"...so hard"

Those were the last words I heard come out of Tori's mouth Monday night at the last show of the first leg of her Original Sinsuality Tour. And they kind of describe the way I feel about forming an opinion about the tour: it's so hard. So so hard.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel a bit holistically disappointed at the close of Monday night's show, but it's not quite as simple as that--I loved almost every performance I saw. Each show was very unique and had very, very high high points.

But the low points were equally very low. Very very low.

I think there was one main issue at play in the negative sense: Tori doesn't know the words to her songs, an issue which hampers the quality of shows both in terms of her mundane setlists and sometimes shaky performances. It's very hard for Tori to give her all in a performance when an entire sense of hers (vision) is focused on something else (reading lyrics). And in each case where she seemed uneasy in her performance, this seemed to be the cause.

And the setlists? I don't know. I don't think I'd be as dissapointed if she'd hadn't set her own bar so high from the get-go in Clearwater, bringing out many songs for the first time ever or in a long time. She continued to do this until Hartford, where her revertion to "Leather" "Cloud on my Tongue" and "Silent all these years" mode became apparent.

"But didn't she play a lot of Beekeeper songs quite often?" you might ask.

Yes, she did. A lot. But I didn't tire of them because I'd never heard any of them before. "Take to the Sky", though?

I'm over it. She doesn't even perform it with ferocity anymore. "Have a seat while [you] take to the sky"? Indeed, a seat on the toilet.

And to echo a fellow blogger's comment, what happened to the period in Tori history between 1998 and 2002?

I'll let you ponder that while I digress from all this negativity, because all-in-all, I think the tour was a good experience. I saw two shows which rank among my favorites EVER, heard several songs I'd NEVER heard before, and saw many songs reinvented into unique and intense manifestations of themselves. I spent a lot of times with friends old and new. It was a wonderful experience for me.

I just wonder if Tori enjoyed it so much. Let's hope--to Europe!

R