The Many Faces of Tori Amos  | Concert Review | Advocate.com

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The Many Faces of Tori Amos
Tori Amos closed her world tour in Los Angeles on Sunday night. Arts and entertainment editor Corey Scholibo was there to witness her evolution -- and in the process learn a little bit about his own.
By Corey Scholibo
An Advocate.com exclusive posted December 17, 2007
The Many Faces of Tori Amos

The first CD I ever got as a present was Tori Amos’s Little Earthquakes. I had seen the video for “Silent All These Years” on MTV and had put it on my Christmas wish list only to have my 70-year-old great-aunt deliver it -- all wrapped up in one of those long cardboard CD boxes. I was 12 years old.

In the early ‘90s, when my generation was wallowing in Claire Danes's self-esteem issues on My So-called Life, other young girls and gay boys like me found Tori Amos and immediately knew we had found our voice. While some found their identity in Nirvana and the passing of Kurt Cobain, for me it was and always will be Tori.

I was lucky enough to be seated in the fourth row at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday night, the last night of her national tour. I had read that Amos was taking turns performing as the various doll characters that make up her conceptual new album American Doll Posse. The idea: different songs for different kinds of women, who presumably each represent some aspect of her personality. Or, all women are made up of similar archetypes like the rocker, the vamp, etc. It doesn’t really matter, though, because the songs speak for themselves, and the dolls serve as chapter headings.

She opened the show as the blond Isabel, vamping in a cloud of smoke and puffing big clouds while slowly turning and pulling the smoke over her head like she was burning sage to clear the air. The first song up was “Yo George,” a not-so-thinly veiled message to George W. Bush, then she launched straight into “In the Springtime of His Voodoo” from her controversial album Boys for Pele. When she began to make stiff, angular gestures with her arms -- at one point even pausing to do the robot -- it took me a minute to realize that she was pretending to be a doll. The first few songs, as Isabel, were all performed as if she were in a trance. For her performance of “Scarlet’s Walk” -- from the album of the same name -- she even swung an antique lamp back and forth methodically, trying to hypnotize us.

Scholibo is The Advocate's arts & entertainment editor

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