Tori Amos: HEREINMYHEAD.COM

Tracks

venus. orbiting.

1. bliss 3.42
2. Juarez 3.48
3. concertina 3.56
4. glory of the 80′s 4.03
5. Lust 3.53
6. suede 4.58
7. Josephine 2.29
8. riot poof 3.28
9. Datura 8.25
10. spring haze 4.44
11. 1000 oceans 4.19

venus. live. still orbiting.

1. precious things 7.37
2. cruel 6.47
3. cornflake girl 6.31
4. bells for her 5.42
5. girl 5.42
6. cooling 4.15
7. mr. zebra 1.17
8. cloud on my tongue 4.58
9. sugar 5.10
10. little earthquakes 7.37
11. space dog 5.46
12. waitress 10.24
13. purple people 4.11

Album Art

Description

Tori’s fifth album released as a new double-CD, entitled To Venus And Back. The set features an all-new full-length studio album, plus a second disc recorded live in concert during Tori’s acclaimed 1998 “Plugged” world tour. The studio disc of To Venus And Back features 11 new Amos-penned and produced songs recorded with the members of her “Plugged” touring band-longtime collaborator Steve Caton on guitar, Matt Chamberlain on drums, and Jon Evans on bass – plus programmer Andy Gray, with Tori on vocals and keyboards.

To Venus And Back was first conceived as a collection of Amos rarities. “I had originally thought we were tracking stuff for the B-sides album.” “And all of these songs kept coming. The writing gods decided to stop by, and you try and be there when the muse decides she wants to hang around with you.” “It became quite exciting because we had no idea we were cutting a new record,” she says. “It just grabbed me by the throat, really. We ended up working around the clock and putting it together pretty quickly.”

Quotes

“I had originally thought we were tracking stuff for the B-sides album,” Tori told Billboard in the magazine’s July 17 cover story, “and all of these songs kept coming. The writing gods decided to stop by, and you try and be there when the muse decides she wants to hang around with you.”
– Tori, Atlantic Press Release/SonicNet Article, July 20, 1999

“Well, we knew the live album was going to happen, and we thought the B-side record was in place; we were going to mix pretty much everything on that and cut, like, three new tracks. But the songs started coming pretty furiously, and the engineers started looking at me and said, “Theoretically, this does not work in a B-side context.” Now, they’re engineers; they’re out of their minds. But they do understand that realm. I began to see they had a theory, and what they were saying was valid. The B-side thing became just so hodgepodge. It became clear it was a new studio work and a live work, so we went that way.”

“Venus could be anybody; she could be Cindy Sherman. The strange thing is I knew it was called to venus and back before we started working on it, because I had been hanging out with a couple of girlfriends. I knew I wanted to go somewhere and back from somewhere, and after a nice bottle of wine, one of them said, “You’d go to Venus, Tori, if you could.” Well, once I decided I was calling this to venus and back, it was almost as if the songs from Venus decided to say, “These are fragments of Venus she’s willing to show you at this time,” and I felt like I climbed up on this little satellite and started roaming around her heart.”
– Tori, Wall Of Sound web site, Late 1999

“The songs,” says Amos, “are individual films..” “This record talks a lot about the shadows and the shadow world”
– Tori, Pulse Magazine, November 1999

“I was talking with my girlfriends,” she notes. “I said I need to go somewhere and come back from somewhere [on this record]. They started mentioning places and I said, `Oh, no, I’d never go there.’ And then one of them, Natalie, looked at me and said, `You know, you would go to Venus if you could.’ She giggled and said, `I think that’s where you try to go when you play.’ And that’s how it began, really.”
– Tori, Boston Globe, August 27, 1999

“Venus is the love-passion place, and once you’e traveled {there} you can never go back to where-or who-you were before.”
– Tori, Seventeen Magazine, November 1999

“After the Plugged tour, I sort of walked into a fierce calm. I didn’t need to be someone’s daughter, wife, or mother — even though I am a daughter and a wife, and motherhood kind of just slipped through time and space for me. The record is just about being a woman and waking up every day.” “Most songs didn’t come until the title was in place. My friend Natalie looked at me at one point and said, ‘You know you would go to Venus, or that you’ve been there.’ If you’re gonna approach the Venus realm, seduction lives there, obsession lives there, trustworthy lust lives there, decadence lives there, control lives there.”
– Tori, USA Today, October 1, 1999