Copyright 1998 Chicago Tribune Company
Chicago Tribune
May 17, 1998 Sunday, CHICAGOLAND FINAL EDITION
SECTION: ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. 8; ZONE: C; Pop.
LENGTH: 1602 words
HEADLINE: ON A MUSICAL LIMB; EXTRAVAGANT? YOU BET. VOLUPTUOUS?; AND
THEN SOME. BUT ROCK NEEDS MORE OF TORI AMOS' GRAND GESTURES
BYLINE: By Greg Kot, Tribune Rock Critic.
BODY: Tori Amos is in a hotel suite off Michigan Avenue sipping a
cup of soup, a few minutes away from dashing off to the Park West to
rehearse with her band. She's elegantly appointed in a black pant
suit and purple scarf, though there is nothing elegant about the
subjects she addresses in conversation, let alone in her songs: rape,
miscarriage, sacrilege, death.
These indelicate matters aren't what gets Amos blushing on this
blustery spring afternoon, however. She chuckles with embarrassment
only when acknowledging that, yes, she has performed certain pop
songs that will never, ever see the light of day. Like cover versions
of Pat Benatar's "Love Is a Battlefield" and Madonna's "Like a
Virgin," which she worked up one giddy evening in a British farmhouse
while recording her latest album, "From the Choirgirl Hotel"
(Atlantic).
"My 'Like a Virgin' is absolutely vulgar--it can't be played
anywhere; it's not even for cable," she says with a laugh, fumbling
the cup inches from her lips and dripping broth onto the hotel couch.
Like her songs, Amos' responses to an interviewer's questions sound
as if they're taking shape in the moment, circling the topic before
zooming in for the payoff. And like Madonna, Amos has been branded
a button-pusher, an image manipulator and a shock-merchant by her
detractors, who find it hard to warm to a singer who straddles her
piano bench and rides it like a stallion, while using the 88 keys as
a springboard for multi-octave vocal flights in which the sacred and
the profane are as tangled as her unruly red hair.
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