In the lush Virginia hills
We held gold dust in our hands
Due to Independence Day, there were two days off between the New Jersey and Virginia shows, and even though I’d originally planned to spend the holiday in Washington DC, a friend of a friend invited us to watch the Macy’s Fourth of July fireworks from her Hunters Point apartment on the 27th floor, directly overlooking the East River… and who am I to pass such an invitation up! This meant that we changed our plans and were going to rent a car on the morning of the 5th, the day of the show, and drive to Wolf Trap directly. I was insanely excited to see her at this venue, second only to Red Rocks, and we were going to spend the afternoon exploring the National Park… instead, this is as close as I have ever come to missing a Tori show.
We rented a car from a place in walking distance from my friend’s apartment, and drove it back to hers to pick up our luggage—and it wouldn’t start again, it just completely died. A small mercy, because I can only imagine how much worse it could’ve been if this had happened somewhere on the way—we were going to drive to all the shows through Kentucky with this rental! Long story a little less long: This happened around 10AM, and I thought we were great on time regardless of this setback, but there was a lot of drama with the rental and tow truck companies—ages spent on the phone arguing with customer service, and plenty of tears shed—until they eventually handed us a different car… just before 5PM. The drive from Queens to Wolf Trap technically takes four hours, but at that time of day, we obviously got caught in rush hour traffic leaving the city. There was no way we wouldn’t miss some of the show, but what were we going to do other than try and get there? Well, I think A. broke just about every imaginable traffic regulation, and I prayed to every higher power for Tori to be late tonight… and somehow it worked out. I hopped out of the car and ran up the hill to the Filene Center… it was past 9PM, the venue was an outdoor amphitheater… yet I couldn’t hear anything other than my labored breathing. The show hadn’t started yet! I started flying down the steps, and that’s when the lights went out. I made it to my seat at the same time as Tori walked out on stage. Miraculous timing.
She was wearing the same outfit as in Oslo, with a cute red ribbon in her hair, and she sounded great. I don’t doubt that my odyssey getting here colored my experience—I haven’t felt such an overwhelming rush of emotion and gratitude from the moment she stepped on stage since the very first show after the pandemic. I’d spent the drive trying to come to terms with the fact that I was going to miss a good chunk of the show, and instead I got to see it all, from the first note, against all odds… this was also her hometown show, a stone’s throw from Maryland and DC, where she cut her teeth performing in gay bars, and she brought her A game and a great story:
“It was forty years ago ago yesterday that I got fired from playing downtown, three blocks from the White House. So I went there, the day before that, with Husband, and had a drink, and I showed him where I played and how I got fired. I walked in on the 4th of July, in my red dress—and my girlfriends know what that get-up was all about—and my hair was on top… I’d played there a couple of years, so I was walking in, and there was a man in a tux sitting at the grand piano. They didn’t even call and say, you know, ‘no thanks’. They didn’t say, you know, ‘don’t spend the petrol money’, or whatever you say in this country—they didn’t say that. They let me come and I realized that I’d been fired. And this amazing man, this African American man, stood in the door and had tears in his eyes, and he said ‘I’m sorry they did this to you, I’m so sorry, and one day they’re gonna regret it’. The truth is, they did me a huge favor. So that was forty-one years ago yesterday and… hiii!”
The Ocean to Ocean intro was longer than the song itself, and it had such a calming effect on me—all through God, I’d been a breathless bundle of nerves, but this felt like floating on gentle waves, it quieted my reeling mind and allowed me to immerse myself and be present, coming off the day’s adrenaline. What made this show extra delightful for me was that they had sign language interpreters, something I’d never seen in real life before: There were three taking turns, and since they were right in front of me and very much into it, they kept drawing my gaze—it was really cool to see how Tori’s idiosyncratic lyrics look translated into sign language, especially delivered by someone feeling the music with their whole body, the way these ladies were! I was also really impressed by how quickly they must’ve acquainted themselves with the songs—they had the lyrics printed out for reference, but knowing how close to the show Tori finalizes her setlists, it couldn’t have been easy on such short notice, especially given how abstract many of them are—although they seemed to be at a loss with some of the improvised bits!
At this point, she reached for a new stick of gum already, so you knew something good was coming up—it was an epic Crucify, my first one on the US leg, and it felt particularly fitting after the story about the end of her Washington piano bar days. The coda was really fierce, and being so close to the capital, she threw in a “no way, SCOTUS—no!” amid some twenty-five “never going backs“—in reference to recent regressive rulings on affirmative action and discrimination by the supreme court, punctuated by a fallboard slam at the end. Hey Jupiter followed—the earliest it’s shown up on a setlist since 2001, and even then it was just once! To me, it’s very much a song to wrap things up and say goodbye, and its usual placement cements this, so it coming up at the very start of a show was unexpected, and it set quite a wistful note—the way those yearning “you-hoos” echoed around the half-enclosed amphitheater, drifting out onto the lawn and the balmy night air, was really wonderful.
From the melancholy of Hey Jupiter, she seemed to switch gears to something more quirky, playing the jaunty new arrangement of Wednesday next—but the sentiment of playing a song that ends with a wistful “lost in a place called America” this close to Washington wasn’t lost on me. I thought it was a really smart move on her part—a way to subtly weave politics into the set without being too confrontational or on the nose. Speaking of subtle, Lady in Blue felt like a nice little “fuck you” that tied back to her piano bar story—her Pretty Woman “Big mistake. Big. Huge!” moment, if you will! The lights were incredible, I was mesmerized watching them dance across the amphitheater ceiling—how I wished that this day would’ve gone differently, and we’d had the time to enjoy this gorgeous venue by daylight with a picnic on the lawn! I hope it won’t take her another 18 years to play it again, I’d love to come back and experience it in full.
It was time for the solo song, and she didn’t say a word—there was no need. It was Gold Dust, and I started weeping at the very first note. It’s one of her most affecting songs, and she doesn’t play it much at all—it’s hard for her to get through; I can’t imagine the storm of emotions inside her, playing this so close to where she grew up, for the first time since Mary’s passing. I hadn’t seen it live since the orchestral tour in 2012, so this was the first time I saw her do it solo, and I consider it a privilege to have been there to witness it—it was a stunning rendition, and I don’t think there was a dry eye by the time she was done, including her own. It’s one of her best ballads, and her most magnificent and perfect album closer—the music alone carries so much weight, it’s almost unbearable, then add in the poignant lyrics, and it’s life, death, love, grief… humanity. I know the circumstances surrounding this particular request, but it was obvious that it meant a lot to Tori herself, and the fact that it was played at this show, after what it took to get here, was very meaningful to me. I was here, and I’m freezing that frame; I knew I was holding gold dust in my hands right then and there, without having to wait for the gift of hindsight.
That’s a tough song to follow, but she chose beautifully, delivering a gorgeously haunting Purple People with an extra long instrumental intro. She made a little flub just before the “she always promises a show” line, which she then went on to sing with a big smile you could hear in her delivery. It was the only time I got to see this song on this American leg, and it was a beautiful, worthy performance—we’d only just passed the halfway point of the show, and this setlist was one for the books already. She had one more big surprise in store, coming right up… but first, I must briefly digress. Even without the car trouble, I never planned to be at Wolf Trap in time for the letter drop because I didn’t have anything to say so soon after my last one in New York—but then, on the 4th of July, I visited the National Museum of the American Indian, and saw a really inspiring contemporary art exhibit by Native American artists that compelled me to write her a note. The museum also featured a room all about wampum beads, and for the first time I consciously realized the connection between Wampum Prayer and Virginia—”white shell beads wrapped around her skin“. I knew she’d never played those songs together before, so I wrote my note right there in the museum, and emailed it to a friend who kindly printed it out and handed it in for me—I figured that if Virginia was going to be played on this tour, it would get its debut at the Virginia show, so I felt that it was my one chance to sell her on it. It didn’t happen at this show, but file it away for future reference… the seed took root and bore fruit out West!
Virginia got her debut, and it was a beauty—it may have been somewhat expected, and with it being an outdoor venue, people had heard her soundcheck it, but despite that “spoiler”, it’s the song that got the most vocal reaction of the night! I’ve seen this one less than a handful of times in a decade of shows, but it’s one of my favorites on Scarlet’s Walk. It’s one of the few songs in her catalogue where the live renditions never quite live up to the glory of the studio version, because she can’t replicate those stunning layered vocal harmonies, but it’s always a highlight regardless. This one was a memorable performance in the most perfect setting—we were literally enjoying this song’s live return “in the lush Virginia hills“…! Addition Of Light Divided was a nice uplifting moment, and so was Black-Dove—this eerie song takes me places. Somehow, it manages to sonically encapsulate the feeling of being underwater, lost in the woods, and floating in endless space—she’s a magician that way. Whoever does her lights deserves a raise, they fit so well—they sort of look like stars blurring past as you whisk across galaxies, or a meadow in the woods swarming with fireflies on a hot summer night.
The main set ended with Cornflake Girl, and I rushed as far to the front as I could—the pit area was closed off, so it didn’t make much of a difference, but everyone was standing up and dancing—at least that was the impression I got. A. was up in the balcony—it was an excellent front row seat—and he said that there was a mass exodus after this song—admittedly the only recognizable single she’d played since God and Crucify early in the set. Wolf Trap has a lot of membership tiers, some of the upper ones costing thousands of dollars, and I knew that Team Tori even had to contractually forfeit part of their front row comps because the venue wasn’t prepared to give up their hold for their elite members. All this to say that there were a lot of casual and even non-fans in the audience who were just there to make use of their annual membership… those who left missed out on a grand finale! The first encore song was Bliss, which was exciting, as it was the first time this had happened on the tour—the band played her in, so we got a hauntingly atmospheric intro until she came back on stage… but halfway through my excitement waned some, because she wove in Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill again. I love both songs, but really don’t care for the mash-up, and had hoped that it would stay in 2022—it hadn’t been shoe-horned into Bliss on the European leg, so I thought we were, well, over that hill! I admit that I didn’t completely hate it tonight though—the rest of the show had been way too good for this to mar it, and also… I quite literally ran up the hill to make it to my seat in time, and I can appreciate when the universe throws some funny synchronicity my way.
And then… The Waitress! I couldn’t believe she was bringing it back so soon after the US debut in New York, but I was thrilled. On paper, it may look like a jarring energy shift at the very end of a mostly wistful show, but it worked, and it was exactly what I needed at the end of this day of all days. She left it all on that stage, and I know she hates the word, but it felt like a catharsis. As soon as the lights came up, people I knew (and some I didn’t) came up to me asking when I’d arrived, or saying that they kept a look out for me and saw me run down the stairs and were so relieved that I’d made it—apparently some of the cheers weren’t directed at the stage, but at me dashing down the steps! Seriously though, a lot of people had messaged me throughout the day to offer help, alternative transport ideas, or just to try and calm me down—collectively, my friends in this community kept me somewhat sane on an otherwise completely shitty, stressful day, and it was really appreciated. If I’d missed this show, I’d be kicking myself to this day.
Setlist
God
Ocean to Ocean
Crucify
Hey Jupiter
Wednesday
Lady in Blue
Gold Dust (solo)
Purple People
Virginia
Addition Of Light Divided
Black-Dove (January)
Cornflake Girl» E n c o r e «
Bliss / Running Up That Hill (Kate Bush)
The Waitress
Banner image credit: Deanna Escobar
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