terror of the urban spell,” who want to kill men who want to be with other men. Because Venus, that’s the mother mode. She’s singing it from her point of view: “The sun is warming, my man is moistening.”’
‘Spring Haze’ follows ‘Dātura’ with lyrics that portray staring down a sense of impending doom with steely resignation: ‘Well, I know it’s just a spring haze, but I don’t much like the look of it / And all we do is circle it / And I found out where my edge is / And it bleeds into where you resist / And my only way way out is to go so far in’. The verses feature the album’s only moment of unaccompanied piano and voice, bringing us back to familiar territory. Those verses are contrasted with full band sections that feature rolling triple-meter drum grooves and round bass tones. It’s a deep cut, but to me it’s a clear album highlight.
I’ve only discussed songs from the album’s back half thus far, but the first half of the record is unfortunately not as strong — though it starts on a strong note. The opening track, ‘Bliss’, is the best of the singles — the dark and moody verses feel Nine Inch Nails inspired, and the clattering and exuberant major key chorus makes for a strong contrast. It’s a brief song with a quick bridge, making it feel like more of a proper single than anything on her previous record, where the songs tended to be more of a journey.
The lyrics further explore the self-censorship that comes from a religious upbringing, as she told Alternative Press: ‘Sometimes, when you express thoughts to people, you leave it open for somebody to tromp in there and start tearing it down. I sing, “Father, I killed my monkey,” to lead off the song, which explains that sometimes you even destroy your own so they can’t excavate it. When I was growing up, I started becoming very secretive about my thoughts and the sensory world I would go to, because there’s a lot of mind control that goes on constantly, people wanting access: “What are you thinking?” So, sometimes I’d have my own defense going, which would be to look them straight in the eye and make them think I’ve killed my imagination. But it’s like, I’ll take control.’
This is followed by ‘Juarez’, the album’s heaviest track. She told Alternative Press: ‘I read an article about several hundred women in Juarez, Mexico, who had been taken out to the desert and brutally raped and murdered. When they didn’t come home, their brothers would go and look for them, and many times they’d find nothing. Sometimes they’d find a hair barrette or a sock or something they knew was their sister’s. The authorities haven’t really done anything about it… they get into this serial killer theory. I mean, how much serial can one man indulge in?’ She tackled this subject a year before At the Drive-in took it on in ‘Invalid Litter Dept’.
Like ‘Dātura’, ‘Juarez’ isn’t exactly a song in the traditional sense — it’s more of a sound piece. It’s a repetitive track that mostly feels static, reflecting the numbing repetition of the disappearances and their lack of resolution. It’s suitably the most chaotic, layered, and intense song on the record, but that takes attention away from the vocals and subject matter, which feel buried. Then again, maybe ‘buried’ is exactly what she was trying to convey, as she told All Music: ‘We really wanted this suppressed track. You would hear the music that was coming out of the car of the guys who were gang-raping her. That’s what I wanted, and the chanting of the guys.’ This sense of distance is especially evident in the chorus, which is just three devastating words — ‘No angel came’.
She told Dallas Observer: ‘‘Juarez’ is probably the place where you’re severed from your heart. It’s based on the murders that have happened in Juarez, the 200–300 women that have been killed. When I was going through Texas on the last tour, one night I was sort of jolted out of my bunk. It was dark outside, and I opened the blinds. It became very clear to me that… I hadn’t written it yet. I was just starting to hear it in my head. I knew I had to take the point of view of the desert. It was made very clear by the voice that I needed to hear the last breath of the girl. I needed to hear the violator, the music that they were listening to. I crawled into this space and did a lot of research about that whole thing.’
‘That’s a place on the record where… I started the record with ‘Bliss’ because, instead of ‘Father, who art in heaven,’ it’s ‘Father, I killed my monkey.’ It’s very much about the control, whether or not it’s God the father. That kind of control — especially having done a lot of biblical study of women and their bodies — of the shame, of the division of the physical and the spiritual. You know what I mean? That kind of concept of, even when your father — your human father — says to you, ‘You can’t go out with that guy. I can’t imagine you with that guy.’ It’s like, ‘These are not your bits!’ Then you go into ‘Juarez,’ which is when you’re really severed from your heart, and you can do that to another person. And then the record moves into different places. But I knew as I was approaching this whole realm of Venus, it got very… as a writer, I got the shit kicked out of me in a sense, because I couldn’t just address the passionate side of things and the seduction side of things. It’s hard to go against your instincts.’
Two excellent songs at the center of the record explore that side of things — the passion was addressed in ‘Lust’, while ‘Suede’ tackled the seduction. Of course, these are not your typical songs on the subject. The vocals in ‘Lust’ are drenched in effects that make them nearly incomprehensible at times (you might even say that they’re extremely wet), forcing you to just let the textures wash over you. She described the song in her book Piece by Piece with Ann Powers: ‘Let’s talk about the Kundalini being activated. At the base of the spine, the idea of the snake is coiled. And that’s what a song like “Lust,” which I wrote after marrying Mark, was really tapping into. The idea of rolling and unrolling, coiling and merging — energy moving through the underworld to the real world. Under flesh into the heart, then taking it back to the real world.’
‘Suede’ is an album highlight — a dark, moody and, sultry track with undercurrents of suspected witchcraft. She told All Music: ‘“Suede” is the danger of… not always the physical fornication of anything. It’s the dangerous games that we play with mind control — the power of seduction, and how so many people put their hands up and say, “I didn’t do anything,” because they didn’t fornicate.’ Or, as she told Mojo: ‘With something like “Suede,” which is about seduction, I picture jets revving and I was walking round the studio with a physics encyclopedia. The guy character in the song thinks the girl character is really evil, yet he’s there to be seduced. Sometimes people act quick to see my evil twin, but they don’t detect their own.’
The three remaining singles are the weakest part of the record. Once again, the two weakest songs on the album are placed back-to-back, this time early on in the album. ‘Concertina’ is hampered by its arrangement — the rim click drums, dated synths, and clean guitars come together to give the song an adult contemporary sheen. Quite uncharacteristically for a song with such an arrangement, the lyrics are rather inscrutable. She told Alternative Press: ‘Do you ever feel like you walk in a room, and you don’t know why, but you’re just so uncomfortable you’re crawling out of your skin, even though nobody’s touched you, physically? That’s in “Concertina,” when you feel like you haven’t excavated enough of your different personalities that when one pops up, you’re not sure where it came from, and you try to hack it out of yourself. It shocks you that you could have this kind of fault, or that other people could bring it out in you.’
Then there’s ‘Glory of the 80s’, a nostalgic tribute to a best-forgotten decade: ‘I took a taxi from LA to Venus in 1985 / I was electromagnetically sucked back into a party going on that night / It was the glories of the ’80s with karma drawn up in lines / and two bugle boy models saying ‘baby, it’s a freebee you sure look deprived’.’ While the ’80s were clearly a dark time for her, she praised ‘the honesty of the decadence of that decade’ to Attitude: ‘It’s also a stab at political correctness — you can’t say this, you can’t say that; now everybody has to be called a Spanish American, an African American and I mean, oh bloody, fucking hell!!! I understand the abuses that have happened and I absolutely think recompense should be paid, but you don’t do it just on a surface level. Everybody thinks that the debt has been paid to the “quote unquote” Indians who had their land taken away from them because we call them Native Americans.
‘It’s hard when everything is so eggshell, eggshell, eggshell. I do miss the eighties. It was great, knowing that friends were on one hand dialing a charity and on the other hand doing a line of blow — and I found that very honest. There was a shadow aspect that people weren’t hiding as much.’ The song nonetheless sounds distinctly ’90s, but with a subtle harpsichord layer to introduce even more temporal ambiguity (she told All Music: ‘She’s part of the bed; I cut it live, with the piano. You might not notice it, but she’s there. I love that, because “Glory of the 80s” could be the 1780s’). Needless to say, it’s not one of her strongest songs and is probably the album’s worst cut, though it does have an enjoyable bass line from Evans.
The album’s closing song, ‘1000 Oceans’, is about loss and grief. It’s surprisingly on the nose for her, even a little corny, with lines like ‘These tears I’ve cried — I’ve cried 1000 oceans… and I would cry 1000 more if that’s what it takes to sail you home’, but there’s some real emotion being expressed if you can get past that. She told All Music: ‘I was woken up in the middle of the night at about 5:30 in the morning or something. And a woman’s voice was singing it to me. She was African, quite ancient. And I couldn’t understand any of the words, but she was humming the first couple phrases. So, I crawled out of bed and found my way to the piano and I put in on a little ghetto blaster so I wouldn’t forget it and in the next few weeks I started to shape it. It wasn’t about one event. It was clear to me that there was this endless determination that the song had to reach her love. And I don’t know if that was a child or a lover or a friend who the song couldn’t seem to be able to make contact with anymore.’
Hawley had just lost his father, and this song became her way of comforting him, as she told AOL: ‘[Mark and his father] were so incredibly close that “1000 Oceans” seemed to be the only thing that could bring him out of his sadness. He’d come out and sit and say, “Could you play that one, the ocean song?” It became about feeling close to people you can’t reach, seeing this depth of love for this person who was gone.’ She told Aloha: ‘I found it very difficult to help him. Sometimes, there’s just nothing to say. You can not just take away someone’s pain. To be the flame that warms the both of you, to be capable of loving someone that much [-] I think that is the reason that this record finally became the Venus record. It’s about all these aspects of the heart.’
It’s undeniable that this album is not quite as substantial or consistent as her first four records. Major life events played into each of the prior albums, so perhaps the absence of a major circumstance changed things — it feels as if she is finally becoming comfortable and content. Between that and the speed with which it was created, it’s not surprising that it feels more lightweight than her other ’90s output. It’s actually quite impressive that Amos and her team were able to sort through 120 shows, pick and mix the live performances, and make such a detailed studio record in less than 9 months. The result is unique — nothing else in her discography feels quite like this record, as she largely pivoted away from this sound after this album. Ultimately, I feel quite fond of the record — the standout tracks and layered sonics make it worth the ride. It doesn’t reduce me to tears like her prior work, but it’s quite mesmerizing at times.
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Venus Live, Still Orbiting
Amos’s fans often consider the Plugged ’98 tour to be one of her finest. Prior to that tour, her live performances tended to be much more stripped down than her studio recordings. The tours for her first two records had been entirely solo performances, only accompanied by the occasional backing track played over the PA during the Under the Pink tour. Guitarist Steve Caton joined her on the Dew Drop Inn tour (promoting Boys for Pele), but the performances remained highly intimate. Amos became known as an extremely intense and impassioned performer. The nakedness of the performances made that intensity spellbinding and inescapable.
Translating that intensity to a less intimate band performance was thus a difficult and risky task, but they succeeded with flying colors. All of the intensity she’d brought to her solo and duo performances was still present, but now she had a world-class rhythm section accompanying her. The band allowed her to finally bring some of the studio arrangements to the stage, while also allowing for many radical reinterpretations and new arrangements. The tour was thus widely bootlegged. An official document of the tour was merited, and so this live album was created.
Venus Live, Still Orbiting does a great job of showing off the band. Jon Evans plays some really fancy bass parts, Chamberlain’s grooves are rock solid, and Caton provides a lot of atmosphere. They often do interesting things with the songs, sometimes stretching them out and jamming on them, sometimes changing the arrangement entirely, and sometimes doing both at once. The track list here focuses most heavily on her first two records. ‘Precious Things’ opens the record, expanded into a near-7min jam with an atmospheric intro and extended final chorus. While her solo live performances of the song were often extremely intense, it benefits a lot from the presence of drums.
This is followed by ‘Cruel’ (the sole representative from Choirgirl), which is also extended with some vamps and vocal adlibs in the bridge. She described this extended bridge at the tour’s Nashville stop: ‘It’s about when that dickhead is right there in front of you, and you look him in the eyes and you just go deeper than you can go… deeper than you can go.’ The live and unprocessed drum performance gives the song a looser and more laid back feel. That looser feel doesn’t necessarily improve ‘Cruel’, but it does wonders for the verses of ‘Space Dog’ — the groove feels more sprightly, and the piano improvisations more than make up for the absence of the prepared piano. The chorus, however, feels a little closer to Earth, losing the eerie disconnect of its album counterpart.
‘Cornflake Girl’ is given a new piano/vocal intro, but is otherwise played pretty straight — though it serves as quite the showcase for Evans’ bass playing. ‘Little Earthquakes’ also sticks relatively close to the album version aside from an extended intro, but the dynamic and tempo shifts feel more exaggerated here. ‘Girl’ and ‘Purple People’ stick the closest to the album versions of any of the band songs, and that’s fine — the performances of both here are top-notch.
‘Bells for Her’, on the other hand, got an entirely new arrangement, as did ‘Sugar’. These were originally amongst her quietest tracks, but they adapt surprisingly well to the band format. The prepared piano in ‘Bells for Her’ has been replaced by a relaxed 6/8 groove, spacey guitar playing, and some new piano ideas. The band arrangement of ‘Sugar’ brought out an anger and intensity which had been quite suppressed in the mellow original recording — it’s surprisingly one of her most impassioned performances on this disc.
‘The Waitress’ got the biggest overhaul. I certainly don’t think anyone expected her to turn that brief oddity into a slowly building 10min atmospheric jam with an explosive ending, let alone to make it the climax of the show, but the result really works. It’s almost turned into an entirely different song. Amos mostly abstains from playing on the verses, leaving the arrangement open, spacious, and stretched out, and allowing the choruses to really explode. She ad libs her way through the second half of the song before whipping herself into an absolute frenzy by the end, which features some intense panting.
To mimic the arc of a show, three solo piano/vocal songs appear at the center of the record — the b-side ‘Cooling’, the interlude ‘Mr. Zebra’, and ‘Cloud on My Tongue’. Those first two songs are the only representatives from the Boys for Pele sessions, which is perhaps this live record’s biggest oversight — it fails to showcase the band’s take on anything from that record. They played radically different (and quite appealing) interpretations of ‘Horses’, ‘Father Lucifer’, and ‘Caught a Lite Sneeze’, so it’s a shame that none of those songs appear here.
The mix is generally quite clear, though it can feel a hair dull on the high end at times. As expected from a live album assembled from multiple shows, not all of the songs sound equally good — for instance, ‘Girl’ sounds absolutely fantastic, while ‘Cruel’ feels a bit muddy. The piano sound is consistently the biggest casualty — the Bosendorfer grand is reduced to sounding like a sampled piano on many of these recordings, with none of the lovely sparkle of her earlier live recordings.
It turns out that the reason it sounds that way is probably because it is a sampled piano. Hawley told Sound on Sound in 1998: ‘Both pianos have been fitted with Bösendorfer’s own MIDI system which drives a Kurzweil piano sampler, and I’ll probably be using that in all the band numbers rather then [sic] the piano mics. In the past, if we had ever suggested having a MIDI piano or sampler Tori would have freaked — her thing has always been about the sound of the Bösendorfer, but she has really changed her attitude for this tour because of the live band.’ Hawley did this because he really hates crosstalk, and claims it rendered most of the recordings from the Dew Drop Inn tour unusable. It sounds to me like the MIDI system was used on the solo pieces, as well, but I could be wrong. Don’t get me wrong — the piano sound here is truly incredible for a ’90s MIDI system, if it was indeed used here. It just pales in comparison to her previous live recordings.
The strangest thing about this disc is that it doesn’t always feature her best vocal performances of the tour — it only takes a quick trip to youtube to find more inspired performances from this tour than some of the ones selected here. The solo performances are particularly interesting in this regard. Her voice changed considerably in the decades that followed, becoming almost unrecognizable. I can hear the first hints of her later voice here, as if the wear from touring was starting to show. Her voice certainly sounds tired on ‘Cooling’.
I am thus not entirely sure why these particular renditions were picked for this disc, especially given that part of the impetus for it was that Amos didn’t feel the bootlegs floating around properly represented the band. Of course, trying to listen through 120 shows to find the best performance is a great way to lose perspective really fast, so perhaps that played into the choices. The entire tour was recorded, so I hope she manages to convince Hawley to mix and release more of it someday. She has evidently expressed support for the idea.
Given that the two discs on this album feel like very separate things, I can’t help but feel like packaging them together did them both a disservice, implying a lack of confidence in either’s ability to stand on its own. If she was trying to escape her record contract, releasing them separately would’ve gotten her there faster. It would’ve been nice to get a double CD of live material from this tour, given that many interesting arrangements were omitted from this collection, like the aforementioned Boys for Pele tracks. I also would’ve appreciated hearing more from From the Choirgirl Hotel, as the band also did some interesting things with those songs live (for example, Jon Evans really spiced up the bass part in ‘i i e e e’).
This band continued to perform with Amos on the tours supporting To Venus and Back — the 5 1/2 Weeks Tour with Alanis Morisette, followed by a solo stint called To Dallas and Back. Those tours were the last time Steve Caton appeared with Amos. There are many rumors floating around about their falling out — that he was trying to pick up underage fans, that he wanted writing credits, that he felt she didn’t support his solo work and became bitter — but none have been confirmed. The 2005 b-side ‘Not David Bowie’ is rumored to be about him, and if that’s the case, it implies that the last theory is true. In any case, he appears in live videos wearing sunglasses and a fedora indoors at night and sometimes smoking on stage, so that probably tells you a lot of what you need to know. Nonetheless, his loss was palpable. His guitar playing was always tasteful, based more around tone and texture than flash, and always perfectly complementing the songs.
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The B-Sides
Singles: Bliss, 1000 Oceans, Glory of the ’80s (1999), Concertina (2000)
Six solo piano tracks from the tour were released as b-sides to the album’s singles, notably featuring a bit more Boys for Pele material and her cover of Leonard Coen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’. The rendition of ‘Winter’ here doesn’t really have anything to offer over the version which was released as an Under the Pink b-side, and thus feel a bit redundant. The rendition of ‘Upside Down’, on the other hand, is a bit different from the prior recording, especially due to the banter at the beginning. Personally, I would’ve very much preferred that more of the band tracks had been released as b-sides, given how rare good recordings of the band songs from this era are and how radically they altered some of the arrangements. As the piano sound is not as appealing to me here as on her earlier live recordings, I can’t see myself returning to these recordings very often.
A Piano: The Collection, Disc 3–4 (2006)
The studio sessions for To Venus and Back only produced a single studio b-side, the near-9min epic ‘Zero Point’. The song was referenced in the album’s line notes with the statement ‘your time is coming’, but that time didn’t come until 2006, when it appeared for the first time on disc 4 of the box set A Piano: The Collection. ‘Zero Point’ was originally in competition with ‘Dātura’ to be the late-album experimental epic on To Venus and Back, and ‘Dātura’ won. And rightly so — ‘Zero Point’ is a bit formless, and is lamentably based on the work of pseudohistory author Zecharia Sitchen.
It also wasn’t mixed until somewhere around 2005, at which point Hawley and Amos had inexplicably decided they hated reverb, so the mix is considerably worse than the 1999 album mixes. In addition to the dryness, it has a muddy and out of control low end. It feels like the drums really need to be a lot bigger to properly blend with the giant out of control bass synth, but instead they are tiny and pushed low in the mix. Ultimately, I feel like the mix totally undermines this track — its electronic elements aren’t given the production they need to really work. I wish I could hear what it would’ve sounded like if they’d mixed it in 1999.
As with her first 3 records, the box also includes a reordered and abbreviated version of To Venus and Back on disc 3, featuring remastered or remixed versions of 7 of the studio tracks and two of the live ones. The new running order works quite well, even if it is missing a few of the album’s strongest tracks and instead features all of the weakest ones. It provides a more complete picture of the record than of Choirgirl, omitting only 4 songs. The unfortunate remix of ‘Bliss’ from the 2003 Tales of a Librarian compilation appears here instead of the original. All the reverb has been disconcertingly sucked out of it and much of the processing has been removed, clearly demonstrating how poorly Hawley and van Limbeek’s 2000's mix aesthetic works for her late ’90s material.
Music From and Inspired by M:i-2 (2000)
Amos contributed a cover of the oft-covered Brazilian song ‘Manhã de Carnaval’ (music by Luiz Bonfá, words by Antônio Maria) to the Mission Impossible 2 soundtrack under the name ‘Carnival’. She was pregnant while working on it, as she told She: ‘I wanted to be calm. I stopped taking calls that were stressful. I’d written a track, Carnival, for the soundtrack to Mission Impossible II and, when I was four months pregnant, I was asked to fly to LA to work on it. I told those involved I’d done the track to the best of my ability and that if they could use it, great, and if not, well, I’d done the best I could.’
It made the album, anyway. She sings an English rendition of the song with a carnivalesque synth running throughout. Her take on it feels a bit sarcastic, right up until it becomes an explicitly dark electronica track in its climax, complete with sinister new outro lyrics. It’s a very interesting and unusual cover, though it feels a little out of place appearing next to songs by Limp Bizkit, Metallica, Rob Zombie, The Butthole Surfers, Foo Fighters, Chris Cornell, and Godsmack.
Tori Amos + Andy Gray — Let’s Do It Again (2000)
Perhaps as an attempt to capitalize further on her prior club successes, Amos collaborated with Andy Gray (who contributed some programming to Choirgirl and Venus: Orbiting) on a 12" called ‘Let’s Do It Again’, which features two versions of its ten minute long titular song. A press release in Worldpop described the situation around its creation: ‘Worldpop understands that Tori’s been able to do this record — which would usually equal breach of contract with her day-to-day record label Atlantic — because her contract with the label only covers the rights to her singing voice, and her vocal performance in “Let’s Do It Again” is spoken word.’ As such, Gray pasted a few ‘oo yeah’s and some spoken word from Amos (presumably clips from studio sessions) on top of the most generic club dance track imaginable. There’s really no reason to ever listen to it.
