The Reluctant Receptionist

those of you who know me (or those of you who don’t know me and read this blog, the two’s of two’s of you left) know about my, shall we say, affinity for tori amos. i’m not one of these kooks that stand outside venues for six and seven hours, hoping to snap a shaky disposable kodak photograph from behind three rows of people, but i have, at certain times in my life, been very, very into her music. like, scary into it. like, dissecting boys for pele and forcing my friends to sit through my thesis of how it was actually in three distinct sections, each one broken up by the mysterious, odd mini-songs that populate it. thank you, amanda, bri, and cory for humoring me. if any of you care to hear about that brilliant rant, email me. like it or not, boys for pele is one of the best albums of the 90s, thorny and difficult, whispered, yelped, subversive in its sexuality and masochism, all 80 harpsichord-y, harmonium-y minutes of it.

all of this is a long way of saying what i’ve been avoiding saying since i saw her live at radio city last week: that tori, the one whose music i obsessed over, is dead. what we have in her place seems to be a hip-grinding, super-skinny, plastic-surgeried, self-described MILF. what’s bothered me so much about her last two albums ( american doll posse and abnormally attracted to sin) wasn’t just their length—though at something like 23 tracks that’s a major issue, too—or their uninteresting, obvious lyrics, or tori’s rapidly aging voice, or the fact that marcel and mark feel the need to record her in what sounds like a kotex box. my major problem has been thematic. she’s turned herself into this, dare i say it, cougar (and i don’t mean that in the bad, women-a-certain-age-can’t-have-sex way, i mean it in the prowling, aging, over-reaching woman way). her songs nowadays are all about two things: completely sleep-inducing reveries about existence (including gem lyrics such as “what does it look like/this orbital ball/from the fringes of the milky way?”); and proclamations that she herself can save you/haunt you/sex you. we get it, tori, you’re empowered. there is an earth mother and we all breathe her power, and you’re breathing her power and that’s giving you the energy to screw your cute british husband every night of the week. you’ve reclaimed sensuality (or, if you’re talking about the beekeeper “sinsuality”) and you’re spreading the word.

the problem is that, as a friend of mine pointed out a moment ago, her best work was done when she was in turmoil. this is true of many artists—ani, trent reznor, corin tucker—but it’s an extreme for tori. her rape gave birth to little earthquakes, her fight with god under the pink, her breakup with eric rosse boys for pele and her miscarriage from the choirgirl hotel. then she met mark, got married, had a baby, and all her problems are suddenly the everyday problems that we all face, but not the interesting ones. so she sits in cornwall and wonders, “what does it look like, this orbital ball, from the fringes of the milky way?”

all of this diatribe is to say that, when i saw her show at radio city on thursday, i was literally asleep for part of it. the setlist, which is always make or break for tori shows, leaned heavily on her last three albums, which in my opinion are her weakest. by the time she launched into “marys of the sea” and scott sent me a text saying something along the lines of “what the fuck is this shizz?” i was nodding off. she’d wake me up with a few stellar numbers—“little earthquakes,” “space dog”—and i’d snap back, flooded with memories of my gold honda and just how good she sounded yelping at me through those speakers. i’d think of my mom and how i would try to hide the cover art of boys for pele from her. i’d think about how dirty the lyric “i shaved every place where you been, boy” used to seem.

and i realized, during my walk down memory lane, that maybe that’s what tori is good for these days. sure, she still has it in her to make another great record. but maybe she’s now a nostalgia act for me.

when i was talking to alyson about it this morning, we both admitted to each other that this made us more than a little sad. tori actually brought alyson and i together 11 years ago this month, and i have a hard time imagining that any other singer i’m into right now would have the same power. i wouldn’t bond with anyone over, say, la roux or florence and the machine. my tastes have become just that, a taste for a certain kind of music; any hint of obsession or excitement like i had for tori amos is gone, left behind on the used car lot in bethany, oklahoma with my gold honda accord. i wonder: will anything ever excite me like that again, or was it specific to the time, to my growth, my still-recent discovery of the inner world, of the prickliness of human interaction? i hope so. i hope that i just haven’t found it yet.

if you don’t already love dolly parton, watch this video. if you do, your heart might explode. at the end, she tears up. i’ve never seen dolly cry before, and i wish i could give her a hug.

in what continues to be a completely insane, red-letter week in the robert camp, my interview with tori amos went live on rollingstone.com last night, and was linked from the main page! so i’m definitely ending the week on a high note. the article can be found here, and i’ve also cut and pasted it below. i have to say a HUGE thank you to my friend caryn for making this happen—and for making my teenage dream of chatting with tori a reality. things happen, people. never give up.

Tori Amos on New “Sin,” Old Songs: “I Don’t Agree that Music Is Disposable”

4/2/09, 5:02 pm EST

Photo: West/WireImage

At her recent standing-room-only performance at this year’s South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Tori Amos premiered songs from her tenth studio album, Abnormally Attracted to Sin, due May 19th. It’s her first studio LP since 2007’s American Doll Posse, and the record finds the singer-pianist exploring familiar territory: power in all its guises, be it sexual, monetary or political. “Before, we used to think power was if you had a job and you had money,” she says. “And if that’s our definition of success, then very few people have it — the money part anyway. So [I’m] redefining what it means, because power is also an aphrodisiac.”

Working once again with her husband, engineer Mark Hawley, Amos says that the album’s production is key. “Sound is an instrument,” she explains. “It’s not just, ‘Let’s jam.’ ” But visuals were central to the record, too: the LP will be accompanied by a series of 16 “visualettes,” short films that Amos largely funded herself that were directed by Christian Lamb. The footage, captured during Amos’ world tour in support for American Doll Posse, actually inspired the songs that would become Abnormally Attracted to Sin.

“I’d see montages of our life on the road,” she says, “and I’d shut off the music, realizing this music is not the underscoring for what I’m seeing at all.” Near the end of the tour, she started writing the songs because she knew that Lamb’s films “needed another story. I said, I wanna give people something that says my favorite thing: If it’s too loud, turn it up. I wanna give people creative worlds to walk into so that they are getting a sensory overload. You give people treasures, not ‘How can I cut all the costs?’ ” Though the project took money out of her pocket, it was important to Amos, she says, because “people are just putting out the worst. And I don’t agree that music is disposable.”

Her own music certainly has staying power — especially for the die-hard fans that pack her shows hoping to hear early cuts. “I’m a different person,” she says, “but the songs, the faces, the life experience or the fantasies that you assign to certain songs in order for you to perform them, and to let them live in you, change. So when I perform them now, if I do ‘Winter’ or ‘Silent All These Years’ [both from Amos’ platinum debut, Little Earthquakes], I’ve surprised myself what stories, what photographs come up in my mind. And that’s why I do insert the catalog, because I don’t see it as my past, I see the songs as timeless for me. It’s just my perception that needs to change.”

Amos’ new music will be her first to come out on Universal Music. She landed the new deal after stumbling into a label rep while she was at lunch — with other, smaller distribution companies. The rep passed her table, said hello and took a phone call from “my boss’ boss,” Amos recalls: Doug Morris, the Chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group. As Amos was finishing lunch, she noticed the woman still outside the restaurant, pacing and talking on her cell. “And in that moment, my life flashed before my eyes,” she says. “I thought, Doug Morris. He’s right there. We haven’t talked in 14 years. I miss Doug Morris. We didn’t always agree, but he’s still passionate about music.

“I put all my mother’s training of manners and everything I know to be right and good in the world, and I walked up and I looked at this woman who I’d barely met and interrupted her call, and said, ‘Would you send Doug my love?’ And she looked at me and said, ‘Right now?’ I said, ‘Now would be good.’ ”

in the midst of some difficult shit that’s been going down (most notably, my grandparents’ failing health and my father’s emotionally and physically exhausting quest to get everything squared away), and in the midst of all the opera craziness and day job stuff, a couple of really awesome things happened last week, and i’d like to share them with you.

first, my friend caryn, a music journalist, contacted me out of the clear blue sky at the end of last week. i thought that she was going to RSVP to my birthday party, but it was something even better: she asked if i could make it to a hotel in midtown in the next forty-five minutes in order to interview tori amos. now, if you know me at all, you know that tori used to be my end-all-be-all. she was (is?) the only artist whose every release i own; she’s one of very few i’ve stuck with through thick and thin; and one of the only i’ll move heaven and earth to see live every time she’s performing in a town near me. i’ve written many words about this woman on this blog alone, about how her music helped me get through growing up in a small town, how it helped me get through college in a small town. it got me through my first heart-wrenching breakup at 18, and every one since then. tori was the link that connected me with alyson, one of my best friends and the mother of my erstwhile godson. tori was the link that connected me with cory, who i’m still so close to 12 years and 1000 miles later. my point is, um, tori amos.

and i got to interview her. i got to sit on a couch with her, just the two of us in a room, for 30 minutes. we talked about music and recording and touring and boys for pele. we talked about singing and growing up. it was literally like a dream i’ve had, where i’m hanging out with one of my heroes (because, let’s face it, i don’t have many heroes. but tori is one of them.), and if i didn’t have it on tape i’d think that i dreamed the whole thing. but i didn’t dream it: i listened to the recording again yesterday, and sent a draft of the news blurb i wrote about it to caryn this morning. what else can i say? i’ve been smiling about it since it happened, and i’m going to be smiling about it for a long time. i met one of my heroes. and i didn’t just meet her, i got to talk to her, one-on-one.

the other thing that happened was that i got to sing at weill recital hall, which is part of carnegie hall. i sang a total of two lines in this opera that no one ever does, but you know what? 30 years from now, when i’m some fucking insurance salesman, i can tell my kids (who will be teenagers and sick of hearing their dad talk) that i sang at carnegie hall. and that’s a pretty good feeling.

i’m wondering when i’m going to recover from this weekend. i’m thinking that probably by the time we go to emily’s wedding in late august i’ll have made up for lost sleep. maybe not, though, so i need to be sure to pack my concealer for my under-eye circles. (reminder to self: buy concealer for under-eye circles.) this isn’t to say that this weekend wasn’t great, though. it was.

friday, i left from work to catch a train to philadelphia, where rhymes with opera was putting on its next-to-last show. george picked me up from the station at 8, and we went to the venue, where the other act was already playing. we walked up to the house—yes, it was a house—where we met robin. i was in the middle of telling her, rather loudly, not to have her friend come and meet us when i turned around to see the audience glaring up at me from their seats on the floor. let me tell you, if patchouli hate-rays could kill. the show itself was interesting: i fucked up all kinds of entrances, getting so wrapped up in my “acting” (as opposed to acting without quotes, which is what real actors do) that i forgot to come in. so that was fun. we got through it, though, and the basement full of philadelphia hipsters (not to mention robin, kate, and courtney) were an appreciative crowd. in robin’s friend’s words: “tell robert he needs to get a manager.” afterwards, i went for drinks with kate, courtney, robin, and george, and caught up. it was awesome.

george and i drove to nyc on saturday after brunch, had a rest, then went to the times square subway station where we met the rest of rhymes with opera and did a quick show. yes, you read that right: we sang in the subway. it wasn’t my idea. we did it, people had fun doing it (if not hearing it, as we were roundly ignored), and we lived.

ricky was in town staying with us, so after some rousing guitar hero we went to a new club called “santos party house” downtown. let me tell you, i didn’t think that clubs like this existed anymore. i thought they went extinct with the death of the roxy. i was wrong. this place is insane. will i be going back there? probably about as often as i went to the roxy, which was exactly twice in eight years. but it was a great adventure.

sunday morning, after dragging myself through church (and somehow sounding no worse for wear) we went to lunch, then finished up our RWO tour with a show at the gershwin hotel. if you ever hear about a show going on there, go. it’s a fantastic venue: an in-tune piano, comfy couches, friendly staff.

so if you’ll excuse me, i’m off to collapse another rehearsal for another show.

every year i seem to write a post about audition season and how heinous it is. it’s not just me writing these posts, either: it’s all my singer friends who have blogs. and those who don’t have blogs send me emails about it. and those that don’t have email send me smoke signals. and those that don’t have smoke signals are too poor and i pretend i don’t know them. but seriously, folks, audition season fucking sucks more than…what does it suck more than? i can’t say hurricane katrina (too soon?) or 9/11 (too soon?), because obviously audition season can’t compare with national, world politics-changing disasters. hmm. audition season sucks worse than having your wallet stolen. it sucks worse than having the laundromat turn all your clothes pink (although i did that myself perfectly fine a few weeks ago) or accidentally giving all of your clothes away to a stranger and then giving you her 44 DDD bras in return. audition season sucks.

it’s not really audition season that sucks. the auditions are the part about the whole ordeal that’s not so bad. if we take the advice of all our coaches and teachers, we should treat auditions as “performance opportunities.” i’m still working on that; i’m hoping that maybe it’ll stop me from shaking in my boots/fucking up as much. i should probably just get some beta blockers, though, so i can truly enjoy the “performance opportunities.” what sucks is getting the audition. it’s the forms and deadlines and 8×10 black and white glossies and 8×10 color mattes and resumes and do-not-refer-to-resumes and three signed sealed recommendation letters that will never actually be read.

this morning in the shower, at exactly 8:05 a.m., i remembered that the application was due for the des moines young artist program today. i got waitlisted at d.m. last season, so i kind of wanted to sing for them again. you know, hedging my bets. plus the application was cheap, comparatively: $20, as opposed to the $75 i’m not paying to not sing for music academy of the west. i had everything i needed, miraculously, except for one very important thing: the recommendation letter. of course i didn’t have ira write one—why on earth would i have thought that far ahead?—but i had one he wrote last year. and the application specifies it has to be written within the last two years. where is it? no idea. like, seriously no idea. i thought i knew and then it wasn’t there. so i tore our apartment apart, to no avail, cursing my procrastination and disorganization.

i got to work and texted phong, who, of course, knew exactly where it was. in a place i never even considered looking: in a bag in our bedroom closet. the bottom of the bedroom closet. of course! why didn’t i think of that?

and so there will be no des moines for me this year. the stars aligned and decided that i would be at this desk today, instead of calling phong from home, finding out where the rec was, and leisurely getting it to the post office. you win some, you lose some in this world of young singerdom. and this audition i lost.

putting my money where my mouth is. our performance from durham. george is on the left. i’m the hot faceless guy singing.

are you going to be in baltimore or washington, d.c. tomorrow night? are you hankering to hear some pretty cool new music and a band in a cool art space? do you want to see me naked? if so, you should definitely go here. i can help you with everything except the naked part (that’s later as a special thank-you for coming). i just sent george an email (jokingly…sort of) saying “how dare citypaper leave bonnie and i out of the article!” i’m not even a “local performer.” i’m coming down from the big apple (i wanna do the b-a buenos aries big apple) to sing this show.

that’s right. it’s tomorrow night. HBX, the show that george and i conceptualized over lunch, is now getting its baltimore and durham premieres. and i have to admit—and you know that i never say this—i’m feeling pretty good about where i stand with the music and i’m really excited to go down and get this piece out there. added to that excitement is the fact that i’m going to get to see my baltimore friends, and that phong is coming down from his parents’ house outside philadelphia to see the show. it’s been better for me already knowing that he’s safely back in the united states (as of yesterday afternoon), but i’m pretty much itching to see him. like i got an itch that only phong can scratch. (literally. it’s toward the back of my right thigh and i only feel comfortable with him touching me there.) missing him this last week and a half has kind of made me wonder how i’m going to handle being away in princeton for seven weeks this summer, but i actually don’t think that it’s going to be that long that i have to go without seeing him. i get at least one day off a week, he’ll probably come up some weekends, and it’s only like an hour and ten minute train ride.

so i probably won’t be posting tomorrow because i’ll be rehearsing with george at the art space (and hopefully eating at the pizza place across the street that i’ve been DYING to go to, and going to donna’s for coffee, and then somewhere good for dinner, and then somewhere good for breakfast saturday…it’s my baltimore food tour apparently!). kel has graciously offered to let us have his bed (hopefully with him in it…zing!). so look out, baltimore. i’m comin’ for ya. and i’m bringing dolly with me.

i’m having a bit of a conundrum when it comes to heartbreak express (heretofore to be referred to as HBX). it’s not that i don’t know it well enough—i do, and, incredibly, i’m not hunting around for notes and sliding up and down a scale trying to match pitch. which made me think during last night’s practice that george has possibly, purposefully made this easier to learn melodically than other things he’s written for me. and i hope that’s not the case because i certainly don’t want something dumbed down for me. then again, i love that i was actually able to learn this in three weeks. so dumb away!

anyway, on to my conundrum. i find—and this has always been the case—that i have to choose between really great vocal production (or as close to really great as i ever get) and “acting.” when it’s the former, i find myself singing completely blank-eyed and floorward. there’s something about looking toward the floor, it seems, that makes that whole creating-the-right-shape-in-my-throat-and-neck-and-mouth thing easier. when i start to “act,” the first step of which is trying to keep my eyes generally at the horizon, which, since i let myself get in a really bad habit, has started to feel like looking up, all kinds of weird things happen. it feels different to sing that way; my breath feels a little less connected; the pingy, resonant sound that i’ve worked so hard with ira to achieve isn’t as easy to get.

i probably should’ve thought about this before three days before the debut. in a way, i’m proud of myself for the way i’ve worked on HBX this week, for the focused, intensive practicing of it i’ve been doing. i actually went through my score and marked action verbs and adjectives to remind myself what my character is doing and when. i want to be like madeline kahn, who, as reported by michael, had written into her score every single quirk and slight of the wrist, down to the beat. i want to have a plan for the way that i’m going to pull this off, rather than doing what i’ve always done and getting out there and assuming i can just wing it.

but for all that to happen, i have to get myself into the text. if i can get myself into the text, line by line, instead of singing a string of really pretty consonants and vowels that mean absolutely nothing, then i can get myself into the character. but as soon as that happens, i stop thinking enough about production and the sound suffers. so this rehearsal this week has me looking toward the future a little, i guess. this is something to work on, i mean. i’m going to sing the premieres on friday and saturday, eating up the text and character and hopefully giving the audience something they’ll remember, and i’ll try to get my singing as best in line as possible. will anyone besides me ever really hear the difference? no, but i’m a perfectionist. that’s why i’m a singer.

i made it through both of my songs last night without any major lyrical fuck-ups, i’m proud to say (type). i’m sure that you can picture me in the moments before i went onstage to sing, pacing back and forth in the residential hallway behind the duplex that sometimes doubles as backstage. there i am, ignoring the glares of the people who live there, people who pay three thousand dollars for their apartment only to have poor musical theater singers running through their lines over and over and over in their dirty hallway. i was standing back there, literally going through both of my songs on a loop, trying to quickly come up with some sort of device—anything—to help me remember the order of these lyrics. all that i really needed, i have come to find out, was to make myself concentrate on what i was doing instead of thinking, “there’s caryn! oh shit, phong is sitting in the very first row. i wonder how much they charged to get in. there’s austin, sitting next to phong. i like his new haircut.” and then, having been “acting” the whole time—and subsequently thinking about my “acting”—i’m somewhere nineteen miles away from where i need to be to come up with my next line. and so the song goes, “there is laughter in the other room/as the bottles crash below/.../.../.../.../.../for you had a thing you can no longer find.” and i’m “acting” like it’s supposed to be like that.

but not last night, ladies and gentlemen. last night i took the stage and was thinking about my lyrics and thinking about what was next and thinking about “acting.” so that’s my big breakthrough from this cabaret: it actually helps you sing if you concentrate. huh. who would’ve thought?

now that i think about it, though, those have been my best auditions, too. the ones where i wasn’t thinking “what is my VOICE DOING?” but where i was focused on the production and—gasp—what character i was trying to portray. so maybe it was a bit of a breakthrough, after all.