Lollipop Girls Pave the Street (Fayth)
Fayth (1988)Way Down/When Doves Cry/Fayth (live, 2017)
Flash forward seven years.
Our protagonist has spent all of them working towards becoming a pop star. Her first serious effort in 1983, a recording session with Narada Michael Walden, who would go on to produce Whitney Houston on the soundtrack for The Bodyguard, produces neither anything of value nor anything that has made it into the public sphere, although lyrics including the chorus “give me the go/ and let me / rub you down /I’m in your power, when you’re / takin’ me down / I’ll just lay low until / you come around / good to go / rub down / good to go /rub down” suggest we’re not missing out. In 1984, she moved to LA, at first doing basically the same sorts of bar gigs she’d been doing in DC. In 1985, she cut a commercial for Kellogg’s short-lived Just Right cereal, where she’s cast as “the piano player who isn’t obviously supposed to look like Elton John.” That year, things finally began to coalesce. She met Steve Caton, a guitarist who will end up sticking with her through To Venus and Back, and ends up forming a band along with future Guns ’n Roses drummer Matt Sorum and a bassist, Brad Cobb. The group cuts a demo tape of five songs (the contents of which will be another Patreon-exclusive in a few months. Don’t worry, this won’t be a habit; the period of Amos’s career where we have a pile of extant demos that never went anywhere ends here).
The tape is sent to Atlantic Records under the name “Tori Ellen Amos and her band named Y Kant Tori Read,” (the name, apparently, is a reference to her frustrations at the Peabody with regards to sheet music) firmly positioning Amos as the project’s focal point, and is enough to net Amos a contract that she’ll spend the next fifteen years working her way out from under. The resulting project is a messy compromise. Amos had only reluctantly shifted gears into the band setup, writing home to her parents, “I have to accept that the girl and her piano are dead. That time in history is over.” And so she reinvented herself in the vein of 80s arena rock. Upon being signed, however, Amos found herself at the mercy of an over-involved label. The ten tracks of Y Kant Tori Read were ultimately recorded across six studios with a rotating cast of musicians. Sorum remained the drummer across all of it, but Caton was exiled to “additional guitars,” and was ultimately one of four guitarists on the album, while Cobb did not appear on it at all save for a cowriting credit on “Fayth.” Pulled in so many directions, the album ends up being a smorgasbord of 80s cliches, almost all of them a few years past their sell-by date. The largest and most obvious inspiration, however, was Pat Benatar, a fact made obvious in the hiring of Joe Chiccarelli, fresh off of work on Benatar’s 1985 album Seven the Hard Way, as producer.…
Baltimore (unreleased 1978 recording).
run on the site come Monday. In the meantime you can still follow me at 
So, my next blog project, starting on Monday August 5th, is Boys in their Dresses: A Psychodiscography of Tori Amos. And I wanted to start by talking a little bit about why this project interests me, and also a little bit about my short to medium term blogging plans in general.
The long awaited (by a small number of people with extremely good taste) return of the Shabcast. I chat with Kit Power about his new books, a non-fiction book about the movie Tommy and, more particularly, his new novella The Finite.
writing on other subjects, please consider pitching in. I’ve recently added a $10-per-post tier to the Patreon for those who’d like me to proofread their writing. If that interests you, we can talk. Any money at all significantly helps out this minimum-wage-working trans writer. Thanks for your support.