Songza Features Tori's Gold Summer Playlist

Tori has created a playlist for Songza, a streaming music site that allows users to create, share and listen to others’ playlists.

Tori’s contribution is named the “Gold Summer Playlist,” a nod to her forthcoming album, Gold Dust, and features her “favorite summer songs.” The tunes included, ranging from old chestnuts to some surprising newer inclusions, will be shuffled over randomly every time you start listening to it.

Unfortunately, due to copyright and licensing restrictions, Songza is currently only available to those in the United States and Canada, but they hope to expand the service to other parts of the world soon. In the meantime, enterprising Toriphiles should be able to stream the playlist on Songza without too much trouble via a proxy server…or perhaps someone would care to build a playlist from the songs on Spotify or one of the other streaming music services that has more world-wide access?

Check out the tunes from the playlist after the jump — or just give it a listen and find out what’s included yourself.

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Deluxe Gold Dust Details From JB HIFI

While there’s been no mention of a deluxe edition of Gold Dust on ToriAmos.com, at least one retailer mentioned the existence of such a beast back at the beginning of July, indicating that it would be a CD/DVD package but offering no other details.

Australian retailer JB HIFI, however, does detail the contents of the deluxe edition in their listing for the release. According to them, the bonus DVD will include a music video for “Flavor,” a performance clip for “Gold Dust,” and behind the scenes footage about the record. Additionally, the limited edition package will include a 32 page hard cover booklet.

They also indicate that the Australian release date for the album, both the regular and deluxe editions, will be Friday, October 5th — and that date is now also listed on ToriAmos.com.

Gold Dust Track Listing And Cover Artwork Revealed

ToriAmos.com has announced the track listing and cover artwork for Gold Dust, the career retrospective album Tori recorded with The Metropole Orkest slated for release this coming Autumn.

The collection’s songs are culled from her twenty years of releases and include:

1. Flavor
2. Yes, Anastasia
3. Jackie’s Strength
4. Cloud On My Tongue
5. Precious Things
6. Gold Dust
7. Star of Wonder
8. Winter
9. Flying Dutchman
10. Programmable Soda
11. Snow Cherries From France
12. Marianne
13. Silent All These Years
14. Girl Disappearing

The album’s release dates have also been confirmed by ToriAmos.com and are consistent from those indicated by some retail sites’ early listings: Friday, September 28th in Germany, Monday, October 1st in the UK and EU and Tuesday, October 2nd in the US and Canada.

Check Out Matt Chamberlain's New Album, "Company 23"

When I’m writing the music I almost feel like I’m the drummer that I’m hiring to play on the record and I don’t him want him playing a bunch of shit all over it. I’d want the drummer that played on the music I wrote to be tasteful and acknowledge what’s going on and not shred all over it.

Matt Chamberlain, the drummer who has toured and recorded several albums with Tori, has a new solo album out under the name Company 23. He recently talked with PopMatters writer Jon Langmead about the album and about his experiences recording with a variety of musicians. The article also includes several streaming songs from the Chamber 23 album, which are quite different from the work he’s done with other artists. Check ‘em out. Thanks to Pavel for sending this in!

Night Of Hunters Earns An Echo Klassik

The winners of the 2012 Echo Klassik awards were announced today and Tori has received a Klassik Ohne Grenzen prize — “classical without borders” aka “crossover” classical — for Night of Hunters!

This particular award is often given to several records in any given year and 2012 is no exception as the Pera Ensemble and Erwin Schrott were also recipients of this prize for their 2012 releases, Baroque Oriental and Rojotango, respectively.

This year’s awards ceremony takes place on October 14th in Berlin. Given the Gold Dust orchestral tour’s Berlin stop is on the following day, it wouldn’t come as a surprise for Tori to be in attendence for the ceremony.

Congratulations to Tori for this achievement!

Gold Dust Listed At Some Retailers

Neither ToriAmos.com nor the Gold Dust press release mention the album’s release date, just saying that it will be coming out in October. However, several retailers have added the album to their websites and they are far less mysterious in their listings.

German retailer JPC has the album with a release date of Friday, September 28th while UK retailers Play.com and Amazon.co.uk both have it with a release date of Monday, October 1st. Amazon.com doesn’t have the album listed yet but, assuming the above holds true and the usual international pattern is followed, the North American release date would most likely be Tuesday, October 2nd and we’d expect it to be either Friday, September 28th or Friday, October 5th in Australasia. Time will tell of course but then in this new age of advance streams and leaks, things are more fluid and an exact date may not matter much.

Update: Brian also points out that JPC.de is listing a limited CD/DVD release for Gold Dust. No additional details are provided.

None of the sites have cover artwork included in their listing, though Play.com does have a cropped version of Danielle Levitt’s promotional taxi photo. There’s no additional text so we tend to think that’s just a placeholder image for the short-term. As with the final release date, though, we shall see…

Thanks to Darrell and Luke for catching the JPC and Play links!

A Book For Pele Redux

Remember the Boys for Pele book for Continuum Press’ 33 1/3 book series? No? Not even a little?

Well, to be honest, we’d kind of forgotten about it too so here’s a quick recap: we first got wind of it when author Elizabeth Merrick blogged that she was working on the book. Not long afterwards, Continuum included it in a forthcoming list on their blog. Then, for a long time, nothing but eerie silence…until a few weeks ago when Ms. Merrick remembered how to post to her blog and sent an update about the book into the ether.

Her post is quite interesting and worth reading all the way through so please do so but for those who want the executive summary: 1) she’s still working on the book; 2) she’s writing it in a rather novel way using brush and ink; 3) she’ll be posting the occasional anecdote and tidbit on Twitter and 4) she’s really enjoying the process!

She mentions that the book is currently slated for publication in 2013 and Amazon agrees, showing a May 2, 2013 pubdate in the States and July 4, 2013 in the UK.

Thanks to Paul for the Amazon tip…and for the reminder that we needed to post about it. (We’d updated our Twitter and Facebook the day Elizabeth posted her latest update but, for various boring reasons, sorta-kinda neglected to get this on the main site until now. Oops. Mea culpa.)

Two New Tour Dates Added — Berlin ON SALE NOW And London

Sorry guys, absolutely no advance warning on this…

Two new tour dates were added, one for Berlin, which is unfortunately ON SALE NOW. (Sorry, you’ll need to search, the direct link we have keeps showing up wonky.)

The other newly added show is London, which goes on sale June 22nd at 9am. It’s 1:45am here, so our apologies for this being rushed and not very detailed. Just wanted to get something up as quickly as possible.

Update: Ticketmaster has added a listing for the London show, with an O2 Priority presale starting tomorrow, Wednesday, June 20th at 9:00 AM BST. The general sale still starts at 9:00 AM BST on Friday as does an American Express sale. (The AMEX sale has been removed from the Ticketmaster listing.)

Note: last time, there was a special link available from ToriAmos.com which allowed people to purchase tickets from pool of good seats set aside for fans. We don’t know if this will happen again but keep an eye on the tour listing at ToriAmos.com just in case it does.

Berlin Gold Dust Tour Stop Pops Up

While not yet confirmed by the tour listing on ToriAmos.com, ticket vendor Eventim indicates that Tori will be performing at the Berliner Philharmonie in Berlin, Germany on October 15th. Eventim does mention that the concert will be the exclusive German stop for the orchestral tour. No ticket sale information is yet available at either Eventim or the venue’s website.

We'll Hold Gold Dust In Our Hands

Tori’s thirteenth studio album has just been announced on ToriAmos.com!

Entitled Gold Dust, it is a career-spanning collection of her songs re-worked in an orchestral setting. With arrangements by long-time collaborator John Philip Shenale, the project with recorded with The Metropole Orkest, with whom Tori performed in Amsterdam in October 2010, under the direction of conductor Jules Buckley.

The complete tracklist hasn’t been made public yet, but a press release from Mercury Classics/Deutsche Grammaphon gave us some hints regarding which songs will be included, and how they’ll be different from the originals:

Beloved gems like “Silent All These Years” and “Precious Things” take on new life alongside lesser-known treasures such as “Flavor” and a number of tracks underwent significant reworking when adapted for orchestra. Almost autobiographical in structure, the songs represent stories culled from Tori’s own life relationships: “Jackie’s Strength” is about her relationship with her mother, “Winter” is about her father and grandfather and “Snow Cherries from France” is about her husband.

Gold Dust is slated to be released in October 2012 and will be supported by a limited orchestral tour of Europe and the United States. So far, three dates have been announced: Rotterdam on October 1st, Brussels on October 2nd and Warsaw on October 13th, with tickets for the Warsaw show going on sale on Monday, October 11th at livenation.pl (the purchase link is there now).

As more details and dates are shared, we’ll be getting them posted as quickly as we can!

Update: Tickets for Warsaw are on sale now at Eventim.

Tickets for Brussels will go on sale at 11:00 AM CEST on Friday, June 15th.

Tickets for Rotterdam go on sale on Saturday, June 16th at 10:00 AM CEST.