I remember the strangest things. Faces in the crowd, like during a concert in Minneapolis. There were people in the audience whose exterior I could describe accurately even now, while they did not impress me at all backthere.

I think you have to know who you are, get to know the monster that lives in your soul, dive deep into your soul and explore it. I don't want to renounce my dark side. The truth has always held an enormous interest for me. Everything is therapeutic, no matter what you do.

When nothing makes sense, music seems to come and bring me a margarita and sit down with me.

You know how women always say men aren't emotionally available. Well, a lot of women aren't emotionally available. It's like, if you're vulnerable, we say, "Look, we need you to be sensitive." So you become sensitive, and yet we go, "You've got no fuckin' backbone." And we kick you in the face and run off with a ski trainer.

I'm a winter girl; I like coming out when things are desolate and everybody's ready to slit their wrists.

Lucifer understands love better than anybody. You know he's done a mean tango with Greta Garbo a few times.

The sense of loss is such a tricky one, because we always feel like our worth is tied up into stuff that we have, not that our worth can grow with things we are willing to lose.

The Chistians think they're the only ones - when they say God, its their God. I don't see the divine force as these religions. I think these are all demigods.

It's hard not to notice a girl with two-foot hair and plastic snakeshin boots up to her thighs, unfortunately. That's what my band, Y Kant Tori Read, was all about. I left home at 21 and I was off to the races.

[Tori on AOL chat, answering "What part of being famous sucks the most?"] You walk into a drug store ... and you just need to get some girl stuff, and you're sitting there with a kinda cute cashier boy person... having you do an autograph over your sanitary napkins for his girlfriend.

Musically, I always allow myself to jump off of cliffs. At least that's what it feels like to me. Whether that's what it actually sounds like might depend on what the listener brings to the songs. But, to me, this album sounds like the biggest cliff yet.

I really got a kick out of the way PETA, the American movement for animal rights, protested against the use of fur. I'm not a vegetarian, but I eat healthy and respect their opinion. I just don't believe in the somewhat fascist techniques they use. Spraying paint on fur is pure terrorism!

Usually they sprinkle a few drops of water on your head; in my case they held my head under for thirteen fucking years.

I'm sure I would've been the youngest child in jail for murdering my grandmother. At five, I just wanted to take the butter knife and slit the bitch's throat. At the same time, if I ran into her in between the worlds, y'know, I'd have a margarita with her. I'd fucking make her inject it before I talked to her. The problem with my grandmother - and a lot of Christian women form the Calvinist side - was that there was so much shame for a woman, with all of the self-righteousness and the finger-pointing. It was very hard for them to claim the dark side of their femininity. They couldn't say "Jesus, how can I be a sacred pure being *and* a hot pussy?"

I just hated my name. If a guy even started to look at me and they heard my name was Myra Ellen, it just created a limp dick immediately. I couldn't bear it. You wouldn't have believed some of the names I was going through at the time. I'll give you one. Sammy Jay. Obviously that was my Dallas period. That was my late-70's prime-time soap opera name. Or it could've been my porn name. I'll remember that when I date Tommy Lee.

Each song has a little soul, a little persona, it's own little birth certificate and favorite shoe shops.

If your work is really linear, that's not much to talk about.

I had a strange incident with a girl when I was eight. It was a bit violent, a bit sexual. She was a little older than me. She held me down on the bathroom floor, made me take my clothes off and fell on top of me. There are women now in my life I love and am in love with, but it hasn't got physical. I experienced it at such a young age, when I wasn't ready. A boundary was crossed. And maybe I drew a boundary, consciously.

You must immerse yourself, and be one hundred percent with something. I have yet even to get my feet wet.

It doesn't matter where I am as long as there is a fat Italian cook near by.

That energy force is within, and we're all connected to it. I believe completly in the great spirit.

There are things that I refuse to deal with except through my music... because I don't trust humanity that much, and I don't know if I trust me that much. But I trust the songs.

[On her fans] I don't call them groupies but "ears with feet". It's more about interaction. They give me something and I give them something. This is how friendship works.

A very internal record, this. "Under the Pink" is this world. Everybody's pink inside. If we tore all our skin off, we're all pink. It's what's within that interests me. You know there are many other things "under the pink", but these are the ones that came to the party. There are many other layers to this work that weren't in the other work.

A friend of mine at the time was dating some guy and she brought him to one of the clubs I was playing and he just looked at me and said, "You're a Tori". I just went, "You know what? I am." So from then on, I made out my cheques aka Tori. Then of course I found that it meant "little chicken" in Japanese.

The way I play is a bit tortuous, but at the same time, it's the only way I know how to play. It would be hard for me to hit those notes with that power and play with accuracy unless I supported myself physically the way I do.

Women must understand that simply attacking or hating all men is just another form of disempowerment. A woman has to realize that when she makes a man crawl it doesn't give her power. All it will do is make her puke eventually. Rather than say all men are bastards let's say all men are infants, until they decide to be men. Calling them bastards is boring at this stage.

Because the truth is you never know when it's all going to fall apart. When it does, you don't get budgets anymore. So I invest in gear. You invest in gear so that no matter what happens you can always make your records.

My dad was a minister so I bought the whole Christian thing, but all I really cared about was spaghetti or tapioca pudding. I just wanted to lay on my bed and squeeze my legs, which is what a young girl should do, although I didn't realize that at the time. I laid on my bed and squeezed my legs together and thought, "Oh, this is a curiousity."

I don't have to try in the least to shock people. My beliefs are sufficiently shocking to most people. Because we live in a culture where passion and sexuality have been replaced by shame. We are miles away from our hearts, our feelings. In Greek mythology the gods were sleeping with humans all the time. But the Christians claim Jesus was fathered without a single drop of sperm. There wasn't even a penis involved. It's a religion without penetration. And subsequently the same believers take their swords and chop the non-believers to pieces, stab babies to death and burn witches at the stake. And you think I'm shocking when I say I gave God a blowjob? Give me a fucking break.

There is a level where humans have been taught that they are so unworthy and incapable. What I try to inspire in my work is that we are capable. That energy force is within, and we're all connected to it.

I'm known as that girl who has tea with the Devil.

The girl who writes the songs never has to meet anybody. That's the deal we have together. She doesn't have to deal with journalists. She doesn't have to deal with anybody. She writes the songs and comes through the music but if it comes to anything else, she has a couple of little friends, she has a boyfriend she'll go play with, and a few ice cream coke float buddies, and she has a dominatrix friend who tells her secrets and stuff, but she does not deal with anyone else.

I've never played the guitar, except throwing it against the wall cause it was pissed off I couldn't play it.

[On the Cure's "Love Song"] Whenever a relationship of mine is falling apart I hear this song, usually on the radio. The relationship's falling apart and I'm contemplating doing something very naughty and on it comes, going, "I will always love you, whatever words I say" and I get all sad and weepy and want to get back together with the person I'm with. There's something about this song. I wish some guy had written it for me. I write all these songs for guys. God, I sound all pouty. I don't mean to whine, I hate whiners. But no one's ever written anything for me. They just go, "Write me something, babe."

Most boys would like to think they're the flu, wouldn't they? But they're really just a... hachoo.

Somebody will come backstage and go, "You saved me". And I have to go, "Stop right there. You saved yourself."

As my shrink said to me, "There's got to be a time where you look at me and you don't need me anymore. I can become your friend and you can come and have tea with me, but you won't need me."

You have to be a team player, even if you're a solo artist.

My songs are like friends. I have a special relationship with my songs and some of them I always want to have around me. I want to hold on to them. Others are not always so close to me. They're still friends, but I don't need to have them around all the time. But they're still my friends. They're still close to me; they're still my creatures but they need to go on holiday sometimes.

The reason I love to play [the pianos] Bosendorfers is because I think their whole manufacturing process is trying to keep them as unmechanical, as unfactorized as possible, so that the soul of everybody who touches one or works with it is in there.

There wouldn't be a lot of aubsers out there either, if the victims weren't giving them the whip.

I am finding that vulnerability gives me great strength, because you're not hiding anymore. It's really about being a pioneer for myself, going into the places where I am not being taught. I have to teach myself.

I talk to a lot of strangers through my music. But it's not like I sit down with everybody and have spaghetti afterwards.

I have a love for shoes. I collect them. Race cars, paintings; those aren't my thing. I just hang shoes on the wall. They're architecture, you know?

Every Friday night I have a margarita with a Christian God. I'll share the observations of my week, and ask for answers and try to keep an open mind. Then we both move on.

Pretty is never beautiful.

If you buy into the fame trip, then you've really lost sight of why you're making music. Fame has just got to be a sideline. It goes with the territory, and once you understand that it's a bit like mosquitos. If you're going to live in the wilderness there are going to be mosquitos.

When I work with musicians, you always want to get the best of them and to get the best of them, you've got to give them some head, which is a dangerous phrase.

Don't let them tell you that the mind is greater than the heart. That is a trap. The mind is very tricky. I don't trust my mind. It's really good, but I don't trust it.

I like butter and the people who like butter.

People can be so vicious toward the imaginary world and it saddens me. You kill a lot of little people's dreams that way. You're no different from Hitler, as far as I'm concerned.

I don't feel a part of any kind of sisterhood. Again, it's the most disappointing thing where I get criticized by women more than men on how I play the piano. They find it offensive. I'm just going, well, this is how I choose to express myself, so if you're truly a strong, independent woman, then how could you possibly find me being a strong, independent woman offensive?

Forgiveness is the most important thing about friendship.

My father wanted me to have a doctorate in music - but I told him that Warner Brothers doesn't give a shit whether you have a degree or not.

What's good singing? You're just appealing to people's likes and dislikes. Who's to criticize? What they like sometimes is what they hear the most.

[On "From the Choirgirl Hotel"] The idea of a series of songs with the same basic sound didn't appeal to me. The woman in "She's Your Cocaine", which is about a reptile woman who has no fidelity to sisterhood, had to be distinct from the woman in "Spark", who's addicted to nicotine patches.

And again, it's really working through being a victim. You can't blame the men anymore; there's always you. It comes back to us; it comes back to me.

If you wan to make a variety of different harmonies... if you want to have different frequencies in your work, you expand. You know, you can only go as far as your musical vocabulary.

People are afraid of what they might find if they try to analyze themselves too much, but you have to crawl into the wound to discover what your fears are. Once the bleeding starts, the cleansing can begin.

I'll never forget the first time I hear about Kate [Bush]. I was playing in a club, I was 18 or 19 and somebody came up to me, pointed their finger and said, Kate Bush. I went, Who's that? I wasn't really familiar because Kate didn't really happen in the States until Hounds Of Love. I was shocked because the last thing you want to hear is that you sound like someone else. Then people kept mentioning her name when they heard me sing, to the point where I finally went and got her records. When I first heard her, I went Wow, she does things that I've never heard anybody do, much less me. But I could hear a resonance in the voice where you'd think we were distantly related or something.

I have horrible nightmares. My nightmares are just like a horror movie. I mean, Mr Blond lives in my head. It's that repressed anger, it doesn't just go away, it breathes in another form in your psyche. You begin to know who your demons are and I think that's where you grow as a being.

Yeah, there was a period in the late '80s where I was working with different shaman. Myself and a friend Beene would take Iowaska - but it wouldn't be in the liquid form, it would be a freeze-dried pill - and mushrooms. Some of those trips were eighteen hours long and I'll never forget, once I ended up sitting by the bush trying to ask the flowers why they didn't like me. It's like, Why can't I be your friend? I was crawling out of my skin at that time. In my twenties I was really... I was just losing my mind.

People play games when they've got you under the microscope and when they don't understand something I say or an experience that I've talked about. They jump on it and try and make it look silly or insane.

So I'm in Virginia, and I had crabs... I keep saying that! I had crab sickness, I had eaten bad crabs in Maryland!

Even if you don't read history or you aren't interested in anything that happened before the '60s, there are reasons why we think the way we do. There are reasons why people are going crazy right now.

Give the kids tools, so they can go build their own houses; not the blueprint of what the houses should be.

Being a minister's daughter, I could tell the moods of people my father counseled. I've been through a lot because so many people I know have been through a lot.

I've been known to have Tourette's syndrome when I meet people in the music business. I'm intolerant of rudeness. Record company people get lazy and think they they're above the law, and artists forget that being a moron just because you're successful might get tiring quicky.

You know the sad thing about theaters? They always look best from up on the stage. And I'm the only who can see it from here.

You're really there to kind of take people to the underworld. That's what you do. And everybody has to be given the liberty to bring whoever they want to bring... the demons, the passionate sides to themselves that they've cut out, whatever it is.

The word "confession", to me, means needing to be absolved. I'm not asking for forgiveness. I'm not asking people to understand. I'd like to think that I tell stories and sometimes my life weaves through it.

I don't have a computer. I stay away from the internet mainly because I don't want to know what color underwear I was wearing during soundcheck. I just don't want to know.

What sense does it make to load yourself with drugs so much that you are not noticing anything anymore?

Playing is the only place where I've felt in touch with my sexuality, my spirituality and my emotions, and never ever, ever anywhere else. So my life is a bit tricky because when I'm not playing, I'm just trying to walk down the street.

[On Alanis Morissette and "Jagged Little Pill"] I really like her. She's such a good person. I like her as a person a lot. I like the songwriting and I think I like her singing but I've got to tell you, I have a hard time listening to that record, just on a sonic level. It would make a dog's ears hurt. I hate records that have so much high end and no bottom.

The rebellion is not about what clothes you are wearing or whether you turn your back to the audience - it's not about shocking for the shock's sake. It's not about singing Smack My Bitch Up and pretending to be hard. All you do is to get your name on K-Mart's black list. It easy, and boring. So Prodigy, if you want to be hard, go to an abortion clinic and try to help those girls who have had an abortion in a front of 20 shotguns. Try to be rough and don't tell how you beat up your girlfriends, if you got the balls to do that.

I go into a real vulnerable side of myself. That's where I am finding a lot of hidden stuff, as a woman afraid to be vulnerable, because I think I will be weak, thinking I'll be taken advantage of, thinking I won't know where to draw the line. But I am finding that vulnerability gives me great strength, because you're not hiding anymore!

My dad likes my success. He enjoys it for a lot of reasons. Yes, he's proud of me and so is my mom, and I think he likes that I stir it up because he has questioned a lot of the things that he preached about for so many years.

[On the speculations about Courtney Love having inspired "Professional Widow"] Let's put it this way. Courtney and I have never spoken. We've never spoken about it and we've never spoken and I think it's best kept that way. We have mutual friends. I don't want to put them in a bad position.

I was pregnant. I got pregnant on tour, it was a surprise, but I was deeply thrilled about it. I was almost three months pregnant... Christmas '96... and I miscarried. And it was very difficult. The sorrow was just really deep. I know some people who've gone through it and they move on quickly. Everybody responds differently to a loss. I got quite attached to the spirit of this being. It was a girl. That's why on Playboy Mommy, I sing, "Don't judge me so harsh, little girl." I had so many responses to it before I could get to the place where I am now. You see people hit their kids in stores and you just go, What force of judgment gives these people these little lives? I have a lot of questions right now. I know it's a free-will planet. Things happen. But you know that saying, Bad things don't happen to good people? That's a painful lie, and it hits you on such a core-level. I know now that I have an appreciation for the miracle of life that I didn't have, but I don't believe in the saying that it all happens for the best... it's just not appropriate.

I feel if you talk about the self it's like a microcosm of wider issues. I know I go into areas which are threatening because it's all about the human going in to play with them. That's how I find out what I'm made up of.

That was my role when I was nine - a freak child.

I have a fascination for people. I don't like them all, but I have a fascination with human nature.

[On "Silent All These Years"] The bumble bee piano tinkle came first. This one evolved slowly but it stayed an obsession until it was finished. I entered boxer occupation - part of me not wanting to hear what 'I' was saying the other part fighting off 'The Brain Drain.' I finally distracted 'The Brain Drain' with the task of filing chocolate cake recipes.

I'm not a part of this buisness. I was playing music before people were peeing in their beds.

Just because people don't know their myths and hardly read anymore, does it mean I'm cryptic or does it mean we're just very uneducated as far as our word paints. Our pallets are like four colors now. We're back to red, blue and what's the other one? See what I'm saying. I do feel sometimes that if it's not three-dimensional and so tangible that it can work back-to-back with Riki Lake and Jerry Springer then people think the writers aren't making sense. To me, the audience isn't making sense. I feel half the audience is working on a McDonald's mentality-and I have no problem with the french fries. They're all over my thighs. Left, right and center, they're there-you'll find them if we ever wind up in a coffin together. But I do feel like I'm encouraging college students to stretch. You all have a responsibility to understand your writers rather then rolling your eyes and concluding they're not making sense. Or maybe you're just a dingbat.

It's one thing to be a glitter girl, but it's another thing to be all woman.

Well what I know is how I think and how I feel and what I believe are not things that people really want to talk about. So yes, I know that in my unconscious there are things that are kinda pukey. Even if I'm saying it to get you going, it's like, Hey, this thought came from me, so on some level, I'm OK with talking about it. If I talk about anything in my songs, and I tell you I never have these feelings, that I'm just lying about it, then I'm lying through my teeth. That's like, y'know, showing up at a porno movie to eat the popcorn.

I don't find anything cutting-edge about "Smack My Bitch Up" [by Prodigy]. The thing that bugged me is that if you're going to say something, you stand by what you say. Or you just be honest and say, Look, I hit my girlfriend and that's my statement, love me or hate me. I think it's honest that all sorts of feelings come up, but you have to stand by your work as a writer. You can't say stuff that's gonna stir people up and then not be willing to stand by it. But then it's not fair for me to say that it's wrong for them to have that thought either. look at the thoughts I've had - killing people, mangling people, hurting myself, having sex with God. But these were my thoughts. Whether I acted on them or not, that's between me and my maker.

[About her miscarriage in '96] It took over, I think, the way I.... y'know, once you've felt life in your body, you can't go back to having been a woman that's never carried life. The other thing is feeling something dying inside you and you're still alive. Obviously when it was happening, it was already over but in your mind, you don't know that yet. You're doing anything, thinking, Oh God maybe if I put a cork up myself, maybe it'll keep this little life in. That's why in Spark, I say, "She's convinced she could hold back a glacier / But she couldn't keep a baby alive." You just start going insane. There's nothing you can do, so you surrender and then... start again.

[About her wedding] It wasn't medieval in as much as... it's not like I ransacked the set of Camelot doing dinner theatre up in Sheffield. We got married in West Wycombe and I just wanted something that... we wanted it really private. But there is a side to me that believes in magic. Yeah, I really believe in that force [of the fairies], I believe in the elementals. I believe that when you call on certain forces and if you respect them, sometimes, they are there for you. I figured if I had it where there were trees and water then maybe the fairies would show up.

Do you know what it's like to be a girl and have blood running down your legs and think that you're dying, just because no one's told you that's what happens? It's horrible.

[On "Bells For Her"] Sometimes, but not very often, I journey to this place of bells. I know I'm there when I see the blue floodlights and I have no hunger for anything, husks of wedding dresses, horse carts, silver liberty churches - anything that I associate with bells remains unharvested. Until I journey to this dimension of bells where I hear them like they never tasted before.

I think I had a pretty average childhood. I wasn't stolen and raised by gypsies, I wasn't sexually abused. I had loving parents. You can't really say my parents put me in a cage with a parakeet. We feel that because nothing dramatic happened that we have no right to look back at our past. But things come up that push my buttons.

I was in love with this boy when I was five years old and I knew we could really make it work. I was trying to convince him and he took this hammer and hit me with it really hard.

I might put out a live record because the people that come to the shows have been asking me to do this for a long time. They have a lot of shitty bootlegs out there.

I've been fourtunate because men have been very creative as far as romance goes. One man took me to a cliff - I thought he was going to throw me off, but he took out a bottle of wine and an elaborate picnic.

You know how in that Warner Bros. Skunk cartoon where that girl skunk comes and the boy skunk smells her scent and he's just off? That's what happens: This girl skunk comes and, and whether she's a song, a rhthym, or whatever, I'm just following her.

[About "Siren"] When they gave me this project, I felt really challenged. I tried to contribute something that I thought would add a different subtext to the scene and give Ethan Hawke's character a different angle.

It like blows my mind when people want to rewrite the facts. Like Thanksgiving; if you really want to do something on Thanksgiving, give something back to the Native Americans. Thanksgiving was about those people saving our asses, and it became mass genocide. We systematically killed all the braves. Hello?

I haven't missed a show yet; I don't know whether that's a good or a bad thing. Maybe I should have. Some musicians will do anything to cancel, a little ache in their throat or whatever. I'm not like that. I've been playing since I was two and a half and I really see it as being, well...you be great at what you do. You be stellar. I believe in excellence. I've done three world tours and I haven't cancelled one show yet.

I've never felt anything that moves me as much as my piano. I'm an emotional player. I don't really like people. I prefer my piano to people. It's totally reliable and it's alive. I can hear what it's saying. For the most part, piano are female to me. Sometimes they're dykes, and they're always good fun.

My father suggested I take my songs and play them homeplace. So I got a job at a local gay bar in Washington DC, playing for free. I used to play there when I was 13, wearing my sister's polyester pants and all made-up to look older. I was happy.

It has crossed my mind maybe that the public doesn't want my ultimate. But I can't censor or contrive. I think I'm lucky to have skated through under the guise of pop musician. I'm really a classical musician. If I get found out now, if the whistle is blown... maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Poppa always said the South was so confusing because the it smells the sweetest after a lynching. That's because after a lynching the goddess cries and the honeysuckle never smelled sweeter.

I felt like I had relationships with these dead icons [classical music composers] that, to me, would have been just hanging out in a house with loads of people, making music and probably having sex with most of 'em. Their music became a champagne social thing, when these guys were the Nirvana of their day.

My girlfriends will tell you, I'm really into hanging out with women friends and having a margarita and being a good listener. If you went to the pub at the end of the world, you wouldn't expect me to be on the other side of the bar making margaritas, but I would. That's what I'm like.

[On "Girl"] The beginnings were composed on an old upright in Virginia. It's horribly out of tune which is one of the things I love about it. The chorus was written but that's about it I threw it down on tape and forgot about it months later I was cleaning the house (truly a happening) and was throwing tapes away. Eric intercepted this one out of a pile I was chopping onions in the kitchen he brought it in and said "listen" - I did.

I never had a fantasy of being a bride as a child after I realised that Robert Plant would never marry me. And with Dad being a preacher, I saw too many weddings. You see, I don't think I could ever have gotten married in America.

[On "Playboy Mommy"] I strarted finding the people inside me; the prostitute that's really angry because I judged her so harshly, the self-righteous virgin who knows everything about sex and has never made love.

I am very interested in what is strong and what is weak in a person. Interested in my vision of self--how people see me instead of how I see myself. I'll pull out each part of this being that is judged harshly, and some of these parts are extreme. For instance, "Professional Widow" is an extreme part. It can get hard because I want to be king. All of us women want to be king but we have to be queens. You know, it's like Lady Macbeth or something.

The second grade was a bummer. I sat in the corner more than any other kid in the class until the ninth grade. I tried to be an inspiring force but my teachers and I were at odds. Independent thinking was not their priority.

It goes back to studying mythology and really getting fascinated with a race of people who were driven underground. They were called faeries in later lore, but they've become this whole caricature. This is difficult to explain to people, when all they can think about is Tinkerbell.

A name holds an energy, like anything else. Look at "Ruby Tuesday". I think Talula is about rhythm and tone and sensuality. It ain't fucking Catherine. There's something in there about West Indian dance. And yet it's a very classic name too. Talula really just started to represent all women to me; women that let themselved dance for themselves.

I use innocence in my demeanor like a Venus flytrap.

We all have creative gifts. My circuitry doesn't work for scientific thing. I'm not helpful when somebody's sick or ill, but I can help with an emotional something. That's why I can't avoid the subject totally, because it is what it is. I'm very aware that there's such a world out there that exists as thoughts that you can tap into if you can...it's the only way I know how to talk. I mean, I don't use crystal suppositories every day... just on Tuesdays.

I'm the Queen of the nerds.

When I started watching my behavior and seeing how I would control people, and how they would control me, it was awareness. I want awareness more than anything, and part of awareness is being able to honor the part of you that's Lady Macbeth.

Wear your butterflies with pride.

I'm doing this so that people who feel that at 21 their lives are over, or they don't know how to have an intimate physical relationship, that they can be beautiful people again.

Almost every culture, every group, quote, unquote, has a way it wants to perceive things. And when I write songs, the Christians feel that because I'm not speaking the way they would like me to, that I don't believe in God, that I'm not part of the Christian formula. But being a minister's daughter, I know it very well.

[On "Boys for Pele"] It's not a revenge record but a releasing record. I've been angry at myself, too, for getting into certain situations with men. Anger is healthy, but out of balance if it doesn't have compassion.

I always met men in my life as a musician, and there would be magic, adoration. But then it would wear off. All of us want to be adored, even for five minutes a day, and nothing these men gave me was ever enough.

If you're brought up with parents who are painters, you probably see everything in light and shade; I can smell a rat real quick when someone tries to tell me their way is the way. And see, I don't think my way is the way for everybody.

A cornflake girl is wonderbread whereas a raisin girl is whole wheat bread.

If it's yummy, I'm there. But if it's mushed up beetles, I don't think so!

I like the freedom of being alone because there's an intimacy that I develop with the audience that I wouldn't otherwise. I mean, they could just as easily bond with the drummer. And the more distractions I give them, the easier it is for them to avoid what I'm talking about.

I don't need my hair sprayed out ten inches and my bra showing through.

I'm not sane.

If you look at rock culture, there is very much a desire for the sacred bridegroom to die. The sacred brides don't die much. Janis Joplin is one of the very few.

My father was a Christian minister. I grew up in dirt-poor hillbilly country. We lived this dry-below-the-waist kind of scene. If you were a sensual woman you were in league with that which is un-Christlike. Where I come from, a cockroach is a roach, and a cockerel is a rooster because they can't bring themselves to say cock. Some of my lyrics upset my father.

"Zebra" gets invited to all the parties. "Blood Roses" doesn't get invited out a lot. She's alright about that. She's very aware of a thing that I haven't dealt with: faithful anger. Anger expressed faithfully. I think she's come to visit me blocked away.

In our minds, love and lust are really seperated. it's hard to find someone that can be kind and you can trust enough to leave your kids with, and isn't afraid to throw her man up against the wall and lick him from head to toe.

There are a lot of hidden nerds. I'm aware of the exciting man in Trent The Nine Inch, but I can see the nerd in him, too. People who become the front runners often used to be outcasts or loners.

I really enjoy having a giggle with a friend, but then someone crosses my line, then I don't really take it lightly. Some guy flipped me off recently in L.A. and I started chasing this group of Mexican guys down the road. I sometimes forget I'm not 7'2 and a Viking.

There is room for everybody on the planet to be creative and conscious if you're your own person.

Sometimes I would rather keep my secrets my own. Anyway, there are some boundaries I won't cross, some things I won't say.

There are some really good things about the teachings of Jesus, but Jesus had nothing to do with modern day Christianity.

I know I'm not like a picnic in the city on Sunday; but when you wake up one morning and you are making these gingerbread muffins for breakfast and you are dropping razor blades into them just to see how he reacts, you have to pull back and say, "hang on a minute". And that's really where the record ["Boys for Pele"] stems from. It's from being a woman alone and not being able to hide behind anyone else's personality.

I don't see myself as weird, I just see myself as honest.

Music is the most powerful medium in the world because of the frequencies. You're hitting places in people that remind them that they're more than just this functional being that makes money, eats and shits and comes.

I come to share, a personal, a real personal secret together, and it's reciprocal. I get a lot back from that audience. I'm very, very dependent on the crowd, very dependent.

[On "Blood Roses"] Let go and love, fuck that shit! My heart is scarred. I have a tear running down the middle of it and I'm not ready to say, "Let go and love."

I think that they were kind of hoping that I would be Neneh Cherry if they just turned their backs... to put it mildly, they were very disappointed.

Of course I believe in past lives, I mean, three quarters of the human race believes this, it's not like a great new thought here.

My strength has been to open again, to live, and my victory is the fact that, despite it all, I kept alive my vulnerability.

The main following is coming from the colleges. But thats because they're into poetry... they just don't want to hear another, you know I'm not here to bash anybody else's music, but "Hold me tonight, make it OK" from another girl, because thats not what we're all about as people. I'm a bit more graphic.

How can anyone have an understanding of the virgin if they don't also have an understanding of the prostitute, the saint and sinner in one body? Attempting to reconcile these opposing forces in my own nature is my goal.

In twenty years we're gonna wake up in a tidal wave of crap.

Maybe it's part of my upbringing, but I really am on a quest to get down to the bottom of an argument.

Well, women and music have been around for a couple hundred years now, but men have mainly dominated it. You'll have a few women popping out in art or literature, but being a female musician is tough.

A lot of times, the animal that bit you, you have to go and commune with that animal to release the poison, to release that bite, to understand the infection that it causes.

I've been a musician before I was a human.

History has recorded some pretty nasty things that have happened to people. I think we remember. I think it's in our cells and I think it can still hurt sometimes.

If people can't see things from the other side that's not my problem, it's theirs.

Any kind of relationship that's just based on functionalism I'm not interested in. For me the real giggles come out of tragedy. I'll have slapstick for five minutes when I'm bored, but there's black comedies where I live. There are moments when I was just laughing my ass off. How can you not? We're all gross, if we're honest. And you know, Amen for the truth.

The worst way to insult the Americans is to question their moral smugness.

There are only ten ideas under the sun. What makes the difference is how you spice them.

I'm the thing that fundamentalist Christians cringe over.

You can never believe what you are up to when you're up to it, of course.

I don't think I'm singing to a bunch of ding-a-lings. If they show me differently, then I misread them.

People can travel great distances on a computer, so why can't we travel that way emotionally?

I wish we could go in a time capsule to a Sunday dinner at my home. You'd think these people are so warm, but boy do you disagree with them. When I was very little I got into trouble for wondering if Jesus had a thing going with Mary Magdalene.

Healing takes courage, and we all have courage, even if we have to dig a little to find it.

I'm not nice music for your apartment.

I think in all cultures on the planet there's an inbalance of the feminine. Within men, within women. It's about honour. Honour. You see a lot of angry women, bittered women because they haven't released their anger and then healed.

You see, I didn't get married because I didn't have anything to do. I really looked at this man [Mark Hawley] and thought "this person is incredibly unique and I don't want to be with anybody else".

The meaning of life is bran in your diet. I'm gonna eat some pasta now.

I've played a lot of universities... they're real thinkers. They talk about stuff, they yell things out at the concert, and we have a little chat. They know that they're the future; I wanna play to them because they're the future.

The goal that my shrink had for me was that I could be intimate as a woman again, eventually, and not be controlled by the way I was violated.

[On her cover "Landslide"] I like to play this sometimes when I'm sad, it doesn't mean I'm sad, I just like to be sad.

What would we do without our assholes?

I'm a tomato freak, but sometimes you have to get it in ketchup form for people to be able to open to tomatoes.

[To rude members of the audience in Mansfield, May '99] Either shut up or show me your dicks!

I find that college students have been really open to what I'm talking about because its an open place to be on a campus. They're away from the real world, thats why it can be so magical. Every ear gets whispered in, its almost like a womb.

I had good memories of who I was before I was five, and then I became everybody else's idea of who I was.

I think my mom would like to tag along and have a dance with him [Lucifer] because she's been a minister's wife for so long!

When you come to my shows, you think you're walking into this really yummy lunch, and little do you know you ARE lunch.

You see, I'm not music theory smart. To me, it's an internal, instinctive thing. It's like, I don't care if this is making mathematical sense, I am not creaming. If I'm really honest, looking back, I wanted my father to be proud of me. But I couldn't do it in that way, because it has to be in your soul to be a great concert pianist.

[On "Cornflake Girl"] I would like to think I'm a raisin' girl, because in my mind they're more open minded. Cornflake girls are totally self centered, don't care about anything or anybody.

Once you get to know sad... she's got some sweet little dresses, you know?

The people on the internet know more about what I am doing than I do. Like, they will say that I am going to be in this mall on this day, and sure enough, I am there.

You can only be you. A lot of times it's never enough for people.

The woman in "Playboy Mommy", she'll swallow. She'd swallow a million seeds to protect this little girl.

I don't hide much, but sometimes people don't understand that I talk about them. Then we sit in the same room and they haven't got a clue. That's also the reason why I don't want to explain every detail of my work.

Truly, I was a sweetheart when I was little, like the Honeysuckle Faery. Sweet-pea. But sweet-peas are not popular after second grade. Sweet-peas become nerds really fast.

What really pisses me off is that the British aren't self-made; they want to win the lottery or go on the dole. I hate people who bitch about people who do well - if someone wants my career they should get off their butt and play in a band for 14 years.

Please tell me what cellulite cream I should use, before I get the wrong one.

I hated my name. My body was screaming to be called something, and it wasn't Myra Ellen.

People can travel great distances on a computer, so why can't we travel that way emotionally?

If you get a band you wanna rock. This is not the Lilith Fair. We love those girls, but come fucking on! If we're gonna do it, let's open for Metallica.

Eric and I were inseparable, and the truth is I don't care any less for him. We just agreed that we needed to go and be independent of each other.

[On "Happy Phantom"] When the songs began showing up I wrote their names on separate envelopes and made a faery ring in the middle of the house. I'd go sit in the middle of the ring to focus on a song's direction. All of the songs seemed to work towards the completeness of the other, and they decided we needed to hang out with death for awhile.

I think the institutions teach you what to think, not how to think, and I'm a big believer in a person having a choice in how they express their belief.

[About her live performing] I'm a road dog, I love being on the road.

Eric made me go to Taos, because he was drawn there, and he kept saying, "You must come, you must come, you must feel this place". When I went there, the minute I was there I knew it was right for recording "Under the Pink".

I started to look at Christianity as Christian mythology instead of this be-all and end-all of what exists. Then I opened myself to many other faith systems the Christians I was surrounded by weren't open to.

Just because I can't write songs sometimes doesn't mean that creative force isn't going. It's cheating on me. It's with Jewel.

I believe that evil is seen most from those who are trying to stamp out evil.

[On "Playboy Mommy"] I strarted finding the people inside me; the prostitute that's really angry because I judged her so harshly, the self-righteous virgin who knows everything about sex and has never made love.

It's really tough to stay around right now. If you notice, a lot of people you hear them for one album and then they're gone. It's not because they're not creating anymore, it's because there is no loyalty with radio, like there used to be.

There are things that I would disagree with Jesus about - and I feel really good about that.

[On her "Y Kant Tori Read" years] I wish I could get into those plastic snake pants again!

It got to the stage where I was sick of playing "Feelings" seven times a night at The Marriot. It thought I was going to kill the next person that asked me to play "Memory" from Cats.

I'm begining to accept and love the parts of me, of women that I was trained to hate all my life. Particularly the bad girl I can still be.

[On the video for "Spark"] I don't know about making pop videos. I know about you know, making little films. That's what I try to do. What it was really about is this woman is in a situation and you find out later she was in the trunk of this car, and miraculously this car accident saves her life. To have your hands tied behind your back and be blindfolded to have that experience and really have to get from one end of Dartmoor to the other it was... you hear better, your instincts get better.

It's so difficult to be critical of children because they need to discover themselves. We're always telling them, "No, the tree has green leaves!"

Me, cynical?

Being in love was not the most important thing to me; being respected was.

I was a rebel for such a long time... to the point where I put on these sexual shows for the sake of shock value. I'm tired of being a rebel. Now I just want to be me.

[Modificato da +Raffa+ 12/03/2006 18.32]

At the age of 3, I was playing the piano, at 4 I was composing and at 5 I decided I would be a rock star.

When things get really empty for me - empty in my outer life - in my inner life, the music world, the songs come across galaxies to find me.

With this record ["Little Earthquakes"], a song like "Silent All These Years" has a certain story line going on musically that's really the antithesis of what's going on verbally. It's counterpoint, pure and simple. But instead of French horns and cellos or something, it's words and music. And I find it very exciting when an acoustic instrument has its knife out. It can take on these different roles. The idea of being a woman... you come over to my house and I'm serving a fruit plate. That's not always going to happen. Especially if somebody isn't being polite, or if somebody's being a dick. Then I'm going to put the peelings on the floor and watch you trip, and giggle. And that's the same with the acoustic instrument. It's not always just about, "I'm vulnerable, I'm sad." There are many different sides, and the beauty comes in exploring them.

I love being in a skirt and boots. It goes back to the librarian-principal look. I like the idea of carrying books around in a skirt.

I mean the music always came first, then the words. I have to hunt them down. Some people think I make absolutely no sense at all!

The feminine, the female, the essence of woman, the sensuality of it, is sacred. Those in the patriarchy making these decisions have been really terrified of holding the spiritual side and the physical side of themselves. There is a line in "Zero Point" [an unreleased track, n.d.r.] where I sing, "Take off, life off, creaming Jesus still." To me, if you are really into the balanced state, you are creaming the divine.

[About her miscarriage and her marriage with Mark Hawley] I just think the whole thing was, the love doesn't go away. Even though we lost the baby, I never really had opened up for somebody before. And that's the thing -- maybe like the Grinch, your heart grows 40 times.

Friendship is a very sacred word and I don't throw it around lightly.

I do believe that music has a coding that nothing else has. That's why there are so many different styles of music. It's so exciting because so many people are carrying a similar message, but just a different vibration.

Some things about myself are not my business. Like people's opinions of me.

I get tired of pop songs that have the same form, which really bores me. So I'm always trying to push that for myself, and if I don't do that as a musician, I feel like I've let myself down. That's all.

I thought Robert Plant should marry me when I was eight. You know, I was kind of out of my mind.

Everything started going wrong when i stopped listening to the faeries.

[About the picture in the "Boys for Pele" booklet in which she breast-feeds a little pig] It's the metaphor of embracing the hidden, the ugly, the shameful. Everybody talks about it, sure yeah. But you know that's a reflection on them because if you really look at this picture, this is mother and child. I'm very aware of what this is going to bring up, but that doesn't mean this is wrong. That means the oppression of this thought is wrong.

I'm a musician first, a food-lover second, a dirty mouth with feet, and a girl last time I checked.

The violence between women is unbelievable. Women try to make each other crawl so that their knees are bleeding.

If you don't think, and you have no wit, and you have so many hangups that you can't look beyond your cup of coffee, then you're never going to understand what I'm really saying. Because you know what? You're going to shut down and close off before you hear me. If I'm threatening you, you're going to see it the way you need to see it so you can dismiss me.

You can't separate completely from whoever made you, because they're a part of you.

You know that saying, "Bad things don't happen to good people"? That's a painful lie, and it hits you on such a core level.

If they keep crashing stuff into the moon trying to find water and then the moon gets pissed off and the tides change and all women start PMSing together, you guys are going to fucking regret that.

I don't spend any time on line. I spend time with boys who spend a lot of time on line. Let's put it that way. I kind of get it indirectly. I spend most of my time with my Bosendorfer.

[On "To Venus and Back"] I was just writing and writing. I knew by the end of March that I had a new album's worth of material on my hands, but I was just going to use some of them for the B-sides album. But the band thought it would sound too random. Sonically, they're all living in a world together, and to take them out of that... how do you just hijack a planet from its own solar system? I realized it needed to be a new album and a live album.

All my pianos are girls and some of them are dykes. They're women with different desires, wants, needs. I see them as female, sorta like ships.

The subconscious is where we mostly work from, but yet, none of us really know how to get to the subconscious, so what you do is bring your little credit cards, of how you want me to view you and I bring you mine of how I want you to view me.

When you stop putting yourself on the line, and you don't touch your own heart, how do you expect to touch other people?

I think that happiness is when you can let yourself feel every emotion you want at any time instead of being a lying little fuck.

Sometimes I think the Christians really misunderstand. They think I don't like them and, it's not that at all. It's that there has to be a place where you don't dishonor my spirituality and I don't dishonor yours.

What girls do to each other is beyond description. No Chinese torture comes close.

I am a hunter. I hunt frequencies, I hunt sounds and I hunt emotions. And sometimes I hunt those who want to challenge me. There is this side of me which has blood in the corners of the mouth.

"Riot Proof" is for all those jocks out there who need to deal with their secret sexuality.

Sometimes I ask myself if I am really dreaming, or if I have some evil twin who does all these things I'm dreaming.

I'm not an either-or person. I'm excited about the whole MP3 thing, I think it works for some people, but I'm really into the integrity of people showing appreciation for the artists. Not everything is free. Good wine is not free. As a hostess, when people come, I always serve them good wine, but I think if you're going to a vineyard...They give me things to drink, but there is reciprocation. I usually buy a case. With computers, there's a way to be generous but a way to give respect.

[About her early twenties] A decade ago I had an amount of energy, like a fireball that was so amped there were times I would just burn myself up and become a cinder.

I think the most dangerous word is envy. People always call it "jealousy", but I think "envy" is a better word. To my mind, that's the root of all evil.

If I saw someone destroying a piano, I'd fucking murder them! I wouldn't think twice!

There has to be a Dionysian frenzy, in that there has to be a place in any experience where, um, whether it's in a church service, in a theatre or the fire ceremony, if you're with the medicine women, you cross over to the other side. If you don't take people there, you haven't done your job.

We put men under pressure too much by expecting them to make us happy. I want to get happy by my inner energy.

I put out a party when I put out an album and if people show up, they show up and if they don't, the quality of the wine does not change. You know what I'm saying?

In 1990 I had this friend, Rantz, and when he went to Parsons Art School in LA he crashed at my apartment for a while. It was this tiny single behind the Methodist Church on Highland Avenue. Rantz left a copy of Neil's book "The Dolls House" lying around. I picked it up, and found myself drawn to it over the next couple of weeks. Then I wrote this song called "Tear In Your Hand", which made reference to Neil, although it wasn't about him. I get inspired by different writers.

The songs started coming not long after I miscarried. The strange thing is, the love doesn't go away for this being that you've carried. You can't go back to being the person you were before you carried life. And yet you're not a mother, either, and you still are connected to a force, a being. And I was trying to find ways to keep that communication going. Along the way on the search, sort of walking with the undead, I would run into these songs. The one thing they kept saying to me was I had to find a deep woman's rhythmaYou begin to create where you can. If you can't create physical life, you find a life force. If that's in music, that's in music. I started to find this deep, primitive rhythm, and I started to move to it. And I held hands with sorrow, and I danced with her, and we giggled a bit. And this record really became about being alive enough to feel things, no matter what that is.

It seems like only men rule the place, but we women have, just like men, a dark side. When a man starts crying, he leaves as fast as he can. When a woman cries, she is acting like a poor little creature to keep her man with her. Just read the Bible or Greek tragedies and you'll see how women manipulate their environment. Emotional blackmail.

I can change a pair of shoes in the middle of the song and it's OK. That there is no structure that says I have to wear the same pair all the way through. As long as I've got feet, it's all right.

Sometimes people want me to give them what their human value is. I can't do that, it's a bottomless pit. I could never pay you in fruit, land, money, or blowjobs what your worth as a human being is. And I'm not going to start opening up my veins and bleeding until they cry enough, because they may never cry enough!

I'm always trying to get the feel of wind on my face. I'd love to paraglide, to be able to fly off cliffs, I'd just like that feel.

I've always loved chasing the dark. Chasing it, eating it, dancing with it.

I was five years old and studying piano at the Peabody Conservatory, and when I heard that [the Stg. Pepper record], I knew. I knew I would never be a classical pianist; I knew from that moment it was all over. Because I brought it in for my teacher to hear, I said, "This! This is it!" And they listened and they said, "No it isn't! Get it out of here! Sit back on the stool and do Mozart again." And I said, "No, no, no. This is Mozart if he were here now. They're the same!" And they said, "No they're not, get it out of here, and get back on the stool." From that day, they and I were at war.

I think if we're all honest... If anybody said they've never thought about just roasting their lover, they're a liar.

[About "Boys for Pele"] This is about a relationship with a few men in my life, mainly because I've looked for my woman's worth through the men in my life. My male worth was quite good. Chemically I'm not interested in women in that way. The smell of men seems to make me want to merge physically, but again I've always had a real problem embracing the feminine.

You have to know instinctively when a record has its time. I'm not talking about how much it sells. I'm talking about whether or not it resonates at that time. I've always felt that music and visual arts are a real reflection of what's going on in people's psyches at a certain time.

It's like, the other guy may have peanut butter and jelly, but you're the one with the chocolate chip cookies. There's a balance there.

I think when you're good at what you do, you've got a skill and you're working on it all the time, then you have your place and you're not threatened. Women are very competative - it can be quite vicious - but I like running into other female artists. It's like: I'm a lioness, I kill my own meat, I don't need anyone else to kill it for me. And yet at the same time, if another lioness is there and says, "Hey, I've just had a kill, do you want a bite?" I'll say, "Sure," and viceversa.

I don't play the piano, the piano plays me.

[On her cover "Raining Blood"] I was reading about what was going on in Afghanistan, the way women were being oppressed, the destruction of religious statues. And when I heard that song, I just imagined a huge juicy vagina coming out of the sky, raining blood over all those racist, misogynist fuckers.

I think Venus can be anywhere, can be left somewhere if you've left pieces of yourself with somebody else.

I get everyone except the paedophiles. I think Britney Spears gets all those.

What did I last cry over?... That I ordered pommes frites in fucking France and got steak fries like I was in Texas. I mean how fucked can you get... They were doing steak fries in Paris, because they thought that was kinda cool. That's just confused. That's like people in Memphis trying to do the polka. What are you doing?

Don't you like it? Fire? It cleanses. It definitely purifies... don't you love that smell?

In January, 1991, I split to London, but Rantz had a tape of what I'd been doing, and he took it to a comic convention in San Diego to pass to Neil. He'd put my number on the tape. I had no idea, so when Neil called I was shocked. He said, "Are you thinking of doing this as something other than a hobby, because it's pretty good?" I said, "That's a relief, because Little Earthquakes is being released in a couple of weeks."

I went through a lot of different feelings after the miscarriage... you go through everything possible. You question what is fair, you get angry with the spirit for not wanting to come, you keep asking why. And then, as I was going through the anger and the sorrow and the why, the songs started to come. Before I was even aware, they were coming to me in droves. Looking back, that's the way it's always happened for me in my life.

You can't compare Precious Things and Waitress and Cruel to Etienne Trilogy, you know what I mean? Or obviously I wouldn't have made the four records I just made (laughs). There is a bit of the balladeer in me, and that comes across on all the records also, but the records aren't just ballad records as you well know. But I do think that Etienne, as a song, was more of what I was doing before I came to L.A.

I don't have a computer 'cause I don't want to know what they think if my left thigh is sticking out too much or I have a zit on my nose. And people say they'd never go onto their own web sites, but they're liars. Don't kid yourself. Anybody I know in the music industry that has a computer always cheats and always looks because how can you not? You want to know what dirt people are saying about you.

The people that always spoke to me, when I saw clips of them, were Janis Joplin and Hendrix and Zeppelin and David Bowie and Freddie Mercury and it was like, if I was going to do this, you give a proper show. Who are these, like, long-haired, smelly things that play four chords? I'm falling asleep!

You know when people smile too much? It's painful, I find that really painful. Happy is not very reliable. I'm trying to live like um, with a fierce calm.

I try to live a life between Clockwork Orange and Harriet the Little Detective. I want to hide in the dimness of Clockwork Orange, but with the hope of a young girl.

I'm really into moderation. Too much of anything will harm you in the end.

[On her passionate piano playing and the way she rocks back and forth with her legs apart] I'm keeping time. You're pounding - pounding - on a piano trying to hit the notes right, trying to count all these odd bars and not choke on your saliva. You've got to get rid of that stuff before you hit your next note, and you've got a millisecond to do it. So sometimes people are going, 'Wow, you seem so caught up in it,' and I'm just trying to keep time.

I don't need to take anything from another person to feel strong. Some women have been quite harsh about me being open about the heart; they just haven't understood the strength of the heart.

[On her daughter Nathashya] It's a cliche that having a child changes everything. But it really does change everything!

I'm not the kind of girl you bring home to meet your mother.

A lot of the time, it was just poking, like, "Hi! I'm sitting on your shoulder! I'm your little nightmare!" You can't cut deeper into the heart of America than their self-righteous morality.

You know, if I'm going to have a boy in my video, I'm going to be eating him.

So much happened to me in childhood and I still feel some kind of thread linking me with those days. I had times when my spirit was broken. I remember when I was eleven and I thought my life was over.

I believe in life force and that we can all tap into it. It's there for anybody and everybody. We're all a part of it.

[On "From The Choirgirl Hotel"] People had a very hard time talking to me about what had happened. And I had a hard time talking about it. But the songs seemed to have such an easy time talking to me. And I began to feel the freedom of the music. Each song would show me a certain side of herself because of what I was going through. So a song like 'Cruel' came to me out of my anger. 'She's Your Cocaine' and 'Iieee' came out of a sense of loss and sacrifice. And other songs celebrated the fact that I found a new appreciation for life through this loss. There's a deep love on this record. This is not a victim's record. It deals with sadness but it's a passionate record -- for life, for the life force. And a respect for the miracle of life. This record got me through a real bad patch. But I can laugh with this record, and I can move my hips to this record, which is really good for me. It's very sensual - that's the rhythm.

I don't have a computer. I stay away mainly because I don't want to know what color underwear I was wearing during soundcheck. I just don't want to know.

I've always said I'm just partly a translator, and then I use some of my skill to try to hunt the frequency down and bring it in with the team that I work with.

I just try to strip myself, peel myself like an onion. At different layers I discover stuff. I do it publicly, and if it helps to inspire somebody else, which inspires somebody else, we're talking about a really exciting world here.

[On her cover album "Strange Little Girls"] Words can wound and words can heal, and both are included on the album. I've heard a lot of people say, 'They're only words; what is everybody going on about?' But words are powerful; words are like guns. Your fingerprints cannot be erased from your words; you only leave the scene of the crime covered in ink. A person has to take responsibility for their words. We as writers cannot separate ourselves from what we create. All of these songs were created by powerful wordsmiths, whether you agree with them or not.

There's nothing that makes you feel better inside than love or communicating.

When you are on your knees, you seem closer to the ground somehow.

There is value in everybody's gift. No matter how hard it is to find or how strange it is.

I have a tiny little dock on the river, sort of like Huckleberry Finn. Sorrow came and sat down next to me. And she would come and hold my hand, and I really began to see that sorrow understands tears. But she also likes going to raves, and shes very multidimensional. And I started to see the depth of sorrow and that theres so much calmness in being able to see all sides of it. And I started dancing with sorrow. That's when I started, in my mind, to go with the rhythm.

I'll never compare records. It's like comparing your children.

That's what the song "Riot Poof" is about. It's like I'm the tooth fairy, the homo fairy and this is my present to all the homophobes. I'm leaving it under all their pillows....blossom riot poof.

Being a lioness, I know the teeth and claws of women.

Everyone told me this "girl on the piano" thing was never going to work.

Really, I'm just translating. Once I accepted that, that this isn't really about me, that it's about tapping into different sides of Woman, then I can take on these parts.

You know when you have this emptiness internally, literally - your hormones are crashing and everything is happening? When I'm in some kind of trauma, the songs usually tear across the universe to find me. I have a really good relationship with the Muse, and she usually comes and brings a lot of girls with her also, and they started to really pull me out of it. So although I couldn't create on a human level, I was able to create as a musician.

I have a real good shrink, and we started beading a necklace, you know... a little bead here, a little bead there. A memory, a moment and then one day something shifted.

[On "To Venus and Back"] For me, it was building a little bridge for myself, with the live album encompassing 10 years of material -- because some of the live stuff was written in 1989 -- then to write a new work in '99, and kind of do some good seeding before we move on. I do think you take frequency with you. It's my little galactic record.

The wolf will show up at your door sometime in your lifetime, and when it does, you can choose if you are going to be devastated by it or not.

Integrity is a hard thing to find these days, and I don't know if any of our leaders really have it, and that's the sad thing.

I'd like to think that my work has multidimensionality. That I can change a pair of shoes in the middle of the song and it's OK. That there is no structure that says I have to wear the same pair all the way through. As long as I've got feet, it's all right.

To have some honest moments is a rarity. We're not encouraged to really look at what we're feeling.

There are only a few people who really, really know me. The friendship with them is almost holy. To be there when the other needs you, that's what it is about.

I've always said I co-write the songs with the creative force, and she shows up, and we write the songs together. I'm really a translator. And yet, it comes through my filter, so bits of me are in there.

The way I see it, the men that I'm with, whoever they are, it's like look, you have to accept that I like ice cream, and I know it shows up on my hips but if you can't accept that, then leave. Go away. Toodles. It is non-negotiable.

You have to really respect your path, or you will lose your mind.

Boys are cute, but food is cuter!

It's strange, because I knew early on that I was pregnant - within days - so I got attached to it wihout really understanding the danger. I mean, I just didn't think that losing it was an option. And when it happened - of course you're not equipped to deal with it, you've no idea how to respond to a loss like that. The love that I felt for this spirit didn't go away. And I knew this love had changed me, because I had never really felt the capacity to love and the capacity to surrender. I had to surrender, because there was nothing else I could do. You go through different blaming things. You get angry. I yelled at every god there was; from the Christians to the Jews to the Hindi to the Celts, I called them all names. I asked so many questions: You see people hitting their children in a shopping mall, really pounding them, and there's no sense to it, why some children get taken away from loving people and some children are given to people who will abuse them. It's all part of the great mystery.

If a guy hits me, I will literally grab hold of his throat, put my teeth into it and rip until he is dead.

Real friends have to be understanding of each other, and their faults.

[About her grandmother] She was a very dangerous woman and proclaimed a saint by all who knew her. I really, really did not like that woman. She would have burned you. This woman believed that you should be a virgin; when you marry, you turn over your body to your husband and your soul to God. So therefore you have nothing, nothing that's yours. She was an enemy, and I knew that as I was growing up.

I didn't have posters because it was the parsonage; we didn't own the home so we couldn't mess up the walls. But all those album sleeves with my sticky little fingers all over them - Led Zeppelin was the big one. I was a real Zeppelin swooner.

I definately have a weakness for shoes. Just call me the Imelda Marcos of rock 'n roll.

[About her songwriting] I might only get one phrase of a melody, and I'll sit with it for two years and maybe it never develops - I have song miscarriages, too. You see, I see a musical source outside of myself, and it's much clearer to me than when people talk about religion, say - a Christian, Jewish, Islamic God, this Divine Father that's separate from all these little god-beings. I feel like there's an endless source of creativity, a flowing well, a fountain, that it's a gift of the Divine, and you are a cocreator.

You write different stuff when you're thirteen than when you're twenty-eight. But I'll tell you, I was more on at thirteen than I sometimes was at twenty-one!

If I weren't a preacher's daughter, I could see myself staring at the New Order of the Nazarenes! But I saw the shadow of the Christian Church, and the problem with all religions, especially the big four, is they don't choose to look at their shadow, their dark side. So I'm a real little vigilante against all that.

I never had a fantasy of being a bride as a child after I realized that Robert Plant would never marry me. And with Dad being a preacher, I saw too many weddings. You see, I don't think I could ever have gotten married in America.

I think I disappoint people a lot. The media has a need and the better the story, the better for the paper. You have to decide what you are willing to do and not willing to do. Some people choose to become media whores and then wake up with themselves in the morning. I am into observing these days. Every time you do an interview you can say things, you can give pieces of yourself away or not.

If you love someone, you're going to lose them at a certain time. You have to accept that Sorrow will be there. You better make real good friends with her, because she's going to be there, especially as you get older. And after a while, Sorrow becomes the deepest part of the ocean. You know, there are times that Sorrow tells the dirtest jokes.

[About her school days and piano-bar playing] I think I really got afraid of it, afraid of playing, afraid of showing my guts. I just kind of went somewhere else for awhile.

I think you can cross time and space to be in contact with those throbbing moments in time that are still running through our veins.

If you call me an airy-fairy new age hippy waif, I will cut your penis off.

When you're boyfriend leaves and you're alone in the house and you talk to your cat differently... it's sort of like that. I think the audience is a wonderful multiplicity of cats. And sometimes we need to kick the boyfriends off the stage and have our own little chat.

I'm the type of woman that I don't need to open the door for myself. You know what I mean? I can negotiate my own deal, but it's nice to have the door opened for me or the wine poured. I just love chivalry.

I believe in eating. I think women especially have this fear of eating, and I think there is a whole euphoric plane you can rise to when you have a good meal. You sit down and with every bite you honestly just say thank you.

I think you're always striving for wholeness. I don't think you can put a time limit to it; it's really always another fragment coming your way as long as you're alive until you leave the planet.

Women can be as cruel to one another as anyone else. But then again, they can be as kind.

The darkside is not something most people think is inside them.

You know, he can never take your soul. there can be scars, but he will never take your soul. Your soul is yours. You take it back okay? You keep your soul.

[On "From the Choirgirl Hotel"] Each song is really complete in herself. I call the songs "girls" because they really existed, sort of parallel to the soul of this being that existed wihout me and came through me and left, because it couldn't take root for some reason. The songs are seperate, they take root, I record them, and then they go out into the world again by themselves. I send them off with lunch boxes and bottles of Krug [laughs]. Each of the girls has her own protons and neutrons whirling around her, like "Raspberry Swirl" is very much her own entity, "Spark" has her own thing going. Then I started to see them at the hotel. I'd see some of them by the poolside, drinking margaritas. I'd see one of them answering the phone after having just gagged the girl on the desk, and another one visiting the odd guy in Room 13. I saw this troupe that were very independent and yet they worked together - sort of as a singing group. I really wasn't sure what my role was: if they'd let me be part of the troupe sometimes, or if I was just reporting what they were doing, or if they were trying to show me bits that I really needed to express.

You remember sitting in that restaurant after it's over, meeting up again just because you have to, and you're crying at the table. You can't help it. He's sitting there, looking beautiful on every level and yet you know not to reach across the table to touch his hand.

Lust is trust. "Suede" is the danger of... not always the physical fornication of anything. It's the dangerous games that we play with mind control, the power of seduction, and how so many people put their hands up and say, "I didn't do anything," because they didn't fornicate.

People think I'm nuts because I can sit in a room and be happy by myself.

If a guy doesn't ask me to the prom, I always have my left hand.

Beyond the logical mind there is the tummy. And I really believe this, because we can over think everything. Hey, I'm not writing things for some genius that's sitting trying to criticize. I'm writing from the tummy, because that goes beyond what somebody else's concept of cool is.

[When asked "Describe yourself in five words"] I. Do. Not. Describe. Myself.

There's an arrogance that some have when they perform. That doesn't impress the crowds I play for. Maybe I'm a good waitress and I serve good wine.

If you believe in the spirit world, you believe in it, if you don't, that's your arrogance. But if you go to Ireland and talk about fairies negatively, you'll get punched out.

Sometimes I only understand my songs through the reactions of other people.

It's very easy to make excuses, to lie, when fame starts to come, because you can justify it in so many ways; you know, it upsets me as an artist to do this. I won't mention names, but I've seen if left and right... and I've done it myself.

I have a really good friend named Rantz, and he is a comic freak. And he, about three years ago, turned me on to Neil's work. He turned me on to other things, too, but I was drawn to Neil's work. The first thing I ever read was "Calliope (Sandman #17)".... "Tear in your Hand"...I think that, because all of the things I just told you, those stories meant a lot to me, and I made a reference to him [Neil Gaiman], because of that.

I'm more of a wild animal than a domesticated one, but that doesn't always mean I'm in attack mode.

I think that the nightmares are telling me things about myself that I need to know. And I try to understand what they mean, so I can get to know something more about my soul.

I think I'm honest on all the records. I think that "Little Earthquakes" made such an impression because it was the first time you heard that from me - it's like a virgin experience.

We don't know where souls go when they die. We don't know a lot of things. We didn't create the planets. We didn't do this all by ourselves. So, therefore, why wouldn't there be a creative force if it can create humans and planets?

Instead of having my kid become a ballerina because I was sitting on my ass playing piano all the time and always wanted to be a dancer, why don't I just go take some ballet classes?

I'm a Bordeaux girl. I love the seduction of good wine. I love it when I have to surrender to it.

It's tricky to sneak in an all-access code to somebody else's psyche, you have to knock first. With yourself, even though I think nobody has complete access to their own psyche, well, you do have the right to plunder yourself. So I'm in a lot of my material. But I might not necessarily be the character you think I am. I let you think I'm the good guy just because people like to think of me as the good guy, though sometimes I'm the villain.

Well, Pele is the volcano goddess. And I thought of sacrificing some of the boys in my life to her. But then I decided that that wasn't really a very good idea.

I can be negotiating serious hardball for my work one minute, then the next, feel like I'm back on the playground at recess ready to put a grenade up some bitch's ass. There are bitches in third grade. The playground is the biggest war zone in the world.

Venus is the love-passion place, and once you've traveled there, you can never go back to where, or who, you were before.

[About "Little Earthquakes"] Emotionally, all these songs come from experiences that trigger them. I haven't chosen to talk much about that side of the songwriting - the seed for all these songs. On the technical side, I heard the music as a steady motion, no change really from verse and chorus, only the bridge that leads straight back like a loop to the same toll booth where you threw in some change to go around only to end up surrounded by the place you left. The only difference is by taking the loop ride you can see the place you left exactly as it is; some sadness, a whole lotta corn field, and a puddle.

God's up there, leanin' back, sipping his iced tea gazing at the world when he should be moving his ass! I say he isn't doing his job, like he was assigned to do. Hell, he needs a chick to look after him and hey, I'm free on Thursdays!

It's important to me that my songs mean what they need to mean to you. They all mean something to me personally, but they might have a different meaning to you and that is just as valid, and just as important.

If you're lying to yourself, and I did that for about ten years straight, you can't be all you are.

When I'm in the studio I'm very much listening to the song itself because I'm just developing a relationship with it. Sometimes I don't even know what they're on about in the beginning. I'm like, that's not what we're saying, is it? Is it? And it's like, yep, that's it. Okay.

Even if I'm just observing something, I'm involved in it because I'm seeing it from my perspective.

[After the failure of "Y Kant Tori Read"] I got myself off of my kitchen floor and went to a friend's house. My friend had this old, old black upright piano and I asked "Can I play your piano for a while?" I played for about four or five hours, and when it was over, she said, "Tori, this instrument is crying without you, and you're a mess without it. This is what you are. It's not about [the fact that] nobody thinks it's cool. You've done everything else, and look what they think of that."

When you've got the virgin and the whore sitting next to each other, they're likely to judge each other harshly.

I've decided Lucifer is a woman, wears white, and drives an ice cream truck.

I'm not interested in being a really nice person; I want to be a creative, responsible person that's balanced.

[Modificato da +Raffa+ 12/03/2006 18.33]

It's just, I think that sometimes when you free one side of your mind up and let the music come, it finds its own rhythm to your life.

In most people's songs men are always potent, women never have their period, rape's unexistant and orgasm vaginal or faked. They're Barbie doll songs, songs without pubic hair or obvious genitals; they don't fit anatomically. My songs come rather from my womb than from the heart. You know, there's some fucking going on in other people's songs, but no one ever gets into an unwanted pregnancy. I sing, "Boy you best pray that I bleed real soon".

In the States I'm presented as a sex object. And in Britain I'm "weird". Either description is a copout and an easy way of avoiding having to face what I'm really talking about in my songs.

[On "Gold Dust"] From being the woman of adventure, she [Scarlet] now has another life dependent upon her. And she sees that which is permanent and that which is transitory in a new light. When the Twin Towers went down we realised that what is permanent rests in your heart.

There are a lot of people who are really committed to being great at what they do. Some of them are very famous, but what I'm trying to really encourage musicians to understand is that they should feel good about having a skill. You may get famous because of your smile, not your skill. That's a skill too, but it's a different one. Because there are people I see - you know, singers - who can't play an instrument, but they have that magic when the light hits them. They sing really nice songs and they make a lot of people happy and I go, well, good for them, they've really achieved and taken themselves somewhere on not a whole lot of talent. They've got magic and you have to give it up for them. At the same time, musicians have a different skill, if they choose to develop it, and some of them don't. They think that if they play a few chords, they're musicians. That doesn't honor the music, that doesn't honor the muse. It's something that I really had to get clear in my head, because I don't think that's an understanding that musicians have and I see a lot of them in pain, and I've been in pain. It's not like two hours a day are set aside on every radio station for the encouragement of pioneering music. I think a lot of musicians are very frustrated because they may have this wonderful ability, but to merge that with the pop world, it can be very frustrating. It's one thing that I have to work through all the time; I really have to not become a number on a pop chart. It's like your worth, if they say you're only number 68.

[About "Silent All These Years"] It's about realizing, painfully, you've kept that voice inside yourself, locked away from even yourself. And you step back and see that your jailer has changed faces. You realize you've become your own jailer.

Some of my harshest critics have been women. A lot of times when you start getting in touch with your sexuality, "feminist" women feel like you sold out on the cause. I think a lot of "feminists" are really afraid to be vulnerable, to get in touch with that part of themselves. We have cut ourselves off from that. To feel passionate, vulnerable, open, exposed... just because you're a passionate woman and in touch with that doesn't mean you're an object.

I love to talk about things that nobody wants to hear at the lunch table.

The greatest problem in Christianity has been the division of lust and love... people have a very hard time having their baby suck their breast and then sucking their man off later. They have a very difficult problem of being a whore and mother in the same household. There shouldn't be a division of the Magdalene and the Mother Mary. You know, Mary had other kids after Jesus. She "did it". God forbid, she spread. People have a hard time with these truths.

Well. Let's put it this way, I have three accountants, and I'm glad. I can't count worth shit. But the thing that's why you're a successful musician. You can have three accountants.

There's a lot of mythology in the work that I do. I'm referring to different characters. So, if you're aboard, there are different layers to look at. And I think a lot of kids have very busy minds.

I think you have to kind of decide what kind of artist you want to be. And you make peace with that. And some people have become sex symbols in their careers, and that's a very different road to take than if you're talking about the heart. That doesn't mean I won't get my botox shots. I don't know what I'm going to do because that's between you and your dermatologist.

I'm in love with my female friends, but I don't lick their pussy.

This isn't about just one artist. All of the songs support the theory that the view changes depending on where you are standing. Let's understand the power of our pens. I'm all for people writing what they believe in. But this is about then saying that you don't believe in it, that "it's only words." You cannot separate yourself from your creation. You can't. You have to be responsible for the shit you put out there.

The piano was my identity for such a long time. Now I feel like we were partners.

[About "Me and a Gun"] I think the deepest pain of the whole thing is that you feel like you betrayed yourself. In a date-rape situation it's the betrayal of a friendship, the betrayal of yourself. I'm still having to get over what my role was in it, and deal with my hatred towards my attacker and towards myself: he hated women and I just took on that hatred.

My grandfather always thaught me that spirit lives in all things. He saw the world like a shaman.

there has to be a peace made within regarding what your integrity is. Sometimes you find a way to put it in a language where you don't feel like you've dishonored your skill. But you put it in a form that isn't so hard to grasp. Sometimes it's writing the anti-pop song in your mind that you're always doing and you ask yourself, why am I resisting? You have to decide where you stand on confrontation. I don't necessarily mean political issues. I just mean, does it put your back up? Does it take you to places that might not be warm and fuzzy, whatever warm and fuzzy is to some people?

Each man in my life has represented a need I wasn't fulfilling for myself.

A good marmelade is a good marmelade.

The man I was with - it was a surprise that we got pregnant; it was not a new relationship, but we hadn't really been together for that long. But we grew closer out of it, much closer. I've heard that you grow one way or the other. You know, I sit here and I wouldn't wish that experience on anybody, but at the same time I've chosen to take the wound and, instead of hiding it away somewhere, sort of dug into it.

I need a way for the excitement level for the band to be there, especially if it's going to be a long tour. They need to feel respected and challenged. That's my belief for both the band and the crew. We have about a forty-person crew with the band on the road. And of course, they're not there because they're my friends. Later they may become my friends, as with Caton [Steve Caton, guitarist] who I've known for years. And Matt [Chamberlain, drummer] is becoming a friend and John Evans, [bassist] I just met. They become friends but that's not why they're there. And that's the greatest compliment. You're not there because you're my friend, you're there because you're great.

[About "Boys for Pele"] I crossed the Styx river with that album, it lead me to improve my relationship with men.

Usually music [comes] first. Because the thing about it is, I think sometimes when you just walk up to her [the piano], and you don't even really have to have a concrete thought happening. But she is subtext to my life anyway.

I do think that there is a level where not everybody likes anything overly challenging, whether it's rhythmically or a chord progression that makes them feel familiar, and I've had to honor that there's a place for that - and it's taken me a lot. There are sides that as a musician I've had to come to terms with that are a bit...pukey. Like why isn't there a radio station in every town that advertisers put money into that is really not about, "Is this programmable?" To succeed you have to come to terms with what your choices are. You make those choices and say, "Okay, this means I'm anchovies, and I know that."

I am not offensive, that's just passion. I want to show my power. Many woman think that, when they are not intelligent or show their passion, they are considered to be bitches. And to justify themselves, they sit there, with dry, closed legs and condemn me for that. I have a conscience, a heart, a spirit, but also my sex. I am a sexual, emotional being. When you describe that appearance with one word, I would consider confrontation the right word. The people should be responsible to their feelings when they leave the concert, because what they feel and think afterwards is not my feeling, it is their feeling.

With this record ["Little Earthquakes"], a song like "Silent All These Years" has a certain story line going on musically that's really the antithesis of what's going on verbally. It's counterpoint, pure and simple. But instead of French horns and cellos or something, it's words and music. And I find it very exciting when an acoustic instrument has its knife out. It can take on these different roles. The idea of being a woman ... you come over to my house and I'm serving a fruit plate. That's not always going to happen. Especially if somebody isn't being polite, or if somebody's being a dick. Then I'm going to put the peelings on the floor and watch you trip, and giggle. And that's the same with the acoustic instrument. It's not always just about, "I'm vulnerable, I'm sad." There are many different sides, and the beauty comes in exploring them.

Johnny [Witherspoon, her tour manager] said last week, "You know the album is coming out and you know you made a choice not to make Ford Fiestas." When you make cars by hand, well, some people don't want that and it's a specialized thing. But you can't go, "Yeah, but everyone else wants this other thing." Sometimes you really have to not live your life by your number. You know your music gets out there, but when it's just you and musicians and everything it's one thing. But once your record gets out and you get your number...I mean, every week, it's like [cringing], "I don't want to know!" Don't tell me I'm 170. It's like, is that what I'm worth, this number?

"Taxi Ride" is about how people react to death and the betrayal that can happen even after death.

Men have their period too, it's just that they don't bleed.

[About her cover "New Age" and its librarian-character] The character is really engulfed in this passion. And I think she's really worried about what the new age is going to be, and she's determined not to sit on the sidelines anymore as it develops. There's this igniting of passion on the whole record. I wanted to have this balmy, undulating rhythm going on... sort of stripped. And that's where the passion was coming from. She's a writer, an observer. She'd doing research; she's documenting like an Encyclopedia Britanica of life and experience. Her big line is, "Well I'm doing research".

To go back to the word "musician," you can get confused about your intention. There is a fame issue that most musicians don't want to own. That is the dark side of the whole thing. But you must recognize it: It's part of the truth, it's part of what it is. A lot of times you'll go in saying, "I don't care about that," but that's not really true or you would have stayed at home in your living room. You've got to be honest about it. There's so much shame around the fame issue, whether you call it recognition or fame or you just wanted to get chicks or you wanted to feel hot, whatever it is. If you don't want to be crawling out of your skin because you're lying to yourself all the time, you've got to admit that you do want to put it out there, because you *do* want to communicate; you want to connect, and if you do get some attention there will be a fame issue and you're going to have to deal with that. Fame is an amazing teacher. "Are you hearing me?" I think that's a normal, natural feeling. But my ego got really confused. What are my intentions, what is the attention, and where do you put all this energy that's coming at you?

"Riot Proof" is for all those jocks out there who need to deal with their secret sexuality.

[About "Boys for Pele"] It is about the heart. So to analyze it, you have to let yourself go. I still recommend a really good bottle of red. Get something good. It is a journey, this record, and when you can dull your brain a bit, you know... If you are detaching yourself from it and reading the lyrics, you will never arrive at what she is really saying. She's crawling on the floor to a phone that isn't ringing. So to understand her you have to remember when you did that. You have to let yourself go there.

I'd be quite happy, as an artist, if I knew that a verse, even a line in one of my songs could do for people what "Thelma and Louise" did for me, liberate them in some way, particularly from a fear of the darker side of their own nature. "Give me life, give me pain, give me myself again."

I know I feel good with myself, 'cause I don't need someone else to feel good with me. It's OK if someone doesn't feel good with me.

Recognition for a lot of musicians is, like, there's a pit in your stomach for some musicians because you've been playing so long, and your work isn't recognized; a wound gets created. And so sometimes when you get that recognition, it's like a truck. You think, "Maybe I am okay." You begin to doubt yourself when there's no response to your work. There's always one exception to the rule, but I think artists need their work to be responded to-- even if it's eggs being pelted at them. Art is a life force, and when you put it out there it is a part of you.

[About her cover "Raining Blood" and its female character] You wait around until you get tapped on the shoulder and you know that she's shown up, this character, this person who can carry the song and knows it, and truly your body feels different. For the Slayer track I walked back from the house to the barn - the studio's in a barn - and I felt that. It was like immediately, this French Resistance movement [person]; when I heard the Slayer, I saw her, I knew who she was. I had a sense of her. And in a few days she arrived.

I don't wanna know how a shrink would define me. I don't wanna know it.

These women were supposedly left wing feminists, saying they were really offended by the way I was playing because I was making myself an object. But I didn't see myself as an object, this what how I felt good playing. And I still do. Not only do I support myself physically, but it is a very passionate thing. Again, it's about sexuality beyond the penis and vagina, so if anyone wants to see it as a shot in Penthouse, then that's their concept, and if I see it as my expression of my sexuality, then that's what it is for me. It's really between me, my piano, the earth and my soul, and how I'm just kind of in this line of energy that moving down from the top, through me, into the earth... And you know what, the only place I've never felt guilty or shameful is when I've been playing.

We're all fairies living under a leaf in a lily.

You go, wait a minute, what if we did this to the great painters, some of whom never sold a painting in their lifetime? I'm really trying to talk to musicians who are frustrated, because I know, I understand, and I see their pain. I'm not complaining; I'm very lucky. I don't have to work three jobs, but I used to, and I got where I am today. I created this. I'm thankful that I had encouragement and stuff, but sometimes I didn't - I just knew that I wanted to play music. I didn't want anything else. I didn't want to be a music teacher, it wasn't in me. Even though some of them were so patient to have me as a student. I didn't think I could do it. I'm fortunate and yet, once you step into that commercial music world, it's a minefield and you've got to work it out internally. You really can't buy into self-worth by what your number on the Billboard chart is.

I am not the kind of woman who takes things sitting down. I wrote "Silent All These Years" because you can have a big mouth and not be saying anything. I didn't know how to say "fuck you" to the people who knew every answer about how I should live my life. I would find myself sitting with my hand on a fork, and I don't know why I wanted to go for the jugular of the person across the table. I didn't understand: What buttons is this person pushing in me?

You have to keep taking adventures and exposing yourself, but there are things in daily living that hide behind everybody's heart, and that's always fascinated me.

[On "Yes, Anastasia"] I was feeling so sick that I wanted to be put out of my misery. And then, I get this presence. It's like a light, a bluish-grayish light… The message was, "You need to learn something out of writing my story".

[About adults not understanding her music] This is a very functional civilization that wakes up, takes a shit, goes to work, eats, comes home, maybe gets it once or twice a week (if they're really lucky), shits (if they're regular), and goes to bed again. Dull, press the eject.

I'm known as that girl who has tea with the Devil. I'm the thing that fundamentalist Christians cringe over. Mothers drag their daughters out of my shows. Because their daughters are going, "Hey, maybe I don't have to think about these things. Why am I worshipping some dead guy?"

"Under The Pink" is a place, it's an internal place. It's the inner world, the inner life. You have to listen from your stomach. To me it's all there. But you've got to be willing to put your moccasins on and walk down the road.

I play a lot of them [the old songs] still because I think that it's odd, but I enjoy performing them now. I enjoy performing all of them more than I think I used to, because I'm not so close to them now. It's not as if I've just recorded them. I've been able to get to know them a little bit, and not make them be something. If that makes any sense. "You have to deliver that song!" So now it's kind of getting to know them a little bit, and with this last tour is very much about how the songs wanted to, I think, be there for everybody.

[About the mysterious "ice cream assassin" mentioned in "Spark"…] Well, people have been praying to him for a very long time and more wars have been fought in his name. The big guy. Think about it.

I'm not a victim to marketing. Don't kid yourself: there's no picture that goes out that I can't live with.... I work with Cindy Palmano, who's an amazing photographer; I want to portray certain things visually, and I do.

I think that when the planes went in the building [On September 11], anybody that's been invaded on a personal level knows what that feeling is. And those that don't know what that feeling is, felt it for the first time. There was a sense of invasion when people were coming to the shows afterwards that was pouring out from people. I think something was split open then, as we all know, that as writers you're able to tap into something on a mass conscious level that before you could only happen to with some that were willing, those who had taken a step on the path to say, okay, I'm going to open this part of myself up. I want to know parts of myself that maybe I've put aside fro a long time. There's always an arrogance that some people have that until they get cancer, or someone dies, or something like September 11 happens, that arrogance, there's no... the wonderful thing about tragedies is it knocks the shit out of arrogance.

[About her cover "I Don't Like Mondays"] We decided to do that one around the time of the [2001] San Diego school shootings. That line about being 'switched to overload'; I've seen that happen in my own family. My niece chased her mother with a knife the other evening - seriously. She calls me afterward and says, "Auntie, sometimes I just get really mad". And I'm like, "Whew." But that's the thing. You can't say that only bad seeds do this. And if some strange little girl has access to a certain type of weapon on that day the chip slips... I know we have a gun culture in America. But it shouldn't be easier to get a gun than it is to get a driver's license.

I'm letting you know that I get far more interesting letters from 19-year-olds. Isn't that kind of sad that the people who are running the world aren't coming up with interesting questions?

I think at a certain point you have to... we all are getting older. Thank God. I'm really glad I'm getting older. I don't know what it's going to bring, but I don't think as a writer... you can't write... I mean, I can't write what I wrote when I wrote "Little Earthquakes" because I saw the world a certain way. And I hadn't found my voice. Maybe I lose it sometimes now, and I try and find it again, but you're in a different place.

When someone says, "Oh, you know you can't take it personally," that's tricky. A friend once told me that once you're known, people don't see you as a human when they're looking at your work. There isn't a head and a heart, and they feel like you don't have that right, that if you've put it out there, you've given up that right. I sense that that's because the critics or whoever feel that if you get the perks of fame or success, you have to take the dark side of it. Sometimes the dark side is the perks, when you're sitting there going, "Oh my God, there's all this decadence around me." You can have anything anytime you want, and it's still not fulfilling. Sometimes it's never enough. That's why we go back to the ego and the internal recognition, saying, "You know what ? We're doing the best we can and we're working on our skills." You're only as good as your job, and I think that's true in a positive sense.

A lot of people ask me about this song ["Silent All These Years"]. And what I try to explain to them is, I was writing it for somebody else, actually. Because I was trying to get some of my songs placed with people. I wrote something for Cher. And it got turned down of course. And then I wrote something for Tina Turner. It was really good. The one for Cher was called "But I'm Experienced, Babe." I thought that was really good... So um, then I just sort of tried to make the rounds cause I was getting fired from too many Mariotts. I mean, I kept doing the same thing... But I did that for like, 13 years, and my leather skirts were getting higher. And then, I got fired again. So finally I needed to like, get work. And I decided, wow, I met this new person who was really nice to me because he looked at me and said, "You've never had good wine." And I went, "Oh my God, how do you know?" And he was like, "I can tell, it oozes from you, you just don't know it." Oh. You know what I mean?... It gets a little nerve-racking. You don't know what you're doing wrong. And so Al Stewart took me to a restaurant and showed me wine like I've never seen wine before. And so um, I wanted to write a song for him. And I started to do this thing. And I went to Eric, who I was with and who partly produced "Little Earthquakes", and he didn't produce this bit so he was totally objective. And he looked at me and said, "You're out of your mind. That's your life story." And I went, "Oh." So, needless to say, Al Stewart didn't get that song.

You don't get respect because you're a pop star. You get respect because you get results and you know what you're doing.

Some babies [songs] are like whales. They take a while to come. What is that? Twenty-four months. Or elephants. That's a while. That's why, with the tapes, what I do is, I have this little thing that takes a no-brain person to work technically, because I don't want to have to ask my technical team all the time, hey could you mike me up and could you play it back, and... [makes frustrated noise]. That stifles you. You need your independence. And I hate being dependent in that way. 'Cause I can go off and listen by myself, and I can change the batteries myself, I am capable of that. I've collected maybe 15 cassettes back and front, and sometimes it's only 8 bars of something. So then you start compiling. That's the stage I'm in now. The songs, I've always seen, as essences. They exist in some way.

I can't be a guy with extra holes, can I? So, I think that if you even cut my hands, I couldn't play the piano anymore, but I would always be a woman.

Things are really breaking down right now. Emotionally, relationship-wise... things that you thought would last forever aren't lasting forever. I said that the people that are going through that dark, on-their-knees descent will understand ["Boys for Pele"], and hopefully, this will be a little [tool] that will help them to ascend and find parts of themselves that would give them strength. Parts that they were afraid, that I was afraid, to look at... my instincts say that quite a few of you are going through what I'm going through, which is trying to find your own power. And I have to trust that some will want to take the journey. Or some are already in the middle of the journey, and this would be like the glass of red wine... which, as we all know, is just a necessity once in a while.

Well, I think there's always somewhere in you as a writer that you hope you have the clarity, you hope you know when you don't have it anymore. I mean I produce an artist called Tori Amos. When I have the producer hat on I say to her, "Sweetie, you don't have it yet. You gotta go work on this a while. I like #17, that's a good song, but the ones before, I don't know about." You have to... there is a real, you have to be an editor in a way. If you think everything you do is crap, you're not objective. Because if you've gotten far enough, then everything you do can't be, really. If you don't have that, you need somebody to produce you. But if you think everything you do is great, you need a producer too. So you... of course I have people around me that I... I'm very selective about that, but there are people I let in on the process.

[About her song "Scarlet's Walk"] America is a young girl looking over the water at another young girl, who may be called France or Spain or England. She's curious so she invites them over. Pretty soon, they've moved in and taken everything - the husband, the house and the job - and the new sheriff is in charge.

I'm much more calm around the idea of death now. Very calm. A friend said to me a few weeks ago, "You know, you're so much closer to the idea of death now. I'd really like to run into you if I was dying." And I held onto him, really held onto him. Because he was right. Because I've been talking to the non-physical for the last year: the spirit of this child.

The playing comes first. I have a lot of friends who I didn't call. Because that isn't the first prerequisite; it's about being good - and then, obviously, not being a walking black hole. There's just no room for it. It's hard enough as it is; if somebody pulls everybody down, I can't have it.

[About "To Venus and Back"] [It's] an emotional elixir, with a little bit of Dionysian frenzy thrown in, which resonates with the feeling world, not the thinking world - where blood and wine become one.

I think there are some really great things in Jesus' teaching, but Jesus is nothing to do with what has been created.

It's when you run into a lioness who's envious that you can kill your own meat because she can't and she wants you to be crippled - that's when it gets nasty. And it does happen, but I think it comes out of them thinking there's not enough. Well, there isn't if you're a bad hunter.

[About her cover album "Strange Little Girls"] I'm scared... that this job is making me hard. That it's making me someone else. Someone I don't know any more.

There aren't enough women supporting other women to be who they are. I have a problem with the judgment that women have over other women, and the incredible jealousy and competitiveness.

It's different when you're a band breaking together than when you're calling in the players and you can afford to pay them properly. It's a different situation, but I still know fellow artists who pull in a band that is abusive or envious. That would never happen with me. No, I'll tear your throat out. But this is where we go back to, I'm a player. I'm not solely a singer. And I feel for some of the girls who just sing but are very dependent on players. They may be talented, but they're not musicians. Some of them are good songwriters and good collaborators with other players. They have a gift, but you cannot command respect of seasoned players - it's very difficult.

[About her cover "I Don't Like Mondays"] This song was sung from the point of view of the cop who went to the school that day, because I couldn't hold the essence of the person who went and killed everybody. I had to be able to hold something in a structure of women, or I couldn't be in the chair for them. I wanted to give the song a child-like effect... I didn't believe that this [convicted felon] was a "bad seed." So I wanted to create it in this sort of shattered playground world.

You can't buy good wine at the discount.

I think because I had three miscarriages that I appreciate the sacredness of life. And before, I think when I was pregnant with the first one, I think I was calling Johnny [John Whiterspoon, her tour manager] and saying "Okay, you can book the tour three months after I've had the kid and I think I can do it". I was out of my mind, and I didn't realize, at the time, the gift, and I think those miscarriages broke me down. I wouldn't wish them on anybody and I'm not saying that if I had to do it over again I would choose to do it. I'm not saying that, but I'm saying it did happen. And I began to really see that becoming a mother isn't something you fit in between gigs. The gigs have to fit around being a mom, and that became my first commitment, trying to be a mother first, and a musician second - and Mark gets this - and a mother third. And you know that's just the way it is. And he doesn't mind. It's kind of sexy to him.

Some of these women [who criticize her] become fascists, because they're saying if I don't do certain things that they deem appropriate then I'm not a strong independent woman. Bullshit! Whether it's the Concerned Mothers of America or the left-wing feminists who have to try and censor things and try and attack you. To me it's fascist either way.

Tina Turner knows music, she can work a band; it's unbelievable what she can do. She's not a player but she knows music so well, it's so much in her soul, she can whip them into shape. She knows what she's doing and it's about respect, even though she isn't a player per se. Tina Turner *is* a musician - some singers are - but you have to strive to do that. You can't rest on your laurels. You have to understand rhythm and you need to know how to communicate with those drummers. You need to explain what you need.

[In '96] I'm turning 33 next week and a lot of my friends don't question things now. They're so busy with the day-to-day functionalism of every day life. I refuse to be domesticated, I refuse to become lethargic.

If you believe in the spirit world, you believe in it, if you don't, that's your arrogance. But if you go to Ireland and talk about fairies negatively, you'll get punched out.

[About "Little Earthquakes"] Emotionally, all these songs come from experiences that trigger them. I haven't chosen to talk much about that side of the songwriting - the seed for all these songs. On the technical side, I heard the music as a steady motion, no change really from verse and chorus, only the bridge that leads straight back like a loop to the same toll booth where you threw in some change to go around only to end up surrounded by the place you left. The only difference is by taking the loop ride you can see the place you left exactly as it is; some sadness, a whole lotta corn field, and a puddle.

When you make the choices, you have to face the consequences, and the consequences can be fantastic.

I think there's so much emphasis on pushing things away, instead of pulling them out of the closet. A lot of times I just notice that people try to hide their dirt for as long as possible. Monsters, dirt, whatever you want to call it, the stuff that you censor and that you don't really want to share with people. I think you can only do that for so long before you start losing your mind. I'm finding a lot of freedom right now in just looking at things that I really feel. We're not encouraged to do that, and I think that's what makes people sick inside of themselves... you're okay if you have monsters.

[Modificato da +Raffa+ 12/03/2006 18.33]

My memory of the piano, my very first memory, was big, black and beautiful. It was one of those old upright's. Not the short ones, you know that have the little army haircut, but the ones with, like, the big afro. And I uh, I just fell in love with this instrument. I knew that when I saw the piano it was like, friend. Friend till the end. This being I can tell my secrets to and it totally agrees with me. An um, I needed a safe place because sometimes allies in a Christian house, you know if they get a little self-righteous they can turn on you and then, you know, everyone is praying for you at the table and you're going, “ugghhh”. You know, you're fuming because you're going, “why was I so stupid to tell them that I'm, like, masturbating. Why did I even do that?”

I’ll never talk about it at this level again, but let me ask you. Why have I survived that kind of night, when other women didn’t? How am I alive to tell you this tale when he was ready to slice me up? In the song I say it was “Me and a Gun” but it wasn’t a gun. It was a knife he had. And the idea was to take me to his friends and cut me up, and he kept telling me that, for hours. And if he hadn’t needed more drugs I would have been just one more news report, where you see the parents grieving for their daughter. And I was singing hymns, as I say in the song, because he told me to. I sang to stay alive. Yet I survived that torture, which left me urinating all over myself and left me paralyzed for years. That’s what that night was all about, mutilation, more than violence through sex. I really do feel as though I was psychologically mutilated that night and that now I’m trying to put the pieces back together again. Through love, not hatred. And through my music. My strength has been to open again, to life, and my victory is the fact that, despite it all, I kept alive my vulnerability.

I played “Little Earthquakes” to Doug Morris, who was the head of Atlantic Records at the time, and uh, he looked at me [laughing] and he said, “*what is this?* You did not give me Rocketman”. And I'm like, “Well, of course I didn't give you Rocketman. Somebody already wrote that song!”

[After the ’97 miscarriage] I passed from anger to pain. And the songs came crowdly. It's the same old story: when my life becomes empty, my inner world gets full of music.

I love that song. “Mother”. It’s not just a song about a mother-daughter relationship, it’s so much more. Like… like how it was in the past, aeons ago, when we weren’t made of flesh and blood yet and our free spirits were floating around. There was no good or bad expression, just free expression. I have a certain idea about the deluge/flood that differs from the accepted interpretation. My vision has to do with the disagreement in yourself. The way you can split up yourself, which means the way you judge a certain part of yourself. Why is Caroline’s green so much better than mine? Instead of this you can also see the expression of others just as a message and stay true to yourself. The deluge/flood had to do with judgements. Some kind of energy is taking power over you when you start blaming yourself and condemn yourself. “Mother the car is here” means: arriving on a place like earth, where that energy is very dark and attractive and sensual. That’s also a part of us. If you try to separate those things strictly, like light and dark, like those New-Age people do, then you are acting superior. Then your hands are so clean, no filth under your nails, no wisdom. You have to unify those two things, that’s what I tried to do in “Mother”. The idea of: If I like it, I hope I can remember. Maybe it happened a billion years ago...

Well, I’m not very good at writing things down sometimes. Maybe it’ll be on the back of an envelope, a bill, a magazine, or I might record it on a ghetto blaster.

[About the inspiration for “Scarlet’s Walk”] I think something happened so that when I was trying to rock my daughter to sleep, you know at a certain point you're trying to sing lullabies that will get them to sleep and it's “uah uah”, so you try every thing you know, you know I let my head go a long long time ago so you start singing anybody's song. And then finally I would talk to her and I started remembering that my grandfather would get me to sleep by telling me stories, he rocked me on the porch with his smoking pipe, I can still remember the smell of that pipe, and he would tell me stories.

[About “Winter”] I was leeching off the men in my life; don’t get me wrong, they were leeching off me, but I didn’t like who I was. So my Dad and I were walking out in the old farm, my grandmother’s farm, she really wasn’t a nice person. Now my Dad, he’s like James Dean or Billy Graham, though there’s no real difference there. I was telling him how bad I felt cause of the first album being so bad and Dad said to me (he’d never said it before), “Tori Ellen, when are you going to accept you are good enough for you?

My father was very committed to the word of God. I mean, he was just devoted to preaching the gospel. My grandmother - my dad's mother - it was all controlling and rules and rigid and you lived this way and “you're a virgin when you get married and you give your body to the man you marry and give your soul to God” and I go, “what's left for me?” I mean, you know - that was sort of the way it was. But um, she and I never got along too well because she decided that I didn't know how to love Jesus properly. Which is odd because I thought he was really cute. And I… I just remember being brought up with a lot of shame. You couldn't have really your spirituality and be this, um, sensual being. My father's favourite phrase was “gird your loins”. [Laughs] I mean every time, I mean I was just going to school with my lunch box, you know my David Cassidy one. It's like, “gird your loins, Myra Ellen”. I was just going... “hmmm, I'm seven.”

I went to see “Thelma & Louise”, alone, on a whim, and my life changed. When Susan Sarandon killed the would-be rapist, I breathed for the first time in seven years.

[About the “China” video] So Cindy [Palmano] called me up and said, “I know what he's building you.” I said, "Cin who’s building me what?” “Your lover in the video,” she said. As I remember, we started to dive into the idea that creative couples make “things” that can rip each other and their images of themselves - separate and together. separate and together. Which makes them separate together. Build walls separately. Build walls together. Egos are delicate things. Unfortunately walls are not. Misperceptions running fast so fast it helps set the stones in place. “China” was shot in North Cornwall, strangely enough were we recorded Choirgirl 5 1/2 years later. As in “Spark”, you are seeing real water in winter's glory in England. My “love” in the video built me two things which the sea took with her - and honest to god rock piano and an upside down china teacup in the form of a skirt.

I feel if you talk about the self it's like a microcosm of wider issues. I know I go into areas which are threatening because it's all about the human going in to play with them. That's how I find out what I'm made up of.

Heavily into the Sandman [Neil “the Sandman” Gaiman] comics by now, the nights were late, candles all over the house dripping where they would. Wax is a bit more fun to play with than bubble gum. The doors were open by now. I could resist, but there’s always air suction.

Something really clicked in me when I discovered Led Zeppelin. And you have to understand what that did for me because first of all, oh my God, besides the guitar playing, which was you know, I *wanted* to be Jimmy Page. That's what I really wanted to be. But I wanted to *be with* Robert Plant. Just the way he'd move his body and the sensuality. I mean, I just knew I had found the Goddess, that was it. And the highlight happened when I was in New York City and, I think, Johnny said to me, “there's a phone call for you in the bathroom”. Obviously, you know you have success when there are phones in the bathroom. So I toodled into the bathroom, I pick up the phone going, “Hi”. And he goes, “Tori darling, it's Robert”. I went, “Robert? Robert from NBC?” He goes, “no darling. Robert Plant darling”. I'm like… and you know, I couldn't, like, scream and tell anybody so I looked at myself in the mirror - something I never do - and [whispers] “Robert Plant is on the phone”. And, I have to tell you, you know [makes whiskers with her fingers]...whiskers. It was just a real moment for me.

My father said to me, you know, “What would you have written about if I had been a dentist?” Which is fair enough. I think that having had so much Christian doctrine shoved down my throat, you know… some of it tasted good. Like I thought Jesus was sort of like Jimi Hendrix. You know, there is that comparison. He had these, um, really radical ideas for the time. But how, as I studied and I started to get books when I was thirteen and really study… I said, “Dad, why are we so controlled and why do we feel so much shame?” This is not what this rebel was talking about. And as I started to study, I really opened myself up to a lot of different belief systems. My dad really wanted me to write religious music...and he go his wish, I guess [laughs].

I saw “Thelma & Louise in London”. When I saw this film, memories came flooding back. I wrote the song [“Me and a Gun”] that afternoon, and I wrote part of it on the Baker Lou Line going to North London. I went to the Mean Fiddler that night and I sang it and I’ve been singing it ever since.

As I was researching for this record [“Scarlet’s Walk”], a Native American woman came back to see me on the last tour and she said to me that people that hold the land and the white brother who owns the land must come together for the sake of our survival. And I said to her, “But so much has been taken from you and your people already”, and she said, and there were tears rolling down her face, and she said “Sadly enough, my dear. The white brother only took the land, now he needs to come and take more”, and I think in that moment I understood activism in a way that I haven't understood before. This woman older, knows fanfare but her commitment to building bridges to people who has not integrated her story, her people, her culture...she's still as compassionate and holds this space by the fire. When you stop holding a space by the fire, then there's no chance for the people who own the land to know what they really don't have access to. It isn't taught in our schools, their culture is segregated, they're merchandised, yet they're still willing to share even when they've lost so much. Yet still not pretend that agreements weren't broken, that there wasn't betrayal, so I learned a lot in this woman's activism that she carried a torch and she carried a tomahawk but she carried compassion in her other hand.

[About the “Spark” video] Well, that was my double, right there. She was walking in a forest while I was shooting all this, because it took hours to get those two seconds. I had changes of clothes - I had wet clothes and dry clothes, and in the middle of the forest the girls would stand around me in their parkas and I'm putting the wet clothes on and putting on the muddy clothes to get the right outfit at the right time. Here [the car at the end], these two are brother and sister, and they're in the album artwork, where they look like angels in the artwork, although here they're very much like the Village of the Damned. You don't know what's going to happen to this girl, but she has a will to live.

My poor dad when I lost my scholarship, I mean, I… I've never seen him so sad. He said “well, what am I gonna do because you were doing so well when you were five and here you are [smiling] at thirteen… and it's all just kind of ground to a halt”. And he said, “get dressed. Put on your sister's clothes, and let's go”. And we went to the “barroom”, as he calls it… and he got me a job, that night.

Now I don’t want to say that electronic instruments are anything bad. For example: the electronic arrangement for “Girl” is mine. Eric made the sounds on the Kurzweil and programmed everything, since I don’t have a clue.

Poppa always said the South was so confusing because the it smells the sweetest after a lynching. That's because after a lynching the goddess cries and the honeysuckle never smelled sweeter.

“Precious Things” is a song that came to me when I was living behind a church. And I was about 24 years old. I had a roommate that listened to really raucous music and it started to take me into flashbacks of my grandmother. And she used to put me in a corner and she would read me something, I think from Leviticus, I can't remember. But she was convinced that I was gonna give my soul to God and my body to a man that I would marry. But at five years old I knew that we were enemies. So, in my mind I was always trying to find ways to get away from this Creature. So I thought of things and my mother thought I was a demon for thinking them but I think she would smile out of the corner [of her mouth] because I think she felt the same way. So, behind this church with this music going on and on in my head, I started to really think that maybe just one day I could run faster.

There was this woman named Terry who was a prostitute and she was, like, one of my favourite people. She would come and sit around the piano bar. And I think I remember her song, "As Time Goes By." She'd come in for like a double scotch or something in between tricks. She'd always leave me a tip. She's always put money in my tip jar and uh, and I… she didn't even have to say, you know, “will you play it for me?”

[About “From the Choirgirl Hotel”] This record got me through a real bad patch. But I can laugh with this record, and I can move my hips to this record, which is really good for me. It's very sensual - that's the rhythm.

I've never told this story. People think um, that this next song [“Leather”] is about wild sex. And I think... well, it isn't. And um, it is for you, probably, that's fine. I mean, I, you know, whatever your experience is, you've probably had much more fun with this song than I have. But um, I've never had fun with this song, but I sing it all the time. I do adore this song because it reminds me of the time that this bitch came over to my house. And I lived in this hovel in um, Hollywood. And I don't remember what my manager called it, but it was a pit. And um, when you walk in all my clothes were strewn, you know, peanut butter and banana, all that stuff. I know, gross. But anyway, you get to my piano, right, and my fish tank, and I had dead fish in the fish tank. Because I forgot to feed them, but I couldn't throw them away. And so I was sitting there at my piano, right? And this girl comes over there that is very very very very very close by - not mentioning any names. And so she comes over... So she comes and goes, "Can I have some sugar?" And I said, "Yes." And uh, she goes, "I hear you wrote a new song." I said, "Yes." And um, I played it for her, and it was one of the songs that went on “Little Earthquakes”, I won't mention it. And she says to me, "Well, you know... I really think you better get a new writing style, because that's like, not catchy." And so I say, "Obviously you have the sugar. Good day." So... The next eight minutes of my life...

I don't know where she is, this little being, this little spirit. But I feel her presence. And I feel her love. And, you know… the songs have become my babies, I guess.

[About “Y Kant Tori Read”] It's a funny thing, making a record and it dying a horrible death. Our music was quite different then what the album was because once we got signed, it was like, change this, change that and I didn't stand up for the band, I let it happen. I was doing it for the wrong reasons at that point. I'd just been told so many times that what I really wanted to do was never gonna happen and this girl and the piano thing... just forget about it. You know I'm not saying that girls with busteirs and spiked hair - I mean obviously some of them did really, really well. But I just couldn't pull it off. I just decided to try and take the piano to a place, for me, in the best way I could. And that's how the songs started to come for “Little Earthquakes”.

Well, I guess writing a story that really is about real people and real events but at the end of the day it is about discovery and it's maybe about betrayal, inner as well as outer, and I think Scarlet is every woman because she bleeds, so she's any woman, she's a thread, this thread takes all of her body map, she begins to believe that all of us have their own unique body map and if you put you under a microscope, or me, you couldn't see it but it's here (points to her heart)... questions that were being asked after the Twins went down, what will you do today if tomorrow doesn't come and I think that is a core question that I heard asked across the country. If you put aside leaders or people who really are leaders but have not that title, then you go to the core and that's what she's trying to find, who is this soul, this being that we call America but was never our mother until she was lying wounded ,until we could smell her burning.

Playing in bars, um, since I was thirteen - at a certain point I'd taken it was far as I could. I mean, I just needed new influences. So, I went to L.A.

[About the “Winter” video] Without question, my favourite time of year. Strange for a girl who is always cold. There is something that draws me though, whether it's to catch me watching Torville & Dean walking down a road so bundled up I look like the Yetti or taste testing Daz's mulled wine. I've found myself out, I'm a winter girl.

I was kidnapped and sexually violated. You feel like your boundaries have been crossed to such an extent that there is no law anymore, that there is no God. You feel like the Mother in you will do anything to protect the child in you from being shredded before your eyes. You’re thinking “I gotta get out alive, I gotta get out alive.” With “Me and a Gun”, I hope that attackers as well as victims are listening. As well as judges, as well as lawyers. I want you to taste in the back of your mouth what it was like to be in the car with that pervert...

Oh, you know very well, men sometimes use good sex as a weapon, or as an excuse, like “I just made you come, so don’t think I’m also gonna help you do the dishes!” Hello?

[About the blonde couple appearing in the “Spark” video] Angels. I knew I wanted "them" represented in some way. Someone had said to me after the miscarriage, "Well, at least the Angels were with you..." NO, I said. They went to a rave, and why not? When the wolf is at your door, there is no insurance no distracting him her. No angel can or has the power to break Universal law, not with this wolf at my door.

[About “Boys for Pele”] I crossed the Styx river with that album, it lead me to improve my relationship with men.

[About the “Raspberry Swirl” video] I will tell you this. Kids and Pigs mixed together with their gorging of sweets and excited kiddie poo vomit and literally piggy poo and cake puddingie ickie oogie sugarie pukie all messied together sitting there rotting under the lights take after take and you wonder why I carry an Oxygen machine - card holder since 94. “Raspberry” was one of the longer days of my life... Karen pulled in these younger directors: Barnaby & Scott. I liked the idea their visual sense and their openness to Karen's mad visions. She was inspired by an Urban Alice and Wonderland feel if I recall the treatment correctly. Kids with Red wings - red wigs little Toris, she said. This Boy leading me into a world where Karen truly lives. Every movie every make, Karen can give her version - "A road ain't NO ONE EVER EVVA thought of pushing," a long by magical day.

[About “China”] The fifths in the bass represent the beginning of an ancient ceremony. This ceremony took me to China, took me to the kitchen table where most wars get nurtured. I’ve always felt “China” and secrets are good friends. This song was the first written on “Little Earthquakes”.

“Mother” came on a bit like a dream sleep. It was early morning when I made the way to the piano. I knew that “they” were trying to show me something. A memory of “the fall.” Not the one we’ve been taught, but the other side of the story, which is the belief of certain ancient mythologies. “Mother” changed me because I began to remember, where I believe, we come from.

It goes back to studying mythology and really getting fascinated with a race of people who were driven underground. They were called faeries in later lore, but they've become this whole caricature. This is difficult to explain to people, when all they can think about is Tinkerbell.

[About a parallel between “Boys for Pele” and “Scarlet’s Walk”] Puzzled mommy… I was rocking on different substances then...that could be all kind of influences, different people, I did not have a daughter then, I wasn't a mommy then, so I was taking a journey, that's for sure.

When you choose your character, you're stepping into fact. This is who you are. In “Me and a Gun”, I'm the girl who's raped. That is the ground that I covered. I did not cover the rapist's point of view. Now, if I were a guy, I'd cover that song from the rapist's point of view, or from that of the victim's husband. If I were somebody who hated women, I'd cover it one way, if I were somebody who loved women, I'd cover it in another way. My having lived and survived this experience in real life wasn't the only reason that I could write and perform from that perspective. I could do it because I could walk back into that violated space and sing it from that space without wavering.

I was going through different name options for like a year and a half because I just knew that Myra Ellen, that's just like, wrong. And um, the tricky thing is, I don't know if… what year this was, but we were in that Dallas period. Well, I almost became Sammy Jay, if you can imagine… I just don't know what happen, I was just drawn to that name. But anyway, um, this friend of mine, Linda, comes with a boyfriend that she only dated for a couple days and, um, “I'm like throwing Sammy Jay”, you know saying, “Linda, I think I'm gonna be Sammy Jay, I'm *feeling* this”. And she just looks at me and she goes, “I want you to meet so and so”. And he goes, “you're Tori”. I went, “I am”. Close call.

I did a video for “China”, down there around the cove. This is before I knew any of these people I'm living with now. I had no idea then that I would be passing by here all the time. I had a piano built out of rocks and I fell into the sea--the tide came in to where my derriere is and I was trying to avoid it because it was cold, it was January, and I slipped. But there's a romance to it...

I like the freedom of being alone [playing on stage] because there's an intimacy that I develop with the audience that I wouldn't otherwise. I mean, they could just as easily bond with the drummer. And the more distractions I give them, the easier it is for them to avoid what I'm talking about.

“Little Earthquakes” is all about celebration. Celebrating the ability to laugh, weep, and scream, particularly if you have been silent for years. And so it’s about celebrating sexuality in the widest sense, including the elements of revenge. As in “Precious Things” where I say to the guy “So you can make me cum/that doesn’t make you Jesus”. Just because I’m with a man and because I’m creaming for a man doesn’t make him a master, doesn’t even necessarily make him worthy of love, of my love. And I now realize, maybe for the first time in my life, that my capacity for love is incredibly deep and that for me to give this to a man he has to fully understand, and respect what that means. Too few do. They’re into pillaging, rummaging around, doing a little Viking stuff! But most women these days realize that’s not enough, boys! And if some women don’t then I hope songs like “Precious Things” will help open their eyes. And, just as importantly, help open the eyes of some men.

The gun is about owning and claiming your anger, claiming yourself as warrior.

[About the video for “Spark”] Water. The rhythm of the water in the tropics where I wrote “Choirgirl” was the element that brought me strength to my woman, who was truly in NO MAN'S land after losing the baby. So James said to me that water had to be the turning point the pivot where my character transforms.

[About the writing of “Leather”] A hole opens sometimes that I fall through a bit like the madhatter. I guess where memories coughing in loose molecules come and chase me around for a while. I felt like I had lived twenty different lifetimes from birth through death during the writing of this song. When I looked up from the piano and at the clock, thinking I was late for someone, it had only been eight minutes.

History has recorded some pretty nasty things that have happened to people. I think we remember. I think it's in our cells and I think it can still hurt sometimes.

Scarborough Fair was a big blueprint for “Tear in Your Hand”. I remember John Lennon talking about listening to songs that he loved, then changing them to make them his own versions. He would say, “God, I love this song. I wish I’d written this song.” Then it would come out totally different. You might not even know what song it is that inspired you to do something, but there is that ingredient. Sometimes I do think that we’re really just rewriting songs. There are only twelve bloody notes, you know.

I believe that evil is seen most from those who are trying to stamp out evil.

[About “Winter”] Summoned to the piano, this Russian music box round played me over and over till I was wrapped in a blanket with the memory of cinnamon apples on my tongue and boys that didn’t “We.” Went back to where I felt no time - it was all happening again, presently.

I wrote that song [“Me and a Gun”] after I saw the movie Thelma & Louise which brought back an experience I hadn’t talked about for about five years. But as I was writing the song other voices rose, other voices that had opinions on what had happened. It was then I realized that the biggest mistake I made was not seeking help from people who understood. But then nobody was there for me on the night it happened. I had to call the East Coast and wake people up to talk. I called 20 people. I talked about it for roughly seven days and then just cut off the experience, not knowing that in doing that, I was letting it take control of me inside. How does a woman re-connect with her own body after rape and not associate sex with violence? That’s the core problem. If I’d sought help that would have been different, I’m sure. That’s what a woman should do. But sexually what happened to me was that I couldn’t respond to a guy at all. I broke off the relationship I was having with a man, the next day. I’d been with him for two and a half years yet I started ranting and raving and telling him I didn’t want him in my life. I then turned to a male friend and though he wanted me to go to the police I said ‘But I’m never going to find that person again.’ I also didn’t think I had a case. I don’t want to go into the details but you’ve read my lyrics, you know I look at things from as many angles as possible. So, even then I could see it from the other side. Nothing would have happened to the guy! And he would have known more about me than he did. Yes that means he’s out there somewhere and yes he may do it with another woman. But he’d have done it anyway. It wasn’t a cut and dried case. With American law as it is and the fact that I’m an entertainer and the kind of performer I was - like Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys - I knew I was going to be set up. And I was not going to be a victim of another experience. But what happened then was that I became a victim of myself. You know I would have killed him if I could have, yes. But I was busier trying not to get killed.. But sure, when she killed him in “Thelma and Louise” do you think I had remorse? Absolutely none. And if he walked into this room now, would I kill him? No. Because I wouldn’t want to make it that easy for him. But any man who gets killed raping someone has crossed the line... But I didn’t kill him. I finally wrote a song about it instead and that has given me the freedom. “Me and a Gun” is not about him. It’s more about me forgiving myself. That’s why my music now is so therapeutic, so cathartic for me. I made a commitment not to be a victim again, by writing and by singing as often as I can “Me and a Gun”. It’s like I refuse now to be a victim of my own guilt. I refuse to be a victim of not having a wonderful sexual experience again. And you are a victim when you can’t allow yourself to have sexual pleasure again. I refuse to put all men in the same category, as I was doing. When something like that happens you do want to punish men, punish the ones that crushed the flower. But no one should choose to hold onto that hatred. It choked me. Sexually, I feel I won’t be able to give completely and love to the extent, say, that I will want to have kids with him, for quite some time yet. I couldn’t even consider that for a few years. I’m only beginning to fulfill myself now because I’m beginning to accept, and love, the parts of me, of woman, that I was trained to hate all my life. Particularly the bad girl I still can be.

The ominous pulse of the video was no different than the feeling I had the day. “Spark” is based on Death Lurking.

There is room for everybody on the planet to be creative and conscious if you're your own person.

[About the “Silent All These Years” video] Cindy helped to put my vision out to the world, and without her it would never have been interpreted the way that it was. She has such a pure eye that she was able to go in there and capture my soul on film.

I started to look at Christianity as Christian mythology instead of this be-all and end-all of what exists. Then I opened myself to many other faith systems the Christians I was surrounded by weren't open to.

I flirt with other people's songs sometimes. Even if I her it only one time, there can be a flirtation going on, where I say, “I can do this, but I'm going to approach it in another way”. A couple of bands inspired my riff on “Precious Things”. But my song is so different from theirs. You can't necessarily make the connection.

I think the institutions teach you what to think, not how to think, and I'm a big believer in a person having a choice in how they express their belief.

[About the song “Little Earthquakes”] My eye twitches sometimes. I was surrounded by the thoughts I smash. They decided I would be a good dinner. I decided I wanted three bridges in this song.

Eric and I were inseparable, and the truth is I don't care any less for him. We just agreed that we needed to go and be independent of each other.

The rapist knows “Me and a Gun”. The boyfriend of the girl who was raped knows “Me and a Gun”, because he’s had to live through it in a different way. The parents of the girl... We could go on and on...

People can travel great distances on a computer, so why can't we travel that way emotionally?

[About the video of “Spark”] A parallel. obviously. People have said to me that they found the video disturbing. I guess facing Death is just that. I didn't want a play by play on film of the literal meaning of “Spark”. So I would spend hours talking to James [Brown, the Director] about circumstances out of your control and having to find this will in yourself that you didn't know you had. I've said before that “Spark” is about a girl having a Really Bad day.

I was always the girl who had friends but did boys like me? Not the boys I liked! They’d say, “She’s nice and she plays really good piano but she’s also Sandy Luman’s friend, can we get her number?” [laughs] I hadn’t blossomed so I was seen as a rather nondescript nice girl, I guess.

The people on the internet know more about what I am doing than I do. Like, they will say that I am going to be in this mall on this day, and sure enough, I am there.

He [pointing to co-producer Eric Rosse, across the table] was there when some of the songs were being written. “Mother” was written at 6:30, 7:00 in the morning. We were on a futon in the little place I had at the time in Hollywood, and I got up really early and started meandering on the piano. I meandered for about twenty-five minutes and I started to get this... [hums the intro to “Mother”] ... and I hear this voice from the futon, “What’s that!” And I said, “Oh, it’s shit. Forget about it.” And he yells, “Play it again!” What happens with each one is that there will be a word that comes with the melody. Then a bridge section will start to work and I’ll know it wants to be there. And then maybe I can’t figure anything else out so I’ll put it aside. Three months later, I’m walking down the street and I’ll come up with four notes, and that’s what I’m going to build the next section on.

After “Boys For Pele”, the tour, we were really excited cause I was pregnant and I was just gonna take time off. Time away from music, time away from what I've been doing my whole life and um, see what it feels like to be a mom. The morning that I lost the baby, it was… it was like slow motion. And everything was so out of my control. I remember going in with Mark and the nurse was so wonderful. And she said to me, “let's just make this ok and see what's going on. Your music has really been there for me and I want to be there for you, and let's go”… and within a couple... seconds I hear her cry and she said, “I'm so sorry Tori, Mark, you've lost your baby”. And in that moment… I don't know what happens - where souls go but I really realized the depth of love that I had for this little being. And thank God for music because I really uh, had a hard time taking the next step. And, like always, the songs seemed to find me.

In America some radio stations didn’t want to play Me and a Gun because of “too feministic” and “too realistic”. I sing: “Yes, I wore a slinky red thing. Does that mean I should spread for you?” That’s the way it is, yes? “But mister judge, she was hitchhiking in a mini-skirt!” Bullshit!

[Cindy Palmano about the video of “Silent All These Years”] Shooting time, we shot over two days. Preparation time I suppose was about two weeks. Conceptual time... I don't know, it's hard to tell actually because I wasn't only working on that project...I'll tell you where the crate came from. What I make as part of a picture always is relevant. It's never there without having had a thought process behind it and around it or explored, because that's the way I work. The box wasn't there just because it was a box. I had the box made specifically because it was a simplification of the idea of Alice In Wonderland. Tori was de-scaled, hence the tiny piano, too....one thing I wanted to do in "Silent All These Years" which she absolutely refused was that I wanted to smash a piano up and feed it through a square hold and she said, "No, I can't do that to a piano. It's like killing an animal." She just couldn't handle it at all...They [the balloons in the video] obviously have to do with women. There was a male image, but we just didn't have time to put it in. It was a bunsen burner with a test tube was bubbling and bubbling until it overflowed. It was a brilliant image, but there just wasn't time. It would have appeared in the bank of images in that part of the video. It has a modern look, very clean.

The goal that my shrink had for me was that I could be intimate as a woman again, eventually, and not be controlled by the way I was violated.

I wrote it [“Me and a Gun”] after I saw Thelma & Louise. And that had, umm, I had to let out all that incredible hurt and anger. The anger came. The song was written in the afternoon that I had seen “Thelma & Louise” and completed. It had always been a cappella. And when I started writing it… I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I mean, I was almost in a trance writing that song. I was back there in that experience, and yet, another part of me was guiding it on. I felt like I was protected writing it, when it was over, when I had looked at what I had written. And the hardest part is performing it every night because, although I know I’m safe, a part of me has to go to that place to sing it. And what this whole process has taught me is, I’m not a victim. Although when I go in and sing it every night, there’s a certain energy I bring to make it very real and then after the performance is over I can go and have an ice cream and have a life and say, “This is over. I can talk about it and I have love in my life.” And it’s really important to get to that stage.

[Modificato da +Raffa+ 12/03/2006 18.34]

Healing for me is being able to sit next to the butcher and say, 'Yes, I'm sitting next to the butcher now,' instead of saying 'There is no butcher. Well, there definitely is one!

It's not something where you just go: “Well, get over it.” Or: “Believe in love and peace, my child, and it'll all be over.” Well, fuck you - That isn't the answer. It's a great thought, OK, but you can go and stick the crystals up your butt and lets get on with it. I'm all for love and peace, but that's not the side I work on. I work on the part before you get into the kitchen, right, before you make a blueberry pie, sit down and drink a herbal tea and watch the Sunset. First of all, you've got to pass me in the basement with the rats.

Mmmm.... Well, I trying to think of... I've been developing things for like over 25 years, so sometimes I can't even put them into words. It's more the tummy test. When I'm ready to throw up, I know a song isn't finished yet. And when I can eat, I know that I can. Sometimes it's that simple.

I am making friends as they come out of the piano…

Well, I separate; I'm very, very much a divided person- no, that's not what I wanted to say. Yeah, I am divided but that's a sickness. I keep that totally separate. Then there are other sides that are quite willing to deal with everyone else so when we talk so when we talk about the stage side and the way people see me, they don't see the girl who writes the songs except through the music. I don't allow it. This is not hunting season. It's not OK. I don't put her in that position.

May I beg you one thing? No exclamation points. I've been getting them lately, so I'm afraid it's contagious. It's like the measles or something.

If we, as women, don't rebel against the way in which the Church and State have conspired to control our sexuality we'll never reach a point of self-evolvement. And evolution, in any sense, has nothing to do with enforcing guilt, with this horrific cross they have stuck between that girl's legs.

I write about things that I hide from myself and to this place that doesn't get dealt with much. And in a certain point, um, you know, you have to write about it, or it just stays locked up inside. So writing about it, my songs become my teachers.

Abuse is abuse and when you're terrorised you're terrorised and sometimes you cut out parts of yourself to survive. I tried to cut out parts of myself before he did and I didn't claim them back.

You know how some songs can have a party on their own, with a little book and a bottle of champagne?

I have a bit of a fun sense of humour that a lot of people don't find very fun. But the kids find it fun because it's like, 'All this shame and all this guilt!' You've got to remember I'm a minister's daughter and I understand guilt and shame very well and I know how it's been used to divide a person because I've been there. When I'm talking about how I see it, it strikes chords in a lot of people that have cut parts of themselves out because they're ashamed. The want to stay accepted by their family so they kept things secret. Well, I sit and say in America, you don't owe your parents that, all you owe them is honesty.

[About "Boys for Pele", to the audience during a concert] What a difference two years makes. Last time I was... um... when I started recording this record, it was, uh, very interesting because, um, none of these record guys wanted to let a woman produce her own record; and they were very, very nervous about letting me do this. And, uh, they were much more nervous when they heard it. Heh. But, um, what sort of happened was I turned in the record, and, um, I've never really had such a moment in my life - I mean, things were kind of better when I pooped in my pants. And, uh, I walked in and, um; you know, I'd sold millions of records for this company; and I walked in - I'd had some pizza, and a nice glass of wine and I was like, "Well, I'll meet the new girls", and I know it's a little dark, but you know, everybody needs a good bottle of wine and some depressing songs every once in a while. And so I walked in, and this is what I... met. So, basically, what I said was - after this record went platinum - I said, "Well, we didn't do it, because of anything you all did"... And, then, so I'm just saying that it was because of, um, you guys... Record companies, radio, had absolutely fuck-all to do with any of this whole year. And that's the truth.

I do believe that we all are, fundamentally, divided creatures. Emotions split from intellect, spirit from flesh and far too often sexuality is disconnected from what we feel, and are, as total human beings. But how, for example, can anyone have an understanding of the virgin if they don't also have an understanding of the prostitute, the saint and sinner in one body? Attempting to reconcile these opposing forces in my own nature is my goal...

[About "Professional Widow"] That's my Lady Macbeth, the side of me that wanted power. But power in a man's world. I wanted to be Indiana Jones, not the girlfriend. But as I began to do that I started to alienate many men. Widow is my hunger for the energy I felt some of the men in my life possessed: the ability to be king. I wasn't content just being a muse. I was the creative force. I was in relationships with different men where if they could honour that, they couldn't honour the woman, and if they could honour the woman, they couldn't honour the creative force.

You will find once you choose truth and light, love and responsibility, then you are in command and control of your life. You still have a polarity when one of you chooses to still be a victim and allow other people to control and blame you. Or, you can choose to take control. To control what is going to happen now as far as if I'm not happy here... I can leave. If I'm not being respected here, I can leave, but I have to respect myself first. Only you can do that for yourself.

[About "Muhammad my Friend"] I was having a cup of tea with Muhammad and saying that there are as many belief systems as there are people; to not acknowledge that means chaos, really. Of course, I had to bring Gladys Knight into it. She's a bit of a goddess.

I waited a long time before giving up my virginity, because of this feeling: “How can I be a nice, respectable girl and want to do this?” And more than anything I wanted respect from men, my father in particular. And even at that age I felt that Jesus was a real, living presence in my life. That can be a bit of a disadvantage. It's weird when you're giving a guy head at 15 and you're thinking, "Jesus is looking at me!"

[About the artwork for "From the Choirgirl Hotel"] I felt like there had to be some kind of contact with the machine world visually. So I laid down on these photocopiers, and you can't move for seven minutes. It captures every movement you make; you basically have to have a relationship with a machine. Your lips and body are pressed up against the machine.

I mean as far as the structure of a tune, there are two things that have to be operating at all times. One is complete instinctive writing, and then the other is the sculptor. Now the sculptor is the one that goes, "Ok, so we kinda have a verse here, but this line has to be gutted because it isn't saying what we need it to say". And then another part of you goes, "Yeah but this came to me, and I was having an experience, and I was eating a banana when I was walking down this dirt road, and it just really, really worked for me". And you're going, "Yeah, but honey, it sucks".

[Tori describing herself] Lots of garlic, with a really vanilla oaky buttery smooth Chardonnay, and salsa. A really good salsa, and cornchips.

[About "Boys for Pele"] There is to me, more like novel form on this, chapter to chapter. It is a story. She does descend, she goes to visit Lucifer, she finds the Black Widow, she finds Mr Zebra and some of the other characters that she takes along with her. It's very "Alice in Wonderland", in a sense

I wrote it ["Professional Widow"] about my own experience. I got all that nastiness out. The truth is, if there's a part of you, of Polly [Jean Harvey], of Bjork, or of Courtney Love, which is the black widow, then you will relate to the song. If people don't feel that way, they won't resonate with it.

I think there has to be a reverence... not respect, because that means a judgement. Reverence is just reverence. For creativity. We don't have to take ourselves so seriously, but at the same time it is very serious...... When you put your ego in the right place, and I have mine, believe me, I have to deal with not getting competitive and the whole bit, because you do get thrown into that. This is the message that you're been taught growing up: that there is only room for one person to read their composition in school... That's right. And we're really, really taught that. And that keeps us from being a community, from supporting each other. There's not a lot of support among musicians. There is not, I don't know, we are really removed from cheering for each other, because everybody is protecting their territory. It saddens me, because we talk about having a unified planet, and we can't even be unified as a musical community.

[About "Northern Lad"] My heart goes out to where that song comes from. It's very much about thinking you were loved for who you were, and realizing you weren't, and realizing maybe you don't love yourself. The line, 'I guess you go too far/When pianos try to be guitars' is just about never being enough. I felt that with my instrument sometimes, wanting to be Jimmy Page. You can only be you. A lot of times it's never enough for people.

I used to get really pissed off that my life was so dictated by when this Jesus guy was born and when he was dying every year. I felt really resentful that I couldn't get on with my own life because I was so busy with his...

But once again, it's essential to go I can stay here dry for the rest of my life, and angry, and maybe that anger keeps me alive. But maybe I'm angry because I don't have love in my life but I am the one who won't allow love in! There's almost a part of me that was addicted to being a victim. Those words are funny, addicted to being a victim…

[About "Doughnut Song"] We were in Ireland and the record was supposedly finished. And the guys were getting ready to go down to a place called The White Lady. And these cute little Irish girls show up, and my crew... drools. And so they were off to find a shag and a Guinness - and they actually deserved it because I had had them up, sometimes at seven in the morning, sometimes a little too much, "Will you tune my piano, pleeaassee?" It's like nag, nag, nag and I'm sorry. But I kind of ruined their evening - cause you know girls - when you're not quite finished, you're just not quite finished...

I mean, the reason I thank the fairies, frankly, is because I'm not stupid.

I usually get along best with the metal guys... the real, real subversives. I don't know, maybe it's because our paths don't cross much, but I think there's a passion there. A lot of the guy bands that are dealing with rage energy, I understand that, and have a lot of respect for what they are doing. I am trying to deal with it as well as other things. Rage is just one aspect.

Part of you has to die, and in "Marianne" it's the whole Mary Magdalene reference, a young girl who I knew that died. There's the whole idea of that part of woman that has been dormant, who's been dead. "The quickest girl in the frying pan", the priestesses who showed her they were one with the knowledge and the passion...man, get rid of them!

[About "Hotel"] I think as you're getting married, all the loves, even the 10-minutes loves, are popping up. Hotel was really like feeling like an agent - a spy - in that he was the greatest guy at one time and they were giving me time behind enemy lines. Even though she knows they can't be lovers because it's a whole other life, she just can't let him go. That's the thing about letting old lovers go. You don't stop loving some of them. There are a couple you love no less than you ever did. Not to mention names...but I'm still in love with a couple. You're not going to try to make it work again, but if they needed you, you'd drop everything.

Then of course in the record we move into a whole other moment. "Not the Red Baron" is the moment of compassion for all the men on the record. It's where I could see their planes crashing, I could see that they have a side too. And if their planes would crash I started to gain compassion for their side of it. But I'm still acknowledging the war with "Agent Orange", the idea of the war.

After all the... you know, the fiery red head behaviour, drawing my lines, making my threats ... I was lying there, feeling incredibly weak. Feeling like there are not enough sold-out shows, like it doesn't matter that every American show is sold out, because I'm only alive when I'm on stage with a piano. The rest of the time I'm just this shell.

I had dead eyes; I let go of the things I believed in as a really young kid, and took on what they told me to believe in, and I don't just mean my parents. I had all my beliefs and feelings, all the things that were to do with me, crushed out of me.

[About "Beauty Queen\Horses"] The record starts off with the horses from "Winter" taking us and we ride. Going into that program of the beauty queen. She's a beauty queen, and that's not enough because it never is. The idea that beauty is our answer when we are four years old, 'oh, isn't she pretty...' that's the first thing that you hear. So it's going after those programs of the feminine, going after them, going after them.

For me, the piano is a living thing. This thing they call the piano has an energy that... how should I say it? It's more than just three-dimensional matter, it's something four-dimensional. It has a body that surrounds it and at the same time it has its own life that transcends the material plane. Sometimes it's male, sometimes it's female, sometimes it's both. Sometimes when I play it has something sexual, sometimes not, and sometimes the relationship between us is so close, that... Well, sometimes I think it's courting me and wants me in bed. And then there are moments when I really have the feeling it fucks with me in bed. But we respect each other. It's like that with the fairies ... I believe in fairies and that they exist. I mean, they talk to me.

[About "Boys for Pele"] It's a record where a lot of thought got exchanged, stolen, thrown back in your face. I wouldn't really call it a party record. It might have a lot of fun on it, but it's definitely got a lot of that vampire feeding energy, domination of each other, and you've got to descend with it before you can ascend. I think you can enjoy it without having to figure out every word, but unless you know that that's the thread... you know, this is not a vegetarian record. It's medium rare. And some people don't eat meat. When I sing, especially with this album, it's uncensored. A lot of the songs were finished in the recording. I had bits of paper hanging up so I could remember the words and I was just going after them, in that moment. I hoped this record would be in the present tense, so when you're listening to it, I'm not singing about something that happened in the past. It's happening in that moment, the revelation of things as they're coming. The argument as it's happening. The desire to drag him and just destroy him as it's happening. Not "let me write a song about what it would be like to destroy..." Wrong! "It's about the feminine side, whether you're male or female. If you're really open to the emotional bond, then you can go travelling there. If you've crawled, and you allow yourself to remember that you've crawled, or that you watched your lover crawl"... You know, men in hetero relationships rarely know what happens when they put down that phone and say "Look, now's not a good time". No, now is the time. How many times have you gone on trying to keep things on an even keel instead of saying, "Wrong, I'm doing something to you: I'm poisoning your muffins"?

There's a funny thing that happens coming out of violent situations... you either become warrior-like, and tough, or you keep turning it over, and pulling more people into your life to abuse you in funny ways. You make them not respect you. And you blame everybody else.

You ask any girl on the planet, you know, just the idea of dancing a tango with Lucifer: and he dances wonderfully, and just gives you a wonderful kiss, has a delicious honey taste of Bordeaux, I mean come on, it doesn't get any better than that...

I do imagine myself being a man a lot. I said to my friend who's a dyke, “if I had a cock I'd rub you from head to toe” and she looks at me and says “let's pretend!”. But at least she didn't say “I've a spare one here”.

To me this is a trilogy: "Little Earthquakes", "Under the Pink", and "Boys for Pele" it's a trilogy child. It could all go horribly wrong. I could pick up the sitar and make my sitar record and there you go. And write only about ketchup, fair enough, right?

I think I'm a magnet for people who want to be alone with themselves. It's not about being afraid to be with other people.

[About the album title "From the Choirgirl Hotel"] Well, having been a choirgirl since I was this big, tiny, tiny, tiny. I really saw these girls in a place that was their own. Where they could have room service or could have a disco by reception or what ever they wanted to do.

I brought back a new rhythmic sensibility and an overall sense of awareness. Playing all those Gershwin tunes in lobbies taught me what not to do. It really freed me up. I feel like the piano hasn't been explored to its full potential. I'm not talking about synthesizers either. I mean really working with the acoustic instrument. I started to approach it as something that has its own consciousness. It thinks. We collaborate together.

“Me and a Gun” has been my flashlight; the thing that has taken me by the hand and led me down a very, very, very long recovery path.

I had separated them from birth: the girl from the musician. For the most part, "Pele" is about my response. The women really held the space for me to dive into on this one. My women friends knew that only I could go after this. They would be dragging me back by my hair, going, "Hello? Are you aware of what you just did to yourself?" And I'm sitting here with veins ripped open, licking a little blood from my chin, going, "No!"

Some people say motherhood changes you and for me, non-motherhood really changed me. When you lose a baby there's a line that's been crossed by the deities. I started to question the universe. And since I live on the river, I started to watch the rhythm of the water. After I miscarried I was trying to find something to identify with as a woman, because I didn't feel very confident at that point-it's a pretty helpless thing to lose a baby. I had to find some primal feminine place inside myself to really understand that the Earth has both birth and loss every day. As I felt all the different rhythms that the Earth produces, I started to see rhythm in way I really hadn't before. As I went to the piano, I knew now that it had to be written and built into the structure. It wasn't something to be put on top of the songs later.

I wrap my arms around the piano and embrace it. I see the piano as a living being. When I went back to it - after having my little explorations through the swamps and forests, and picking up a few bug bites along the way - I brought back new things.

Being able to be on this planet is an incredible gift because it is where we can act out things, it's where you can put into a body consciousness. Say when you're flying around and stuff, and you don't have to eat and you don't know what being a rock and roll god is like. You have a whole different set of problems. You don't have avarice. You're not jealous. Maybe you're jealous 'cause, "Wow, her wings are cuter than mine". But I don't think that it comes to, y'know, I think your whole vision is different.

I like my father but he is very very very very very very very very Christian. I don't have a problem with Christians except when they expect you to be very very very very very very very very Christian, which when you think about it, isn't very very very very very very very Christian. So I'm home for Christmas at the church service, and I'm 32 right, and I am sitting in church with my father, thinking about that hot piece that I should be with. So I'm there out of guilt and I'm watching these kids in the choir. There's always that kid in the front row doing this [simulates picking her nose] and you're like, "Put down your hand." And they are singing like... [holds her nose and hums part of "Away in The Manger" in a kid's voice.] And my dad would want us to join along and he would say, "Myra, sing." And I would say, "I just finished a world tour, piss off." He would go, "I'm still your father and I want you to sing." And I said, "I'm not hearing what they are singing, I'm going to sing my version." And he would say, "What are you hearing?" And I would go... "Muhammad my friend, it's time to tell the world..."

I brought back a new rhythmic sensibility and an overall sense of awareness. Playing all those Gershwin tunes in lobbies taught me what not to do. It really freed me up. I feel like the piano hasn't been explored to its full potential. I'm not talking about synthesizers either. I mean really working with the acoustic instrument. I started to approach it as something that has its own consciousness. It thinks. We collaborate together.

In "Baker Baker", not blaming... that’s where gaining my power is coming from, being able to say I am the one who has not been able to be intimate, I’m the one who pushed him away.

I don't think I preach at people. I think I nail you against the wall and rip your skin off a little before we decide if we're going to put salt or ice cream on you. There is a level of the vampire in me, which is OK. I've got a really nice shoe collection. And then there's a part of me that's a part of me that's a nerdy girl who watched her best friend get the guy she wanted over and over again.

[About "Doughnut Song"] Um this record was almost finished and this little song began creeping through. This meant the guys couldn't go and get Guinness. And they thought it was all over and I said, "Um um excuse me, but I hate to break the party, but this girl has to come now." And they went "OK, fine good... fuck..." But she came and she's like my favorite right now.

[During the "Little Earthquakes" period] Our generation has an incredible amount of realism, yet at the same time it loves to complain and not really change. Because, if it does change, then it won't have anything to complain about. I think our generation loves our pain, and if you dare fucking take it away from us, we're going to kill you. We like our pain. And we're packaging it, and we're selling it.

You know, all music contains a code, in every sound and in every sequence of notes there's a DNA, genes, specific memories of our own lifetime. That's why music talks to people on the subconscious level. Things resonate there that come from early cultures, from the original music of the North American Indians or from the folklore of the Celts. A lot of what I play goes back to these traditions. I mean, even if the musicians from these cultures played it on different instruments, say on drums, I can still take it over for my piano.

[About the pictures for the "From the Choirgirl Hotel" booklet] Having to not move for seven minutes, and being stuck to Plexiglass, is a whole different thing than meditating. Not that I'm a big meditator, but it's a whole different thing. Your eyes are open, and the flashes are going by; you really understand that this machine is alive, and you're trying to have a conversation with it, and it's completely interrogating you.

I don't care what you offer me right now: if the fairies don't sprinkle their litle wee on my head, it's not gonna happen. I can't make it happen. Now, say I'm walking down the street, eating a banana, and something happens - four bars, with a sketchy lyric. If you give me two weeks, maybe I could develop it, just on my skills and craft alone. I'm not telling you it could be great. It might be passable. But there are certain songs I look at and say, I would not change a breath.

This record ["Boys for Pele"] goes into relationships, archetypes even, Lucifer, Jesus, etc., et al. Relationships with your brother's friends, relationships with your brother, your father, relationships with that boy you had a crush on the first time, even the first time relationship with the guy that you were seeing last night. It's the boy record. Boys for Pele. Some of it was a bit of an eye-opener for me, it came down to these men that have come into my life, the one's I've run into anyway. They made me see that I had to find my own passion, not steal theirs, and this is what this record is to me. "Boys" is not a short album. I've had many different types of relationships with men in my life. A relationship does not mean sex. It can be any person you've ever known, friend, lover, brother, mother, but this album is mostly about the men I've come in contact with. So there are still songs negotiating for position. Some are gonna switch because as the mixes are going down, I'm pulling my hair out. I'm going, this is like "Upside Down", how can I not have this on the album. It's the same scenario of everybody's humming this, wanting to hear this one, but if I don't have this one on, I'm gonna kick myself. One of those situations.

And, that's an extreme of women's relationships brought to just like, your girlfriend that you're hanging out with, but betrayal is betrayal, and I was thrown in to many situations as I was reading that book where girls, my girls, we were just dissin' each other. The things that we were doing, umm, it's like I would have never imagined that we could be so unsupportive of each other, and it was just happening while I was reading this book, and "Cornflake Girl" is the betrayal really of girls.

I realized that I sometimes crawled on my hands to the phone. That I humiliated myself. One moment I was signing a million dollar deal, the other moment I led me beat into the dirt by some fellow.

"Not the Red Baron" was a B-side, but really got, she slipped in there. She slipped in and kicked another one off because... it was a compassion for the men. Not the Red Baron holds so much compassion for the boys for me because as they're going down in their planes, and they're crashing. And as I started to see in some of the relationships with the men, how when it was their turn to crash, their turn to scream, their turn to face the pain. At that point I didn't want to kick 'em in the nuts any more. And there was nothing I could do, 'cause I was going through mine and they were going through theirs and sometimes all you can do is just pat them on the head and give them a Guiness. Yet this song really became about... 'and are there devils with halos and beautiful capes, taking them into the flames, taking them into the flames.' And I saw these lovely women ushering the men with the tears to their next place. Always connected to Fire, always all of us trying to find our own fire.

A lot of the old songs are being reworked. The band has tackled Horses and Waitress much differently. It's exciting to see the songs take a different shape... some of them don't want to go into the new territory, though, like Winter and Hey Jupiter. You can't just put a drum on something for the sake of it. Horses on the album was just the piano going through a Leslie cabinet. Now it has a really different read, but it can hold it.

[About "Professional Widow"] That's my cornerstone song, my Lady Macbeth. It's my desire to be king, to have what the big boys have, and giving up my femininity and vulnerability to taste it.

I just can't accept it when the blanket response of my women friends is simply “all men are bastards, let's just cut them out of our lives, be rid of that male energy completely”. And it's really disappointing on a personal level because my friends were not cornflake girls, not closed-minded rigid creatures, but raisin’ girls, who claimed to be open-minded and liberated. But they're the ones that have turned out to be the most reactionary, the most disappointing in terms of feminism. They are fascists. And I don't want fascists in my life. I've had this idyllic view of the sisterhood that has been shattered over the past year, that they would never betray each other. But I was wrong ...

I developed this record ["Choirgirl"] around rhythm. I wanted to use rhythm in a way that I hadn't used it before; I wanted to integrate the piano with it. On the whole record, the piano and vocal were cut live with a drummer and a programmer. I didn't want to be isolated this time around. I've done the 'girl and the piano' thing. I wanted to be a player with other players.

On top of that I took from the rape that man's hatred of women, so much so that I couldn't access parts of myself. It's as though a computer chip has been put in, to cut out contact with your core self, your central energy source. And that hatred ran so deep that I just numbed myself to survive. Even sexually, after the rape, I became the vampire, I drank but would not let the men drink. And I had to be a hooker to have sex, having felt I let myself, and all women, down because of my total vulnerability the night I was raped. I then had to continually tell myself I was in complete control, so I had to feel like I was gettin’ paid.

"Earthquakes" was my diary, "Under The Pink" an impressionistic painting. This record ["Boys for Pele"] is a novel.

[About "Beauty Queen\Horses"] When you hear Beauty Queen, you are hearing this girl in that ment: She's standing in that bathroom, watching those girls put on that lipstick. I don't want us to be talking to her 15 minutes later about what she realized in that bathroom. I want her to go back to that moment in the bathroom: It's white. It's that funny fluorescent light. It's that tile, with the green crud in between. It's those old toilets with the beautiful handles. You can hear the sound of the water dripping. Time doesn't exist in that moment. I wanted you to feel that kind of swimming, where you're almost coming back from 15 feet under water, and you're coming up, and you're almost up. That's what it's like in that bathroom, when you're looking and you're realizing what's really going on at your table. That's what I want to catch. This is not a confident girl. You are not at acceptance level. You are in her brain, getting triggered. The little windshield wipers are going, and you're starting too see it from the other side. You want to bring that moment always onto the tape. Every time you hear it, that girl is in the bathroom, putting on that lipstick. Every time.

And, what I was singing about was, it's funny how from generation to generation women really betray each other in the ladies' room. There is a whole secret society that happens, and a lot of times a mother will say "I'm doing this for your good" whether it was binding the feet in the Eastern cultures or whether it's marrying your daughter to this gangrene, smelly-breathed, old, decrepit, rotting scumbag that's 80 years old with dough. "You know, this is really the best for you," when the truth is, it's the best for everybody else.

I never talk about this and it helps the healing process to do so. Because people out there must be told about the self-loathing that follows rape and how it's the greatest breakage in divine law to mutilate themselves, as I have done. emotionally, I mutilated myself by feeling I'm not worthy of being loved and fucked, and being able to love and fuck at the same time. I was straining toward the reconciliation the last time we talked but the last frontier was crossed when I got the illness. At that point I had to deal with so much trauma in that part of my body and psyche. I do believe repression of that nature can cause the disease.

And the songs started coming. "Blood Roses" was the first, and it was that feeling of ripping open your vein and going, "This blood has sold millions of records. This blood can do many things." And [the men are] like, "Yes, Tori, and this blood isn't enough for us."

You tell me who's been ruling institutional religion: males, patriarchy and a male God. The female Goddess who has been our role model has been the Virgin Mary, a sexless being. Now even though the Virgin Mary had kids later on, nobody wanted to talk about that when I was growing up, nobody wanted to talk about the Magdalene. Nobody wanted to talk about Mary's true role.

In "The Wrong Band", the hooker’s saying, "I have a voice here that’s worth believing. I got in over my head."

I went to Hawaii when I was at my lowest. I was desperately trying to find passion. I had five minutes of wanting to push them [past lovers] over the edge; I think if we're all honest ... If anybody said they've never thought about just roasting their lover, they're a liar.

We cut the album live with a drummer, which I've never done. Normally I cut live piano/vocals, and everything then is built around that performance, whereas "Choirgirl" was about piano/vocal/synth in one room cut live with the drummer in the other room.

With "Agent Orange", I was hoping you could see this orange-bodied muscle man, and give yourself a giggle so that we'd transform this being from a mutilated skin person to Orangina. It's the idea of becoming Tang - transmuting the chemical effect. You can't forget that happened - you can't forget the warfare. So, of course there's that level. I just had to bring it in. I decided to bring it in as the muscle man

[About "Cloud On My Tongue"] So um, this is a bit of a strange story. Um... I was in a strange place in the Pacific and this um, guy, showed up. This was many, many, many, many, many years ago. And he said to me, ‘I’ve just come from Borneo, and I’ve come to take you away with me for a few days.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s just fucking great, because my boyfriend’s here, and you know I have a boyfriend and you had a chance with me a few years back.’ And isn’t that always the way that they come...

It's a multi-layered work, and there are people that don't get that impression. But I think that's a reflection of them more than the work. I say: get a bottle of red and lie down... you know, the head gets in the way. My head wasn't in the way when I was crawling on my knees trying to find my womanhood. These are the things that I said when that phone wasn't ringing; these are the things I wanted to say to men - this was my innermost heart. And if it's "You think I'm a queer", well, I think you're a queer, I think you're a queer, I think you're a queer!

[While recording "Choirgirl"] We would wait for days sometimes for the Muse to show up, just going, "She's not here,' there's just no passion in the room," she says with dead seriousness. "We would all know, you just feel it". You know when the high heels walk through the room, you go, "Whooh." You just see the leg, you see this ethereal leg stick itself in the studio and everyone goes, "Oop, red light."

[About "The Wrong Band"] There was this hooker in D.C. that I knew, and she’d been having a fling with one of the governors. She got in too deep and thought her life was threatened, so she fled to Japan where she was protected by one of the hierarchy over there. I never heard from her again. It just all came back to me when the Heidi Fleiss thing hit and I started thinking about what that world is about. People don’t think of hookers as people, but I quite like them. I find their story really interesting, and when people start judging [them], they should just shut up because they have no idea what it’s like to be on the other side.

Very few people are willing to admit anything that in their mind is a weakness. So, I started being honest for 15 minutes a day and it was excruciating, how I really felt when I felt like I was strong and being clever, what I was really doing was being totally intimidated, trying to make another person feel bad about themselves, I mean, I would rationalize everything, you can justify anything, so that's how it started and then after the first six weeks of that fifteen minutes of honesty I was shocked to see what I was really thinking and really feeling, that means if you don't want to talk to your mother on the phone you say "I'm so sick of my mother calling me" or whatever it is.

[About "Boys for Pele"] I was separated from my soul mate. Just feeling that shock when half of you walks out - the songs just started coming to me.

No censorship! If you feel like you want to jump somebody's bones, I don't care how old they are, I don't care what sex they are, if you're turned on, you say, I had these feelings and you might be so horrified! But you must admit things to yourself because they don't necessarily mean what you think they mean. You have to start thinking and open up this tunnel and it's very scary because we suppress what we feel with such judgement and once I worked through that I would start asking questions but not at first, you don't question anything, not at first and I did this alone, so it was almost as if I was my own teacher, I was my own conscience.

[About the first line of "Playboy Mommy"] I had written this thing and I couldn't get the first line ... I was in France with my friend Beenie, I go a lot of places with my friend Beenie. We were with another friend of hers and her mother, anyway... two of them were having an argument, so I decided champagne for everybody was a good idea. And that's what you do in France, and it was like, after lunch, so that's good...that's improvement. And um, anyway they make very good champagne, we had Krug and if you know if you ever have that experience ... just like ... even if you have to steal it ... it's really worth the experience. So. okay, I sent champagne around because everyone is arguing, and Beenie comes to like update me on the fighting on who's winning. And so um I'm standing at the top of the stairs in a schmoozy suite, I'm embarrassed to say, but I was. And so we're standing at the top, and she goes 'let's go out to the deck and talk about this. So it's one of those round stair cases like they have on the Love Boat. And so I'm in these Prada Studio platforms, and um, I'm at the top of the stairs and I fall all the way down stairs cause I trip on my platform shoes, it serves me right. So I trip all the way down and I lie flat on my face, and I swear to Christ ... I'm lying flat and my nose is like taped to the rug, and I said 'oh Beenie I need more champagne, this is so horrible'. But I laid there and I go 'oh my god Beenie oh my god, I have a first line!!!'

Think about it; you walk into a room, and you really don't need to pretend to know something! It's OK I don't know this stuff! When you stop needing things from the people in the room, you walk in a room very differently. When you need people to think you know what you are talking about, you're already minus ten! You're already sliding down that inner judgement scale! Because you're not looking at what you need the people in the room to understand. Well, I want them to think I am intelligent... NO! Let them think anything they want! “Do you know, Tori? Do you know where you stand with yourself?”, It's really changing how you look outside of yourself.

There's a bitter sweet quality about it ["Doughnut Song"]. There's a sweetness to becoming a woman that the virgins don't have. They have a physical sweetness, but once you claim the woman...Yes I want to wring their [men's] necks sometimes - those I fall in love with - yet there's much more of an understanding.

I can see how "Space Dog" is tricky... But "Space Dog"’s a mushroom trip.

[About the "Jackie's Strength" video] This video was tricky because it was close to the bone, having only been married for 2 1/2 months. Karen and I would talk about how "She" - the girl in Jackie, the Bride in Jackie - was a parallel on some plane somehwere who had made different choices in her life. A medicine woman told me once that alternate dimensions existed where a different you, a different me play out choices we could've made.

On this record, I try to hold hands with violence. I'm holding hands with him and it's like, “Let's go get some dresses and hang out together”.

"Doughnut"... that's so much to me the ache of... I think one of the most important lines in the entire record for me was "you told me last night you were a sun now with your very own devoted satellite, happy for you and I am sure that I hate you, too sons too many too many able fires"... There's the Cain and Abel reference, there's the idea that you can't have two whole beings together. And I couldn't live like that, and it made me really sad, that whether it's a female relationship or a male relationship, we're not supporting each other to make a whole. When I am not happy when you are taking you as far as you can. I can't support that or I withhold from you because the truth is I am afraid you aren't going to need me any more.

“Under The Pink” is a place, it's an internal place, It's the inner world, the inner life. You have to listen from your stomach. To me it's there. But you've got to be willing to put your moccasins on and walk down the road.

On this record, it was really about me trying to speak to the spirit of the baby. She had taught me so much about love, and even though I lost her in the physical, I don't feel like I've lost her influence.

I read the Alice Walker book, “Possessing the Secret of Joy”, and there's umm, in that book, the mothers take the daughters to the butchers to have their, let's say, their genitalia removed. And even though it's a patriarchal culture that she's talking about, and that this custom was put into practice a long, long time ago by the patriarchy, it's the “mothers” that take their daughters.

["Boys for Pele"] is a fast ride with pedals to the floor and a load of snacks in the backseat.

Even though I had been working my way out of that violent experience I realised that I would remain a victim of it until I recognised the violence in myself. And my willingness to give up my Victims Anonymous badge followed my realising that the withholding of passion and pleasure, from myself, was a form of self-violence.

I'm writing the whole record ["From the Choirgirl Hotel"] in the tropics. It's great to watch the lizards and drink margaritas while you're writing. The humidity influences the whole rhythm of the songs - your hip sways differently and my left hand is not the same as it was before. It's so humid, as soon as you take a shower you regret it. I love the heat, although it's absolutely necessary to ship in a lot of French perfume.

In "Space Dog" when I make the reference to Neil Gaiman and Patti Smith, or when I say deck the halls, this is going into the past where I had visions of how I thought things would turn out. Always coming back to you the people that haunt you. ‘It’s you again, it’s you again’ or ‘Is she still pissin’ in a river, heard she’d moved into a trailer park’ meaning didn’t carry the torch as far as she could. The song is about giving your power to someone else - passing the torch.

I'd be quite happy, as an artist, if I knew that a verse, even a line in one of my songs could do for people what “Thelma and Louise” did for me, liberate them in some way, particularly from a fear of the darker side of their own nature. What is any art form worth if it doesn't do that? Isn't that what all great art is all about?

Once you write a song like "Blood Roses"... which is really about me finally being aware that I'm choosing to be defecated on, this sort of [other] person [comes] out, the black widow who would systematically drag somebody's balls to Antarctica.

Question: Some critics have claimed you're using your personal hardships as a marketing tool. How do you deal with that?
Tori: Fuck them. If they lose a baby, then they can call me. That's my experience. I always write about my experiences, whether it's rape or losing a baby... or picnics, falling in love with women that are gorgeous, falling in love with men that are gorgeous. It's all a part of it. It's all a marketing tool if you want to go there. If those people are going to come after me, well, let them lose a baby and write a poem, write anything about it and I'll fucking crucify them.

I think the last album, "Boys for Pele", was very much like that. That record was very much about trying to understand a serious break-up that I had with someone I had been with for a long time. I was trying to find parts and pieces of myself that I had never claimed. I'd been living through other people in my life, particularly the men in my life. So, it was a really tough record, very depressing, but in the end it gave me a lot of strength. It was a real tough journey - one of those where you think you're going to bite your own arm off. And you just hope somebody is there to put a muzzle in your mouth. But nobody put a muzzle in my mouth and I made "Boys for Pele".

In "Playboy Mommy", I'm much of a voluptuous... you know, but I'm allowed to do that because I'm a writer.. so it's like, I make myself in that way. And I saw myself in a different way than I am; with a thirteen year old daughter... and a mother/daughter relationship just not being enough. I saw my mother, you know I saw how I felt when I was.. not ashamed, but that moment of why couldn't you be the thing that I wanted you to be and I realised that I would probably... have that in my heart.

"Past the Mission" refers to a personal experience with sexual violence, which I had a song about on Little Earthquakes also. So, the remark ‘I once knew a hot girl’ is painful. Where’s she gone? On this record there are songs about the healing from that experience, like Baker Baker (‘Make me whole again’), Past the Mission, Yes, Anastasia. The idea is to rescue myself from the role of a victim. That I have a choice left. Though I can’t change what has happened, I can choose how to react. And I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being bitter and locked up. That’s also the thought behind the phrase ‘past the mission/I smell the roses’.

Jesus Christ has nothing to do with that and it has nothing to do with Jesus Christ and don't let anyone tell me that it has. The cross has been used as a weapon, as it has been used against all women throughout the ages. And that's the greatest evil of all.

That album ["From the Choirgirl Hotel"] had everything to do with a quest for the primitive woman deep in me. At the time, I really felt as if I had failed. I didn't succeed in the most normal thing women do. Later, I started to realize that some women are good in having babies, and that there are other who fight better, tell better stories or write songs. I have a creative uterus that gives birth to song. When I'm feeling bad I flee to the music. If I haven't had my songs, I really don't know if I would be mentally sane although some people already think I've lost it.

We couldn't go to "Blood Roses", who we needed to go to first, because she's the one that is crawling on her knees, and has given it all away just to be accepted. And has gotten defecated on to the point where she's in the middle of the stench going, 'How could I have let myself be so degraded, how could I have degraded myself by letting certain events happen. But we had to go to her, we had to travel. And it was very important that "Beauty Queen/Horses" took us there.

I was always the girl who had friends but did boys like me? Not the boys I liked! They'd say, "She's nice and she plays really good piano but she's also Sandy Luman's friend, can we get her number?" I hadn't blossomed so I was seen as a rather nondescript nice girl, I guess.

[About the guy names mentioned in her songs] Greg was definitely real. Billy was definitely real. He was my crush. When I was twelve.

Doing it with a priest never got me off, they wash it so often! But doing it with Jesus, now that is something else! Most Christian women would be trained to think that even this thought is blasphemous. But I say that's a load of bollix! That's how women are paralyzed, disconnected from the source of their own power, by religion.

[About "Winter"] My father's here tonight. I remember he took me for this walk in the mountains, and it was snowing and [and she says in little toodles voice] it got inside of my boots and made my feet cold. But i'll never forget it because it was the first time in a long time that we had connected. I wrote this for him.

"Little Amsterdam", which is all metaphorical, is about wanting to kill people, being angry at people that you feel have done something... the whole domination thing, the whole hierarchy, patriarchy... and her way to fight back and they are blaming her but 'it wasn't her bullet' but she still believes it would have been fine if... [Makes a soft gunshot noise]... they lost him.

I was going, 'Oh, I wanna see him crawl.' And letting that be there. Wearing a really cute fuzzy pink shoe. And having no limitation of exploring certain facets of the personality. And being shocked and horrified about "Professional Widow", and then loving her - just loving the fact that she's convincing him to kill himself, guaranteeing that Mother Mary will supply. And I said, you really can't get any lower than that. I love the fact that she said, 'This is how far I've gone - this is where I am at this moment. Are you willing to see that part of yourself? The part that wants his energy, that wants his fame, that wants his light - not recognizing your own.' It gets to the point where you don't even have to push him over the edge - you're just reading him poetry, and that's enough to make him want to kill himself.

I'm not into races or religions, you know, I'm into faeries.

I think I wanted to expand a bit as a musician [on "Boys for Pele"], as a player and arrangement-wise, so I do think that that's changing. On the tour, I'm hoping to have guest musicians show up at different times. I'm not bringing a band because, first of all, I don't think I could improvise. I only have ten days to get the live show together. We couldn't learn how to think like a band that's been together for a long time. Part of the live shows are very much based around improvisation, so I think you're going to see some people show up who maybe won't be there for the whole tour, but I hope to keep it interesting for everybody.

So, I mean, you have to have two things working at all times, which is your skill side and your instinctive side. And sometimes I don't really know, if what I've done, it might be really, really cool, but if it hasn't *nailed me in the gut*, if I don't have that little fishhook on my intestines, then it ain't happening.

What has happened is there has been this real snobby judgement on what is considered art. Art is just expression. Sometimes there's a craft involved, sometimes there isn't. I have seen people do something that is so effecting and they're not aware of what they're doing. They just tap into that place that we were talking about. Then there are other people who know their craft really well, and they choke it to death. They can never get to that place of magic. Now, I try and work with both. You have access to both. We all deserve to be able to tap into it, it's not like a hierarchy here...

I recorded the videoclip for "China" down there, in that bay. When it became high tide, I almost sat with my ass in the water. I tried to avoid that, because it was January and it was freezing. And then I slipped and fell in the sea At that time I had not the smallest of coming here [Cornwall] that often. I had no intention at all to live here.

And again, it's really working through being a victim. “Counting the tears from ten thousand men, and gathered them all, but my feel are slipping.” You can't blame the men anymore; there's always you. It comes back to us; it comes back to me.

Lyrics to me, when they become references so that "Mr Zebra" can be who you want it to be, although you know that there are certain clear words "Strychnine, sometimes she's a friend of mine". And you get a sense of the characters, of who they are. And I'm sure the person, women that you know that are Ratitouille Strychnine, and we can kinda love those women, but you have faces that are different from the faces that I see when I sing about um, that cute little babe that's poisoning the muffins in the kitchen. But we love her, too. And that was important in this record. This is really the hidden sides of the feminine, the ones that get a little wicked, and the reasons that they're wicked. That's what is being said also in the story, the reasons, 'cause they haven't been recognized, that they kinda have to mutiny for me to listen to them so that we can get to the heart, and that's really the core of the record.

It's not like master and servant. At times - and we're all guilty of this - you start whipping your instrument. Domination. Not that I don't like domination. But when it comes to the piano, it's not going to work unless there's give and take.

Marianne was a 14 year old girl she knew in school who was really “the most beautiful human being”. That's hard to believe isn't it? We women can have a real mean streak. Another pearl can enter the room and we are ready to go... and your boyfriend will say 'she's so nice', but that's okay guys, we women have been killing each other in the 'harem' for years. But Marianne was truly nice... Fuck you mom [on being told that Marianne killed herself]. That's your first reaction you know, Somebody so wonderful that gave everyone such a gift, NO.

[About "Spark"] There're a few that live in that song. More than anything, that girl is having a really bad day. She doesn't know how or if she's gonna see the end of that day. But there is this sort of action girl that comes out of her, refusing to not strive and stay on the planet. She realises that she really doesn't want to leave the planet. That she will take her problems with her if she leaves this planet.

I do believe that we all are, fundamentally, divided creatures. Emotions split from intellect, spirit from flesh and far too often sexuality is disconnected from what we feel, and are, as total human beings. But how, for example, can anyone have an understanding of the virgin if they don't also have an understanding of the prostitute, the saint and sinner in one body? Attempting to reconcile these opposing forces in my own nature is my goal and what I write about in songs like "Precious Things", and all the songs on the album.

It keeps moving into the dance of “Talula”, and her desperately trying to dance, desperately trying to figure out the whole idea of loss: it must be worth losing if it's worth something. So if I feel like I am losing something, at lease I valued something enough to lose it in the first place... it's going back into that train of thought. Talula is very much a riddle. Talula came as a nursery rhyme, my little dance that I would do when things were so sad. Because I started thinking but 'God, I have these feelings, which means...' we shared so many moments that I value, I really valued that, so what a gift that I can feel this loss, that I am not so numb, that I haven't cut myself off so much, and once I could feel the loss then I started to feel free. I want to dance and go 'yeah, I want to be with Talula. I want to be able to dance through the people that come in and go out of your life. I want to learn how to dance with the gifts when they come and the gifts when they need to take a different route.

I told you before that seeing the movie "Thelma and Louise", years after the rape, finally made me feel like I wanted to kill that man but, instead, I now realise that what I did was kill a part of myself. I already had the hatred that women feel for themselves in the Christian Church in terms of their sexual response: that tyranny of believing that love is one thing and lust another, instead of being able to join them together. That was where I first began to be segregated, within myself.

[About "Past the Mission"] Of course I believe they [Jesus and Mary Magdalene] were together. Of course I believe they were a couple and that she understood things. She represents the Goddess, the female, the feminine, the joining, the equality. ‘Some things only she knows.’ And until we acknowledge that there are some things only she knows; and there’s some things only he knows, too; and until we have mutual respect, there’s that prison tower, and there’s that mission (church), and the hot girl got lost somewhere in between.

I dangle carrots to get the meat for my next carnivore experience.

[About "In the Springtime of his Voodoo"] The key for me here is he was going to show me spring. Going to... and so much of my life has been about going to. Instead of what is happening now, it's what are we going to? Not what are we really giving to each other now. What am I promising him? That whole idea of looking to this, the idea that somebody else carries the voodoo, instead of becoming part of the voodoo and accessing it yourself. That runs through the whole thing.

I'm only monogamous in bed; I'm sharing my thoughts with everyone. I have a very deep imagination: I don't have to do it with somebody to be emotionally involved. It's beyond the penis and vagina. How many dicks do you have to suck before you realize that you have to draw the line somewhere when you're sharing molecules with someone?

[About "From the Choirgirl Hotel"] After that, I think that this record, as far as lyrics go, is not as abstract [as "Boys for Pele"]. Even though there's a lot of symbolism in it, there are moments when I turn around and I say something like, "she's convinced she could hold back a glacier/but she couldn't keep baby alive". Really clear. There are moments when it gets really clear and it goes back into symbolism again - "ballerinas that have fins that they'll never find." Which makes a lot of sense to me, because it's obviously a mermaid reference, but it's more than that. Maybe you'll be a mother and you'll never have that physical experience - like you'll never have the experience of being a mermaid. But even though you might not be a physical mother, it doesn't mean you can't have that kind of maternal love.

When I say I want to “do it” with Jesus Christ it's not just that I want to sexualise Jesus, bring him down to our level, I want to breathe the earth into his lungs. He came from Heaven and we, as women, come from the earth. So it's the idea of soil beneath the fingers, the notion of, “If this blood is sacred, then drink it”. That's what it's all about.

[About "Blood Roses"] I don't feel like the jokes and the pain are on the inside, it's so worn on the sleeve. Sometimes, it being a metaphorical work, you have to get your head out of it. But you know, when she says, 'I think you're a queer... God knows I've thrown away those graces'... it's very clear that the war has begun. You've just walked into the record and the war has begun. The blades are out. And she's become a piece of meat in her mind, she's willing to cut out her voice, she's willing to 'cut out the flute from the throat of the loon, at least when he cry now he can't even hear you.' It doesn't matter who the people are, you know, and if you resonate with letting yourself go that far to be needed or to keep something going, well, do you need another pound of flesh? What do you need, what more do you want? And that's the point when I say, 'he likes killing you after you're dead.' So from the beginning of the record on it's really obvious that you're walking into not what is going on on top of the table, the conversation with the rose at the dinner of the couple, but what's really going on in the couple. Sometimes the man changes, but it's her story. It's her, who she pulls in to work this out with, and the men that defecate, the men who can't be enough, the men who aren't ready to embrace themselves so no matter how much you like them you can't go there because... they're not yet whole.

Even though I had been working my way out of that violent experience I realised that I would remain a victim of it until I recognised the violence in myself. And my willingness to give up my Victims Anonymous badge followed my realising that the withholding of passion and pleasure, from myself, was a form of self-violence.

I've been taking tea with Lucifer. I mean I've truly spent time with Lucifer, the energy of Lucifer. So when I sing, 'Father Lucifer, you never looked so sane,' I truly went to those places. I'm talking about the shadow side, the secrets of the unconscious. It's about claiming in ourselves what we hate in other people.

But it's funny, back to the "Silent All These Years" thing, if I can just jump in and say, it's made me look at the fact, I just think I'm able to understand Silent now, and some of those songs, "Me And A Gun", so that my writer side of me is going, "God, these songs are very current for me now", and they have a power that I didn't really at the time know how to translate on tape. I think I'm doing "Icicle" better than I've ever done on record. I'm, like, growing into them. So for my next step as a writer, I don't know. Silent is as current to me as anything I'm writing now, and it's leading me by the hand, saying "That wasn't clever enough, Tori. That line isn't good. You can't do that. I won't let it through my door". Silent is my doorkeeper, a bit. She's really stroppy about who comes to the party.

[About "Marianne"] But the one thing is, you guys did [support me]; and this is one song that demanded to come tonight, because, although she's not on this planet anymore, she was, um, probably the main song that gave me strength to withstand, when everybody said that I'd made a piece of shit.

I've nearly always believed that Jesus Christ really liked Mary Magdalen and and that if he was, as he claimed to be, a whole man, he had to have sexual relations with her. So in my deepest, most private moments I've wanted Christ to be the boyfriend I've been waiting for. And a lot of Christian girls have a crush on Jesus. I may have felt guilty at the thought of wanting to do it with Jesus but then I say why not? He *was* a man.

"Talula" is the track on the record that holds the space for permission to dance. And as the record moves on with the story, once we get to Talula, where she's placed, there's been so much grieving, there's been so much acknowledgment, finally after Jupiter, when she knows it's over, whatever 'it' is, but she knows that she can't go back and things just aren't gonna...you can't pretend that certain events haven't happened once they've happened in a relationship. And we travel further into Little Amsterdam, we go down South, which is really symbolic for the primal, the primitive, and the lies and the... really the domination. Little Amsterdam is so essential to release that place before we can finally say... we went back to the childhood, we went back South, to the bloodline, where there is so much hierarchy... and now it's time to just let her dance.

[About "Putting the damage on"] Girls, do you know when you keep going and doing something... and I don't mean like chocolate cake.. that you know is bad for you? Well, men, women, whatever...

There exists such a thing as boasting about misery. One sentence in "Cruel" deals with that: "Dance with the Sufis celebrate your top ten in the charts of pain". When I had a miscarriage, there were people who said, "Yes, but you only lost an unborn child. Our son was murdered!" For some people things aren't bad enough as it is. And some hang on to the fact that The Most Terrible Thing happened to them; they entered at number one in the charts of pain. And then others are secretly jealous because they're only at number six.

Marianne Curtis is a girl I went to school with in junior high. She was the kind of person everyone adored, she was just magical. I had written a song about her years ago which I used to play in the bars sometimes. It never went any further than being performed, I didn't record it. Since then I have always wanted to have Marianne in a song. She died from a drug overdose when she was 15. It is not known, but I don't believe it was suicide. I think she took the wrong things together. She is very special to me, and comes to visit in my songs sometimes.

[About "Girl"] When I was thirteen, I believed in faeries and other spiritual things, was sunk in my own world of imagination, believed in the unseen world, what I still do today. But over the time I started to feel like a nitwit. I mean, when you smoke dope, it might be normal, but like this? You sit in your English lesson and you are talking to a faerie. The people did not want to understand that, and when you are thirteen, you don't want to be faced with a pitiful smile all the time. So I began to destroy the part in me that is actually creative. Instead, I became very cynical, disguised myself to become popular, to be loved by everyone. But actually that was nothing else than a game of hide-and-seek. You can be a bigmouth without having anything to say. At that time, I definitely only had the wish to be an in-chick. Today I know that you should have your own thoughts and that you have to stick to your point of view.

Yeah, because when I hear that someone's been eaten by a crocodile or shark, I just get all gooey. I start salivating. I'm facinated by it. If I had to get tortured by a human being or eaten by a crocodile, I'd take the crocodile any day of the week. The reason is that it's not personal. You were lunch.

There was almost a memory that happened with me when I would here her [Billie Holiday] sing. And I would remember things that I didn't even know I had experienced. I'm sure some of you have had that, whether its a scent sometimes a smell or something that you hear. Just for a minute the veil lifts, and she has always done that for me.

"Muhammed My Friend" surprised me too. I was singing in Christmas services [in '94]; I was with my parents. I was watching the Nativity, and after a while I said to myself, 'Wait a minute. There's something wrong here.' We were singing Away in the Manger [Almost sings the first two bars of Away in the Manger, and then sings the opening line to Muhammed My Friend, with the identical first three notes.] I kept getting more and more into the perfect little love with the lullaby of Away in the Manger. I started to get husky in the throat. I started to wonder who, with everybody speaking of the baby Jesus, should come up to the cradle. And I found that, of all people, I wanted to have a chat about it with Muhammad, because the Prophet is the one who supposedly knows the Law. So I decided that they needed to talk about the Law - the Law of the Feminine that had been castrated with the birth of Christ. I believe that Magdalene was the Savior's bride, the High Priestess. And that Magdalene was not a blueprint for women - meaning that this was a woman who was honored as the sacred bride, not a virgin. We're talking about a Woman. We have a Virgin matrix, but they needed the Woman blueprint: the compassion/passion, wisdom, wholeness. But this blueprint was not a structure that one could relate to Woman - until now. Think about it. It's just been uncovered in the past twenty-some years. Even though women have been given power to be heads of corporations, we're talking about not just power within the hierarchy but access to the different fragments that make up the whole of Woman.

This story for somebody might be, “Jesus, girl, get over it. There are real problems in life.” Well, for me, that was my tragedy. A death of anybody close to me was nothing like that, because I had a part of me that was getting beaten in the corner; that expressive side was degraded, was forced to do things, was not loved. I'm a very cruel jailer. And I was.

But with God, I think that the energy force of creation feels really pissed off at this usurper that humankind has created is misusing that force, you know? I think it's really pissed off.

[About "Jackie's Strength"] This wonderful boy had asked me to marry him, and of course I said yes, but I was shocked. "You know, there was a part of me that had sworn that would never happen. You fantasize about what it would be like on that day, and then you fantasize about never having that day. Then you're a vigilante and you will never have it. Then, all of a sudden, there it is, and you're wondering, 'Are we going to make it? Half of all marriages end in divorce. Is that us?' That was all going on as I got lost on my wedding day.

There are other sides that are quite willing to deal with everyone else so when we talk so when we talk about the stage side and the way people see me, they don't see the girl who writes the songs except through the music. I don't allow it. This is not hunting season. It's not OK. I don't put her in that position.

People say to me: “I can't believe you've made God a woman” and it's like, “OK genius, leave the room, think for five minutes, go over your history, come back in the room and you tell me who has been the pope for the past few years”.

And of course "Damage" speaks for itself. The song, being herself damaged, it's trying to teach myself about graciousness, and I have such a hard time with that. I have a very hard time. "Damage" was so essential for me to sing, it's one of the most difficult ones for me. I can look and have love and feelings for some of these people but...

Any part of myself that does the interviews and does the other stuff can handle themselves just fine. It's all a bit of a game to them because they don't take it personally. If the songs are getting attacked they deal with it from a different viewpoint. You see what I mean?

[About "China"] The fifths in the bass represent the beginning of an ancient ceremony. This ceremony took me to China, took me to the kitchen table where most wars get nurtured. I've always felt China and secrets are good friends. This song was the first written on Little Earthquakes.

[About "Boys for Pele"] These songs are not about make-ups or break-ups. And they're not concerned about who is sleeping with whom. These songs are about the realization that you and the person you're with are talking different languages. They're about recognising that an extreme kind of viciousness is being played out even as you exchange honeysuckle. They're about the hidden things that go on in a woman's heart - the things that are expressed and the things that have to remain hidden. They're about the breaking down of the patriarchy within relationships and the idea of women claiming their own power.

Everybody is encouraged to listen to our dying leaders, dying meaning, their ideologies dying. Instead of running to Christianity or running to Islam, or running to... whomever, we have to move forward. You bring the truth, you glean it, like, you separate the pits from the fruit and you take with you what you've learned. We don't know how to think for ourselves, how to reason and this is what this generation needs to do is stand up and instead of PASSING THE SICKNESS TO OUR KIDS BECAUSE PLEASE TELL ME, WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN US AND OUR GREAT GRANDPARENTS? BECAUSE BELIEVE ME, WHEN WE'RE 50 YEARS OLD, THERE'S GONNA BE A YOUNG GENERATION GOING "THOSE FUCKING OLD FARTS, THEY'RE SO CLOSE MINDED! So when we talk about religion and my unacceptance of the institution, it's because it MUST BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR IT'S ABUSE OF THE TRUTH! AND IT HAS ABUSED THE TRUTH! ALL OF THEM!

"Father Lucifer" is really about going to have a cup of tea with Lucifer, which I had to do. Now, when I say Lucifer, I'm talking about the feelings that we hide from ourselves, not something that's twisted and evil, like during the Inquisition when they used Christianity to torture people. That's Satanism. I had to go in this record when I was trying to find parts of myself that I had not let scream and dance and have a tear. I went to go visit Lucifer to get my talisman, which means my little magic key that took me to the places that I hadn't let myself go. That's really about having a little tango, a little dance, with Lucifer. The idea that Dark is not a scary thing if you go in there understanding there is a purity in Darkness.

What's come out of the gangsta rap thing is that the women rappers are reacting against it, it's all coming out from the home and getting discussed, taboos are being broken, which can only be good in the long term. Women have been kicked around since the beginning of time. These guys have got rid of the silent hypocrisy and secrecy, so now it can be sorted out. Progress comes from confronting the unthinkable and unsavory. Widespread child abuse would never have been known about if terrible things were never allowed out in the open.

The whole current of "Sneeze" is doing anything so that you don't have to face yourself. Nothing is enough - you don't feel that you have the tools. I couldn't get to this until everything was falling apart. I couldn't get to this until things were being flung back in my face. When you're being gushed and gooed over, and all that stuff in a relationship, it disgusts you. It's like "10 minutes of that, boys - then give me something else." It's strange knowing the whole time that your contact with the Earth Mother - your contact with the ocean - your contact with all of those things - you feel an outsider to them. You know they're there. You go and try everything. You go through everything you've ever been taught to try and feel enough. And I just stand there with my little plug, going, "What wall can I plug into?" Not knowing that we're all plugged in, already. You just have to remember.

I've really dealt with a lot of female journalists, believe it or not, that don't want to talk about healing from violence and working through... certain things, they just say, "Who's interested in talking about Jesus, masturbation, and rape?" and it's like, "What else is there to talk about? Of course we're going to talk about these things." And I've found that the women are the ones that block these issues a lot of the times, not the men, and that's the betrayal, it's like, "You're not a woman. You're ... you're a lizard walking around with a stolen ... genital."

[About "Raspberry Swirl"] I wrote it for one of my girlfriends who just had a streak of men who really didn't get her. Sometimes I play the role of the man in my relationships with my female friends. I'm not talking physical, I'm talking on an emotional level. And so this is about being understanding. That if I were 6-foot-4 and had one less hole and a couple more round hairy things, there's no way that these men would be able to compete. Because I really think that they miss the beauty in the women that I find really attractive. They really miss it.

There's a stream that runs up in the rockies and it runs into a bigger stream and finally makes it's way to a river but never the ocean and I was thinking about being whole again and that you don't have to make it to the ocean to be whole again maybe you freeze and become a snow witch or maybe a sandwich and melt away and that's o.k. I think.

Yet the record isn't finished until "Twinkle"; it just wasn't finished until that song. That level of the flame, feeding the flame, because after all the stars, the fire, I had to go into that place of becoming that instead of trying to find it again.

I have no idea what people think about when they listen to my work. It's one of those things where if I was a fly, I probably wouldn't want to be in the room. I just put it out there, and people can think what they want.

(About “The Wrong Band”) There was this hooker in D.C. that I knew, and she'd been having a fling with one of the governors. She got in too deep and thought her life was threatened, so she fled to Japan where she was protected by one of the hierarchy over there. I never heard from her again. It just all came back to me when the Heidi Fleiss thing hit and I started thinking about what that world is about. People don't think of hookers as people, but I quite like them. I find their story really interesting, and when people start judging [them], they should just shut up because they have no idea what it's like to be on the other side.

(About “Take To The Sky”) It was the first song that began “Little Earthquakes”. After “Y Kant Tori Read” was deep in the toilet, I was living behind this church. I started to really get into the rhythms of it all, the Catholicism, but being Protestant I must have been Catholic-channeling.

At first “Caught A Lite Sneeze” was going to be filmed in black and white so that the special effects could work, so it was a nice surprise when Mike the Director said he wanted to give it a go in color. A ghost. He kept feeling my character was my own ghost trapped between the worlds. Whether a part of me had gone so close to the edge that she went over the edge thereby resulting in a death of some kind.

(About “Bliss”) Sometimes, when you express thoughts to people, you leave it open for somebody to tromp in there and start tearing it down. I sing, “Father I killed my monkey,” to lead off the song, which explains that sometimes you even destroy your own - so they can't excavate it. When I was growing up, I started becoming very secretive about my thoughts and the sensory world I would go to, because there's a lot of mind control that goes on constantly, people wanting access: “What are you thinking?” So sometimes I'd have my own defense going, which would be to look them straight in the eye and make them think I've killed my imagination. But it's like, I'll take control.

(About “Thoughts”) “Girl” was being recorded and I couldn't get a take. I was freaking out. Eric was in the booth playing air ball encouraging me to take a ten -minute. Glued on the bench, I started this thing, coming from nowhere, singing nonsense into the mic. When I finished Eric said, “It's a take.” I said, “What?” - he had left the machine running.

“Boys for Pele” is an album in which men drive me to Lucifer, which turns out to be a woman. “To Venus And Back” trails me around Venus, my reconciled femininity, to Lucifer, my dark pole.

(About “I'm On Fire”) You can't cage a wild animal. “I'm On Fire” is like a lioness - hungry before the kill but waiting patiently.

(About “Concertina”) Do you ever feel like you walk in a room, and you don't know why, but you're just so uncomfortable you're crawling out of your skin, even though nobody's touched you - physically? That's in “Concertina”, when you feel like you haven't excavated enough of your different personalities that when one pops up, you're not sure where it came from, and you try to hack it out of yourself. It shocks you that you could have this kind of fault, or that other people could bring it out of you.

(About “Song For Eric”) This one song that I just - I love singing is Song for Eric, and it's acapella, so my hands don't know what to do with themselves when I'm singing it, but I always think about this... You know when you have a memory of something, and you can't quite put your finger on what it is, but you just kind of feel it in your belly, and “Song for Eric” reminds me of a different time, something that isn't in this time, and I go there.

Casting “Greg” for “Pretty Good Year” was vital because the song was inspired by a real boy named Greg - whom I have never met - not that I know of. I received a letter from this boy and it therefore became the seed for “Pretty Good Year”. The boy that was cast in the video had the real name of Greg and we felt he carried a similar longing... The duality of the video for me is starkness in fantasy things are going well, clinically well or maybe transparently well that she senses what is about to come. Her breaking of the glass to follow him into his private dream world is her way of confirming her instincts. Karen and I chuckled over the Ann Margaret reference, as always when things are on the precipice of blowing up - break in to a dance routine I say.

(About “Upside Down”) Sticks, rocks, food - all sundry items came into the faery doughnut including my feet over my head and a little blue girl.

(About “Juárez”) I read an article about several hundred woman in Juárez, New Mexico, who had been taken out to the desert and brutally raped and murdered. When they didn't come home, their brothers would go and look for them, and many times they'd find nothing. Sometimes they'd find a hair barrette or a sock or something they knew was their sister's. the authorities haven't really done anything about it... they get into this serial-killer theory. I mean, how much serial can one man indulge in? So as the song started to develop, I really began taking the voice of the desert, singing in that perspective.

(About “Cloud On My Tongue”) Why Borneo? Because I travel a lot around the world, and I went to all sorts of places, and I ran into different people. Borneo had something that I didn't have. It was a very free, hot, jungly place, and the people that, or a person that came from there, had something that I didn't have that I desperately wanted, which was this no rigidity. When I say, “Leave the wood outside/what, all the girls here are freezing cold/Leave me with your Borneo…”

There's beauty and wisdom in the darkness, and illumination. “Pele” and “Choirgirl” were very much about that for me. Then it was time that I put my high heels on and ran into Venus - and had a good bottle of red wine.

(About “Operation Peter Pan”) Operation Peter Pan spanned from 1960-1962 whereby over 14,000 children were sent away from their families in Cuba, some never to reunite again. Pan Am flights took the children to Miami, FL, never - never Land and the children became known as the “Peter Pans”. I wrote this song for my daughter, and it is sung for all the daughters and mothers, fathers and brothers who felt this pain of separation all because of governments and their politics.

(From the booklet of “Y Kant Tori Read”) For the best result, you should apply the same care in storing and handling the Compact Disc as you would a garden hose. No further cleaning will be necessary if the Compact Disc is always handled with rubber gloves and is replaced in it's case before going to the restroom. Should the Compact Disc become soiled by fingerprints, dust or dirt, it can be wiped (always in line with magnetic North) with clean and lint-free soft, dry cloth. No solvent or sandpaper should ever be used on this disc. If you follow these suggestions, the Compact Disc will provide a lifetime of pure listening enjoyment (if not for you, then for the guy who steals it out of your car).

(About “Winter”) Summoned to the piano this Russian music box round played me over and over and over 'til I was wrapped in a blanket with the memory of cinnamon apples on my tongue and boys that didn't - “We” went back to where I felt no time - it was all happening again, presently.

(About the tour with Alanis Morissette in ’99) I've never done a tour like this before - with somebody. It was actually (Morissette's) idea. She had come to see me at Jones Beach [Long Island, N.Y.], and we had a cup of tea and a giggle and got along really well. We share a lot of the same philosophies of putting on a show, which is important. I'm talking about the semantics of it, not just the music. Having all of these people on the road together is like a little town on the road, where you're all part of the same tribe. People do it differently, and it's difficult to pull it off with someone who doesn't hold the same priorities.

(About “A Case Of You”) Any time I would ever slip, I would put on “Case Of You” [written by Joni Mitchell], and there is not a song that could move me about the way a woman loves a man the way that song does. I wish I had written that song. I'm living that song, I should have been able to have written it!

(About “Cooling”, before playing the version which appeared on “To Venus And Back”) So this little song, it's probably… she's one of my best friends of all the songs, and she just didn't wanna be on any of the records, she was supposed to be on “Pele” and then she told me to fuck off and... then she was supposed to be on “Choirgirl”, sort of… kind of… and then she said, you know, “no”. And then she decided she'd like to be played live, so I play her a lot… this is my goodbye to you…

(About “The Waitress”) Condiments are my favorite thing, sometimes when I was lonely I'd line up all the condiments and pound them on the table and let them applaud me, adding confidence to my dishes before they got cooked.

(About “Crucify”) Being the minister's daughter means you get really good poppy seed cake at Christmas time, and you get really wonderful dresses and things made by these really nice little old ladies - and you also get incredible amounts of confusion, but when you're 14 years old and you don't know what your beliefs are, you're taking on everybody's beliefs around you and you're making them yours - and I'm not about the institutionalized church - at all.

Sometimes I feel emotions through other people. Take “1000 Oceans” on “To Venus And Back”. I had a dream at five and a half in the morning of an African woman's voice, excessively tribal. It wasn't a language I knew. I only understood the melody and it only had a few measures. I went to my piano, in the dark, and recorded two measures on a small tape recorder, which is always on the instrument. I sculpted the song during the following weeks, looking at Mark who just lost his father. Until the day when, striked by what I played in the living room, he said, “Could you replay this song about oceans?”

(About “China”) So Cindy called me up and said, “I know what he's building you.” I said, “Cin, who's building me what.” “Your lover in the video,” she said. As I remember, we started to dive into the idea that creative couples make “things” that can rip each other and their images of themselves - separate and together, separate and together which make them separate together. Build walls separately, build walls together. Egos are delicate things, unfortunately walls are not misperceptions running fast so fast it helps set the stones in place. “China” was shot in North Cornwall. Strangely enough where we recorded “Choirgirl” five and a half years later. As in “Spark” you are seeing real water in “Winter”'s glory in England. My “love” in the video built me two things which the sea took with her - an honest to god rock piano and an upside down china teacup in the form of a skirt.

To visit Father Lucifer, to have a moment to dance... to go down in the dark, to visit with the dude! Not these Little prince of darkness wannabes... some of them are cute, but to visit the real energy force that has held the darkness: you go there with honor. And that takes a very big heart to hold the place of shadow. When I went to Lucifer I learned many things. But that whole thing of “he didn't see me watching from the airplane, he wiped a tear and threw away our appleseed...” there's so much religious reference and metaphor coming back full circle from the myths. A part of her loved Lucifer, a part of her tried to find him in so many men that couldn't carry his energy.

(About “Space Dog”) Flying over Chicago from New Mexico - I heard him - him who lives near 7 eleven. Fork in hand at a dead dinner table staring at the peas on his plate going, “Come in, lemon pie - do you read me? Do you read me? Beam me up... get me out of this place ... I can't have their genes in me... come in, lemon pie” … I read you, buddy.

Looking back, I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else in the 80's than as a working musician in LA You just can't match that kind of decadence.

(About “Boys for Pele”) It was a journey in me finding my own fire - my own flame - not through another person or through things or through the piano even, but just trying to find it as a person. I had to find fragments that sort of made up more of the whole. This record really took me to some of the hidden places in my heart as a woman. The programs that I have carried with me started to break down. The way I look at my life changed with this record.

(About “Pretty Good Year”) I got a letter from a guy named Greg in England. This one got to me - it missed getting to me for, like, three months. But it just got passed around to different people, and finally somebody just - I was walking through the record label in between the tour up in England, and somebody put it in my bag. They just said, “You know what, Tori? This has been sitting around here. Just take it.” And I took this letter, and I opened my bag two days later, and I read it. It was a picture of him he had drawn himself. It was a pencil drawing. Greg has kind of scrawny hair and glasses, and he's very skinny and he held this great big flower. Greg is 23, lives in the North of England, and his life is over, in his mind. The tragedy of that for me, just seeing that over and over again, got to me so much that I wrote “Pretty Good Year”. You don't really know what my role is. Am I Lucy, or am I that eight bars of grunge that comes out near the end where I express, and then nothing, everything else is Greg's story? I found that kind of really fun. The emotion is coming from somebody else's story. And yet it touched me so much that I could sing it.

When I was studying all the videos with my friend Tam I tried to remember my impressions when we were filming. “Sneeze” was physically demanding whereas “Jackie” was the most emotionally challenging. I remember on the “Sneeze” set, which was at a Studio somewhere in London, having conversations with Karen and Leslie about parts of 'one' dying when there is no resolve in a particular relationship. It really took until “Choirgirl” with the inception and then the loss of the baby for me to nod spiritually to the two men of whom “Sneeze” references.

(About “God”) Lemons and burnt oranges would come barreling down the skyway on the draw if the dark gray cats didn't open up and let those girls twirl in their fluffy new dresses.

(About “Glory Of The 80's”) Well, the harpsichord is very much in 'Glory of the 80's.' She's part of the bed; I cut it live, with the piano. You might not notice it, but she's there. I love that, because “Glory of the 80's” could be the 1780s. I love some of the Minimoogs and those old sounds, and also the new sounds. What I have a hard time with is a lot of electronica. I don't like a lot of it, because it's real cheesy, from people who don't know keyboard sounds... not just the sounds, but the choice of the notes with the sound; that's so fundamental. It's not just the sound, but how you use the sound.

Sex is only safe for men. “The Wrong Band”, that's what it's about. “The Wrong Band”, with Heidi and Ginger and me, we're all professionals in “The Wrong Band”. My character, although I say she, who's really written about a woman that I knew that had to leave for Japan. She left to be protected, because she was involved with somebody in the house years ago. This was years ago. She got in too deep. She just knew too much, and she was really afraid they that they were going to kill her, they were going to set her up and kill her. She went to Japan to be protected by another powerful man, but she didn't have too many choices at that point, and he was powerful enough to hide her in Japan. I never heard from her again. I don't know what happened. And I knew her for three years. You just get in too deep, and when the Heidi [Fleiss] thing came out - whatever you do to open your mouth or cause it or whatever it is, it's just kind of a shame that, again, it's that control of the Patriarchy. That goes back to God again.

(About “Baker Baker”) There's a stream that runs up in the Rockies and it runs into a bigger stream and finally makes it's way to a river but never the ocean, and I was thinking about being whole again and that you don't have to make it to the ocean to be whole again - maybe you freeze and become a snow witch or maybe a sandwich and melt away and that's o.k. I think.

(About “Talula”) Henry VIII was guilty of killing his wives after each had failed to bare him a son. And it keeps moving into the dance of Talula, and her desperately trying to dance, desperately trying to figure out the whole idea of loss: it must be worth loosing if it's worth something. So if I feel like I am loosing something, at lease I valued something enough to loose it in the first place... it's going back into that train of thought. “Talula” is very much a riddle. The loss of Eric in my life was... it felt like half of me walked out the door. And “Talula” came as a nursery rhyme, my little dance that I would do when things were so sad. Because I started thinking, “But God, I have these feelings, which means...” we shared so many moments that I value, I really valued that, so what a gift that I can feel this loss, that I am not so numb, that I haven't cut myself off so much, and once I could feel the loss then I started to feel free. I want to dance and go, “Yeah, I want to be with Talula. I want to be able to dance through the people that come in and go out of your life. I want to learn how to dance with the gifts when they come and the gifts when they need to take a different route”.

(About “Cloud On My Tongue”) I crawled up in a flower when this one was being written. It was safe there and I wasn't ready to let this one in too deep - it was already to close. Yeah. Or don't leave me with your Borneo, because I've had it before, and that's why I need the wood, because it just, “you can go now, you're already in there”, whether it's pregnant or whether it's just infused. You don't even have to hang around and watch me disintegrate, because you've already done your job. You've already accomplished what you wanted, which was another scalp on your belt, and you did it. That's not one of my more favorite men songs. It's much truer to the way men generally are. Most of us could go now, and the race would continue on without much difference. You could fill this cup with semen and propagate Manhattan again.

“Boys for Pele” is an album in which men drive me to Lucifer, which turns out to be a woman. “To Venus And Back” trails me around Venus, my reconciled femininity, to Lucifer, my dark pole.

(Before cutting the live album for “To Venus And Back”) I hope to get eleven or twelve songs on the live album, but “Waitress” is nine and a half minutes long and “Precious” is seven minutes long. We'll have to see which ones make the semifinals.

(About “Muhammad My Friend”) I was singing in Christmas services (in 1994); I was with my parents. I was watching the Nativity, and after a while I said to myself, “Wait a minute. There's something wrong here.” We were singing Away in the Manger… I kept getting more and more into the perfect little love with the lullaby of Away in the Manger. I started to get husky in the throat. I started to wonder who, with everybody speaking of the baby Jesus, should come up to the cradle. And I found that, of all people, I wanted to have a chat about it with Muhammad, because the Prophet is the one who supposedly knows the Law. So I decided that they needed to talk about the Law - the Law of the Feminine that had been castrated with the birth of Christ. I believe that Magdalene was the Savior's bride, the High Priestess. And that Magdalene was not a blueprint for women - meaning that this was a woman who was honored as the sacred bride, not a virgin.

(About “Pretty Good Year”) Mountain biking became a major event in my life for a week. The mud was so thick on the tires - we got there just in time to feel the mountain thaw, the sound when these two merged was something like “thclpleekooh” - I said on an intake of breath with no lips moving and no throat usage, I like this word and I liked the idea of the eternal footman saying “asta” on a mountain bike.

(About the “From The Choirgirl Hotel” booklet) In the album art, there's a map. The “Choirgirl hotel”, in my brain, is very near this map, and you can see in the right -hand corner, it says, last stop before the CgH, which is the “Choirgirl hotel”, of course. The “Choirgirl hotel” is metaphorical. It's the idea that these girls, the song girls, live in this space and sometimes they let me come and visit and sometimes they don't. They're real persnickety. I feel like they're very independent. Whereas each record has it's own little story and family tree, this one was very much about... I swear to God, I could see some of these girls having margaritas together out by the pool, just saying hi to me as I walked by, you know? It's like, oh yeah, there's “Jackie's Strength”, hanging out by the poolside [laughs]. So I saw them as very independent, but I saw them as a singing group, and that's why I put them in a space that lives nowhere that I've ever been.

(About “The Wrong Band”) Orchards are simple. A peach tree says, “Some of me will be juicy and some of me will be dry. I'm not growing for you - I grow because that's what I do.” You always hear some person complain about how dry their peach is and the peach says, “It's not our fault you have no understanding on the proper use for dry peaches.”

With “Riot Poof”, there's cocoa butter on that golden ass. And that ass is chocolate. A lot of R&B has no ass right now. Some of it does, some of it doesn't. And there's a sterility to a lot of electronica. Sometimes you want something to be sterile; that's your point.

(About “Yes, Anastasia”) I hope I told your story correctly, my friend. Too many codes - it was hard for me to decipher, but I believe Anastasia's story is everyone's in a way. She tried to tell me that and I blew her off.

(Before playing “Marianne”, talking about the Genesis of “Boys for Pele” and the difficulties for getting the record supported by her record label and producers) Record companies/radio had absolutely fuck-all to do with any of this ordeal [the album going platinum]. And that's the truth. But the one thing is you guys did, and this is one song that demanded to come tonight, because although she's not on this planet anymore, she was probably the main song that gave me strength to withstand when everybody said that I've made a piece of shit.

(About a b-side record before she had the inspiration for “To Venus And Back”) I didn't know which b-sides to choose. It was getting too random. It started to become neither fish nor flesh, and that's not good for a mermaid.

“Father Lucifer” is really about going to have a cup of tea with Lucifer, which I had to do. Now, when I say Lucifer, I'm talking about the feelings that we hide from ourselves, not something that's twisted and evil, like during the Inquisition when they used Christianity to torture people - that's Satanism. I had to go in this record when I was trying to find parts of myself that I had not let scream and dance and have a tear. I went to go visit Lucifer to get my talisman, which means my little magic key that took me to the places that I hadn't let myself go. That's really about having a little tango, a little dance, with Lucifer. The idea that Dark is not a scary thing if you go in there understanding there is a purity in Darkness. There's also a lot of distortion in Darkness. It's a choice where you want to go, and I wanted to get to the truth, not to the drama and to keeping me from the truth.

(About the video for “Caught A Lite Sneeze”) Karen and Leslie knew I was seancing through the whole video shoot demanding my heart to race across the planet and back into my body - a theme I come back to time and again as in “calling for my soul at the corners of the world I know she's playing poker with the rest of the stragglers…” The chair scene here has become a mechanical dragon dragging parts of myself from other parts - it's a long way from the protective chair in “Pretty Good Year”.

(About marriage and the inspiration for “To Venus And Back”) What I didn't get before I got married, is that marriage can come with trust, and lust can come out of trust. Of course that affects the new record, because I see passion differently. But Venus is also the result of a very personal journey. After the Plugged tour, I sort of walked into a fierce calm. I didn't need to be someone's daughter, wife or mother - even though I am a daughter and a wife, and motherhood kind of just slipped through time and space for me. The record is just about being a woman and waking up every day. Most songs didn't come until the title was in place. My friend Natalie looked at me at one point and said, “You know you would go to Venus, or that you've been there.” If you're gonna approach the Venus realm, seduction lives there, obsession lives there, trust lives there, decadence lives there, control lives there.

(About “Cloud On My Tongue”) My only problem was, I said 'You can go now' after he was already in there. I mean, it had done - it was already planted, so whatever it was, that's where I think Cloud balances out Baker Baker a bit, because it's the shadow side. She's not ignorant. She knows exactly what's happening. You can have things happen you didn't want to have happen to you and still be in control. Like you're driving along and make a wrong turn; it's not as if you can't get out of the wrong turn, but you know you've made a wrong turn. I think she went into the wrong state. She went into Borneo. Wrong continent.

I find it funny sometimes that although Pele was really playing with emotional death, my character physically dies in two of the Pele videos. “Choirgirl” on the other hand, which confronts physical death, has the most energetic - being physically present - from Supergirl in “Spark”, to Running Bride to Rave chick in “Raspberry”.

There's this moment in “Suede” where the narrator's being called 'evil' by this other person because of whatever she's done to them in their minds. But there's this side of obsession and passion where one party thinks the other party is doing something to them - and sometimes people aren't always looking at their part in something. In “Suede” she knows what she's up to - she knows what she's been doing.

(About “Talula”) I went after those archetypes that have been so misunderstood. With Anne Boleyn's relationship with Henry VIII, he'd manipulate the truth. That's why he says one plus one is three. Whatever the patriarchy says goes, and you'll burn for it.

When people talk about this (“Juàrez”) track, they're comparing it to, I don't know, an “electronica” track. But you're confusing your terms here, people. You're just confused, because it's a commentary on the real hardcore misogynistic stuff, done in a way that captures them with their pants down, literally, mutilating her.

(About “Boys for Pele”) The whole record is about my response to men, and that's my right.

(About “To Venus And Back”) I think once the title was in place, then really, the songs started to show up and say, 'Hi, we're from Venus, sit down.'

(About “Space Dog”) Scrumpy became our friend. We rescued him after a car crash and then he died from a disease 4 months later - he was our wiz dog.

Lyrics to me, when they become references so that “Mr Zebra” can be who you want it to be, although you know that there are certain clear words - Strychnine, sometimes she's a friend of mine. And you get a sense of the characters, of who they are. And I'm sure the person, women that you know that are Ratatouille Strychnine, and we can kinda love those women, but you have faces that are different from the faces that I see when I sing about um, that cute little babe that's poisoning the muffins in the kitchen. But we love her, too. And that was important in this record. This is really the hidden sides of the feminine, the ones that get a little wicked, and the reasons that they're wicked. That's what is being said also in the story, the reasons, 'cause they haven't been recognized, that they kinda have to mutiny for me to listen to them so that we can get to the heart, and that's really the core of the record. In “Mr. Zebra” we pick up Ratatouille Strychnine, who we love because she's our little double agent who can poison people and get us out of trouble when they're hurting us. But she's tired, she's tired of the poisoning.

(About “Bliss”) Actually it's about my relationship with the Christian god. Instead of “Father who art in heaven”, it's “Father, I killed my monkey” and because my father um... Methodist minister. Methodist minister... my grandparents' Church of God ministers. They're gone now. But it was very much about um... the Marys, the two Marys were divided, the Magdalene and the Mother Mary... um... divided in the psyche. So, the Mother Mary um... the way I see it and the way I think a lot of mythology people that I respect see it is that she was severed from her sexuality, the Mother Mary, and the Mary Magdalene was severed from her spirituality and her wisdom. So, there's a division here... of almost this um... circumcision of women; Christian women have had to work through for the last 2000 years, and I feel the control that's really gone on. You know this whole thing of divide and conquer, it's a joke really. Divide and conquer what - a village? No, divide and conquer a person with themselves, that's control. Then, you think you have to go through these people for some kind of..uh..soul purification some kind of um..acceptance and forgiveness, and I'm like 'no, no.' The Christian God can sit over there, and we can have a chat, and he can do stuff I can't do, "I'm only a woman". But no, there's gotta be respect that I'm a woman, he's multi-dimensional.

Tori talks about "Siren":

“The whole thing about Siren was I was asked to um, do this music to this film, Great Expectations. And um, when I saw the rough cut of the movie it was a bit of a different thing than it ended up to be. But point is, the scene that they asked me to do, um, when I first saw it, I was on the water and my concept of his character um, who was Ethan Hawke playing the part of -- they call it Finn in the movie. But it's Pip, right? That’s the correct Great Expectations person. Anyway, I felt like those guys were on a boat fishing. And uh, they had had this grunge music there -- being a manly kind of thing and I’m like, screw that, that’s ridiculous. If you’re gonna do a manly thing on the water, go Polynesian, 800 years ago. Go into the sirens and do it correctly. I mean the Miller time and all the baited worms all this stuff from the great tackle shop -- blow that. Go and find the sirens, make your sacrifice, cut off a toe, do what you're supposed to. Be good guys. So I decided that it would make his character a bit more enriching if um, there was this mythological element of the sea creatures.” [KFOG, Berkeley - October 8, 1999]

"I know I'm an acquired taste - I'm anchovies. And not everybody wants those hairy little things."

"Many scholars believe that Mary Magdalene was a high priestess who came from the cult of Isis," Amos explains. "She wasn't this 'anything for a fiver, honey.' She was a peer to Jesus." In her new song "Muhammed, My Friend," Amos is inspired by this idea when she sings, "It's time to tell the world/ We both know it was a girl back in Bethlehem."

"It was all about fire, claiming my fire," Tori continues to explain. "Claiming the female part. The feminine that's been so shamed and so 'this is a correct feminine expression,' 'this is a naughty feminine expression,' 'this is a mother feminine expression.' So she began to read about Mary Magdalene; Amos calls her ''the blueprint for women which was never carried over and passed down.'' She sees Magdalene as representing woman as a passionate, compassionate being."

"They're about recognizing that an extreme kind of viciousness is being played out even as you exchange 'honeysuckle,'" she said. "They're about the things going on in a woman's heart; the things expressed and the things hidden. They're about the breaking down of the patriarchy within relationships and the idea of women claiming their own power." "I think you have to know who you are, get to know the monster that lives in your soul, dive deep into your soul and explore it. I don't want to renounce my dark side. The truth has always held an enormous interest for me. Everything is therapeutic, no matter what you do."

Tori Amos, Connection Magazine, 6/98
"Reach high; doesn't mean she's holy, just means she's got a cellular handy..." - Siren
"I have my own parties. They involve being barefoot with a piece of fried chicken and margarita in each hand."

"God is a misogynist. When you really spend time and look at things God said, if you have a brain on you, you've got to raise an eyebrow and say this God is a macho pig. I mean, if Sylvester Stallone said this stuff we'd be giving him a very hard time and he has said some of this stuff and we have given him a hard time - he deserved it. But the point is the Christian god hasn't honoured women. Sorry, the cat's out of the bag and it's just not cool so it's something we have to address..."

"I can't have discussions about it anymore, I just can't. When someone asks me if I've found Jesus, I say, 'Yeah, I saw him at a Nirvana concert a couple of years ago.' It's like, Jesus has got things to do, he's got a ten o'clock. He's not going to fix things for me, I have to fix things for myself, so I try and have a sense of humor about it and nobody finds my humor very amusing. We've just got to lighten up on the savior bit, folks. You know, get off the cross, we need the wood."

"Mary Magdalene is really someone who has made the church very uncomfortable," Amos said. "That is why you have two Marys in the Bible: onethat is very sexual, and one that is virtuous and spiritual, cut off from her sexuality. "In doing so, they take away all her wisdom. So instead of people having to align with one or the other, the Marys need to become married - joined together."

"It was all about fire, claiming my fire," Tori continues to explain. "Claiming the female part. The feminine that's been so shamed and so 'this is a correct feminine expression,' 'this is a naughty feminine expression,' 'this is a mother feminine expression.' "And I went, well, where's the Magdalene in all this? Being brought up heavy Christian, I was going down that bloodline. I was going down to the blueprint that hadn't been passed down, which started to get me into things that are hidden, which was very much what the music was about. The hidden thoughts."

"That's why I sing 'God, sometimes you just don't come through/ You need a woman to look after you.' The God-force must be feminized, perceived more as a God-Goddess. Jesus, his mother, 'his church' all must be redefined. Especially a figure like Mary Magdalene, who I and so many Christian women were taught to despise, because she was a prostitute. Because of that we had great problems coming to terms with the prostitute in ourselves, which again, is something the Church teaches us to deny, and something my song, 'The Wrong Band' is about when I sing. 'Ginger is always sincere/But not to one man.' The shadow side of that was Mary Magdalene, who we've always been taught was a whore because that's the camp I was in. But why did I have to be divided from the two Marys? Shouldn't it be about the balance? It should be about a wholeness, but it's about division."