Tori Amos - Interviews Archive

Radio.com (US, www)
May 5, 2014

Tori Amos (Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images)

Tori Amos Recording Soundtrack to 'The Light Princess' Musical, Eyes Broadway Production

By Brian Ives

Tori Amos will release her new album, Unrepentant Geraldines, on May 13, following a few years of non-pop-album-related projects. This includes writing the music and co-writing the lyrics for the musical The Light Princess, that opened at England's Lyttelton Theatre last year.

Amos told Radio.com in an interview last week that she's aiming to bring the show to Broadway ("That's the plan, that's the dream"), and that she's already started work on the soundtrack.

"To be honest with you, we are making the cast recording now, I'm producing it for Universal," she said. "In a climate where the record business the way it is, a lot of labels aren't making these cast recordings anymore, because of the time and the expense."

She's about to kick off a tour for the her new album, and her road crew will be working double time to help her work on the soundtrack. "We're doing eighty shows on this tour. I said to my crew, 'Not only are we doing eighty shows, boys, but we're making an album!' And if I'm ready to work that hard on a show day, they can work that hard with me! So we have our Pro Tools rig, we recorded the orchestra Easter weekend, and we'll be editing on the road and catching the actors as we travel. And building it that way and mixing it. Thirty-three songs, it'll be out globally early next year."

Of course, there will also be a demand from Tori's die-hard fans to hear her versions of the songs, as opposed to the versions sung by cast members. But she has no plans to release her takes on the songs just yet. "Of course, I have all the demos. They got orchestrated with me playing all the parts, which was a bit freaky. But I really enjoyed playing the male roles. That was my favorite part: being the guys. But I really feel like you need to hear The Light Princess as a story, the characters coming alive, not my quirky versions. Once you know it, then you can hear the quirky Tori stuff."

Will it be too quirky for Broadway though? Amos and co-writer Samuel Adamson wrote it with a lot of artistic freedom. It was written and staged for England's Royal National Theatre -- a publicly funded house: "It wasn't commercial theater, so from the top down they said, 'Do not dumb this down. You be brave, you be bold, you be confrontational.' Sam and I said, 'Well, this is a feminist fairy tale, and not everyone will be comfortable with it.' It's not always going to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy. It brings up confrontations between teenagers and their parents, that would resonate in the 21st century."

On the other hand, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a rock musical about a botched sex-change operation and gender roles, received eight Tony nominations.

"How exciting that theatre is encouraging people to be expressive," Amos says. "The Light Princess has to be something that kids can come see, because it is a story of a teenage girl. And we felt it was essential that adolescent girls could come [to see the show] too, although it might be a little dark for some. But we found at the National [Theatre], that there were kids that were completely entranced. And even though sometimes it got scary, they stayed with the story."

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