Fade To Red: The Tori Amos Video Collection
Over a dozen of Tori Amos’ videos, from the abstract, low-budget visualizations of the songs from her breakout first album to the much more conventional, Hollywood-ified videos of her mid-1990s stint in the mainstream limelight, to more subdued recent efforts, are collected here, along with a couple of videos rarely seen in the U.S. and a running audio commentary with Tori herself talking about the genesis of both the songs and their videos.
Ever since her solo debut with 1991’s Little Earthquakes album, Tori Amos has embraced the medum of the music video, often taking a visually sparse approach. In fact, Little Earthquakes had its own “video album” released about a year after the album itself, featuring the videos from that album (many of them in a somewhat similar thematic vein) directed by Cindy Palmano, interspersed with interview segments and concert footage. Tori is no stranger to music video, either short-form or long-form.
This is an unexpected collection for a variety of reasons - and naturally, Tori Amos fans have been clamoring for it for years. The problems in pulling it all together were plentiful - Tori moved from Atlantic Records to Sony/Epic in recent years, so there were rights hurdles aplenty there (this 2-DVD set was finally released by the relatively neutral Rhino label). Getting everything cleaned up to DVD spec was another challenge; though they’re exposed to scrutiny more often than, say, a half-hour show with a decent syndication shelf life, these videos still required a bit of cleaning up, with some of the well-preserved master copies being about 13 years old at the time of release.
That Tori herself was involved in this release is just the icing on the cake. It’s not that I wouldn’t expect her to be, but the running audio commentary lends the whole thing an intimate touch. There are revelations aplenty 
about songs that I thought I knew inside and out, and plenty of insights as to the meanings of the visuals. (In some cases, she acknowledges that while her fans may widely hold a certain interpretation of a given song or video to be definitive, they’re not quite on the same wavelength with the team of the songwriter/performer and director.) Some of the stuff revealed here may well be old news to fans who immerse themselves in everything Tori; to more casual (yet still loyal) followers like myself, it’s very interesting stuff, and in either case, you can’t get much more definitive than the woman herself talking about her own work.
I had just about given up on ever seeing this sort of release, if for no other reason than the pesky rights situation involved, so to wind up with such a definitive and lavish package for an artist who, even at her mainstream height, has willfully remained on the fringe, is a treat, and the bonuses are the icing on top of that treat. Hopefully it won’t be another 13 years before we can add some of her more recent, post-Beekeeper visual works to the collection.
