The Tori Amos FAQ

Who is this Neil guy?

Neil Gaiman (for American speakers, that's pronounced "gay-man") is the creator of the Sandman comic strip. Tori is a good friend of Neil's... she wrote the introduction to Death: The High Cost of Living (a 3-issue series about Death, in collected form). Neil once said that "bits of Tori have have found themselves into Delirium". Delirium (a willowy redheaded woman) was not intentionally made in Tori's image, though -- she first appeared in Neil's work before Neil ever met Tori.
Tori really likes Neil's work, and refers to this in several of her songs, and in the sheet-music to Little Earthquakes.
You might also be amused to read a Neil FAQ I just saw on RDT...

What did they do to the piano used in Bells for Her?

I don't have the details on this quite right; soon, I'll try to transcribe Tori's comments about this from an interview in Atlanta... but ....
Eric Rosse and some other guy (Phil Shenale) took an ordinary piano and detuned it down an octave, and modified it by adding things like paper or wires to the strings. But it's definitely just a heavily modified piano; it's *not* a glockenschpiel or a harpsichord or anything whacked like that....

Also, reported on rdt by woj@romulus.rutgers.edu:

meredith had a chance to talk to tori's piano technician before the show in preparation for an article in an upcoming issue of rdt-the-zine. he talked about what he did to make the "bells for her" piano sound like it does. although the piano that is being used on the tour is not the same one that was used to make the recording, he said that, acoustically, it is identical to the original though the acoustics and soundmen at each venue may may it not sound like the original. for instance, at the uconn show, it sounded more like a muted koto than anything else.

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