When you’ve listened to an artist for nigh on 15 years, you start looking back on their career for traces of your own lost youth. The musicians that moved you as a child exert an undue influence on you in a way that can’t be done for music encountered at an older age. The first musician to whisper the sweet secrets of life and the disappointments of age, etch themselves in your memory. These secrets are not easily forgotten.

So it was with some trepidation and not a little excitement that I make my way to Oakland to see Tori Amos live. The last time I saw Tori was in 1996 in Sydney, at the art-deco State theatre. This time around, it was at the equally sumptuous Paramount Theater. In my mind’s eye, I can see the morph of the young artist of 1996 to the accomplished maestro of 2007.

Back in 1992, Tori single-handedly revived the singer-songwriter-piano genre, in the release of the remarkable album “Little Earthquakes”. In the next ten years, we see the young singer turn into a super star, a feminist icon, a shaman, a therapist for every women, and a mother. She wears ambition and success like a personality quirk. In interviews, she has a gentle soothing voice and a true command of the magical in the everyday. When she talks about the fairies, I believe her. In Tori’s world, fairies are everywhere, songs are girls, and music punches a physical heft. She makes it possible to believe that art and commerce can happily coexist in the same place.

Tori Amos is a consummate performer. She has been performing in public since she was a underage girl, when her father would personally take her to play in piano bars. This is a woman who plays piano as easily as she breathes. But what has 10 years bought the performer? This time around she had acquired a band and costume changes. And who can blame her? I imagine that playing the same songs by yourself on a solo piano can get monotonous after a while.

But Tori Amos in drag? Well that’s always been her appeal, the way she treats the piano like a sexualized object. She virtually patented that half straddle stance at the piano seat, with her body facing diagonally to audience, singing half towards us and half towards her piano. Her songs are intimate creatures, and she inhabits them wholly on stage. Yet, the charm has always been that this was an unspoken relationship, like the girl on the street who dances a little too wildly while listening to her hermetically sealed earphones. But when she grinds into that piano, it is her lover, and she is the piano’s jeezebel. Except this time around, Tori has embraced consciously this aspect of her performance. During an instrumental break by the band, Tori disappeared backstage to come out dressed in a slutty costume. Before remounting back on the piano stool, she performed a kind of dance of the seven veils, except that without her singing and playing the piano, something was lost – the intelligence, the candour, the storytelling. I felt like I was watching a pole dancing class in community college.

Still what was there left me unsatisfied. The problem is that Tori Amos is not really a musician who plays well with other musicians on stage. Tori’s music rings most true when it flows from the neuroses and idiosyncracies of her personal life. She is a gifted storyteller in song, and her stories come out savage and lyric and beautiful, all at the same time. The problem is that this voice is undeniably piano based and that’s never going to change.

Throughout the later part of career, Tori has tried to write songs with more of a rock feel. She once confessed that she had wanted to be Robert Plant. And the lineup on stage mirrored this. She had a guitarist, a bass player and a drummer on stage, but I the sum nver felt greater than the parts. Most of the time the drums drowned out even the piano tinkling at her fingertrips. The drummer was Matt Chamberlin, formerly of Soundgarden, now ovulating with Tori Amos. It’s an aggressive rhytmic sound, but unfortunately, it clashed with most of the songs. The insistent beats needed to be balanced with the sweep of a string section or the snarl of some heavy riffs. The tickling of the piano was just overpowered by the drums, , leaving a muddy sound made up of mostly voice and percussion.

I couldn’t help but notice people leaving through the concert. In some ways, I am fan by default. If I wasn’t such a fan boy, I probably would have left too. The sound was so uneven. Tori’s music has been a gradual come-down from the dazzling heights of “Little Earthquakes”. It is one of the most perfect albums ever made. The lyrics are poetry and the production sublime. She had three different producers on that album but if you didn’t know that you wouldn’t be to tell because the album is so seamlessly conceived.

For two songs in the set, Tori played without the band. When she is given the space she can really inhabit a song. For those brief movements (including a heart-breaking rendition of “Baker Baker”) I was reminded of the majesty of her voice and piano-playing. It is all about a raw vulnerability on stage. You need silence and space to hear her words, and they are very beautiful words indeed. Although there are zillions of young piano-playing song-writers, there are few who can write such perfect lyrics and sing with such presence. But what do you write about when you’ve had critical and commercial success for well on ten years? It’s hard to draw upon your personal traumas for a life time. Besides, Tori is a more ambitious artist than that. Still the success that has been bestowed upon her has siphoned away the sharp edge of experience that made her music her great in the first place.