It's all quite a departure from the simple intimacy of the earlier "girl and her piano" days when Amos whispered and wailed her way through hurt, anger and her trademark nonsensical lyrics ("Heard the eternal footman / Bought himself a bike to raise") accompanied by nothing more than her beloved Bosendorfer.
Times have changed, though, and as would be expected of a performer who takes her band with her everywhere she goes, the Tori Amos concert I saw on Nov. 19 at the Tsongas Arena in Lowell, Mass. was less about catharsis through performance and more about pure spectacle. A professionally focused Amos scarcely addressed the audience between songs, though she did improvise some lyrics to welcome them. Her performance didn't begin until nine o'clock, half an hour after it was scheduled to, due to technical difficulties during Howie May's opening act. But she proceeded to play without stopping for two and a half hours and returned for two encores. The band absented itself only once, during a trio of songs Amos rendered solo which, in a way, was closer to her former starkness. At another point, seated on a swivel stool, she played electric organ with her left hand and grand piano with her right, as she continued to sing.
Despite this display of virtuosity, it was Amos' voice that stole the show. Cool yet sultry, at times ragged with passion and at others carefully controlled, it ultimately proved to be her greatest instrument-one which showed no signs of diminished strength after its workout of more than twenty songs. Fully a third of these, starting with the a cappella "Wampum Prayer," were from "Scarlet's Walk." Though Amos paid a visit to all her albums, breaking stride only to perform a cover of Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat" halfway through her set.
There were also the old solo standards, like "Crucify" and "Little Earthquakes," so thoroughly transformed by Amos' newer, band-based sound that they were unrecognizable until she began to sing-at which point half of the audience joined in. The two songs are practically hymns to the Tori faithful, more often recognized by their air of otherworldly angst than by the apparent normalcy surrounding me. There was a notable absence of the poetry notebooks, the extravagant clothing and even the skewed gender ratio that is the Tori concert stereotype. Far from the hordes of alienated teenage girls I expected (having been one of them myself not too long ago), I saw happy-happy!-couples necking in their seats and straight guys who seemed to be enjoying the music on their own without having been dragged in by their girlfriends. Overall, the audience had a strikingly mature air; there were plenty of people in their twenties and beyond, and by contrast, few junior high kids who appeared to be violating curfew. Yet the arena was full; the show, like all the others on the "Scarlet's Walk" tour, was sold out. Maybe Lowell is a freak city, maybe its residents were faking their enthusiasm, or maybe the sage Amos had burning in the auditorium caused me to hallucinate. Or maybe, just maybe, Amos's fan base has matured and expanded along with her.
Mellowed by success and motherhood, Amos-whose songs once seemed to flow only from personal tragedies, such as the rape famously described in "Me and a Gun" on her debut, "Little Earthquakes," or the miscarried child whose ghost inhabits "Hotel"-has lately distanced herself from her music to the point of creating an altar-ego, Scarlet, who serves as the heroine of "Scarlet's Walk." Billed by Amos' new label, Epic, as a "sonic novel," "Walk" replaces the personal with the quasi-fictional, following the imaginary Scarlet on an 18-song road trip through America that mirrors a journey Amos herself took this past year. The album comes with a map tracing Scarlet's travels as Amos, discarding inner pathos, instead takes on the pathos of an entire nation, singing about Latin American revolutionaries ("Sweet Sangria"), "closet misogynist homophobes" ("Pancake"), and the dispossession of the Cherokee nation (on the title track).
Despite these intriguing concepts, "Walk" doesn't quite live up to its premise. Amos' lyrics are simpler, more concrete and more overtly political than they have been in the past, which should gratify those who have previously been frustrated by her often esoteric wordplay. But where Scarlet is and just what, exactly, she is up to, remains largely opaque in the songs, which are weak on evoking both action and sense of place. Nor do the songs create the linked progression we would expect from a "novel." They come off more like isolated vignettes, showing that Amos, as always, is more comfortable with free association than with a more narrative approach to her songs. They are also vulnerable to misinterpretation. Such is the case with "I Can't See New York," a song often identified, even by Amos, with the World Trade Center bombing, despite the fact that it was written before 9/11, Not to mention that Scarlet, circling down in a plane towards the city-how many times a day does that happen?-is thinking about her lover, not Osama bin Laden.
Of course, if you really want to check what Amos is talking about, an in-depth commentary on each song can be found on the spoken CD "Scarlet Stories," available for separate purchase (if Epic had been less blatantly commercial, they'd have included the stories as liner notes, rather than all those pretty but meaningless photos of Amos posing as Scarlet).
Luckily, "Walk" is still plenty enjoyable without plunking down that extra $20, which I, for one, don't plan to do. Amos has backed off a bit from both her recent electronic experiments and her traditional searing vocal delivery-toning down the tortured quality of her singing as well as its range. The result is a more bluesy mixture of voice, piano and electric organ that may remind some fans of her early days, though these arrangements, cushioned by their underpinnings of bass and drum, lack their predecessors' starkness and intensity. You can hear them without devoting your complete attention to them, which is nice if you aren't interested in delving into all the traumas of Amos' emotional life.
Amos' work isn't ground-breaking this time around, and I sometimes miss her old anguished rawness when I listen to "Scarlet's Walk." However, I will continue to enjoy it for the same reason I enjoy every Tori Amos album: for the sheer loveliness of her voice and melodies, and for her enduring originality, which is still unmatched in a world of imitations.