It’s been a busy year for singer-songwriter Tori Amos: After releasing her tenth studio album, Abnormally Attracted to Sin, in May, she found time during the ensuing tour to record her first holiday-themed record, Midwinter Graces, which arrived in stores yesterday. Her dramatic piano lines are intact, but the album deviates from Amos’s traditional style (most notably, it includes Christmas songs). As the daughter of a Reverend, Amos grew up surrounded by theology, and Graces is steeped in interpretations of old religious hymns. Vulture spoke with Amos about her new album on the phone from her home studio in Cornwall, England.

Is writing in this style harder for you?
Well, in order to make this kind of record and to have it work, I needed to know what the carol writers were doing, then you need to know the theology of where it came from in order to change it. I did change it in making it more inclusive rather than exclusive. Because some of these lyrics were written, it was in a very puritanical time. Women had no rights, they couldn’t vote. Some of the music would’ve been fifteenth century.

I love Tori Amos interviews, I always end up learning something new. Did YOU know that Xmas carols were written as drinking songs back in the day? I love that! Even before I heard the album, I knew that Tori would do her research first and then make the traditional songs we thought we knew into something wholly hers. I cannot stress enough how great this album is … I’m very happy to read in the comments that some of y’all agree that Midwinter Graces is one of Tori’s finest albums. If you’ve yet to hear it for yourselves, you can listen to the album in full HERE … and if you love it, I urge you to buy a copy to own. This album actually makes me look forward to Xmas … cuz it reminds me that what we are really celebrating is the Winter Solstice :)

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Despite rumors to the contrary, Neil Patrick Harris, star of How I Met Your Mother and host of this year’s Emmys, says he and partner David Burtka and are not expecting a child – yet. Still, “We’d make very good parents,” Harris, 36, tells New York Magazine. And they’re already making one very good couple. “We yin and yang very well,” he tells the magazine. “I’m just bowled over by him. I’m his forever protector, and I’m happiest when he’s happy.” But coming to terms with his sexuality in Hollywood wasn’t always so easy for the former child star of Doogie Howser, M.D. “I tried … dating different girls, being the funny, witty guy at the party,” he says. One person that helped inspire him? A gay Real World cast member. Danny Roberts, of The Real World: New Orleans, “was a unique entity at the time, as someone who was seemingly so confident in their own skin,” says Harris. As host of this year’s Emmy Awards, Harris jokes that he hoped to include the Muppets – specifically Statler and Waldorf up in the balcony – in the opening number. And while that plan didn’t pan out, the actor jokes, with self-mocking air quotes, that he’ll make this year’s show the “classy Emmys.” Tune in to the show Sept. 20 to see what he means!

I gotta say, I love the idea of NPH and David Burtka becoming parents … even tho they may not be expecting any children right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if these two do become dads sometime soon. After the jump, check out a few photos from NPH’s New York magazine photospread …

While I get that the photospread has a theatrical theme to it, I can’t help but be bothered by the coverphoto. Why does “Hollywood’s First (Openly) Gay Breakout Star” have to be wearing lipstick on a magazine cover? Personally, it seems to send the wrong message … that gay = men in make-up. While I and many of y’all understand the difference, there are a lot of folks out there who make the same assumption that all gay men like to dress like women. I find that insulting to both gay men and women. While it is really great to see Neil Patrick Harris on the covers of magazines, I’d be much happier if he was featured in a less confusing way.

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Victoria Beckham sat down with Harriet Mays Powell to talk about her new line — when she says that seeing her designs on a rack next to YSL is “more exciting than having a huge album,” we totally understand. She also introduces us to “Sucky, Sucky” dress and claims to do the dishes in a gold minidress. See? Posh is fun!

Wonder of wonders, the interview actually proves that VB is kinda, sorta human. After the jump, watch the clip in full …

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Women have been availing themselves of new faces since the dawn of plastic surgery, but suddenly it seemed that there was a better new face to be had. There is a New New Face, very different from the old one, and both my friend and Madonna now have it. Once I starting thinking of it in these terms—the face as the new handbag, say—I started seeing New New Faces everywhere: Demi Moore, Michelle Pfeiffer, Liz Hurley, Naomi Campbell, Stephanie Seymour. They all have it! Even the Olsen twins seem to have a starter version of the New New Face, with their big crazy doll eyes and plush lips. Just to be clear, I don’t presume to know exactly what any of these women have done to their faces, if anything at all. It’s possible (though in some cases before-and-after pictures would seem to suggest otherwise) that this face is occurring entirely naturally—after all, these are women who are famous for being beautiful. The point is that there is a noticeable aesthetic shift happening in the face, and that it’s dovetailing with quantum leaps in plastic surgery and dermatology. Through some unholy marriage of extreme fitness and calorie restriction (and maybe a little lipo), women have figured out how to tame their aging bodies for longer than ever. You see them everywhere in New York City: forty- and fiftysomethings who look better than a 25-year-old in a fitted little dress or a tight pair of jeans. But this level of fitness has created a new problem to which the New New Face is the solution—gauntness. Past a certain age, to paraphrase Catherine Deneuve, it’s either your fanny or your face. In other words, if your body is fierce (from yoga, Pilates, and the treadmill), your face will have no fat on it either and it will be … unfierce. It was only a matter of time before a certain segment of the female population would figure out how to have it both ways, even if it means working out two hours a day and then paying someone to volumize their faces, as they say in the dermatology business. As a friend of mine recently pointed out, there is now a whole new class of women walking around with wiry little bodies and “big ol’ baby faces.” And they look, well, if not exactly young, then attractive in a different way. A yoga body plus the New New Face may not be a fountain of youth, but it’s a fountain of indeterminate age. Psychologists and anthropologists have long tried to nail down what makes us perceive one face as beautiful and another not. There are theories about the math of it, the “Golden Ratio” — how, if you take careful measurements of the lines and triangles formed by a beautiful face, they will add up to the same proportions first noted by the Greeks to be aesthetically pleasing. More recently, a scientist named Michael Cunningham took it upon himself to study the faces of 50 women, half of whom were finalists in an international beauty pageant. In “Measuring the Physical in Physical Attractiveness” (italics mine), he wrote that the width of an eye, if it is to be part of a beautiful face, should be precisely three-tenths the width of the face, and the chin ought to be just one-fifth the height of the face, while the total area of the nose had better be less than 5 percent of the total area of the face or … you is ugly!

LOL! It’s an interesting article, one that I think has some bit of merit, but the cover is misleading. The assumption is that the writer knows specifics about the sort of nip/tucking that celebs are enjoying these days … when, in fact, the article is just an entire piece on assumption and conjecture. I don’t know that Maddy would take too kindly to being made the posterchild for this piece but I suppose she’s as good a candidate as any. At the end of the day, Madonna looks pretty amazing these days (well, except for that odd off day or two) and whatever it is that she does to keep looking so good is OK with me. On a playing field where the new starlets are getting younger every day, well, you gotta do what you gotta do. If plump is the new hot then plump away, I say.

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As Tim Gunn has discovered, there really is no time to rest when you’re trying to make the world a more stylish place … Gunn told us he won’t have a day off until September 22. “I have no vacation plans,” he said. “I’m traveling to the Project Runway set.” That would be the set of the last Project Runway to be shot in our fair city (and therefore possibly the last season of the show worth watching — ever.). Then it’s off to shoot Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style. But Gunn isn’t worried about his endless work schedule. What really freaks him out is the idea of moving to Los Angeles when Project Runway switches to Lifetime for season six. “Can I be honest with you?” he said. “I’m panicky about it, and the whole idea of moving to a place that has a big car culture has me apoplectic.” Gunn won’t be moving to Los Angeles permanently but will have to stay there for a whole five weeks while the season films. He says he’s not even sure he wants to get an apartment: “I may have a little lean-to inside the set, wherever it is, so I don’t have to worry about travel.” At least, unlike most New Yorkers, he knows how to drive. He just isn’t sure he knows how to drive in L.A. “I’m not a good highway person,” he said. “I’m much better at back roads. I’ll make it work.” And what of that ubiquitous catch phrase? Heidi Klum has indicated that the show might say “auf Wiedersehen” to a few old favorites like “Make it work.” Is it true? “What?! No,” Gunn said, aghast. “I couldn’t possibly. ‘Make it work’ comes with me. I’ve been saying it for decades.”

HMMM … more evidence that the first season of Project Runway to be made for Lifetime will permanently relocate to LA instead of NYC (as opposed to the bullshizz we were told when the news broke that Lifetime acquired the show which claimed the show would be shot in NYC and LA). This huge change does have me worried but I’m far from apoplectic about the matter (ap·o·plec·tic — of, relating to, or causing stroke). Personally, I’m sure that Tim Gunn will do well in LA — there are a lot of folks out here who love him and the show (the majority of those folks live in West Hollywood, CA). I just hope that producers don’t muck up the show to the point of complete and utter destruction of the brand. I don’t know that my frail little heart could take ruination of the show I lurve so much. Hearing Tim Gunn’s concerns doesn’t do much to appease my fears. I guess we’ll have to watch what happens (sorry Bravo).

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