Brussels: Favourites Of Mine, You Know Them All Well

The second night of The Gold Dust Orchestral Tour, at Bozar in Brussels, Belgium, is in the books.

With the gracious help of @Markec who live-tweeted the show, we were able to post the setlist in real-time on our Twitter and in the Tour section. As many suspected might happen, the performance followed the same setlist as the evening before in Rotterdam — as Tori has pointed out in many recent interviews, improvising with an orchestra is difficult and sometimes it’s best to just ride the dragon.

However, there was one divergence from the previous evening’s setlist: the single solo performance in the first half of the show. Tonight, the “fairy song,” as they’re denoted on the printed setlist, was “Here. In My Head.”

If you were at the show and are so-inclined, please post a review on the Brussels concert page. As always, we’ll get photos and videos posted there as they come in.

Meet and Greets

Tori is doing M&Gs on the Gold Dust Orchestral Tour. If you’re planning to go to one, be sure to check out our Meet And Greet Info page.

Rotterdam: What You Were Born To Be

Worldwide, Toriphile eyes and ears were aimed at Rotterdam this evening as Tori Amos and The Metropole Orkest performed together at de Doelen, their first performance together since 2010’s one-off concert in Amsterdam that planted the seeds of what would eventually grow into the Gold Dust Orchestral Tour.

As one might expect, the meat of the performance was taken from Gold Dust, the collaboration between Tori and The Metropole just released this week, but there were several surprises including “Hey Jupiter,” “Edge of the Moon,” “Our New Year,” and a solo performance of “Purple People.”

Thanks to the TWitterific efforts of @NicotineLove and @MarianneRoseP, the setlist has been posted in the Tour section. Take a peek if you want to see what else was included in the concert and, if you were fortunate enough to be there and care to, please post a review using the form there. We’ll also be posting any concert photos and videos that people elect to share — if you have any, please let us know and we’ll get them added!

Speaking of photos, CB Images has posted a gallery of shots from the show which are really quite excellent. (Mmmmmm glasses.)

Tori Shines In The PopMatters Performer Spotlight

As foretold by the prophets countless years ago (or by us last week), Tori would be the subject of the next PopMatters’ Performer Spotlight and, lo! during the release week of Gold Dust, the predictions teased from the tea leaves in the dens of soothsayers and fortunetellers have come to pass!

But seriously, the PopMatters staff writers have teamed together to produce a week-long series of interviews, articles and essays to digging deep into Tori’s music, lyrics and body of work. The spotlight kicked off today with introductory comments by those who have worked with Tori over the years from Samuel Adamson to Eric Rosse, an examination of the characters in her songs, and an essay by Alex Ramon about archestype, image, and identity in Tori’s music. Heady stuff but all worth the investment of some undivided attention.

We’re looking forward to the rest of what the Spotlight has in store for us!

The Little Orchestral Tour That Could

The five-night Gold Dust Orchestra tour kicks off Monday night in Rotterdam with dates in Brussels, London, Warsaw and Berlin to follow and, snuggled in between London on October 3rd and Warsaw on October 13th, a foray back to the United States for a couple special non-orchestral performances in New York and Connecticut.

We’ve been informed that the orchestral shows will start promptly at the listed times and, as there will be no opener, being on-time is strongly recommended. The performances will include a 20 minute intermission.

As always, we’ll be doing our best to cover the shows as they happen on our Twitter. Unfortunately, we won’t be in Europe but several people have said they will be trying to live-tweet setlists so, hopefully, we will all be able to follow along as it happens…but at the very least, we’ll be getting setlists, reviews, and so forth posted in the Tour section after-the-fact. if you can help with setlists, let us know!

We hope all who are attending these performance enjoy them! Wish we were there!

Happy Release Week!

It’s been almost a year since we first heard about a record celebrating the 20th anniversary of Little Earthquakes and four months since the official announcement about Gold Dust and now, finally, the record is here!

Gold Dust was released in Germany and other parts of Europe on Friday and it hits the shelves in the UK and the rest of Europe on Monday, North America on Tuesday and Australia on Friday.

The album is available in a regular and deluxe edition, with the deluxe edition including a 32-page hardcover booklet and a bonus DVD. The regular and deluxe editions are also available digitally, with iTunes and Amazon each offering a different bonus track with the digital deluxe edition — “Maybe California” at iTunes and “Snow Angel” at Amazon.

So far, there’s no sign of a vinyl release for the record, but one never knows…

As mentioned, the album is already out in parts of Europe and Inka, one of the fortunate people in Germany to have already picked up a copy, has sent us photographs of the deluxe edition booklet. Many thanks to her for seeding these over! Enjoy them!

Jump the cut for the rest!

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Tori And Fashion And Cornwall Oh My!

The German magazine Brigitte has published a collection of photographs of Tori showing off some new Fall fashions. Taken by Jan Rickers in Cornwall’s countryside, they’re really quite lovely. There’s six in all, though the final one is only a thumbnail. Alas!

Thanks to Susan and mayly for letting us know about these!

BBC Interview (September 29, 2012)

My attitude with classical music hasn’t been the problem. It’s been my attitude with the professors and teachers I think are completely out of touch with the emotion and spirit of the whole thing. It’s taken me a few years, and Deutsche Grammophon had to come knocking, before I opened up to it again.

Including another video clip from Tim Masters’ interview with Tori, BBC News & Entertainment has posted another article on Tori. This one deals with the origins and evolution of the project that became Gold Dust.

Unfortunately, the video clip can’t easily be embedded outside of the BBC site, so head on over to BBC’s site to view it — at least until someone rips it and posts it to YouTube!

Thanks to mkgtweety, Ethan, and Robin for letting us know about this!

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The Observer's This Much I Know (September 29, 2012)

I’d like to make music for the rest of my life. My daughter’s plan for me is that at 83 I’ll still be in heels, straddling two pianos. Fully clothed though – there’s a “no boob” rule these days.

Yesterday’s Observer included this cute article by Shahesta Shaitly (and lovely photograph by Suki Dhanda) in which Tori enumerates a number of observations on herself, life and music.

Thanks to AngieZ for the link!

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Washington Blade Interview (September 27, 2012)

The thing about a remix is you don’t have to retain the narrative or even the spirit of the original work in the same way. So the “Professional Widow” remix, for example, became a very different expression of the song from the original. Some of that narrative was there but not the way it was on the (album version). And yet the remix still clearly did its job. But in doing something like [Gold Dust], you don’t want to lose the song’s story or her narrative in any way, so it was important to really, and sometimes very subtly, make changes.

The Washington Blade’s Joey DiGuglielmo did a phoner with Tori and the resulting interview went up on The Blade’s website earlier this week. While hitting the usual questions about Gold Dust and The Light Princess, DiGuglielmo takes a slightly different slant and Tori’s responses shine a brighter light on her creative process, both for the new album an in general, than most of the other recent pieces.

Thanks to Jon for the pointer!

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