Jana's Piano Bench
A   T O R I   A M O S   P A G E


hello  ·  her story  ·  the records  ·  to venus and back  ·  at the piano  ·  b-sides

Hello, and welcome to my piano bench. Pull up the other end.

I'm Jana Hildebrand. I'm 22, I'm a senior piano major at a small college down east in North Carolina, and I have been in love with Tori Amos since I was fifteen, when my older cousin played me Little Earthquakes in her car and I made her rewind the first song three times. I had been taking lessons since I was six. I had played Bach and Chopin and Clementi for recitals in white tights. I didn't know the piano was allowed to sound like that.

This page is my small place to think about her music out loud. Below is her story, every album in my own words, my first impressions of the new one, and how I go about working out her songs on a practice-room piano. My B-sides want list and trading rules are on their own page.

This past month has been a strange one around here. Hurricane Floyd came through on the 16th, and school was closed for days with the flooding all over the east. My family and my apartment are all right, and so many people can't say that. It felt odd to be excited about a record that week. I was anyway. Music is how I get through things. That's sort of the point of this whole page.

Her story

She was born Myra Ellen Amos on August 22, 1963, in Newton, North Carolina, which I like to point out to everyone at school. Her father was a Methodist minister, and she grew up mostly around Washington and Baltimore.

She was playing the piano by ear before she could read. At five she was accepted into the preparatory division of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, the youngest student they had ever taken. By eleven she had lost her scholarship. The way she tells it, she wanted to play by ear and write her own music and listen to rock records, and that was not what a conservatory had in mind for her. As a piano major, I read that story with two very different feelings at once.

As a teenager she played piano bars in Washington, with her father along as chaperone. Then she went to Los Angeles, and in 1988 made a synth-rock album with a band called Y Kant Tori Read. It did not go well. She tells that part of the story with a sense of humor, and she went back to the piano, and that is where Little Earthquakes came from.

She also helped start RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, in 1994, and has been its spokeswoman since. I mention it because I know more than one person who called its hotline because of her.

The records, in my own words

And Y Kant Tori Read, 1988? I have never heard it. It went out of print almost right away, and nobody I know has a copy. It's at the top of my want list.

To Venus and Back: first impressions
five days in

It came out Tuesday, September 21. School was still closed, my apartment still had no power, and I sat in my car in the parking lot of the record store with both doors open and listened to the whole first disc before I drove home.

It's two discs. The first, Venus: Orbiting, is eleven new songs. The second, Venus Live, Still Orbiting, is live recordings from last year's tour with the band, which is a gift to everybody who has worn out a bootleg tape.

The new songs are mostly not piano-and-voice songs. There are loops and synthesizers and things humming underneath, and the piano comes and goes. My first listen I missed it, honestly. By the third I didn't. Some quick notes, with the warning that I've only had five days:

• Bliss: the single. It took me a few listens; now it's in my head all day.
• Concertina: my favorite so far. There's a lot of air in it.
• Glory of the 80's: I laughed out loud the first time. In a good way.
• Juárez: dark and heavy and I think the most important song on it.
• 1000 Oceans: the one where the piano comes all the way back, at the very end. I had to pull over.

The live disc is the band at full strength, and it makes me so glad I got to hear them this summer.

The 5½ Weeks tour

On Tuesday, August 24, my roommate Christi and I drove four hours to Charlotte to see Tori and Alanis Morissette on the 5½ Weeks tour at the Blockbuster Pavilion. We left after my 11 o'clock theory class and had to stop for gas twice in Christi's car, which only gets about twelve miles per gallon.

Tori opened with God. She played three of the new songs, Bliss and Juárez and Glory of the 80's, a month before any of us could own the album. And then in the middle the band left and she sat alone at the piano and did a Rolling Stones song, Angie, and Icicle, and thousands of people on a lawn got very quiet. That was what I drove four hours for. She closed with Precious Things. Alanis was wonderful, too. Christi knows every word of Jagged Little Pill and proved it to the people around us.

We got home at three in the morning. I had juries practice at nine.

At the piano

People ask me how I learn her songs, so here is how. Room 14 in the basement of our music building has an old Baldwin upright with a sticky D above middle C, and nobody else wants it, so after ten at night it's mine.

1. Learn it by ear. I don't use the printed songbooks. The ones I've seen don't match what she actually plays, and working it out yourself is half of it. I bring a tape player and go a phrase at a time, rewind, play, rewind. My roommate says I sound like a broken music box from the hall.

2. Start with the left hand. In a lot of her songs the left hand is doing far more than you'd expect, walking, rocking, crossing up over the right. The melody is usually easier to find than the bass.

3. Don't fight the meter. She'll drop a beat or add one where a phrase needs it. Count it the first few times, then stop counting and feel where she breathes.

4. Watch the pedal. She uses a lot of it, and the songs are built on things ringing into each other. On a dry little practice upright you have to decide what to give up.

5. Then put it away for a week and play it from memory. Whatever comes out is your version. I think she would approve of that.

So far I can play, all the way through: Winter, Silent All These Years, Mother, Icicle, Marianne, Hey Jupiter and Jackie's Strength. I'm three months into Precious Things and my left hand is still losing.

My teacher, Dr. Carpio, has had me on Brahms all semester for my senior recital. She lets me play one Tori song at the end of a lesson if the Brahms was good. She says there's nothing in Tori's playing that would embarrass Brahms. I think that is the highest compliment she gives.

My B-sides want list and trading rules

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last updated September 25, 1999