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Peoria Journal Star (US)
July 1996

Tori Amos

Highlight: From the first moment that she appeared, Amos immediately sought and held her fans' attention and for the next half hour she accompanied herself on piano and harpsichord, while singing strange melodic tunes about lovers, relationships with friends, horses and religion. Although this reviewer found some of her music to be complicated and difficult to interpret, her fans seemed to enjoy every note and word.

Lowlight: an incredibly long intermission between Amos and her opening act Willie Porter, a folk guitarist/singer.

interview excerpts:

Her views on Boys For Pele:

"I think that every instrument is a character, and sometimes you only want one character. You can't play Clue with just Professor Plum."

On the number of shows:

"They haven't counted all the double shows, and I do a double once a week," Amos explains matter-of-factly. "It's a lot of shows."

On Boys for Pele:

"The whole record is a descent to find my own fire. And fire's just a metaphor. To go there, though, I had to begin to look at certain fragments (of myself) that I didn't want to."

The song "Father Lucifer," in particular, seems an attempt to delve into darker themes. Amos explains that the song has nothing to do with Satanism but with the mythological idea of a place where certain feelings reside.

"So for anything that we as beings don't want to look at, we put it in this place. It's a mythical place that we call Lucifer. It's our choice to either want to claim it and see our part of the illusion, or not."

Harpsichord as cleansing ritual for Boys for Pele:

"I needed it at the time, because it was after Under the Pink, and I went through a lot of changes, and I needed something to remind me of being a musician, of what my commitment was." Still, it took the prodding of a couple of members of her touring crew to get her to really learn the instrument. "I was just, I guess, a bit lazy. A part of me went, Ugghhh. I didn't think I'd have to go to school again at 32." Amos also knew she couldn't get away with just using the instrument as ornamentation. "It's kind of cheesy for me if I don't learn to play it right. It's a cop-out on my part. It's not like it's a guitar player coming and playing it. I'm a wuss if I don't get that one right."

On being named one of People magazine's 50 most beautiful people:

"My comment was, and has always been: Where were they when I was 13?"

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