Tori Amos at Beacon Theatre

Tori Amos returned to Beacon Theatre (night 1 review, videos, setlist)

Tori Amos‘s North American tour in support of her fifteenth studio album, Native Invader, stopped in NYC on Tuesday (11/7) for the first of two sold out nights at Beacon Theatre. It’s a venue that’s familiar to Tori; aside from small, one off shows at Le Poisson Rouge in 2012 and Rough Trade in 2014, multiple nights at The Beacon have become a NYC routine for her going back to her 2011 tour for Night of Hunters and continuing to the Unrepentant Geraldines tour in 2014. While she could certainly fill larger rooms, it’s nice that she’s stuck to this size over the past few years. Beacon Theatre is large but not cavernous and has good sound and sightlines, beautiful decorative details, and a stage that can amply accommodate Tori’s huge Bösendorfer grand piano.

Though she’s toured often with a band in the past, the Native Invader outing is a solo one for Tori, leaving the stage empty except for her, a piano, and keyboards. Because of this, when she opens the show with “i i e e e” from 1998’s From the Choirgirl Hotel, it’s with a backing track to give the song its layers of sensual repeated vocals. Backing tracks were only used on a few songs during the set, which is overall a good thing; having the extra instrumentation is nice, but even better are the unexpected improvisational twists and turns Tori frequently takes when bringing her beloved catalog of songs to a live setting. For her second song, “Bliss,” the first single and standout from 1999’s To Venus and Back, and third, “Father’s Son” from 2007’s American Doll Posse, she makes few changes from the album versions, but she begins fourth song “Amber Waves,” from 2002’s Scarlet’s Walk, with an improvised intro promising, “America, we won’t let them swallow you whole.” “Amber Waves” deals with the corruption of a young woman and by extension the corruption of the whole country, and Tori plays it switching back and forth between her piano and keyboards, repeating certain lines for effect.

The highlight of Tuesday night’s set came with an unexpected choice of fifth song, the live debut of Little Earthquakes-era b-side “The Pool.” The recorded version is less than three minutes long, with eerie, haunting vocals, but while it retained those qualities live it was expanded and almost unrecognizable until the familiar lyrics, “don’t be afraid, she said,” came in. Tori used “The Pool” to segue directly into a fiery version of “Icicle,” her infamous song about masturbation from Under the Pink, dropping the vocals an octave and adding a growl and a “goddamn” to the ending “I could have, I should have flown.” Tori got her New York references in for the night with a moving version of classic Little Earthquakes ballad “China,” followed by “I Can’t See New York,” with which she got some of her biggest reactions of the night and displayed her most impressive musical prowess, playing much of it with one hand on the piano and one on the keyboard simultaneously.

For her Native Invader tour, Tori has been breaking up her sets with a pair of covers, different each night, performed under a banner reading “Fake Muse Network” and modeled after the Fox News logo. On Tuesday she started this section by playing — “for the boys” — what she called one of her favorite songs, Joe Jackson‘s “Real Men.” It previously appeared on Tori’s 2001 collection of covers Strange Little Girls, and was a big hit with the crowd, with lines like “don’t call me a faggot, not unless you are a friend” eliciting some of the biggest cheers of the night. She followed it with a cover of Bruce Springsteen‘s “Streets of Philadelphia,” another song she’s covered in the past.

Tori Amos at Beacon Theatre

Not until halfway through her set did Tori play any new songs from Native Invader, and when she did, she stuck to the ballads: “Reindeer King,” and “Breakaway.” Both songs are lovely but didn’t hold the audience’s attention as much as the classics they were surrounded by did. “Curtain Call” is one of the highlights of Abnormally Attracted to Sin, and “Bells for Her” transforms from a gentle, sinister dirge on album into something with heft and weight live. For her final song before the encore, Tori did a faithful rendition of “Northern Lad,” one of her most moving ballads with some of her frankest lyrics: “girls you’ve got to know when it’s time to turn the page, when you’re only wet because of the rain.” As an encore, Tori transformed “A Sorta Fairytale” into an improvisational jam almost ten minutes long, complete with drum machines, before transforming Beacon Theatre into a dance club environment with flashing strobe lights for an energetic take on “Raspberry Swirl.” It was a fun end to what had been an alternatively moving and thought provoking performance.

Tori’s tour in support of Native Invader continues into December. Find some videos from Tuesday night’s show, and the setlist, below.

Setlist: Tori Amos @ Beacon Theatre, 11/7/2017

i i e e e
Bliss
Father’s Son
Amber Waves
The Pool
Icicle
China
I Can’t See New York
Real Men (Joe Jackson)
Streets of Philadelphia (Bruce Springsteen)
Reindeer King
Bells for Her
Breakaway
Curtain Call
Northern Lad

Encore:
A Sorta Fairytale
Raspberry Swirl

Categories: