Her Secret Garden
by Steven Daly

You are Tori Amos. Year after year you've opened a vein for your public, serving up for their consumption every painful detail of your personal life, including your own rape. Despite the fact that your very own father is a Methodist minister, you've stared down the Christian patriarchy and offered listeners the escape of a mythical, pagan, faerie world. You have given till it hurts in interviews and sung your lungs out in hundreds of live shows a year - critics call you "sensuous," "electrifying' and "possessed," and fans flood backstage for your healing touch. Yes you're all that, plus tax. You're sometimes dismissed as an ineffectual sprite, but you've managed to rally major corporate funding for your charity, RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. And despite having been assured that your girl-and-her-piano shtick will never, ever play, you've become as one observer put it, a "moon child for lost souls and misfits" with a million devoted followers worldwide.
Next thing you know, your hard-won success is opening the door for a new generation of rock ladies with personal revelations of a more polite nature. And here they come: the Joan Osbornes and the Sarah McLachlans, the Paula Coles and Shown Colvins and Jewels, mild-mannered Pottery Barn poets who, one by one, get all the multiplatinum albums and pop-radio play and Grammys that have always eluded you. Then there's this little piano-playing glam freak Fiona Apple - a teenager, yet - who even has among her musical-journal entries a song about being raped. The press, being the press, gives the benefit of the pout. What's a girl to think?
"Isn't it great, all this diary stuff?" gushes the real Tori Amos. "So much better than it was a few years ago, when record companies had a quota of, like, ten female signings a year. I'm so uncompetitive, really."
"You can't control your popularity; I know I'm an acquired taste - I'm anchovies," Amos explains with typical moon-child exuberance. "And not everybody wants those hairy little things. If I was potato chips, I could go a lot more places, but I'm not. On my second record I though that way, like with the song 'God':'Why don't people want to hear about God getting a blow job?' I thought those born-again Christians would love that. But then I realized that even my sister wouldn't buy my records if I wasn't her sister - to her, I sound like the psycho in Reservoir Dogs, Mr. Blonde. She says, 'Why do I want to listen to that on my way to work?'"
The erstwhile Mr. Blonde is presently cooking up her latest sardine platter down among the gentle quilted hillsides of Olde England. The county of Cornwall is England's most westerly and independent-minded and also it's most mythical; The wind-swept province, with it's own language and culture, was the setting of the Tirstram and Isolde fable, and, according to legend, King Arthur convened his Round Table here. Among the scattered possessions in Tori Amos' playback room is a shopping bag full of books from the King Arthur Bookshop in neighboring Tintagel.
It's appropriate that Amos has elected to record in Cornwall, being something of a far-out, mystical type herself. Her last album, Boys for Pele, was named after a Hawaiian volcano goddess, and Amos rarely forgets to thank "the faeries" on her liner notes; her publishing company is called Sword and Stone. And asking her the most straightforward questions is liable to produce a radical unnerving detour into any number of ancient cultures or religions - show the slightest unfamiliarity with names like Osiris or Persephone or Demeter, and Amos will simply fix you with the indulgent smile of a grade-school teacher addressing a slow learner.
If there's one well-known mythical name you would expect Amos to drop, it's Lilith, the figure of ancient Jewish lore, adopted by the defining event of the femme-rock era. Surely the uncompetitive and surprising well-adjusted Amos must find her spiritual home in the pagan bosom of the festival for which she is unofficial den mother. Then again, maybe Amos is not quite that well-adjusted. "Well, I would have a good bottle of wine with Sarah [McLachlan, Lilith Fair's founder] any night of the week," she allows. "But my shows are theater, and I've worked a long time to get them to this point. This isn't just about eating some chicken and hearing a few of your favorite female singers. You walk into my show, you walk into a world - it's a film every night. I can't impose that on Lilith and vice versa.
"Plus, I'm not into the all-male, all-female thing," says Amos with growing agitation. "Where's Dionysus? Where's Hades? You can't cut out the testosterone. And we need some pansy-ass people, too, like little camp Hermes. Even though I'm sure some of those women have more testosterone than Hermes," she adds with a slightly unsisterly roll of the eyes.
As she speaks, Amos clasps in her hands an Eeyore tea mug. In between sips, she presses it to her jaw to ease the discomfort of a bone deformity that's troubled her for two decades.
"When I was fifteen, I thought it was brain tumor," Amos says ruefully. "Well, of course I did!" The condition is sufficiently grave to give Amos headaches she compares to the pain of a tooth abscess. Surgery is not an option, and since painkillers do not agree with Amos' constitution, she simply gets "Tiger Balmed-up" backstage before every show and iced down afterward. The condition is "a little, tiny handicap," according to this ethereal survivor. "It's so boring for everybody - and I hate to bore people."
To make her new record, "from the choirgirl hotel," Amos has convened her own high-tech round table in a converted barn that's distinguished from it's neighbors by the modest satellite dish on the roof. Behind a door with a scrawled sign that says "rock factory" lies Amos' inner sanctum, the airy room where she communes with her muse. It is, like the rest of the premises, bare, enlivened only by a Bösendorfer piano and a nineteenth-century Russian chaise longue with elaborately carved dolphins on each arm. (The $12,000 piece is one of what Amos calls "Tori's follies," the other one being the moat around her spread in Ireland.)
The one-lane bridges and sheep congested backroads that greet visitors who make the five-hour drive from London would certainly act as handy deterrent to any record-company suits who might fancy checking in on their investment. "They could pop in before Little Earthquakes did well," Amos says with a glint of steel. Since that debut album took off, she has enjoyed such complete control of her career that she can now smugly utter the statement, "Mess with me and you will not survive." Scratch the space cadet and you'll find a starship trooper underneath.
Amos' accomplices on the Cornwall mission are a group of well-trained engineers who have come to understand her uniquely exacting ideas about "sonic geometry." If she asks them to make a track sound like, say, a desolate scene from the movie Fargo, they will spend as many hours as it takes to make it so.
Tori Amos was creating her own world around her long before she was taking thirty-strong bands of "pirates" on world tours. At the age of five, her imagination inflamed by the Poe, Dickens and Faulkner her mother would read to her, Amos could conjure up a whole playground of pals. "I would get lonely sometimes when other children didn't want to come and play with me," recalls the bib-overalled artist as she sits outside watching her neighbor's cows feeding at their troughs. "I had millions of friends from the other world. As a little girl, you play with who you can, and if they're not in human form they're still very real to you." The habit persists to this day. "Let's put it this way," Amos says. "It's never lonely in my Toyota 4-Runner."
Amos reads avidly about arcane imaginary worlds, taking eminent mythographer Joseph Campbell as her lens and prism. In his 1949 book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Campbell ties together the world's mythologies into a "monomyth," tracing each story back to a universal archetype. The common theme among all myths, the author posited, was a hero taking on an adventure, then suffering in an unknown land before returning home, triumphant and enlightened. By the standards of The Hero With a Thousand Faces - which, incidentally, inspired Star Wars - Tori Amos' own life has all the makings of a pretty decent myth.
Born in North Carolina to a Methodist preacher and his part-Cherokee wife, Amos was, at five years old, the youngest-ever student at Baltimore's prestigious Peabody Conservatory. Expelled at eleven for musical insubordination, Amos took to playing piano in bars in her teenage years; a week after her twenty-first birthday, Amos decamped to Los Angeles to pursue her own musical vision and, after numerous strange side trips, had a painful fall from grace. Only after she was exiled to England did Amos ultimately find redemption, returning home triumphant and, yes, somewhat enlightened.
Physically, too, the thirty-four-year-old Amos has something of a mythic aura. She is a tiny creature of Tolkenian aspect, with an Irish Spring complexion, piercing gray-blue eyes and a pillowed lower lip on which rest her prominent front teeth. It is no great surprise that the English comic-book artist Neil Gaiman was able to use Amos' appearance and persona to shape Delirium, a character in his epic, labyrinthine Sandman series.
I remember congratulating Tori after a show in Minneapolis, and she said, 'Now we must jump up and down and down, and dance around and around,'" says Gaiman, who met the singer after she name-checked him in her lyrics. "And we did! She has that wonderful un-selfconsciousness that allows one to say exactly what one thinks. That moment at the end of 'The Emperor's New Clothes' when the child stands up and tells everyone that the emperor is actually naked - that's very Tori. The mistake people make is thinking that's all there is to her."
How low can you go? How about "not quite getting it together" to audition as a keyboard player for Billy Idol? Feeling genuine elation that you managed to edge out the then-unknown Sarah Jessica Parker for a Corn Flakes commercial? Not mythically low enough? Try working as an extra on a Raquel Welch commercial for Crystal Light - and being told by the directory that Miss Welch would like you to "Tone it down, please." Finally, after being sneered at by the casting directory of Howard the Duck, you slink off to your regular gig as happy-hour entertainer at the downtown-L.A. Sheraton, where you sing "Send in the Clowns" and "Feelings" in your best "Love Is a Battlefield" outfit.
These were some of the outrageous slings and arrows endured by Tori Amos after she moved to Los Angeles, trying to make it as a singer/songwriter. The sum total of her experience up to that point was playing piano bars in the Washington, D. C., area - her father would drive her in from the suburbs. Now here she was, a big-haired hopeful living in a scuzzy one-room apartment off Hollywood Boulevard, "making friends with the palm trees."
Adrift in Hollywood, sick of day-job degradation and music-industry rejection, Amos ditched her beloved Bösendorfer to form a pop-metal ensemble called Y Kant Tori Read. The band, which played but one live show, was signed by the same Atlantic Records staffer who brought you Twisted Sister and Skid Row.
Billboard used the word "bimbo" in a review of Y Kant Tori Read's debut album, and the record stiffed. Amos did not leave her apartment for a week. "I cried constantly; I was on my knees," she says. "From child prodigy to musical joke in twenty years - how do you reconcile that? So I went back to the faerie world." And to happy hour at the Long Beach Sheraton.
Amos says she "got down and sucked the big Böse," rediscovering her self-belief in new, piano-based material that was to become Little Earthquakes. The songs were a little bit Joni Mitchell and a lot Kate Bush, but they were distinguished by their striking personal revelations. Amos' signature track was "Me and a Gun," her stark account of being raped. The record company wanted to hear guitars.
At twenty-eight, Amos had been down that road before. So she drew herself up to her full five feet three inches and pulled her American Indian blanket (worn for "protection and clarity") tight around her shoulders and intimated that there was another company interested in her. It was a bluff, of course, but Amos did not blink. The tracks were released in their original form, and Amos shipped out to London to relaunch her career, slogging away at the bottom of meaningless bills in shabby little venues.
Amos' Virgil in London's underworld was fellow U.S. expatriot Karen Binns. "She looked like a teenage bag lady," says Binns, a fashion stylist who took the late bloomer under her wing, "poor white trash and completely out to lunch. I didn't' know what planet she was on, but it was definitely the right planet. I said 'Honey, I can give you a Galliano dress and tell you you're fabulous, but just keep it real. Reality always sells.'"
Little Earthquakes did, of course, sell. And Tori Amos' Judgement was never again called in question. By her third album, she had Atlantic renting Sunset Boulevard billboards featuring an image of her suckling a piglet.
Tori Amos strides down a central London street, pulling up her red woolen hood against the driving rain. Despite the inclement weather and the fact that Amos' perfectionist ear has found fault with the mastering process of Choirgirl Hotel, there is a distinct glide to her gait. This could be because she got married.
The happy event was staged just north of London in a church built on a 1,000-year-old pagan site. Very Amos, as was the flowing diaphanous dress she wore. The Church of England ceremony was not, however, quite what you'd expect from a sworn enemy of Christianity. "Yes, I know, the religion that chopped all the women's heads off." Amos concedes, referring to King Henry VIII, the Church of England's misogynous founder. "I thought I was never gonna get married, but it felt fright. I didn't have a fantasy of this ritual, and I played at so many weddings."
Amos' groom was thirty-two-year-old mark Hawley, and engineer on Amos' new record. Her last serious romance was a seven-year union with the co-producer of her 1994 album, Under the Pink, Eric Rosse. "I like men on the tech side of things," says Amos. "They have a different point of view, and I like that - they don't want to be in my world; they want to be playing with knobs."
Keen Tori watchers might have caught the reference to "my wedding day" on "Jackie's Strength," and elegant Choirgirl Hotel ballad inspired by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy - a most unlikely addition to Amos' goddess pantheon. "The songs just grab me by the throat sometimes and say, 'We're coming in,'" Amos explains. "I saw Jackie as a bride - and I used to think I would never be a bride. I started to look to Jackie and how that woman held the country together after she watched her husband get cut down right in front of her."
Choirgirl Hotel's other guests are a motley bunch, indeed, with traditional Amos piano-based arrangements yielding to a band setup. "The piano pulled me aside and said 'You're boring me to tears,'" Amos says. "So I was like, 'Calling all sailors. . . .'" Amos hired a crew of able seamen, who chop out vacuum-packed studio funk in the Peter Gabriel mold; there's even some dance-music dabbling, inspired by Armand Van Helden's abstracted dance remix of Amos' "Professional Window," a huge U.K. hit early last year. And there are plenty of what they call "treated" vocals, the ones that sound like someone is singing through a toilet-paper roll. All in all, nothing that Depeche Mode didn't try five years ago and nothing likely to put her among the popular girls of Lilith.
Then again, applying ordinary standards to Tori Amos' music is missing the point by a glorious margin. Earthbound analysis can't diminish Amos in the eyes of the fans who celebrate her freedom to follow her muse all over the map. On Web sites and in fanzines, they breathlessly interpret every line, every nuance of her records; the baroque time changes, vocal mood swings and loopy metaphors only deepen the intrigue. While Amos' work certainly taps into the contemporary appetite for public confession, there is a larger dimension to her appeal: She's part of a culture that's unloved media trend suckers. This is the widespread fin de siècle tendency to obsessively immerse oneself in complex myth worlds, from Myst and Dungeons and Dragons to Star Wars and Star Trek. And this - far more than Lilith Fair - is the context to which Tori Amos belongs: Think of her as the Anne Rice of rock.
A few years back, Tori Amos was sitting in yet another anonymous hotel room, flipping channels on the TV, when she happened across one of her own concert performances. As she saw herself writhing on the piano stool, furiously tossing her mane, the performer had on odd reaction: She was utterly horrified.
"I know when I'm playing passionately, and it's primitive and it's as old as time," says Amos. "But I know when I look at myself and I'm in anguish, sexualizing myself. At that point I was very cut off - I only knew how to express myself sexually through my instrument. But it left me as soon as I got offstage, so I searched for it and tried to find it in other people. It's painful when you don't know how to be sexual.
"I was so torn apart by the pain of not being a woman. I wanted to experience things I'd heard other women talk about: Like Pinocchio said, 'I want to be a real little boy.' It's a real private. . . ." Amos adds, trailing off in a rare moment of self-censorship.
Amos began to re-examine her own persona as she was writing 1996's Boys for Pele. "You would not," she avers, "have wanted to have a drink with me during that record." The nineteen-song Pele was no bargain for listeners, either. Produced by Amos herself and recorded in the wake of her split with Eric Rosse, the record is by some distance the singer's least accessible. To her it may have been like "crossing the River Styx into my own psyche" or "the descent of Inanna [of Sumerian legend] into the underworld," but many nonbelievers heard only musical sophistry and emotional incontinence. Amos' overeducated fingers got medieval on your ass, hammering seven shades of Scheherazade out of a harpsichord, while her keening anima ran wild and free. This unholy union of progressive rock and self-help literature proved that rock's femme era could rival, in terms of sheer excess, the strutting cock rock of an earlier age.
Even though she knew she was in bad shape, Amos undertook a mammoth world tour in support of Boys for Pele. She collapsed from exhaustion. "I didn't cancel," Amos says with perverse pride. "It's not part of my nature to cancel; it's just not what I do - I play." It wasn't until she crawled from the wreckage of that tour that she began to get perspective on her relationship with her art - and it wasn't pretty.
"I think I was in real trouble, and I happened to be in the public eye," says Amos. "You're playing your wound - and sometimes you reach your hand in there and it doesn't feel so good. I see other singers doing this: They're in serious pain, and they're doing stupid, crazy shit that I used to do. But that doesn't go too deep. You have to go deal with it privately; you have to do the work."
The work, for Amos, meant everything from intensive reading to visiting psychics. Perhaps tired of being a shrink to the rest of the world, Amos engaged a Los Angeles analyst, whom she consults regularly by telephone. "Now, things come up and I have a way of working through them," says Amos. "Before, I would write the songs and never discuss them, except with journalists, maybe. Now I'm more aware of what I'm writing about - not always when I'm doing it, but after it's done, I'll sit back and go, 'Oh, jeez.'"
To recover from the turmoil of the Boys for Pele tour, Amos took a hiatus at her Florida retreat, north of Miami. It was there, on December 23rd, 1996, that she encountered her gravest crisis yet. Pregnant by her future husband, she miscarried.
"You feel death, but you're alive," says Amos, sitting in a small central-London cafe. "You're walking between the worlds. I went through many different sides to it. You got through every question. I even went through a phase where I felt rejected. Then I began to feel a peace; the spirit started to take me to another level of love. Like the Grinch, my heart grew three times that day - I began to feel the capacity again."
Music was once more the key to Amos' survival, with new songs like "Spark," "iieee" and "Playboy Mommy" helping her to work through unspeakable grief. "I didn't know when I was gonna make another record when I got pregnant," she says. "I was going to put things on hold for a while. But the music became vital again, as it always seems to. Songs started to come, and they showed me different ways of feeling and expressing, ways that surprised me. 'Playboy Mommy' dealt with my feelings of rejection - 'Wasn't I enough to be your mother, didn't you want me? Well, don't come, then. Go choose some little right-wing Christian for your mother.' It's a human response."
Amos orders up a cappuccino, "real milky, like you'd make it for a child," and when it arrives, she clutches the cup to her jaw. As the pain subsides, her face takes on a distant look. The spell is broken when Madonna's "Frozen" comes on the radio. "I love this song!" Amos squeals. "It makes me want to . . ." Amos trills an operatic version of Madonna's spiritual opus, then clamps a hand over her mouth as Saturday-afternoon shoppers turn their heads her way.
Tori Amos could have been Madonna. Well, more accurately, she could have been Tiffany or Debbie Gibson or Taylor Dayne, or any one of the other Eighties disco bimbos who rolled off the production line in Ms. Ciccone's sacred image. In a bizarre subchapter of the Amos myth, she was discovered at a D.C. hotel bar by a pop-soul producer, Narada Michael Walden, who put together some demo tapes for her. Among the aspiring dance diva's 1982 compositions were. "Predator," "Rub Down" and the implausibly titled "Skirt's On Fire." "You think Y Kant Tori Read was bad - you haven't heard anything," Amos says with a laugh. She sings a few bars of "Skirt's On Fire" with admirable commitment. Actually, it's quite catchy.
The following day, Amos is sitting in her favorite restaurant, a little French boîte in London's exclusive Mayfair enclave. Luxury is a necessity for this cosmic cracker, whose taste for the good life runs from fine wines to Manolo Blahnik shoes to the $600 Nicole Fahri coat with thick fur collar and cuffs - "That's fake fur, sweetie" - that she's presently dousing in mussel sauce. ("At least it's keeping my sweater dry," she notes.) Amos was making $600 a week as a sixteen-year-old barroom chanteuse, and she retained enough of her family's Protestant work ethic to subsidize her artistic flights of fancy. "I have always been able to pay my bills," Amos boasts.
Kate Bush and Béla Bartók and Jimmy Page are some of the oft-cited musical influences who put the wind beneath Tori Amos' wings, but an equally important character in her fantastic voyage is her paternal grandmother, Addie Allen. Amos' maternal grandmother was also, she says, a "tough broad": but it was Allen who captivated the young Myra Ellen Amos, as Tori was known for the first seventeen years of her life. It was Allen who seems to have imbued her with much of the strength she has needed to survive as a moon child in a harsh, uncaring world.
The Waltons, Amos has said, were living in luxury compared with the Scottish-immigrant clan that spawned Addie Allen. As a teenager, Allen came down from the Appalachians to the University of Virginia to attend summer school and, says Amos, "could give you interpretations of Byron and Shelley that would make your head spin." But it was Allen's formidable toughness that really impressed Amos.
When Amos was just five years old, she became aware that grandma Allen - like her son, she was a Methodist minister in the Church of God - was taking a particular interest in her upbringing. She'd see letters in which grandma earnestly advised Amos' father that his youngest daughter need to learn how to love Jesus." Such messages, of course, only served to deepen the child's intransigence.
"That church is very controlling - I guess that's why I'm such a control freak," says Amos as she walks back to her hotel. "I hated her, sure, but you had to admire her power over people. She definitely had a mission."
Despite the fact that Tori Amos has escaped the Manifest Destiny of her hillbilly genes and has wrenched material comfort from the jaws of psycho-religious turmoil, there is a sense that she, like Addie Allen before her, is still on a lifelong mission.
"Yes, I do have a mission," Amos says bluntly. "To expose the dark side of Christianity."
This, judging from Amos' dead-on stare, is not just shtick. The woman has few peers in the God-baiting stakes. Compared with the Amos oeuvre, Madonna's blasphemous stunts look positively devout; and when this little minister's daughter starts exorcising the "shame" of her "Victorian Christian" upbringing, she makes soi-disant Satanist Marilyn Manson seem cartoonish and ineffectual. (Not, admittedly, an enormous feat in itself.)
Tori Amos wants a piece of you, Christian right, and she knows where you live. The struggle for self-preservation may have mellowed Amos, but the ironclad resolve she brings to her own anti-Christian crusade would impress even the unsinkable Addie Allen.
"Jesus had wonderful things to say, but Christianity is dickless," Amos asserts as she paces the floor of her expansive suite, popping minibar pistachios. "Jesus was not made from semen, so Christians have been using that conquering sword [make phallic gesture] to find that in their religion
"The problem with Christianity is, they think everything is about outside forces, good and evil. With Christianity there's not a lot of inner work encouraged. I don't like it that people don't own up to the fact that every thought we could possibly have, we've all had. That's why kids get into weird cults - they're desperately searching for the dark side of themselves. You probably won't do it if you look at it. I think a lot of kids are starving in high school - they want tools to do the inner work."
Amos' own years at Richard Montgomery High School, in suburban Rockville, Maryland, were largely anonymous, save for her surprising coronation as homecoming queen. She still seems somewhat mystified by her rare brush with peer popularity. "I was kind of a nerd in high school," Amos muses. "I never really fit in, but I had a little bit of status because I was playing clubs. And I got along with the minority groups really well. I never liked bullies - I have a lot of time for the nerds of the world, the ones that don't make the cut. I'd hang out with science kids - they can blow things up! I mean, what's cooler than that?"
The constituency that voted Tori Amos homecoming queen is probably not too distant from the "lost souls and misfits" who launched her into the rarefied orbit of rock stardom. It's a public that takes her every word as gospel, heartily applauding her untethered imaginings, accepting the literal and the oblique with equal gratitude. One wonders how such complex and occasionally confounding music can possibly mean so many things to so many people.
"Because the songs are complicated and not so literal, people get lots of room to move," says Amos. "And I think the songs can become little myths for people. All the myths are symbolic and representative of something." And anyone who mocks these myths can expect the moon child to morph once more into Mr. Blonde.
"I want to torture the people who don't understand the world of faeries," fumes Amos with almost church-lady righteousness. "You'll get some reporter from Voque who doesn't know what she's talking about, who prints me as some insipid Tinker Bell character - well, Tinker Bell ain't up my Strasse, baby. I'm not some shivering waif in the forest. Sometimes I want to grab these bitches by the hair and take them to the world of faerie and say, 'Would you repeat that?'
"People can be so vicious toward the imaginary world, and it saddens me. You kill a lot of little peoples dreams that way. You're no different from Hitler, as far as I'm concerned."
Amos stares her piercing stare. You wait for her to realize what she's just said and issue a disclaimer or make some gesture of self-deprecation. She does not blink.

[Modificato da +Raffa+ 30/10/2005 22.35]

Musician Magazine
July 1998
by Maureen Herman


Tori Amos is a busy woman. Within the last month, she has finished her album, From the Choirgirl Hotel (her first with a full band), made a video for her first single, Spark, gotten a touring band together, started practising for a world tour, and somehow found time to get married along the way to longtime live and studio sound engineer Mark Hawley. Besides this, she is doing the publicity required of an artist with a major release looming: photos, interviews, TV appearances. This kind of frenzy would make most people spin out of control, but strangely, Tori Amos is very *in* control and focused. What kind of freak *is* she?

And how does she handle this chaos without losing sight of the big picture and retaining control of the music? According to her long-time assistant and tour manager, John Witherspoon, she is uncomfortable with inactivity and is always doing three things at once. "I have no idea where she gets her energy," admits the friendly Englishman who, rather than seeming like the usual fussy, flustered road manager, clearly cares about Amos professionally. As I see throughout the day, this is the running theme with all the people around her: mutual respect.

At 11:00 A.M., I've already had breakfast with her band -- a guitarist, bassist, and drummer from various walks of life. All were brought to this project for their talent and professionalism. Except for guitarist Steve Caton, who worked with Amos back in her now-infamous big-hair rock-chick L.A. days and has played on her records and done numerous tours, these guys find all this activity pretty new. Matt Chamberlain, the drummer, auditioned for Amos at the recommendation of Caton and played percussion on the record. Bassist Jon Evans, on the other hand, has only been a part of the project for three weeks and was in turn, recommended by Chamberlain. Apparently, it always comes down to who you know. Though long-time Amos bassist George Porter Jr. performed on the album and will likely do so on future recordings, Evans was hired for the live shows because Porter has a young family and is not interested in doing extensive touring. (It's worth noting that many musicians would not be allowed this flexibility -- again, respect and professionalism are the rule in this camp.)

When asked how it felt to be thrown into a major world tour at the drop of a hat, Evans said, "I was nervous about getting here and not knowing all the songs. I had a tape of the record and I practised at home, but once I got here, Tori was so professional and direct. I just try to play the thing that will make her start dancing around when she's at the piano. That's how I know I'm on the right track."

Later at their practise space, The Depot, with Hall & Oates doing their thing two floors down, I'm witness to her patience, and encouraging directness with the players. She knows what she likes, and when she likes it, she is all over her piano bench like a woman possessed, one foot stomping the beat and the other working the pedal of the Bosendorfer with impassioned focus.

Before practise though, we are driving in a big, black London cab through the winding streets towards her hotel, oddly separate from her band's digs. This and the fact that she was with her personal trainer while I was having breakfast with the band that morning, strikes me as smacking a bit of the pampered "pop star" lifestyle. But after spending almost nine hours around her, the band, and crew, a different picture emerges. It is one of a determined and talented musician who understands the pitfalls of stardom and thrives on the chaotic business that naturally accompanies a successful working musician cum pop star. She has made a separate peace with the business side of music, and she works out the rest with her piano and her voice.

At our first meeting, her excitement about doing an interview for a potential audience of musicians is disarming. Like a big sister talking to her little brother the night before he begins high school, she wants others to learn from her experiences, to help them avoid painful mistakes, and to celebrate being a musician regardless of their playing level. Her desire to communicate with others is strong, even in the middle of an already hectic day that shows no sign of slowing down. Most admirable is her commitment to professionalism in the way she conducts business and her considerable achievements of the past four weeks despite being under pressure that would make most people's heads blow right off.

(M will denote Musician magazine, T for Tori)

M: How do you get the time you need to get ready for a tour when there is all this side business and distraction from what should be the most important thing: the music?

T: "Need" is a strange concept, because you always want it but at a certain point you're saying, "I can't do it if I don't have this much time;" you're limiting yourself. You can't control what the radio does, but you can decide what level your performance will be; that is in your control. I mean, I can see why people ask me, "Are you a control freak?" Well, you know; some people think I am; it depends on if it's Thursday. I think I'm an ant-fucker. (Makes motion with hands as if trying to, well, fuck an ant, laughing) I'm trying to find ways of climbing on that little guy. But I'll do it and I'll sit there and it's getting that detail.

Yet, the engineers are much more like that than I am. They're interested in whether it feels good and gets the magic, if it was technically on. But there's going to be mistakes in every piece; for me it's much more about if we get the rigt feeling in that take. The conversation that you're having with the other musicians, I mean there's going to be bum notes, but to me it's not about that. It's like, what is kissing perfectly about? I don't know what that is. You know, the tongue is moved to the left every millisecond in increments of blah blah blah. What lip gloss you have on will change the whole thing. So I really encourage the guys to not play it the same all the time. Obviously there are elements that you always want there. For instance, in the bass there will be a beautiful line and you wait for it and everything's dependent on it for structure; there has to be a skeleton. But I'm building space into the new material; there's about a three-minute break in a few of the songs -- the "groove" tunes. So off the new record, in songs like Iiiee and Cruel, there are breaks, where at a certain point, you just play and Matt knows things can change within that time, and I don't have a set timeline; we know when it's time to get out. They come alive. If I didn't do that I don't think they would be fed. When I made the decision to get these players and play it live, I felt like it had to be constantly growing.

M: Which brings us to your choice of them as players. How do you find the right players?

T: 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 (guitarist Steve Caton) who I've known for years. And Matt (Chamberlain, drummer) is becoming a friend and John (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.

M: A lot of people choose their musicians based more on the length of time they've known them, and then sometimes it is harder to deal with things musically because the friendship gets in the way.

T: Yes, but if you live in a small town, like if you live in Columbus, Ohio, right? And you can only choose between three bass players really? Your choice of people is different when you can network and say, "Who's out there anywhere in the world?" What an amazing thing. That's a gift to be able to have that opportunity.

M: But you've worked hard to get to that point of being able to choose.

T: Still, I think there's that thing where, it's not so much about how fast you can play. It really does come down to an internal thing with the musician: What's going on inside? That reflects in your playing; the mud oozes through their fingers.

M: Great musicians play because they have to, and your skill increases because of your emotional involvement.

T: And that's very different from pop stars.

M: What do you consider a pop star?

T: Pop stars are famous people who sell a lot of records, but don't really play music or really feel it. You know, they love music -- and hey, good for them. They sing songs...

M: But they could live without it. They don't have the drive, or the vital need to express.

T: It's not about the music. I mean, they like music as much as anyone. Half the pop stars are not musicians. It's not a slag, but it's something musicians need to understand. Being a musician is a skill. It's not a fashion. Just because you think you're one doesn't mean you're one -- sorry, sweetheart. I'm not trying to be vicious here, but I'm trying to give players pride. Because there's a lot of players that will never be on the Top 50 Billboard charts. And there are some great musicians in serious metal bands, where sometimes it becomes a bit tongue in cheek but still they are amazing players. And I think it's having them be aware that being a musician *is* a skill.

There are a lot of famous actors who don't have the acting craft. They're cute and they get by and they have good personalities, but they're not Judi Densch (nominated for best actress for her portrayal of Queen Victoria in the film Mrs. Brown) But 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.

M: You're presented in the media as a "pop star" but your lyrics are definitely more in-depth than usual pop fare.

T: For those writers who are listening and are going to read this article, 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?

M: Sometimes warm and fuzzy is another person's nightmare and vice-versa.

T: 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."

M: You're saying that you need to know the parameters and not necessarily feel like they're limiting you, but in choosing to work in that context, you must make concessions.

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

M: Well, once you reach the stature that you have, you're better able to call the shots in the way that you tour and record. But you have to give a little to get a little as far as power goes.

T: That makes sense, I mean Johnny (Witherspoon, 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?

M: It's like gauging your worth by what order you get picked in gym class in grade school.

T: Yeah, and then 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.

M: It's vital that the musicians who read this interview know how important it is to be strong to achieve personal success in the music business.

T: 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.

M: How have you dealt with the fame issue?

T: Very badly at first. It can become like, again, your worth is based on outside factors and yet it's a natural thing to want to know that you're being seen, that you're being heard, like you're being understood.

M: It's like mirroring back from your family, asking, "Am I doing okay?"

T: Exactly. "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?

M: It's like a loop of energy from the stage to the audience and back again.

T: 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.

M: But the art is public too--

T: 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.

M: Saying that you're only as good as your job certainly applies to finding people who are good players, not necessarily your friends, for your band.

T: 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.

M: On a day-to-day basis, having a negative or draining presence around can really affect performance and the crew's ability to do its job well.

T: It really does. 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. I mean, 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.

M: ... and you need to be able to listen.

T: 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.

[Modificato da +Raffa+ 24/12/2005 15.07]

Q MAGAZINE
May 1998


Ready, Steady... Kook!

It's been a harrowing, then hallowed, typically switchback 18 months for Tori Amos. Miscarriage, marriage, a perspective-alterting retreat into deepest Cornwall, and finally an album of towering and volatile new music. Tom Doyle gingerly places his head in her old joanna and waits for the fairies to turn up.

Just after four o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon and the concourse of Paddington station is already infested. Ranks of commuters stare up at the flickering announcement boards and then scurry away the very second their platform number is called. None of them casts a second glance at the slight, flame-haired woman in the brown jacked and faded blue jeans, gripping the handrail of a trolley, her neck craned, eyes scanning for any information on the 16.35 to Exeter. In this setting, at least, there is no glittering star-like aura or huddle of attention-attracting minders surrounding Tori Amos. Nothing to suggest, to the casual passer-by, that she's not just some mature student or year-out world traveler waiting to catch her connection.

It's an enviable and unusual anonymity for an artist who - at last tally - has sold upwards of eight million albums globally. Although in England (her on-off home for the past six years) she can drift unnoticed through a crowd, in her native America, where her fan base borders on the near-religiously fanatical, she is far more likely to be accosted in public places. In the US, Web pages document every aspect of her life history, discuss her tangential, often brutally candid lyrics. Freakily, there are lists of every foodstuff she has ever mentioned in her songs and interviews.

"I don't have a computer," insists Amos, keen not to add cyber-stalkers to her menagerie of over-obsessive fans. Coaxed further, while she and Q each take a handle of her hefty bag and struggle down the platform, she adds. "Well, I'm aware of them. This might sound strange but I really live independently of all that."

Although she is often forced to gravitate towards the accepted music business capitals of London, New York, and Los Angeles, Amos is a rustic girl at heart. Today our destination is the 300-year-old North Cornish cottage that houses Martian Engineering, the studio purpose-built in a renovated barn where work has just been completed on her fourth album, From The Choirgirl Hotel ("My fifth album actually," she points out, mindful to include the debut effort of her failed Los Angeleno rock band, Y Kant Tori Read).

Reluctant to parade the trophies of a successful career, she is coy when questioned about how many properties she owns - dot-joining detective work revealing two, a Georgian house in County Cork and another retreat in a "geriatric community" north of Miami. The farmhouse studio in Cornwall is owned by Mark Hawley, Lincolnshire born recording veteran of the last two Amos albums, and since February 22nd of the year, Tori's husband. Strangely, she refers to him, along with partner Marcel Van Limbeek as "the engineers".

"I talk about so much in my songs that I really need something for myself," she offers, sliding into a seat. Amos is full of such dichotomies - appearing guarded at times when the topic seems slight and inoffensive; yet, as the questions probe more conventionally sensitive zones, she will prove unsettlingly frank. The kooky affectations often attributed to her appear, close-up, to be natural eccentricities, and although she often lapses into therapy-speak, even her most earnest divulgences can be punctuated with little, gaspy laughs. Still, you have to wonder about the two torn-off Teletubby heads peeking out of her handbag.

Amos is razor-sharp, fond of unflinching eye contact, not shy of peppering her sentences with what video censors refer to as "sexual swear words". She insists for paying for Q's gin and tonic when the buffet trolley rolls our way. Any polite protestation on Q's part is met with a comedy rolling of the pupils, the millionairess flatly stating, "Look, you're a cheap date, OK?"

On March 31, 1977 in an edition of The Montgomery Journal, the first published photograph of the 13-year-old Myra Ellen Amos in mid-song, seated at a small piano, appeared above the headline "Top Teens In Talent Test". She scooped first prize in this local competition, winning $100 ("I played by own song that night, something called More Than Just A Friend"). But by the dawning of her teenage years, Amos was already a prodigious talent, having first clambered up onto a piano stool at the milk-toothed age of 30 months. By five years, she'd won a scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland, their youngest ever admittance. By 11, having forcefully revealed her disdain for classical studies and her passion for Led Zeppelin, she had been expelled. This, she admits, was a crushing blow to her Methodist minister father, who had firm designs on his daughter becoming a concert pianist.

"You see, I'm not music theory smart," she reasons. "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."

Even is she was often at odds with her reverend father, it was Amos's Protestant grandmother who became the target of her youthful hatred.

"I'm sure I would've been the youngest child in jail for murdering my grandmother," she says, her temper flaring even now. "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?"

As such, in puberty, Amos claims to have harboured sexual fantasies about both Robert Plant and Jesus Christ (iconic, long hair etc). When eventually she recorded a duet with the Led Zeppelin singer, "Percy" fancied his chances ("He asked me to marry him, and I said, *you* are late). Later, at 13, Amos's desire to shag Plant was supplanted by the desire to *be* Jimmy Page.

Chaperoned by her father, she began fulfilling hotel bar engagements in and around Washington, performing easy listening standards. At home, she composed and recorded her own songs. Reverend Edison Amos then dutifully mailed them to record companies and dealt with the stream of rejection letters. For nigh on a decade, it seemed as if the minister's daughter was destined to burn eternally in the fires of piano lounge hell.

"It got to the stage," she sighs, "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."

In the midst of all this, at 17, she changed her given name to Tori, a matter she rarely discusses.

"I just hated my name," she bluntly reveals. "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."

Come on then. Give us three.

"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."

How did you stumble on Tori?

"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."

By the start of the '80s despite Tori Amos's dogged efforts, the consensus among disinterested A&R personnel was that the appeal of the girl-and-a-piano concept had died in the '70s along with the dwindling commercial fortunes of Carole King. Narada Michael Walden - celebrated funkateer and future producer of Whitney Houston - disagreed, having spotted Amos playing in a hotel lobby and likened her to a young Joni Mitchell. Following a year in which the singer-songwriter posted off a succession of cassettes to Walden, at 19, Amos flew to San Francisco to work with him on her first serious demos. The resulting tracks featured her voice tweaked up a vari-speeded notch to make her sound more girly - which she hated - and no record contract was forthcoming.

In desperation, in 1984, at the age of 21, Tori Amos moved to Los Angeles, heralding the beginning of her ill-fated rock-chick makeover. In teased hair and thigh-length boots, she became a Sunset Strip metal fashion atrocity, although this transformation was to fleetingly pay dividends with the singing of her band Y Kant Tori Read to Atlantic Records. Following a fraught recording period in which the outfit disintegrated and the record company seized the creative reigns, the band's eponymous album was released to mass critical derision and negligible sales. Amos woke up to the reality that she had become "a musical joke".

In licking her wounds, she turned once again to the piano and began to pen the confessional songs that would make up her 1992 solo debut album, Little Earthquakes. Although, lyrically, these were dominated by Amos's incisive, angular ruminations on sex and religion, the most shocking inclusion was the a capella Me And A Gun. Its true story begins at a Y Kant Tori Read show in Los Angeles, after which she offered an audience member a lift. Some miles down the road she was raped by her passenger in the back of the car with a pistol held to her head. In the past, Amos has been understandably less than keen to relive this horrific experience (once chillingly pointing out that "he's still out there"), although she is now open to talking about the lasting aftershocks.

"I have horrible nightmares," she admits. "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."

Amos has also hinted that part of her psychological unburdening involved Carlos Castaneda-like experiences with Native Americans both in Los Angeles and New Mexico, where she supped the ritualistic brew.

"Yeah, there was a period in the late '80s where I was working with different shaman," she says. "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."

If the songs on Little Earthquakes served to heal the emotional scars of their creator, then the reviews for the album threw up one recurrent comparison : Kate Bush. The debt's there in the songs' skewed perspectives on the world outside, and the singer's contortion of certain vowels.

"I'll never forget the first time I hear about Kate," Amos recalls. "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."

So you were never influenced by her directly?

"Well... I must tell you that when I heard her I was blown away by her. There's no question."

Did you sing along to the records.

"Absolutely. But I knew that I had to be careful, so I didn't voraciously learn her catalogue. I left the records with my boyfriend at the time, because I didn't want to copy her."

The kook rock torch passed from Bush to Amos, but it didn't stop there. Little Earthquakes had a massive influence on the formative Alanis Morissette (quoted in Q as saying that the first time she head the album, she played it, "in its entirety, lying on my living room floor... I just bawled my eyes out"). For her part, however, Amos is careful when offering her opinions on the glove-seducing phenomenon that is Jagged Little Pill.

"I really like her. She's such a good person. I like her as a person a lot."

So you don't like the record.

"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."

This is mild criticism, however. In the version of Professional Widow that appeared on Amos's third solo album - as opposed to Armand Van Helden's remix - Amos appeared to be attacking another of her key contemporaries, Courtney Love. Since then, the singer had fiercely denied that Love was her target in the song. Lines like "Don't blow your brains yet / We gotta be big boy" are fairly unequivocal, though.

"Let's put it this way," she hedges daintily, "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."

The songs on each of Amos's albums have always borne a central thematic link - Little Earthquakes (catharsis), Under The Pink (the female condition), Boys For Pele (the emotional fallout of her split with long-term boyfriend/co-producer Eric Rosse) - and in that sense, From The Choirgirl Hotel is no different. Amos explains that many of her new compositions are underpinned by a more recent wretch, a tragedy in the wake of the Boys For Pele tour as she recuperated in Florida.

"I was pregnant," she softly states. "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."

Do you know if it was a boy or a girl?

"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."

Did It overshadow everything?

"Yeah, it did. 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."

There have since been happier times, enjoyed in calmer waters. Let's talk about your wedding.

" Oh let's *not* talk about that."

A photograph appeared in Hello! magazine.

" Oh can you *believe* that? I thought I'd really pulled it off and there it was.. Hello! magazine.. right there."

It seemed to have a medieval, Arthurian theme. "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."

It was the definitive fairy-tale wedding, then?

"Yeah, I really believe in that force, 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."

Bright and early the following morning, the air in the kitchen of the Amos cottage is suffused with the twin aromas of coffee and toast, as the housemistress emerges comfortably attired in T-shirt and combat trousers, toweling her damp hair. Grabbing the studio keys to conduct a guided tour, she leads Q across the courtyard. Outside hangs the overpowering smell of dung. "Yep", Amos smiles, nostrils aloft for a cartoon sniff, "it gets to you sometimes."

Inside the studio she introduces on of the two Bosendorfer pianos she owns as "my baby". Always referring to her instruments in the female third person, a year ago, Amos had told Q that this piano "had no character, she was boring". Now she admits, "She's making me pay for that statement daily," before beckoning Q under the piano's lid saying, "Here, put your head in," for the full cochlea-rattling experience. Following a torrent of expert arpeggios played by a swaying, trance-like Amos, she holds the sustain of the last note, and then emits a breathy, "Isn't she pretty?"

In the control room, the window of which frames a suitably calming natural spring, she flops into a tall-backed, black leather studio chair. The talk turns to the freedom of lyrical speech, something that - as a provocative writer - is a key issue for Amos. Specifically she experienced a strong reaction to The Prodigy's shoulder-shrugging defence of "Smack My Bitch Up."

"I don't find anything cutting-edge about Smack My Bitch Up," she begins, her voice raised in passion. "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."

But then you must be aware of the shock value of some of your songs. Do you ever think, This'll get them going?

"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."

In mid-April the wheels of the Tori Amos touring freight-train grind into gear for the first of 200 dates, offloading emotional baggage at every destination. A self-confessed "road dog", in 1996 Amos was named as the most tour-hardy act in the US (followed by Garth Brooks and Kiss) notching up 600 shows since Little Earthquakes. For everyone one of her devotees, each night will mark an epiphany of sorts.

But she's smart enough to realise that the pungent brew of characteristics that make up her music divides public opinion. Even after all this time, there are still those who can't stand Tori Amos.

"You know what?" she feistily announces. "I could have a drink with those people."


The Diary

October 2nd

OK, so small noises at first. Like not so terribly irritating for before-the-sun's-up noise. But by 7am every drill, saw and hammer that ever was is welcoming me. We have one week till the musicians come - we have half a roof.

October 3rd

George is my favourite builder. He swears that there are Germans that will be doing a rear dorsal attack at 13 hundred hours, so maybe I'd like to bring over plenty of sandwiches and a thermos of hot tea before the siege.

October 9th

Drummer arrives today, we have sort of a roof. It looks like thousands of bin bags superglued.

October 23rd.

I'm having flashbacks of a hospital emergency room. There's bed upon bed with not a Chelsea blue for the sheet color but kinda a more faded color. All I really want is a little nap. The nurse - there's only one - says she needs the beds and I can't nap and I say this place is empty except for hundreds and hundreds of beds and she said if I can find a bed without chopped pieces of hair on it I can lay down, and sure enough I go from bed to bed finding clumps strands split ends of every colour and kind possible. I don't know if it's worth trying to make sense of this but the boys were dying their hair this week to look like Debbie Harry and Marcel had an accident.

November 5th

The Butchers' League Of North Cornwall knocked on the studio door and said, "We'd like to record our Christmas album here. We normally record down at Giles's in Strawhaven but we thought since you're new... you'd give us a deal." The engineer said "How much do you pay at Strawhaven?" "well," said the Butcher, "we normally get it for free."

November 18th

Fire enginge fridge with magnets of Marilyn: one of us changes her outfit every day. There is no law other than she MUST be changed.

December 7th

Fish bottoms, Tellytubby heads. We did our own choreography to "Children's it's alrigh to pass gas song."

December 23rd

Christmas shopping for the boys - got Marcel a porno star belt buckle. The surf shops are as good as Zuma Beach in Cali. This one surfer genuinely invited me to go surfing in the North Sea on Christmas Day. "It's for charity." he said. It would have to be.

January 5th

Taking a little Cornish walk, a hand reaches out - I don't even know this woman - she gives me some sherry. I don't even like sherry. I feel like I was being anesthetised - Beene calls this true happiness. What's her plan - I'm not sure but after the second or third glass of sherry promised her my house, backstage passes to all the shows, free transport to an dfrom the gigs, a place in the band for her grandson, if she'll just let me go. She grabs my arm and says, "So then, will you bring around that tall dark intriguing Dutchman sometime?" (Rob). Gulp, whew. Does that mean I get to keep my house?

January 10th

Shocking cold. The piano is dropping quickly. Scalextrics isn't affected. I put on a pair of shorts and whipped up Sea Breezes for the boys. Checking into... um, Betty Boop.

January 27th

Mixing - still - mixing. I've written Nurofen into my will. Bless those people.

February 1st

The night the builders and the crew go out story. It was suggested to me that everybody needed a night out so the builders came to rescue the crew. It was suggested to me that I should grab my boyfriend and have a night in. So I get all these scented candles, a bottle of warm-on-the-throat red and everything's going really well for the girl. I'm off in that never land and from far away I hear my boyfriend say, "Hey Toi I think all your candles are really beautiful but do you smell something funny?" Wouldn't you know the duvet was burning.

Next Day

I'm up early. Marcel's walking into the door. "Jeez," I said, "what happened to you, then?" He had just walked all night nice miles - the other boys had some luck with some teachers while he was prancing completely naked in the kebab shop and somehow missed his ride.


A Woman's Work

A Brief Tori Amos Discography

Y Kant Tori Read
Atlantic Import, 1988

Rare one-off outing with Amos fronting glam-pop-metal collective. Flopped immediantly. Big hair, mammary-revealing bustier, Samurai sword and scary Pat Benetar impression quickly disowned. Tori nuts now pay top dollar for any unburned copies.


Little Earthquakes
East West 1992

Effortless melody, dynamic piano-bashing, a whiff of health food, and for most, the first exposure to that challenging whoop and purr of a voice. "So you can make me come/That doesn't make you Jesus," she sneered. Menace and seduction in one hit.


Under The Pink
East West 1994

Sirens struggle to capitolise on their breakthroughs, but Amos survived a second album that retrod the first, mostly on the strength of her piercing dissection of woman-to-woman attiudes (the towering Cornflake Girl) and the richer arrangements. Still fine.


Boys For Pele
East West 1996

The "pure being/hot pussy" dilemma resolved against a sparse, self-produced sonic landscape comparable to Joni Mitchell's Blue. Harmonium, bagpipes, chruch bells, poetic babble and the suggestion that Jesus was a woman. Weird and wonderful.

[Modificato da +Raffa+ 30/10/2005 22.23]

RAREBIRD'S REVIEW OF "Y KANT TORI READ"

Band: Y Kant Tori Read
Album: "Y Kant Tori Read" (Atlantic 81845-2) 1988


A few years before her rebirth as an arty alt-rock demigoddess in 1992, Tori Amos recorded an album in 1988 called "Y Kant Tori Read". This evidently was also the name of the band; Ms. Amos is billed only as "Tori" in the credits. The title is reportedly a joking reference to the talented pianist's inability to read sheet music. Other musicians who participated in the recording include at least two of her future cohorts (guitarist Steve Caton and Brazilian percussionist Paulinho Da Costa) as well as Matt Sorum (then-drummer for the Cult and later for Guns N' Roses and its offshoots), Steve Farris (former Mr. Mister guitarist), jazz musicians Peter White and Tim Landers, and one Zobbin Rander (clearly a pseudonym for Cheap Trick vocalist Robin Zander). Amos has disowned the album, and Atlantic has kept it out of print reportedly at her request. That's a smart move for both parties. Although a reissue would surely be profitable, the album would disappoint her fans, and would be a too-visible embarrassment to her catalogue.

The music of Y Kant Tori Read bears little resemblance to anything that Amos has done since. Although her Kate Bush-like vocals are recognizable, the only songs that suggest her future piano-dominated style are "Fire On The Side" (a song about adultery), the opening seconds of "Heart Attack At 23", and bits and pieces of the "Etienne Trilogy" that closes the album. The rest of the songs are reminiscent of several '80's female pop-rock acts (i.e. Heart, Bonnie Tyler, Vixen) with a few borrowed stylings from Robert Plant's solo albums. There are occasional signs of Tori's future persona trying to break out, but too many of the clumsily overproduced tracks are bogged down in redundant synthesizer noise that is annoying and inappropriate. "Y Kant Tori Read" is a badly aged relic of the hair-band era; the cover art, in which the now-famous redhead is made up like a metal chick, is particularly embarrassing. The album was a commercial disaster even in its day, where it deserves to stay.


Track Listing:

1. The Big Picture
2. Cool On Your Island
3. Fayth
4. Fire On The Side
5. Pirates
6. Floating City
7. Heart Attack At 23
8. On The Boundary
9. You Go To My Head
10. Etienne Trilogy:
-- a. The Highlands
-- b. Etienne
-- c. Skyeboat Song

[Modificato da +Raffa+ 16/11/2005 10.24]

This article is taken from the amazing www.ondarock.it


Tori Amos Discography

• Y Kant Tori read (1988) 4/10
• Little Earthquakes (1992) 7/10
• Under the Pink (1994) 8/10
• Boys for Pele (1996) 7/10
• From the Choigirl Hotel (1998) 7,5/10
• To Venus and back (1999) 4/10
• Strange little girls (2001) 4/10
• Scarlet's Walk (2002) 5/10
• The Beekeeper (2005) 4/10



TORI AMOS
Story of a rebel pianist
by Claudio Fabretti

Daughter of a methodist minister and his half-cherokee wife, she was the youngest prodigy of the piano of one of the most prestigious conservatories of the USA. But Tori Amos refused her destiny and decided to become a rockstar. Here are her story, her words, her songs

"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". Tori Amos shows her psychological wounds, talking about the genesis of her songs. And they aren't slight wounds. The last drama was the death of the baby she was waiting for. The miscarriage happened after the third month of pregnancy. "It has been the seed of my music", Amos says. "It filled me up with pain, but it also gave me the courage to speak about life and its strength". Two songs of her album "From the Choigirl Hotel" recall what happened in a self-accusatory way: "She's convinced she could hold back a glacier/ but she couldn't keep baby alive here" (the hit single "Spark"); "Don't judge me so harsh little girl" ( the intense "Playboy Mommy").

Such a pain's exhibition can disturb someone. But Tori Amos (born in 1963) belongs to the family of the songwriters "without defense", like Sinead O' Connor and Lisa Germano, PJ Harvey and Suzanne Vega. A kind of artist who can't divide life from art, and who can transfer every anguish in music, looking for vent, expiation, consolation or catharsis. Sixteen years ago she composed her first "confession in music" after a dramatic night in Los Angeles. That night she played in a concert and offered an audience member a lift. Some miles down the road, the man held a pistol to her head. He raped her on the back of the car. "5 am friday morning thursday night far from sleep... / It was me and a gun and a man on my back/ And I sang "holy holy" as he buttoned down his pants", she sang in "Me and a gun" (a track of the debut album "Little Earthquakes"). She explained her feelings about it: "I think the deepest pain of the whole things 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". From then on, Tori Amos has always had difficult relationships with men, till the recent wedding with her sound engineer, Mark Hawley.

The story of this red-haired american songwriter is full of contrasts, between religious oppression and sex, moral law and transgression, love and hate, but also between the classic studies and her passion for rock'n'roll. She could play the piano from the age of three and she was composing musical scores at the age of four. "I was a freak child who had really good rhythm" she remembers. At the age of five she was admitted in the prestigious Peabody Conservatory (Art school) of Baltimore, she was the youngest person to be accepted at the school. But she left it quite soon, in order to follow the tracks of her myths: Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors. "She could play Beethoven sonatas wonderfully", remembers Pat Springer who gave Amos private lessons after she left the conservatory. "One day during practise she asked if she could play her own songs, so I dragged my kids down to listen, kicking and screaming. We were all totally blown away".

So the infant prodigy became a rebel: that's the destiny of Myra Ellen (the nickname Tori - "little chicken" in Japanese - was suggested by a friend of her). At home Tori Amos (Newton, North Carolina) felt trapped into a deep America's oppression: her mother was a half-cherokee bigot, her father an ultra-conservative methodist minister, her grandmother a calvinist who believed all girls should be virgin. "I masturbated in my room while my father was conducting prayer meetings downstairs", Tori revealed in "Icicle", a song from her second album, "Under the pink". But nobody could imagine that one day Rev. Amos would have accompanied the daughter to sing in the gay pubs of Georgetown. Moreover: "I think she's the contemporary female Mozart of this century in terms of her genius", said once the former hyper-moralist in an explosion of paternal pride. "The funny thing is that my father's becoming liberal now", marvels Amos.
The conflict between freedom and religion returns obsessively in her lyrics. As in "God", where the relationship with God got almost physical, and in "Crucify", where the childhood's sense of oppression bursted out in a sort of "j'accuse": "Every day I crucify myself/ Nothing I do is good enough for you/ Crucify myself/ Every day I crucify myself / And my heart is sick of being in chains". Nevertheless, Tori Amos doesn't renounce to spirituality: "I believe in the Great Spirit. I believe Mohammed exists; I believe in Buddha; I believe in Aphrodite; I believe in Rhiannon. I believe in Jesus Christ". Her spiritual research passes also through the ancient myths. One of her favourite books is "The History of the women of classic mythology". And her album "Boys for Pele" is dedicated to the hawaian goddess of fire. But in Amos' songs there's always something dark and spectral. Maybe it's the shadow of her childhood's nightmares, when, at the age of five, she used to listen from her mother the thrilling novels of Edgar Allan Poe, just before sleeping.

Musically, the work of Tori Amos is the result of an intense struggle between voice and piano: they follow each other, they met, until they get merged. Her vocals can reach the highest tones to create unexpected melodies from complex sonorous themes. They are wispers and invectives, sensuality and childish tenderness. A style that many people compared to the Kate Bush one. "I don't imitate her", Tori points out, "but when I first heard her, I went Wow, she does things that I've never heard anybody do, much less me. I could her a resonance in the voice where you'd think we were distantly related or something. Anyway, I must say that when I heard her I was blown away by her".
Amos has an intimate relationship with her piano, like a sort of physical attraction: "When I touch the keys I feel the same energy of making love. It doesn't come from my head, it comes from my stomach. Only when I play I can feel completely in touch with my sexuality and my spirituality and my emotions". But in the United States some women were offended by the way she played piano, with her legs wide open and her body sensually shaking. Some feminists said she was making an object of herself. "They were supposedly left-wing feminists, but I think they became fascists", Newton's songwriter replied.
Every Tori's albums can be considered a step towards her artistic maturity. But the first experiment, Y kant Tori read, was too dazed and confused: hard-rock sounds, Benataresque make-up, uncertain tracks. It was a real flop, so that Tori now describes it as "Madonna and Kate Bush in head of collision after eating bad mushrooms" (even if today Amos fans are still searching to find the rare copies of it).
The real debut, Little earthquake, revealed her and her repertory of intimate confessions and complex melodies, and it worthed her one million of copies sold. But the following Under the pink gave her the real fame worldwide, thanks to a stronger rhythm and to some easier tunes, just like the single "Cornflake girl". The songs faced up the female condition always between irony and fairy tales. Then it came the time for Boys for Pele, recorded in Ireland into the cathedral of Delgany. That album has the signs of the Tori's split from her fiancée, the producer Eric Rosse: "I crossed the Styx river with that album, it lead me to improve my relationship with men". It was her most difficult work, with bare and dark songs, and with a charming ballad, "Hey Jupiter".

A record like a plaster
"It was born as a plaster, just to cure my wounds but, strangely enough, listening to it made me want to dance". So Tori Amos described From the Choigirl Hotel (1998), considered till now her best album. The "girl on the piano" shaked herself and gave strength to the rhythm. "I didn't want to be isolated", she explained. "I wanted to play with other musicians, with the guitar, the bass, the drums. I wanted to use the rhythm in an original way". That album was recorded with a curious technique: in a room there was Tori on her piano, in another the drummer Matt Chamberlain. They both conversed through a monitor, but they had to work in separate atmospheres. The rest of the arrangements was added later. The result was a fascinating mixture of tribal beats, giddy piano and dreaming vocal melodies. You can also find old-styled songs like the touching "Jackie's strength", that recalls the murder of President Kennedy and the myth of his wife Jacqueline.
Much paler her following work: the double-cd To Venus and back, a collection of unpublished songs, b-sides and live tracks, with a confused issue, except for the beautiful ballad "1000 Oceans".

In 2001 Tori Amos came back with Strange little girls, a cover album in which she plays some classics songs of Tom Waits, Beatles, Eminem, Neil Young and others. “In Florida I listened to a lot of male singers on the alternative Fm stations", she told. "Many of them sang of hate against women. So I thought of what men say about women and I wanted to build a sort of brige to unite these two worlds. I thought it was the only way to go into the heads of those men”. The twelve tracks of the album are turned into a passionate and sensual mood. But now the audience expectation is about the next original compositions of the American songwriter.

In 2002 Tori Amos cut Scarlet's Walk, a concept-album composed while she was pregnant with her child Natashya and after the terrorist attack of the 11th of September. Inspired by her mother stories about her Cherokee's family and by the American crisis of today, Scarlet's Walk is an epic and metaphoric voyage. The main character, Scarlet, met on her road many people that, as Amos revealed, reflected America itself, whit its contradiction and his lost morality. From Los Angeles to Alaska, from Little Big Horn (last homeland of America's native people) to the Bad Lands, you can find a collection of characters: the prostitute "Amber Waves", the depressive maniac "Carbon", the dangerous and fascinating "Crazy". "Pancake" is a story of power and religion, about the madness of a preacher; the tragedy of the 11th of September rules "I Can't See New York", where Scarlet is the witness of a plane crash. Scarlet's Walk is another example of Amos' piano-voice formula, but certainly not the most creative.

In 2005 she cuts the disappointing The Beekeeper.

Today, Tori Amos is a cosmopolitan. She lives between the States - that frighten her for their being "too much competitive" - her Georgian country house in Cork (Ireland) and her husband farm-studios in Cornwall (England). She already sold ten millions of records all over the world. She's got a lot of fans, that idolize her calling her "the Goddess of rock" and that have created a large number of websites about her. So Tori Amos finally made her childhood's dream come true. The dream she had when she was playing baroque sonatas and romantic melodies: to enter the firmament of rock'n'roll.


OndaRock.it is a Musical Webzine by Claudio Fabretti

[Modificato da +Raffa+ 24/11/2005 10.15]

German magazine Musikexpress (1999)

Mysterious

Tori Amos is in very good hands in Cornwall - the place of myths and fairy tales. But in this conversation the brisk fairy leaves us with more questions than answers.

Sally jumps up and down. Sally works for Atlantic Records, UK. She is the one who picks us up in Heathrow but her first question is not what we think about Tori's new album or if we are well-prepared. She's asking us if we brought our swimming suits along. She is wearing a summer's dress with flowers and she is ready to spend a holiday weekend instead of a weekend of work. The driver who brings us to Cornwall from London is named James. What else. James spent half of his life driving rockbands and Michael Jackson's equipment through Europe and he seems to be happy that this is over. It is also a very relaxing weekend-job for him and when we pass the bridge to Wales and stop in a very picturesque town, this vacation mood takes over the whole crew. Ain't it beautiful? Oh yes, indeed. Even wonderful. The grass is green, the sky is light blue, die flowers almost explode of colors. The houses are small and a often little slanting. The ocean is in front of the door. The temperature is around 18ƒ, fresh, very pleasant. There are sandy beaches for every taste ‚ for family-swimming and some lonely bays with an amazing landscape. The main thing: stones. Stonehenge is not far, even closer are the remaining parts of Tintangel, King Arthur's legendary castle.
To make it complete our hotel is called "Camelot". But knights and magicians are far away. 15 years have passed since Myra Ellen Amos read "Avalon". Then she was 21, lived in L. A. and was far away from any kind of career. Now she doesn't read something like that anymore. It is real and not mysterious anymore. Her new neigbours tell her stories of ghosts and circles in fields just as if they were talking about soccer or the petrol prices. "This has nothing to do with New Age" Tori says carefully "this is not my world, this is a cliché, too conformistic."
Even though Tori Amos' music and the imagery of her album covers speak another language the sun is shining so brightly that you have to believe her. No twilight, no doubts. It's the opposite: there is so much South-European mentality surrounding us, that Tori looks more like a flowergirl than a soul-seeking woman of pain. All projections, all images are in a blur: the puppet box called "Little Earthquakes", the red-curled angel of "Under The Pink", the witch-like outlaw with a gun and a piglet at her chest of "Boys For Pele", the siren pressed behind glass of "From The Choirgirl Hotel". The piano. The guilt. The atonement. The father. "Father I killed my monkey" is the beginning of the new album, a biographic step further. Father, I am free. Again pschoanalysis is clapping its hands, again Tori Amos presents herself as an artist who carries her life and pain expressively into public. You don't have an interview with her. She opens a door for a certain time and it is good to choose which side your on before you go. Otherwise you'll find yourself swirling around 50 times and thrown in the bushes, confused and like on drugs, but the door is closed. She is looking at you from a short distance right into the eyes and sometimes in dramatic moments she grabs your hands. "Hang on" you might think irritated, you are positively amazed, you feel important, special far away from the sexual aspects of this touch (which is not the case) but you have to take care that she doesn't wrap you in. Is this strategy? Exhibitionism? No question: the 36-year-old is a professional and she knows exactly what she is doing. Even the way she appears tells a story. Bare-footed she walks over the lawn, blinks and shows the little tricks of manipulation. "You journalists don't know how much you reveal of yourselves" she says a little later "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." There are a lot of fighting Toris, one founded RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network) which helps abused women and then there is this part "that you don't want to introduce to your mom."
Right now, flooded by light this aggression seems to be far away. All the people are happy and relaxed. England celebrates summer like never before and turns itself into a different England, far away from the one which is supposed to be Tori's home with its history, its culture and fogä but you have to remember sometimes that she is American and originally from North Carolina. For two years now Bude in Cornwall is her place although it is not really her home. There is no such place for Tori. Tori owns real estate(s) in so many different places such as Ireland and the Carribeans. There she goes to spend time on her speedboat. She's married for almost two years now, built a high-tech-studio with Mark, her English husband who is also her producer, at the coast of Cornwall in an old barn. "From outside it looks like it's 200 years old and inside like a spaceship" she proudly says. It is her kingdom, just waiting for her creativity, her next tornado. And then there is her baby, her fetish, her piano, the famous "Bosendorfer". After two albums concentrating on the piano the "evil" is not the most important anymore she claims. "To Venus And Back" is the record which was supposed to be just a collection of live outtake of the last tour, a step toward half-played, half-programmed music out of the depths of an ancient "techno barn". The anwer why there is a new album gives a good insight into Tori Amos: "They came to me." She gets signals. The desert talks to her, the earth speaks to her. She is the voice of them. Not a surprise that you will find sites on the web like "Church of Tori" and "Force of Tori" which are admiring Tori without any irony.
Tori Amos is a star, not a big one but a constant one. A trademark, a brand, a magazine for women in flesh and bone, always at the edge of creativity and expression. Tori combines opposites ‚ passion and work, discipline. "Only both are possible, there has to be a give and take, just like in tennis. If somebody is just doing aces (?) it turns boring." She is talking about her new album calling it her "Cindy Sherman record" just like the excentric photographer she changes constantly but stays the same. That is what the songs shall make come true. A very glamerous one is called "Glory of the 80s" and ends with the almost whispered words "nineteen-eighty-five". This is just in the middle of this famous decade which a lot of people have lived through very intensely, the meaning of musical depths: keyboards and synthetic drums, kitsch and pathos, over-production and stadium sound. On the way home we listen to "Broken Wings" by Mr. Mister on BBC Radio 1 as we drive through the hills and straight away we all know: this is the world of Tori Amos, her sound, her expression, her sentimentality which tastes after the end of the cold 90s very much like kitsch. Nevertheless Tori is able to press a well-hidden button in those moments which makes us want more, a wish for pain and emotions in panavision. Sometimes Tori Amos is afraid that there is no tornado in sight: "But then you have an ice-cream on days like these‚ and you've got the white shark on a leash. When you're awake things like that will happen till you breathe your last breath." All she's saying and stopping abruptly. One hour has passed. We were cruising around earth, Venus or whatever once and now our lives have to part. Her life leads into the studio mine to the beach.


Holger In't Veld (interview) Jason Bell/Katz/Focus (photo)

Tori muses straight To Venus And Back
By Kieran Grant, "Toronto Sun", Friday, September 3, 1999

When Tori Amos recently announced that she had a double album in the can for a fall release, it wasn't just an unexpected treat for her fans.

Turns out Amos' upcoming To Venus And Back album -- the Sept. 21 release features a disc of all-new material plus a live best-of collection -- was a surprise for the singer herself.

Says the cryptically-inclined Amos over the phone from a recent stop on her tour with Alanis Morissette, which brings them to the Molson Amphitheatre Tuesday: "It came back in time to get me, from next year."

That is to say: Amos was in the studio last winter preparing an album of B-sides and outtakes, and weeding through hours of live recordings from last year's "Plugged tour," which marked the singer-pianist's performances with a backing band.

Suddenly, Amos noticed, the muses were out. She wasn't about to argue with them.

"I was just writing and writing," she says. "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."

To Venus And Back also represented a chance for Amos, like so many other artists, to get one last album out in the '90s, or as she jokingly puts it, "before the numbers change.

True reflection

"You have to know instinctively when a record has its time," says Amos. "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.

"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."

In the spirit of the electronic-based "Plugged" shows, Venus filters Amos' latest batch of piano performances with airy touches of beat-box, guitar and synth effects. Still, the singer is leery about calling it a technology record.

"Every effect was studied," she says. "There were no pre-set programs. It was put together like hand-done tiles."

So, while the record came together smooth and fast, it wasn't easy.

"It's never a matter of ease," says Amos. "This was full-throttle all the way. Everyone is kind of walking around like after a big rave -- too much ecstacy over too many days. There was a lot of ecstasy making this, but there was a lot of ant-f---ing, too.

"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."

Not to mention the collection of solar-system maps, space dictionaries and chemistry books that Amos says were strewn around her for inspiration.

"I have a tool box," she says with a laugh. "You get inspiration, but you have to be a good tracker. Where did the wildebeest go? Sometimes I think I'm just a good hunting dog, y'know?"

Tori Amos plans to cover Slayer, Eminem
Tori Amos' next studio album will be a set of covers, but with a gender-bending twist.
Tuesday July 17, 2001

(Article taken from www.canoe.ca/Jam/home.html)


"Strange Little Girls" is due in stores Sept. 18 and consists of songs written by men, but sung from the perspective of women, Warner Music Canada said in a press release.

Among the artists getting the Tori cover treatment are Neil Young, Eminem, The Stranglers, Depeche Mode, Slayer, Lou Reed and The Beatles.

"I've always found it fascinating how men say things and how women hear them," she says," Amos said in the press release.

"Words can wound and words can heal, and both are included on the album," says Tori. "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."

Specifically, Amos mentions Eminem's "'97 Bonnie & Clyde" as an example of a song's lyrics deserving closer scrutiny.

"The scariest thing to me was the realization that people are getting into the music and grooving along to a song about a man who is butchering his wife. So half the world is dancing to this, oblivious, with blood on their sneakers," she said.

"But when you talk about killing your wife, you don't get to control whom she becomes friends with after she's dead. She had to have a voice."

Amos approached the songs as if the woman's voice in each song was a distinct character, and for the album's cover, she even posed in character as the embodiment of each song's "narrator."

After releasing the album, Amos is planning a solo cross-country tour which kicks off in September.

On previous tours, Amos has spiced her sets with diverse covers, including Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

Here's the tracklisting for "Strange Little Girls," with the song's composer and original performer.


"New Age" (Reed) The Velvet Underground - from "Loaded" (1970)
"97' Bonnie & Clyde" (Mathers/Bass/Bass) Eminem - from "The Slim Shady LP" (1999)
"Strange Little Girl" (Black/Burnel/Cornwell/Greenfield/Warmling) The Stranglers - single (1982) & on various compilations
"Enjoy The Silence" (Gore) Depeche Mode - from "Violator" (1990)
"Rattlesnakes" (Clark/Cole) Lloyd Cole & The Commotions - from "Rattlesnakes" (1984)
"I'm Not In Love" (Stewart/Gouldman) 10cc - from "The Original Soundtrack" (1975)
"Time" (Waits) Tom Waits - from "Rain Dogs" (1985)
"Heart Of Gold" (Young) Neil Young - from "Harvest" (1972)
"I Don't Like Mondays" (Geldof) The Boomtown Rats - from "The Fine Art Of Surfacing" (1979)
"Raining Blood" (Hanneman/King) Slayer - from "Reign In Blood" (1986)
"Real Men" (Jackson) Joe Jackson - from "Night And Day" (1982)
"Happiness Is A Warm Gun" (Lennon/McCartney) The Beatles - from "The Beatles" (White Album, 1968)


-- JAM! Music

SPIN MAGAZINE
by Will Hermes
October 2001

Don't Mess with Mother Nature

Taking shots at male violence, the gun lobby, and Eminem, Tori Amos has made an unlikely covers record--a cross between Sybil and Quadrophenia. She's also made a beautiful child. A house call with rock's avengin babymamma.

By Will Hermes

Tori Amos reclines on a deserted beachfront in West Cornwall, England, her orange mane--showing brown roots and a touch of gray at the temples--swirling in the breeze. We're in Magick Country, somewhere between the famously haunted Bodmin Morr and a town called (no joke) Fairy Cross; it's a region known for wicked sprites, weeping ghosts, and vengeful mermaids. The singer, who turned 38 this summer, is clearly in her element. She proclains love for "Earth, mother of us all." She admires the feminine beauty of the morning moon. She invokes the power of the Egyptian warrior goddess Sakhmet. And she praises the poesy of mythic North American thrash lords Slayer.
"Beck's bass player (Justin Meldal-Johnsen) suggested I do a cover of Slayer's 'Raining Blood," she says applying strawberry lib balm with her pinkie. "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."
Consider that a gentle beckoning into the world of Strange Little Girls, perhaps the most elaborately conceived covers album in rock history. Amos recasts a dozen songs made famous by male artists--including the Beatles, Depeche Mode, Joe Jackson, and (ahem) Eminem--from a woman's point of view (the original lyrics remain, edited slightly, chanted repeatedly, ect.). Some songs, like Tom Waits' "Time," are faithful to their sources. Others, like "Heart of Gold," are inhabited by howling furies that may offend old-school Neil Young heads. But PJ Harvey fans should feel right at home.
Musically, its pretty goth, with vintage Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzer keyboards adding dark nostalgia and guitar whiz Adrian Belew channeling netherworldly noise. Conceptually, it verges on performance art: in voicing each song, Amos has imagined a different woman. Sometimes she's a charactger straight from the lyrics, such as Slim Shady's babymamma--locked in a car trunck and dying, while Daddy conspires with their daughter ('97 Bonnie and Clyde"). Or she may be a purely Tori invention, like the Texas Ranger whom whe envisions walking into the Columbine--like carnage of the Boomotown Rat's "I don't like Mondays." For each song, there is a corresponding depiction of the singer costumed as the "song character"--photos, like those of self-portraitist Cindy Serman, that conjure their own mini-narratives. Amos has also collaborated with graphic novelist Neil "Sandman" Gaiman on a series of short stories about each woman.
Perhaps this is what happens when you spend too much time indoors. Or maybe it's just what happens when you look into your newborn kid's face and wonder who she might be and what her future might hold. Natashya Lorein was a surprise, announcing herself September 5, 2000, after Amos' third miscarriage. At ten months, she's willful, curious, and an accomplished flirt, with piercing blue-gray eyes and a remarkable vocabulary of gutteral diphthongs. The bloodline is strong.
Natasha Lorien could be considered and uncredited collaborator on Strange Little Girls, a record with the maternal instinct as savage as the culture of violence it critiques. "It's a cliche that having a child changes everything," Amos says as we pull into Martian Engineering studios, a converted 19th century stone farmhouse where she and husband Mark Hawley, a recording engineer, worked on the album. "But it really does change everything."
Spin: You got deep into these songs. Which did you feel closest too? Tori Amos: Actually, it was one that didn't make the record--Public Enemy's "Fear of the Black Planet." The album Fear of the Black Planet was the driving force for [Amos' first album] Little Earthquakes.--its sheer commitment to belief. It made me ask, "what do I believe in?" It was a huge thing for me, and I thought it was time for a woman classified as "white" to sing the song. But I just couldn't find a way into it.
[Looking at the photos] Tell me about some of these women. Who's this? I like the Kiss jacket. She's from the Lloyd Cole [and the Commotions] song "Rattlesnakes." She's a showgirl, much older than the other women. She wants to be a stage actress, but things haven't been going well for her. She hangs around with a lot of girls who do porn, and she doesn't judge them; she just wants to love them. Her mentors are some of the old screen ledgends--like Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. She lives in a fantasy world, in stories.
Hmm. So how much of this album is autobiographical? I don't want to talk about that.
Over lunch with Amos and her husband, the conversation turns to Andrew Kernan, and mental patient recently shot dead by Liverpool police. Hawley--a laconic Englishman with shaggy brown hair and a three-day beard--suggests that a team of trained cops should have been able to subdue Kernan, who was waving a samuri sword on a city street, without killing him.
"It's getting a bit like America here," He says smirkingly grimly.
"I do think some people have become desensitized to violence," adds Amos. "And it troubles me deeply. I've read about kids who get brought into hospitals, and they can't believe their [gunshot] wounds actually hurt.
It's sad that after 20 years, "I Don't Like Mondays" [a song about a kid shooting up a school for "no reasons"] is more relevant than ever. 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 the bad seeds do this. And 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 drives's license.
Now tell me about this photo--its the mother from "'97's Bonnie and Clyde." This is her right before she was killed. She's deeply sad. She absolutely loves her daughter.
Was it difficult knowing that, on a certain level, the song is Eminem fantasizing about his actual wife and daughter? No. This is not about the person called Eminem. I'm seeing a woman in a victim situation for whom the last thing she's hearing is the person she had a child with [Amos' eyes well up] weaving in that child as an accomplice to her murder. I'm seeing it as a mother.
So you've entered this purely as storytelling? Absolutely. This transends Eminem and his wife, just like "Me and a Gun" transends Tori.
That seems like a valid defense of Eminem's work as powerful storytelling. This is not about storytelling--this is about getting nailed if you are a fucking pig. On this album, I say words are like guns. And if you don't believe that, well, check-fucking-mate, cocksucker.
So your basically calling Eminem out?
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.
Its easy to reject the notion that artists should be role models. But in a pop world lousy with soulless scumbags happy to say any damn thing for an icy Rolex, Amos, a self-proclaimed "alpha-female," commands respect. If she's prepared to argue about artistic responsiblity until the cows come home (which, as the sun sets, they literally do--to the dairy farm over the garden wall), she's also willing to shut up and defer to her work. "You can just listen to the music," she says. "It makes you feel things. It makes you question things."
So what about those who don't like the liberties you've taken with one of their favorite songs? Screw them. [She laughs and throws back her mane.] They've probably got some memory of hearing it that has nothing to do with the song, of making out with some girl at a dorm party who probably doesn't even remember them. I took these songs on spring break and had my way with them. They aren't going to take me home to meet their mother. I'm not the kind of girl you bring home to meet your mother.

Tori Amos "The Beekeeper" (Epic)
By Tim Den


Getting tougher to find the gold amongst the soot... but still worth the effort.

Although I still hang onto Tori Amos' every move like a pasty high school goth girl, her last few records have steadily declined in terms of cohesion and quality. Thematically, yes, Strange Little Girls, Scarlet's Walk, and Tales of a Librarian: a Collection were wrapped tightly in imaginative narratives that would shame most screenwriters... but when it came down to the actual songs, each album had maybe 30% gold and 70% soot. And even though The Beekeeper doesn't break from that tradition, it reminds us that 30% from Tori is still worth a million bucks.

When the songs hit their target - "Jamaica Inn," "General Joy," "Goodbye Pisces," "Marys of the Sea" - verses grow out of enchanting intros and into choruses, each part naturally extending into the next with a sense of pure continuity. Every nook and cranny makes sense, every chorus goosebumps-inducing, every transition smooth and stylish (much like the insert photos). "Marys of the Sea" especially: it starts off with a bang and never loses momentum or focus. A monumental stomper with a fiery hook, it belies its position at the tail end of the album.

Some aren't so lucky, though: "Sleeps With Butterflies," the title track, and "Martha's Foolish Ginger" all fumble most of their playtime before blossoming into nerve-tingling choruses, which in turn is better than how "Witness," "Original Sinsuality," and "Hoochie Woman" fare. These "70%"-ers drag the album down with bland melodies, mundane lyrics ("original sin? / I don't think so / original sinsuality!"), and - in the case of "Hoochie Woman" - Tori's worst weapon of choice: cheesy "blues." They feel heavy handed, unnecessary, unfinished... and at 19 songs, The Beekeeper certainly could've trimmed them down.

Which is the other problem with the latest Tori Amos albums: length. Scarlet's Walk was a behemoth to take in from start to finish, but at least it had a magnificent story threading all the songs together. The Beekeeper is longer and more abstract (the number six being the hexagon in which bees represent the meaning of life and the six days that God took to create the world and the subversion of women in Christianity...!), taking the listener on an 80 minute (!) journey into sometimes useless territory just for the sake of it. Why? Why didn't Tori turn the 19 songs into 11 really good ones? Maybe it would've resulted in more double/triplespeak metaphorical revelations like "China" instead of "he's cheating on me with a hoochie woman."

But I guess that's asking too much, since the Tori of Little Earthquakes and the Tori of The Beekeeper are very different people. The former had years of pent up anger, resentment, hurt, and other unhealthy voices to speak with, while the latter is a content wife and mother living a happy life. You can't really expect The Beekeeper to be as filled with specters and psychosis. Still though, I yearn for the days when she could spin one line - lyrically or melodically - into webs of possibilities and interpretations. While that day might never come again, you can still find traces of it (about 30% of it, to be exact) on The Beekeeper... which is enough for me to keep coming back.