Gold Dust Tori Amos

• 1Flavor04:08
• 2Yes, Anastasia04:17
• 3Jackie's Strength04:32
• 4Cloud On My Tongue04:23
• 5Precious Things04:44
• 6Gold Dust05:45
• 7Star Of Wonder03:46
• 8Winter05:45
• 9Flying Dutchman06:21
• 10Programmable Soda01:27
• 11Snow Cherries From France03:01
• 12Marianne04:08
• 13Silent All These Years04:33
• 14Girl Disappearing04:06
• Total Runtime01:00:56

Info for Gold Dust

Tori Amos re-imagines a personally handpicked collection of songs spanning her entire catalogue with her thirteenth studio album, Gold Dust. Produced by Amos with arrangements by long-time collaborator John Philip Shenale, the new album features reworkings of songs in orchestral settings which Amos recorded with the renowned Metropole Orchestra, conducted by Jules Buckley.

All the way back to Y Kan’t Tori Read, Tori Amos has always been the feral Kate Bush—slightly more muscular, possibly more grounded on terra firma, but absolutely given to an ethereal sense of melody, a fraught tension that pushes the limits juxtaposed by a celestial voice that quivers in ways mere mortals could never affect.

For Gold Dust, a career-spanning redux of 14 songs, the dervish diva of lush song structure enlists Netherlands’ 52-member Metropole Orchestra, a progressive big band/symphony amalgam that’s also worked with Chaka Khan, Andrea Bocelli, Ella Fitzgerald, Brian Eno, Steve Vai and Sarah Vaughan. Re-sculpting many of her best loved songs, the complexity of her musicality emerges from the intensity of the originals—as dynamics are truly sculpted and the songs take on new and often more ominous colors.

The cascading piano of “Flying Dutchmen” opens into a string section that punctuate the melody, evoking Rickie Lee Jones gone classical. Oboes thread in, harmony vocals rise on the chorus and that momentum-driven soprano asks “are you out there,” equal parts three-ring drama and bravado-steeped innocence.

Not that innocence has been the helium-and-dagger-throated songwriter’s stock. Even with orchestral framing for “Precious Things,” her guttural enjoinder “all those Christian boys/ just because you can make me cum/ it doesn’t make you Jesus…” falls with a definite lash and sting.

The flute-strewn ooom-pah-pah whimsy “Programmable Soda,” the holiday sparkle of “Star of Wonder” and the swooning, ‘20s-evoking romantic elegance of “Snow Cherries from France” demonstrate the depth of what these songs can do. But it’s done to coax nuances, not lose the original intent in a rococo frame of complexity and virtuoso performances.

On the devastating “Silent All These Years,” the silken quality of the paprika-tressed Amos’ soprano is mostly buoyed by a grand piano scattering notes across the moment, the string section only serving as a Greek chorus to echo the themes being excavated by singer and primary instrument.

Like Bush and Joni Mitchell, another writer who flourishes in complexity and a pristine vocal style, Amos has sought sanity in the unthinkable, courage in the storm and a gorgeous way of rising from the fire and ashes. “Girl Disappearing” spirals upward, dizzying in its strength and candor.

As a woman who cites “Jackie’s Strength” as a means of fortifying her own reality, the metaphor of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis becomes a role model for what many women endure. Swathed again in strings and grounded by the piano passing from rising chord to chord, it is classic Amos. (Holly Gleason, Paste Magazine)

Tori Amos, piano & vocals
Metropole Orchestra
Jules Buckley, conductor

John Philip Shenale, director

Tori Amos
Tori Amos has an extraordinary fan base. It’s not unusual to hear her listeners explain how a song changed their life, through its ability to alter perspective and heal. Or even that a song might have saved their life. Since the release of her debut Little Earthquakes 20 years ago in 1992, where she smashed apart boundaries with her piano rock and raw, confessional poetry, Amos continues to be adored, picking up new fans along the way, romanced by her messages of empowerment, tenderness, acerbic assertiveness, and that utterly unique sound.

Even before her commercial breakthrough at 28, the enigmatic sides of her personality were being realised: years of classical training at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, singing in clubs and bars from the age of 13 and, then, fronting synthpop band Y Kant Tori Read. A taste for pushing limitations and stretching her talent and imagination had already been planted.

Although her signature remains swelling, filigreed piano rock, she has experimented with different musical styles and instruments over the last twenty years, from the baroque dusk of Boys for Pele (1996), the electronic experimentalism of From the Choirgirl Hotel (1998) and To Venus and Back (1999) to her return to the classical world with the classically inspired song cycle Night of Hunters (2011). She managed to achieve the rarely possible with a successful concept album (American Doll Posse, 2007) and an acclaimed Christmas record (Midwinter Graces, 2009) while retaining her artistic integrity. Gold Dust is her 13th studio album, a varied selection of works from her songbook all newly arranged for vocals, piano and orchestra, recorded with the Metropole Orchestra for Deutsche Grammophon/Mercury Classics.

Amos, never one to shy away from the reality of life in her lyrics, has tackled the breadth of life's subjects over the last two decades. Although her writing is confessional and she has famously put her own experiences, both positive and harrowing, into song, the way she does it leaves the door open for the listener to join in.

Each of the 12 albums Amos has released so far have been layered with symbols, history and dimensions, that make them stand out as true works of art. The Beekeeper (2005) circles around topics of death, loss and adultery; Scarlet's Walk (2002) maps and re-calibrates the American psyche after 9/11 seen through a prism of the writer's Cherokee roots; Abnormally Attracted to Sin (2009) is accompanied by a set of short films, each a visualisation of one of the albums songs, whilst Boys for Pele, her first self-produced album, is a virile feminist totem through which she binned the patriarchy and snatched back her independence.

In interviews Amos has spoken of the way she sees herself as a vehicle for a higher musical power or muse. Perhaps it is this unusual humility that has kept her creative force safe for twenty years.

Booklet for Gold Dust