Tori Amos: Piece by Piece

by Amos, Tori

  ANN: The oppositional elements among Amos's immediate forebears found a resolution in the marriage of her father and mother. The partnership flourished, though it had its costs. Amos grew up witnessing the dreams of her parents collide and transform, and she found both inspiration and much to challenge in their loving example.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  My father was going to be the next Billy Graham. That was his inspiration, his calling. When I was a child, he was grooming himself for that. He was pastor at a really big church in Baltimore; I think at one time there were 2,500 members. He had his aspirations. But I'll tell you this, when somebody was on their deathbed, or a family had lost someone— and this could happen once a week in a big church—he always paid serious attention, whoever it was.

  He says ministers and priests are the last ports of call. Doctors can explain what happened clinically, and say, “We're very sorry.” But at that point the families are saying, “Where are the guys with the dog collars [our church slang for clerical collars]?” The family is standing there saying, “They've just sewn our daughter up and, you know, she's twentythree years old, she has breast cancer, and it's taken over her body and we're going to lose our baby.” Or, “She was in a car crash and is gone now, though she was perfectly fine an hour earlier.” These people are looking death squarely in the face. And my father will sit there with them. In that hour, in that time of need, I've seen him show up time and time again. In our own family he couldn't always show up, even for a dinner conversation. But he fully understood his responsibilities in those moments of grief.

  Sometimes all you can do is just sit and hold a space. It's the hardest space you'll ever hold. You pour the tea, you bring the food, you don't have to make silly talk. They'll talk or not talk. I watched him do that and began to see that there's a rhythm to it. And it's one that I have to find in performance, when people are bringing their grief to me in a similar way.

  What I find really intriguing about my dad is that certain aspects of his character that he doesn't think are of value are his true gold. And I believe every person has their gold. It gets tricky when people put so much value on their gifts because it makes it hard for some of us, mainly because they don't give us much of a chance to value their gifts. Other people think their gold is something other than what it really is, so they keep their gift in the background. That was his reality.

  In 1963 my father marched with Martin Luther King Jr., in the big March on Washington. He was always close with the African-American ministers in the conference. His best friend was a guy called Bobby Bishop. We would be sitting at the Orioles baseball game surrounded by black people. When Bobby would drop me off at school, the teachers would say, “Who was that black man who dropped you off?”—they thought he was a kidnapper. I'd say, “That's my Uncle Bobby,” which he was. My father joined the civil rights movement because he'd seen how his friends had been in chains. And I think that is one of my father's qualities that people don't understand. He believed in education for women and he believed in civil rights all the way.

  I think my father was so drawn to my mother because the distant Mormon side of his people, on his father's side, believe that the Native Americans are the lost tribe of Israel. So she was, in a way, part of something. And he didn't even know why he was drawn to her, I think. As for my mother, she thought she was marrying a handsome doctor. A healer. My dad was a premed student before he switched his focus and studied theology. My grandmother, his mother, wrote to him and told him that he needed to change his major. “How could I have five boys,” she wrote, “and how could not one love me enough to become a minister?”

  He bit the carrot. And he and I have discussed it. He'll turn the tables on me. He'll say, “Well, what would you be writing about if I had been a doctor?” And that's fair enough.

  It was difficult for my mother, though. She dealt with it by pushing a Jackie O persona. Here was this woman who believed all these things— the Native American philosophy—and people at church had no idea who she was. She was the minister's wife: completely gracious, never said a peep. She played the wife to a T. I mean, the southern lady, polite, lovely, style, class, boom. Not a foot out of line. And yet something in her was dying slowly.

  I was fairly young when I realized that I was compromising my mom by telling her certain things I'd seen happening in the Church. I began to see that she was in a really weird position. That's the word I would have used as a kid. For a while, my mom gave up so much to support my father that she lost pieces of herself. But she regained that as she dove into her Native American research years ago to prove that her people were on the tribal rolls. As my mother helped my sister get into the Indians Into Medicine program (INMED) at the University of North Dakota, she aligned herself with the Corn Mother and brought the compassionate heart into her Bible study. You will find that many Native Americans practice a form of Christianity, mainly because the one called Jesus, with his compassionate heart and constant love, reminded many Native Americans of one called the Great Peacemaker, recognized in numerous tribes as a spiritual prophet who lived before those who came and landed at Plymouth Rock. My mother runs my publishing company now. She and my dad. For her it's always been back to the texts.

  What I began to see as a child was my grandmother's power over people. She was able to get my father to make the life change from being a doctor to being a minister—that's power. It's changing someone's life completely. It changed my mother's life as well. Hey, she went along with it. But she was going to be an English teacher married to a doctor. She then had to go to work to support the minister, and give up her education. This is not a small thing. I also didn't like the way my father's mother treated my mother. There was a distance. And my mother so wanted to be embraced by her. That was so important to her, and it never happened.

  If these things hadn't happened, if my father had gone on to be a doctor and my mother had been able to follow her original path, we wouldn't be having this conversation. I would have been writing songs about God knows what. I wouldn't have learned the key lesson I learned from their hardship at the hands of my grandmother and the Christian Church. I wasn't going to let anybody have power over me like that, so I looked at her and I studied her, and I came to realize that she kept going back to the idea of the Word made flesh. And I said, All right, the Word is going to live inside my flesh, and you will not have a library card to get into it. So that's when I started making songs that other people couldn't walk into, and I discovered my creative spark.

  ANN: The intimate impact of her family on Amos's developing identity was soon joined, and sometimes countered, by another crucial source: music. The fledgling pianist's alliance with her instrument allowed her access to a new, self generated world of secret revelations. At the same time, other artists’ music transported Amos into realms she'd never imagined existed. Passionately, but carefully, she incorporated their spirit into her own forming imagination.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  It's the kind of question one often gets asked, and I suspect most people faced with it simply make up an answer—but I do have a first musical memory. I remember looking up at this big black upright piano. It was old. There was a wind-up stool, and I remember putting phone books on the ground, trying to get myself on it. I was two and a half. I was stalking the piano, seeing it, warming up to it. I wasn't intimidated by it. I was checking it out and it was very welcoming. And so I began a relationship, which just seemed the most natural thing to do. And you don't question things at that age, really—it's just natural, you're drawn to certain things. My family encouraged it, which was great.

  When I was five, I had begun going to the piano and composing little snippets, little songs to help me stay clear on what I was seeing and thinking and hearing. Especially within the Church, because people wouldn't openly discuss their perceptions or what was really going on. There wasn't a lot out in the open. This was before the dam broke on the abuses within the Christ
ian Church. Whatever the extent of it for different girls, different guys, what they went through, I was there, watching, as the minister's daughter, and I was able to kind of clock it. My dad and I have recently had conversations about the shocking extent of these abuses within the Church worldwide. Some young people were sexualized and others were desexualized. I had my little radar up, because I was a composer. I mean, come on—it's like there is this big elephant shitting in the living room and everyone just looks around it to watch the football game. Later, when I went to the conservatory, my teachers told me that if I wanted to compose, I'd have to be a camera at all times. And as a child I created sonic paintings, so that I could walk into them without having to leave the house or leave the room. So I was able to chronicle what was really occurring but not being acknowledged.

  After a certain point I didn't even feel the need to leave the Christian system because I thought nothing could get me. I was able to sit while my dad was reading the paper after dinner and create musical worlds, and sometimes they were encoded. It was all there for people to hear. Very much like the Renaissance painters who placed symbols within their paintings to be interpreted. I tried to follow their pattern and put sonic symbols in my work. I created musical codes from a very young age, so I could recall what was really happening in my life. I had to know where the knowledge was, so I stored it all in the songs. I store everything in the songs, everything. I'm leaving you clues and I'm giving you the chance to go on a little hunt.

  Sometimes now, I go to the piano for a while before I do an interview or make a public appearance. I'm going back to the Source. This is how I figure out where I'm really coming from. It helps me decide what I will tell somebody, whose opinions I want to clothe myself in before I lie down under the microscope. This, at the piano, is where I chronicle everything. If I have a misunderstanding with someone, a falling out, I come here.

  A time came later in my youth when I had to find the bridge between the aspects of playing music that constituted communication with myself, and performance. That's when I got a repertoire together, things that people would like. This is why I've done covers over the years. It's something that I started doing a lot of, while cutting my teeth as a lounge player, and after you do so many you see the songs you do well. I'd slip one of my songs into a set occasionally. But I understood that I was there to play songs that the customers wanted to hear, and so I learned a lot of material that maybe I wouldn't have chosen to learn. That's how I learned song structure; I've seen a lot of architects’ blueprints, you could say. When you look through all those blueprints, then you begin to go, Oh, that's how they solved that problem with the basement.

  These days, I do keep my specific musical influences private, somewhat, when I'm in the middle of a work. This is one thing that is sacred to me. What I'm listening to during my process, how I get my groove, that's private. Some journalists have asked, “Is there anything you won't talk about?” Yes—what I'm listening to. The Internet practically has my gynecological record, and I accept that. I'll also share information about some of the things I'm reading, and other nonmusical starting places. But if a text is a jumping-off point for me and if it's really part of my core process right at that moment, then no, I won't share it. I think that's very personal. And also, there are people who will penetrate the process for reasons that are not benevolent, that go beyond mere curiosity.

  That said, I am happy to acknowledge certain artists who made a big difference to me when I was developing as a composer. As a pianist, my left hand was really kind of developed by listening to Stevie Wonder, along with the bass playing of Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones. I remember just listening to “Superstition” from Talking Book, and the whole of the Innervisions album, and studying them, as a player more than a writer or a singer. My sense of song structure was developed by listening to Lennon and McCartney and Joni Mitchell. Or Gershwin, or Hoagy Carmichael, any of the classic songwriters of the early twentieth century. Now that's song structure. I really love that kind of structure, that older style of writing a standard. I was also influenced by the Negro spirituals my Poppa sang.

  My mother had a huge record collection—she'd actually worked in a record store before meeting my father. She saved all her records, and when I was small, along with educating me through books, she'd play them for me. She's the one who played me Gershwin to Fats Waller, all the greats of the pre-rock repertoire.

  Like everyone born in the 1960s, I heard the Beatles at a young age. My brother, Michael, is almost ten years older than I am, and he was bringing home music that affected him. I was able to hear Sergeant Pepper when it first came out, though I was only four years old. Michael was this huge giver of information. He was the messenger. He and his friends would borrow records from each other. He was studying the guitar, so he was drawn to guitar players. So my mom was bringing in one generation of music, and he was bringing in the next. And then, when I went to Peabody Conservatory, I began hearing the classics and getting the idea of discipline.

  What the Beatles’ songs did for me was create space. To this day those songs create worlds for me to walk into, or puddles—whatever it is, it's a space. And I don't feel I need to know what Lennon and McCartney were seeing. I don't feel I need to know them. I feel I'm given permission, and it's unspoken, to have my own—I don't like the word journey— but adventure, almost. And I'm allowed to walk and breathe in that space and have my own relationship with the song.

  Then, of course, there was Led Zeppelin … Talk about a second coming. I just remember listening to them and feeling my body move and going to the piano and moving my body at the piano. And their music would transform into other music I was working on. What their work taught me was how to stay in a rhythm, feeling my body move to this rhythm and trying to create a continuation at the piano, just knowing that I had to take this power into my world. Realizing it would look different, because I'm a piano player.

  SONG CANVAS: “The Beekeeper”

  I watch how Tash, her friend Emily, and Tash's cousin Kelsey make their creations. They have been inspiring me to pick up my pen. Writing a book and a record at the same time is not something I'd choose to do again. Nor is getting married two weeks before rehearsals began for a ten-month world tour. Why? Well, the upside is that they share the same breathing space, the same emotional house. Let's say they are like roommates. The downside is, they share the same breathing space, the same emotional house. Let's say they are like roommates. So in a way, yes, they breathe creative life into each other, but they also can steal breath from each other. Either way they share a bond. Similar to a marriage. If marriage works, it's because the two that have joined together as a force have discovered that when the well runs dry, there is a second well with an endless Source. But as we all know, the trick is to discover that second well.

  There is no map you can buy to the second well; it can seem elusive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've been to the mountains, to the desert, to the sea, just like you, and for a moment it seems that, wow, here it is, the second well. And then no sooner than you think you've discovered it, it's gone. Then you find yourself following the “food change path”: you know, change your food, change your path, you are what you eat, Eat Right for Your Blood Type, etc., etc…. we've all done it. But if you're like me, then you realize one day that after you've been doing this for a year, your actual blood type is A+, not O … Fucking great. Then you go to the philosophers and you read the Jameses—Hillman and Hollis. You read Hollis's Swamplands of the Soul and there is a glimmer. You devour Robert E. Johnson, Joseph Campbell, Marion Woodman, Jean Shinoda Bolen, the endless list of writers. You go to the ancient myths, including the Bible. You go to the Gnostics and discover that St. Paul, in all probability, was one. You study Elaine Pagels, all her writings on early Christianity: The Gnostic Gospels, The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters, and Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. At a certain point you begin to bead a necklace, weighing what you have been taught compared to
the information you've discovered yourself, and you realize all the contradictions.

  While beading what may be truth, you bead that which may have been hidden from us. Truths that have been uncovered with the discoveries at Nag Hammadi in 1945 of ancient texts, even Gospels, that were written as early as the four Gospels that we live by—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Discoveries including texts such as the Gospel of Thomas, the secret book of James, and the secret book of John—and all of a sudden there is a flash of light. And where has it come from? Watching Eddie Izzard do Ozzie as well as Ozzie does? Mixed with the love of a good man. Mixed with watching a transvestite perform “I've Never Been to Me” by Charlene, mixed with your mom barely surviving a cardiac arrest … and then voilà. There it is. Finally, you stumble upon the second well.

  Tash said to me the other day,

  “Mum?”

  I responded, “Yum.”

  “Mum?”

  “Yum.”

  “Mum, sometimes I'm stupid.”

  “Tash, don't be so hard on yourself.”

  “Mum, sometimes you're stupid, too.”

  “Hey, Tash, what are you getting at?”

  “Sometimes, Mum, when you're cross and I'm Bombaloo.” (She uses a word meaning how it sounds, from the kids’ book Sometimes I'm Bombaloo.)

  “Yeah, go on …”