An Open Letter to Tori Amos
Dear Tori,
How are things in England these days? I hear it's warm there in the wintertime, which is totally not how I picture England - that's so weird! Oh, me? I'm good. I had a good show the other night, but hey - something came up and I wanted to talk to you about it. (And I thought my blog was the most appropriate channel.)
So, we're both pianists, and do a lot of solo gigs where we kind of have to come up with unique arrangements for songs that typically benefit from having drums or even a more percussive guitar strum in them. I'm not saying all solo pianists have the same style, but there's only so much distinction one can make between various solo piano covers of the same song. I opened with Portishead's "Glory Box", and after the show someone informed me that you cover the song too. Which is fine -- it's a fantastic song, I'm sure you're doing a great job with it.
No, I was actually just wondering if you could leave some songs left to cover on solo piano. I don't want to step on any toes, or frogs that may be loitering near or on said toes, but you've done an awful lot of covers now. I downloaded a bunch of the bootlegs back when I was in college, and it's been more than a few years since then... I just don't know how many of them are circulating out there now. I mean, the "Famous Blue Raincoat" cover is obviously all yours, not to mention "Losing My Religion," "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Killing Me Softly," and the whole cover album. And several of your singles.
Could we maybe work out a bidding system where you can call dibs on the next 10 covers you're going to record and/or play publicly, and then the rest of us can sort out who's going to do what? I just want to avoid embarrassing redundancies, like when Iron & Wine covered "Such Great Heights" a couple years ago and you couldn't go to an indie music concert without hearing someone do the exact same cover. Yeah, that was pretty funny! But let's work out a system where I can find a popular-yet-original signature cover that no one else has thought of yet. Thanks!
Kisses,
Ian
How are things in England these days? I hear it's warm there in the wintertime, which is totally not how I picture England - that's so weird! Oh, me? I'm good. I had a good show the other night, but hey - something came up and I wanted to talk to you about it. (And I thought my blog was the most appropriate channel.)
So, we're both pianists, and do a lot of solo gigs where we kind of have to come up with unique arrangements for songs that typically benefit from having drums or even a more percussive guitar strum in them. I'm not saying all solo pianists have the same style, but there's only so much distinction one can make between various solo piano covers of the same song. I opened with Portishead's "Glory Box", and after the show someone informed me that you cover the song too. Which is fine -- it's a fantastic song, I'm sure you're doing a great job with it.
No, I was actually just wondering if you could leave some songs left to cover on solo piano. I don't want to step on any toes, or frogs that may be loitering near or on said toes, but you've done an awful lot of covers now. I downloaded a bunch of the bootlegs back when I was in college, and it's been more than a few years since then... I just don't know how many of them are circulating out there now. I mean, the "Famous Blue Raincoat" cover is obviously all yours, not to mention "Losing My Religion," "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Killing Me Softly," and the whole cover album. And several of your singles.
Could we maybe work out a bidding system where you can call dibs on the next 10 covers you're going to record and/or play publicly, and then the rest of us can sort out who's going to do what? I just want to avoid embarrassing redundancies, like when Iron & Wine covered "Such Great Heights" a couple years ago and you couldn't go to an indie music concert without hearing someone do the exact same cover. Yeah, that was pretty funny! But let's work out a system where I can find a popular-yet-original signature cover that no one else has thought of yet. Thanks!
Kisses,
Ian
posted by Ian at 2/22/2007 10:25:00 PM
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