The Fillmore Miami Beach at The Jackie Gleason Theater

Unrepentant Geraldines Tour

Date	August 24, 2014
City	Miami Beach, FL
Venue	The Fillmore Miami Beach at The Jackie Gleason Theater

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Setlist

Parasol
Caught A Lite Sneeze
Beauty Queen/Horses
Don’t Make Me Come To Vegas
Butterfly
Leather
Carbon
Weatherman
Girl Disappearing

Lizard Lounge

Teardrop (Massive Attack)
Billie Jean (Michael Jackson)

Winter
Bliss
Yes, Anastasia
Sweet The Sting
iieee
Cornflake Girl

Encore

Drive All Night
16 Shades Of Blue
Wedding Day
1000 Oceans

Reviews

Lorraine Eakin says:

Did we begin, without knowing it, to find fault in every gift?

I am most certainly guilty of this, since this was a magnificent show that I walked away from muttering “Leather instead of Sleeps with Butterflies REALLY T??” But this line from Fearlessness reminded me that, when one gets to hear Butterfly, Weatherman, the world premiere of Drive All Night, the world premiere of Massive Attack and MJ covers, PLUS a stately, haunting, other-worldly version of Anastasia, your heart should be too full of gratitude for scoffing. And Fearlessness is right of course! But backing up to the beginning…

CALS was insteresting tonight. She softened a lot of her delivery of certain lines that are usually aggressive, but I noticed this did not remove the power from the song. Beauty Queen and Horses are always pretty stunning – I haven’t seen it not be so. I had seen Vegas before, but only once and a looonng time ago, back at one of the first shows on the 02/03 tour. At the time I thought it’d become a tour staple, and am still surprised that it didn’t. The crowd around me (in the back) responded well to that one.

But they lost a bit of interest during Butterfly (which was uniformly excellent). Honestly, her decision to do Leather may have had as much to do with regaining those rowdy Miamians (Miami-ites?) in the back as it had to do with chickening out on a song she hadn’t performed in 9 years. The second she said “setlist change,” she crossed her legs, so I knew what was coming. Drunk ladies LOVE Leather, and the ladies surrounding me were several glasses of wine into the night by then. So Leather brought them back to the show in a way that Sleeps wouldn’t have.

Carbon is my favorite from Scarlet, and Weatherman is my second favorite from UG (only because Oysters exists). Both were beautifully sad. Girl Disappearing lived well with these two songs.

LL. I don’t have to tell you both songs were out of control. You can tell just by looking at them!

I think it was this show, although I may be mixing them up at this point, where the audience attempted to clap along with the piano bridge of Winter. Then it got all awkward when she started the whispery part.

Up til this point, there had been a lot of moments that came very close to making the extra drive from Orlando to Miami worth it for a girl traveling from Baltimore. But Yes, Anastasia was the moment where I said “THAT’S IT.” That’s the reason I took an extra day off work and added 7 hours of driving to my week. I heard it was a special request, and Tori more than delivered. To have merely performed the song would have fulfilled a request, but this went deeper than that. She performed the whole Poppy intro in a stronger way than in San Antonio 2007 (which, make no mistake, was OUT OF CONTROL awesome). Tori steps out of herself when Anastasia takes over. Nowhere is it more clear than here that Tori has access to the source but is not the source. Anastasia comes from somewhere else, and she just interprets it for us. The whole audience (even the drunk ladies in the back who sang along with Leather)responded in kind – all around me, people were moved.

Sweet the Sting is a nice use of the organ. I listened to a couple 2005 boots on the long way home, and her organ playing has developed so much since then. The songs are now in their fullest forms. Heck, she wouldn’t even play this one on the organ in 2005 – when I saw it debut back then, it was a piano song.

The big surprise for the encore was Drive All Night, which I had considered as a neat possibility since I’d be doing just that right after the show. It was great to see.

1000 Oceans was a touching way to say goodbye. I thought she’d be doing Cooling or TIYH, and it almost was so!

I am heartened by her comment earlier in the show – “I’m not fucking going anywhere.” I definitely don’t want her to – not now, when she’s so on her game. I hope 2015/6 has more in store for us than just the Light Princess cast recording. Thank you Tori for a very memorable tour!
r says:

This is kind of a hodge-podge of reflections regarding the last show of the U.S. tour, last Sunday evening, August 24, in Miami Beach.

Background info.

The evening began with meeting a fellow Tori fan I had never met before, and as nervous and distracted as I felt, it was thoroughly pleasant to meet this person and listen to her talk about her relationship to the music and experiences at past shows as an ears-with-feet.

Even though a good friend of mine had gotten me into Tori’s music about 17 years ago, she and I have been out of touch for most of those years. So, most of the shows I have attended have been either with someone who seems only mildly interested in the show, or just by myself, and sometimes I have wondered if it is best when I just go alone.

But this time, I felt incredibly fortunate to not have attended the show on my own, and that the ears-with-feet with whom I was attending was not only totally invested in the show and the experience in general, but was also exceedingly friendly and positive company. I really cannot imagine a sweeter and more fascinating person with whom I could have shared the experience of this show.

Regarding the album, Unrepentant Geraldines, I have to confess something here…I have neglected listening to the recent album very closely, to the point where I wasn’t sure I would be able to recognize all the songs. The reason is that I have been feeling overwhelmed with the day-to-day demands on my energy throughout the past year…

Quietly I kick myself for not being devoted enough and not being driven and disciplined enough to make time for Tori. As the date of the show approached, I worried I wouldn’t be ready to listen to the new songs live in the way they should be listened to…

(Fortunately, my fellow ears-with-feet had agreed to help me out if I couldn’t figure out a song.)

‘Caught a Lite Sneeze’ was played with such a subtle intensity, and at one point she struck some part of the piano, producing a supremely loud “BANG” [my caps lock does no justice to it at all] and the energy shift or release (not that I consider myself knowledgeable in any way or particularly sensitive to “energy”) was fully palpable – even an obtuse mouth-breather like me could figure out that much!

What I am not totally sure about, since I haven’t been to tons of her shows, except for usually 1 or 2 or 3 on each of the past tours, is if this move, this almost supersonic-esque BANG! that she rocks out is something she has begun to do relatively recently, or if it was always in her repertoire of improvisational moves for live shows.

I’m not confusing it with the more gently rhythmic tapping on the piano that she often does, as if to emphasize a particular tempo or rhythm in a given song – this new BANG! (or at least kind of new to me) is something quite explosive and really conjures the spirit of that 6-foot Viking she has sometimes playfully mused about having embodied in a past life.

‘Carbon’ made my heart well up to my throat, because it is a song that I associate with a couple of people I have encountered in the past several years and related to in a deep way. Powerful urgency characterized this song, even more emphasized by the intensely pale blue, striking lights…

I didn’t recognize the Massive Attack cover at first – it briefly occurred to me that it might be ‘Teardrop,’ as sung by Liz Fraser, but I doubted myself. I won’t say anything about how I feel about the original ‘Teardrop’ song. I will say I adore Liz Fraser’s voice, and I love her other work so thoroughly and whole-heartedly. And as for ‘Teardrop,’ I feel that Tori – the invincible, undefeated genius of cover songs – gave the song a subtle makeover and gave it wings, made it glow as it should…

I never thought I would hear the entire version of ‘Yes, Anastasia’ live. I have heard it played live before, and I have seen videos of her playing it live, and I had come to believe she simply didn’t want to play the entire version ever again, that for some reason, the first part of the song was no longer part of the song to her.

I don’t know think I can explain all the complexity this songs holds for me.

At a very personal level, I follow it back to a very difficult point in my life, in my early 20’s, in which I found death terribly seductive – well, in short, I was suicidal, swinging between imagining precisely how I would do it, and trying to justify my existence to myself. This song challenged me to try to make something out of nothing, and I took the challenge, at length… Whether I succeeded or not is a different story entirely.

In another sense, still quite personal in some ways, ‘Yes, Anastasia’ illuminates for me very different dimensions to thinking about World War I and the Russian Revolution – different, especially, from what is often found in history books…

At this point, I don’t want to try to rehash what has probably already been written much more eloquently by other people who have written about this show. I just thought I would kind of sound out how the show, the new songs, and how Tori has been resonating in my consciousness over the past week since then.

In the past week, I have been struggling with an uneasy existential feeling about me being too attached to certain songs, that I cling to certain feelings I associate with particular songs, and have made myself too close-minded to open up to all the different and new ways in which Tori channels her talents, her source of inspiration. In dealing with this, I’ve been steadily making room to listen to ‘Unrepentant Geraldines’ more closely and have relished getting more acquainted with the songs, being struck by their surprises, all the ways in which Tori continues to grow and explore.

I also want to take the concept of this album to heart – I have spent too long, in my recent years, feeling some sense of “grown-up” defensiveness about how I feel about Tori and her work, about being thought of as some “crazy fan,” sometimes even almost apologizing for it. I am done with that.

This is a lifelong thing, after all, and this sort of “army” she has co-created with us and with her songs, this collective being is not like anything else that has been before. To make a kind of unnecessary reference to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, what we all are together with the songs, with Tori, with all of our own stories, is like a “rhizome,” and I am too busy paying attention to what new forms we are continuously growing into to be sorry or ashamed of any of this.

Last but certainly not least, I want to express profound gratitude to Undented for the immense work involved in constantly and tirelessly getting vital information out there to all of us, helping us stay tuned in to Tori’s world, especially during this tour, and helping our collective being have such a strong, resonant heartbeat. (This is what my “Unrepentant Gratitude” spiel should have been, but alas…)

I do not know how you, Violet and Woj, do it. You find a way to make the time, muster up the energy to bring this together, even during the hyper-busy periods of album release interviews springing up in newspapers and all kinds of websites around the world, consecutive days of shows, etc. and somehow you make it work and keep us connected and informed – especially those of us, like me, who are just too scatter-brained to keep track of even my own schedule.

I am simply always in awe of this disciplined devotion, and always have been (since way back in earlier years when it was just website and email list) and nothing I can say can do justice to it. But I am fully, endlessly, unrepentantly grateful for all of it!

Cheers! :)
r

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