Music inspires so much love. LOVE.
This album is what our NOW needs. So grateful to this amazing woman, musician, songwriter, out-of-this-world vocalist and genius pianist - a real force of nature - for her path and her maturity.
Extract from The Guardian yesterday, my very personal selection... I don't like the title and some of the questions, so here are only a few parts of the long article.
In bold, two of the most important topic of the moment, completely under-addressed:
-The US and the killing of the First Nation people
-Men and vulnerability...
These could have been source for a great title.
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Thank you Lady Amos.
And see you on Monday au Grand Rex.
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Tori Amos - Reindeer King (Audio)
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A walk in the Smoky Mountains in the footsteps of her late Cherokee grandfather helped the musician rediscover her muse – and write an album that confronts the US’s rapacious violence
Thursday 7 September 2017 17.00 BST
Charlotte Richardson Andrews
(...)
Native Invader, released this week, is Amos’s 15th studio album, some 25 years on from her solo debut Little Earthquakes. She is feeling “fortunate, blessed” about this benchmark. “But writing is still nerve-racking, mostly because I’m waiting for the muses to turn up.” She has jump-started the process in previous years; a penchant for hallucinogens, for example, is well documented. “Oh, I haven’t done those in a while,” says the 54-year-old. “I’m leaving that to the youth now.”
(...)
It was a trip through the Great Smoky Mountains, her late Cherokee grandfather’s ancestral lands, last autumn that grounded her. Trekking through the Appalachian sub-range (a stretch that bridges North Carolina and Tennessee), she imagined her “Poppa” as a boy, treading those same routes. “In that moment, we shared something; seeds were planted. I didn’t recognise them at the time, though. It was very humbling.”
Poppa’s influence runs deep on Native Invader, peaking in the urgent thrum of the album’s standout single, Up the Creek. When she was a girl, Poppa taught her about songlines – the sacred navigational paths of the indigenous folk. “We’d take walks. He’d smoke his pipe, tell me his people’s stories. There was no fanfare to it. I just drank it all in, like a weed.”
Lineage and land, then, are dovetailing influences on this album. Resilience, too, the environmental kind – climate change hangs heavy – and the psychological, both in the face of Trump-era chaos. In the US last year, while working on a song for the Netflix teen drama Audrie & Daisy, Amos experienced the poison he has spread first-hand. “I remember flying into Florida and sitting next to a woman who chanted, ‘Lock her up!’ the whole way there. Oh! Such hate,” she says. “After that, I began to see the polarities; people unfriending family members on Facebook …”
The schisms bore an unsettling similarity to Poppa’s accounts of post-civil war life, gleaned from his mother, Little Margaret, a formidable, tomahawk-wielding matriarch who had evaded the forced relocation of Native Americans by means of taking refuge in the Smokies. “I remember Poppa telling me how cousins would fight cousins, how some families still hadn’t healed, a hundred or so years later. The similarities terrified me. I cocooned myself there for a minute, and the muses weren’t coming.”
(...)
“I think mother earth is being incredibly resilient against a government that seems hell-bent on exploiting her resources,” she says. “So she is under attack, and yet, when I walk in her bounty, I don’t get the sense that she’s giving up, or defeated. I do sense that [feeling] in people though.”
She says that paranoia and fear permeated the tours for her post-9/11 album, Scarlet’s Walk, but she’d encountered the “smell, the taste” of political influence, years before, playing to piano bar lobbyist crowds in Georgetown, Washington, throughout her teens. “I was at a very impressionable age, performing for people making huge backroom decisions about the country. That was back when [Trump’s Supreme Court appointee] Neil Gorsuch’s mother was head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Iran-Contra; Weinberger – I played through all of that.”
She says that paranoia and fear permeated the tours for her post-9/11 album, Scarlet’s Walk, but she’d encountered the “smell, the taste” of political influence, years before, playing to piano bar lobbyist crowds in Georgetown, Washington, throughout her teens. “I was at a very impressionable age, performing for people making huge backroom decisions about the country. That was back when [Trump’s Supreme Court appointee] Neil Gorsuch’s mother was head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Iran-Contra; Weinberger – I played through all of that.”
Remaining creative in the face of the machine, she says, is vital. “You can’t beat a bully at his own games. And I’m not talking about one particular bully here; it’s energy. You have to out-create the destruction – it’s the only way.”
But first, says Amos, the US must face its shame: its crimes against the First Nations, from Andrew Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act to the bulldozers that crushed the Standing Rock protests this February. “I’m not in a position to speak for First Nation people – that’s a sacred task. But, as an observer, it seems to me that, unlike Germany, we’ve never had to really face our holocaust. Until we do that, the healing can’t begin.”
(...)
It was Amos’s physician sister, Marie Amos Dobyns, a member of the Association of American Indian Physicians, who prompted the pilgrimage. “Marie’s a big believer in championing the voiceless; I didn’t truly understand that until Mary lost hers.” Dobyns has forged deep friendships in the Native-American medicine communities over the years, says Amos, kinships she has been generous enough to share with Amos. “I call them the ‘Seattle sweat lodge sisters’. There’s nothing I’ve experienced like [sitting in a sweat lodge with them]; you feel so nurtured, so given to. But there’s a nakedness, a vulnerability, you have to bring to it in order to receive that.”
Vulnerability – men’s, in particular – is tackled compassionately on the Native Invader song Wings: “Sometimes, big boys, they need to cry.” Is she referencing anyone in particular here? “Oh, I see it all around me: in my marriage, in my crew.” Men can spend hours gabbing in the pub, Amos says, without ever articulating their feelings. When, I wonder, did Trump last cry? Would we all be safer from the epidemic of toxic white masculinity – Charlottesville, Dylann Roof, “fire and fury” – if men could own their fragility? “Listen, we have all heard men being called a certain female body part when they cry. And we all know the real power of that body part; talk about a multitasker! Emotional vulnerability takes bravery. Great male leaders through the ages have understood this.”
(...)
“I’ve been doing music since I was two and a half; it’s the thing that makes sense to me.” And yet, at her peak, Amos didn’t always make sense to her critics. In the 90s, her genius was frequently couched in misogynistic backhanders by the music press: she was a “weird chick” in Q; a “Grade-A, class-one, turbo-driven fruitcake” in the NME. “And they weren’t all men, those critics,” Amos points out wryly. But she persisted, and here she is now, 15 albums in – still touring, still creating, still defiant.
Link to article : https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/sep/07/tori-amos-menopause-is-the-hardest-teacher-ive-met-harder-than-fame?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Sleeve+notes+Collections&utm_term=242873&subid=88933&CMP=sleevenotes_collection
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I add this short review:
Review: Tori Amos Processes our Trump-Era Trauma on 'Native Invader'
Our take on the 15th album from the piano-balladeer (Rolling Stone)
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