I’ve never seen blue
like the blues he drives
In and around and through me again
Weather conditions grounded all flights to Norway, and we traveling fans spent a very stressful hour or two getting constant pings on our phone about being rebooked onto a different flight, only for it to then be cancelled again—by the time this all happened, we’d missed the window of opportunity to hop onto a train that would get us to Oslo in time for the show that night, so we really had to hope for the weather to ease up. After seven hours at the airport, most of which were spent in an airport lounge stuffing our faces at the free buffet and playing the tour’s final game of Cards Against Humani-T, we finally took off… and in the rush of the moment, upon arrival three of us accidentally got onto a train headed the wrong way, because apparently the airport is not the final station on the line, and we ended up somewhere in the Norwegian countryside, trudging through knee-deep snow instead! It was an adventure.
Oslo is my least favorite European city, and as far as Norwegian shows go, I’d only ever been here for the 2015 summer festivals, so the venue was new to me—it was over forty seats wide, and everyone I know was given a front row upgrade. After that day’s ordeal, I was simply thrilled to be there, and had no particular setlist hopes or wishes—she had already told us that they wouldn’t get a soundcheck in Oslo, and even though I knew that they’d rehearsed the yet unplayed Past the Mission and Pancake the previous week, I just kind of assumed that this would be a rare show with no band debuts. I was delighted when it turned out that I was wrong… on two counts! At first I thought that this was the first outfit repeat of the leg, but upon closer inspection it was entirely different from what she’d worn in Munich; all they have in common is an aquamarine-teal base color.
A Sorta Fairytale opened the show, and I was glad: It had been a challenging day, but we found plenty of silver linings, and successfully made our way up north in the end—this day would prove to be one of the most memorable of the tour, so the song got me a bit misty-eyed, out of sheer gratitude for having made it, and getting to share this show with this community I love. She greeted the locals with “hey there Vikings“, and mentioned that she was so happy that it had snowed that morning because she hadn’t seen any yet this year. She was feeling quite sassy, saying that the 25 years she’s been playing with Jon “seem like twenty-five thousand—I know he’s very tired of me at this point of the tour“, and she introduced Ash as an “amazing magician“.
The Ocean to Ocean improv intro started out quite playfully, with enough laughter shared between the band that the audience couldn’t help but grin and chuckle along to their antics… and then it morphed into an urgent, almost frantic piece. I really love that, even though there is always a recurring motif, they continue to play around with it on a nightly basis this far into the tour, at a point when other musicians might have long since fallen back onto a fixed, tried and tested arrangement. I really think that no two intros to this song have been the same since she started playing extended versions towards the end of last year’s American leg, and I look forward to getting lost in it every night.
The surprise came really early in the set: An exceptionally lovely Martha’s Foolish Ginger! Not a tour debut, and I’d heard it at the first Los Angeles show last year, but it was the first (and only) performance of it in Europe, and she introduced it saying that the song’s been planning on coming in Oslo, and that “it’s not just happenstance that she’s here, she wanted to be here, tonight, with you“. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard her stress a particular setlist choice quite so emphatically, and I really liked that the song about a boat and harbor lights was placed right after Ocean to Ocean—just as it had been both times last year! She followed up with a brooding Horses, for the third and final time on this leg, preceded by a gorgeous, long intro I couldn’t place.
Wednesday was next—this was the first time it was played when it wasn’t actually wednesday, and I wonder if that jinxed it. She did some excited heavy-breathing into the mic before they started, saying “I gotta be quick“, and even though Ash counted them in and it sounded perfectly good to my ears, she stopped half-way through the first line, said “fuck, it happened so fast! Can you give me a little more time?“, and started on some banter directed at Ash, saying that he’s got to give her more time, “you’re a drummer, for fuck’s sake, I’m not asking for anything but time, Ashley“. Then it took a weird, rant-y turn… “I wanna introduce you to this amazing new gay couple, this is Jonathan and Ashley, they’re together, in another kind of plane, and I’m not asking to be part of the twosome, I’m just asking for some more fucking time“.
It was a weird moment. She was laughing, and it was clearly meant to be a joke about how Jon and Ash were in sync while she missed her cue, but Jon and Ash looked more confused than amused, and I got the sense that she’d realized that she’d snapped at her drummer in front of a crowd, and then tried to downplay that she’d been kinda harsh with a weird quip for the audience’s benefit? There was a bit of an awkward pause before Ash counted them in again, during which Tori said “I feel like this is my first rodeo… first time I’ve ever played piano in front of people… at almost fucking sixty“. The song was great on the second attempt, but by the time they played it again in Zurich, they’d worked up an intro so it would no longer have the simultaneous start as on the album…!
Lady in Blue had some playful variations on her vocal line, and there was a bit of a rasp in her voice tonight that worked really well for this song—I could just picture her taking a drag from a cigarette in a cocktail lounge thick with smoke. She flipped the bird again at the start of the song’s climax, and went all badass on the outro—she was hitting the keys so hard that the top notes sounded a little discordant, but it was an amazing effect, especially coupled with her fierce, howling vocals—I always enjoy this song, but it hits different when she literally embodies the Lady in Blue in a blue frock…! It might’ve just been my favorite of the three performances of it on the tour so far, she struck the perfect balance between the looser version from Milan and the more controlled one in Munich—tonight’s was intense without her going off-pitch.
She likes to place Lady in Blue as the last band song before the solo section—because she can play too, duh—but tonight it made for a particularly nice transition, because it segued into Never Seen Blue, one of the not-yet-performed songs that had been soundchecked in Hamburg. It didn’t emotionally wreck me as last year’s LA performance did, when she played it right after Me and a Gun, but the way she delivers that one “yes” always gets me—it’s a spellbinding, impossibly sad yet beautiful song. I had kind of been holding on to hope that Bachelorette, which she’d scrapped in Lille, would get her moment at one of the upcoming shows, but I was still really pleased that we got this other From the Choirgirl Hotel b-side.
She had another surprise in store: Tonight was a rare solo section featuring two full songs! She reached for something that had been sitting on top of the piano the entire time—it was a young girl’s sparkly craft project. She held it up and turned it every which way so we could see it, and said that “this is a very special request… this showed up at the stage door today, so I’m playing this, for you, lovely little lady“. It was Silent All These Years, and it felt particularly poignant and maternal tonight, like she was reaching through generations to deliver a teaching moment, both to the little girl who had requested it, but also to her own younger self who’d written these words over thirty years ago. The seven-year-old girl was sitting in the front row to my left with her mother, and the thought of how special this moment must be for her touched me deeply, and transported me back to my own young womanhood, and what this song and the whole of Little Earthquakes meant to me when I first found Tori.
Over twenty shows into this year’s tour, I’d have to single out Upside Down as my favorite song to bring back the band after the solo section, and tonight it was extra fitting because it rounded out the mid-set blue-trilogy by turning our little blue world upside down. There had been no opportunity for rehearsal that day, yet the Taxi Ride that followed was the most flawless performance of the song yet; they worked out all the backing track kinks and she was word-perfect, it was really great—it definitely seemed like she’d found her confidence in regards to performing this song. We were approaching the end of the set, and you could tell that it had been a rocking show by how messy her hair had gotten—she was whipping it back and forth and feeling her oats on Mother Revolution.
Metal Water Wood references sailing a boat, so it felt like a nice way to bookend a show that had started with the leg debut of Martha’s Foolish Ginger, and Tear In Your Hand was a perfect goodbye to Scandinavia—she mouthed ‘I love you’, blew loads of kisses, and sent out air hugs at curtain call. They fixed up her wig during the encore break, and she came back perfectly coiffed for a classic encore consisting of Cornflake Girl and Take to the Sky, which had a nice little variation before the I Feel the Earth Move bridge: “I feel you / every day / trying, just trying to get through / I feel you, yes I do / I hope you’re feeling me too…“. At the end, she sang “come on with me!“—the next day, we were indeed going to take to the sky again (enough of us on the same flight to take up half the plane!) to get to Poland for the final three shows—but first, an unheard-of two days off to rest and prepare for the most grueling stretch of travel yet.
Setlist
A Sorta Fairytale
Ocean to Ocean
Martha’s Foolish Ginger
Horses
Wednesday
Lady in Blue
Never Seen Blue (solo)
Silent All These Years (solo)
Upside Down
Taxi Ride
Mother Revolution
Metal Water Wood
Tear in Your Hand» E n c o r e «
Cornflake Girl
Take to the Sky / I Feel the Earth Move (Carole King)
watercolorstain 