’Tis the season for live albums nobody asked for. Dua Lipa, Katie Melua, Nils Frahm, Laufey and The Rolling Stones are among the avalanche of artists putting out pre-Christmas stocking-clogging concert records this year. As are The Cure, who released their big comeback LP only last month. Yet of all the musicians flogging old songs in a new context, none cuts a more fascinating figure than Tori Amos, whose stage performances have long offered a more profound and esoteric experience than her studio work.
Amos is an altogether different musician in a live setting than on disc. That much will have been evident to anyone who caught her 2022 and 2023 shows in Cork and Dublin. Under the spotlight, whipped to a cold fury by Amos’s Bösendorfer piano, familiar compositions blossom into strange and haunting shapes. If clearly rooted in the recorded versions, they are nonetheless entirely their own thing. Typically, they will be longer and feature instrumental flourishes that take the material in a starkly different direction.
That effect is magnificently replicated in her absorbing and entrancing new live LP, Diving Deep Live. It is a dazzling plunge that will appeal to veteran fans. But it will, in addition, fascinate those who have come to Amos more recently – perhaps via the cult TV series Yellowjackets, which used Amos’s Cornflake Girl for a big needle-drop moment in its second season.
Diving Deep Live arrives at a strange time for Amos, who has seen her friend and sometime muse, Neil Gaiman, accused of sexual misconduct. Speaking to The Irish Times in 2021, Amos portrayed Gaiman as a guiding light when the music industry had turned against her experimental third album, Boys for Pele. “He got the record and said to me, ‘Look, you have to go to town to town. You cannot take your foot off the accelerator of the Pele train here, my friend. You have to go and preach the gospel.’”
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They were close. In her lyrics, Amos would reference Gaiman and his Sandman comic-book character Morpheus, the king of dreams. Tear in Your Hand, from 1991, for example, has a line in which “me and Neil’ll be hangin’ out with the dream king”. But talking this month, she describes the accusations against Gaiman as a ‘heartbreaking grief’. She also says, “If the allegations are true, that’s not the Neil that I knew, that’s not the friend that I knew, nor a friend that I ever want to know.”
As it happens, none of the 12 tracks that feature on Diving Deep Live name-checks Gaiman. Recorded during her two-year, 93-date Ocean to Ocean tour, these songs arrive with a lovely pre-Christmas sparkle, though these snowflakes have sharp edges.
It starts with a thunderous God, from Under the Pink, Amos’s 1994 album. A bruised, brittle ballad, the tune is her admonishment of male divinity and its incompleteness without the feminine (“You need a woman to look after you”). Here it acquires a jagged, head-banger edge. The new treatment also amps up the ominous wordplay. Singing in a dusky croon, Amos paints a unsettling picture of how “a few witches burning gets a little toasty here”.
One surprise is the extent to which she skimps on the Ocean to Ocean album itself. The record was Amos’s response to the death of her mother and the anxiety she felt as an American over the January 6th riots in Washington, DC. Only the title track features, depriving the listener of the collection’s musings on the idea of the natural world as a place of renewal. We also miss her delivering the line “all the way down to Skibbereen”, as she did when performing the single Spies in Cork and Dublin a couple of years ago.
Amos has never been a hit machine firing off popcorn to order. So it is hardly shocking that Diving Deep Live skimps on the smashes. Instead it’s an A-grade tour of her lesser-spotted B-sides and deep cuts. They include an extended and powerfully ethereal Amber Waves, from her last truly great album, Scarlet’s Walk, from 2002, and a tempestuous Daisy Dead Petals, the Tim Burtonesque flip side to Pretty Good Year, from 1992. The duo of Jon Evans, on bass, and Ash Soan, on drums, are left in the shade by Amos’s seismic piano playing – gorgeously reproduced on a lush and detailed recording.
Cornflake Girl, the eerie and evocative but above all alluringly catchy hit for which she remains best known, sees Amos dipping a foot in the mainstream. Stretched to 6½ minutes, it is outfitted with a proggy bass intro from Evans before Amos’s piano surges through. The tune is a beautiful hat-tip to casual listeners, though credit to Amos for not giving her audience more of the same. Instead of just reheating the hits, Diving Deep Live opens the door to a secret history of Tori Amos – and what a wistful and wonderful experience it proves.
