Tori Amos: Piece by Piece

by Amos, Tori

  I did have to listen to the Dark Prince when he said, “Stop playing with the baby demons. Baby demons are men in training on their path who will defecate on women in any way.” If you're drawn to that, as I was during that time, you need to look at what in your own male aspect is fucking your woman up the ass with her head smashed into the pillow. That's stuff to make you throw up. And you have to take responsibility. I wanted baby demons because I desired what they could access. But once it got down to it and I would be in a room alone with one of them, I would kind of go, “Do I really desire this guy?” And my inner chick would say, “He's a turnoff; I mean, his hands smell like onions—and he's not an Italian chef.” These were guys who became friends but first drew me in because I found in them something I needed to see in myself.

  That's what the Dark Prince told me. “You need to spend time. Your male needs to spend time with your woman, take her shopping.” I did that. I spent a little bit of time before I got into another heavy relationship, which was Mark after that.

  ANN: The romance with Mark Hawley led Amos into a new kind of fairy tale— not the ravishment of the princess by the beast, but the less obviously dramatic story of the unassuming sweetheart who waits in the wings until his belle is

  ready for ordinary happiness. Hawley offered Amos respect and artistic partnership); as the main engineer on Boys for Pele, he created a pristine space in which she could articulate the rage the Dark Prince and the dark goddesses demanded. Over the years, they have forged a creative partnership and a model for contemporary marriage—equal parts passion and humor, exhilaration and amicability. Their relationship has allowed Amos to turn back to her project of integrating the sacred feminine and profane in her music with a new sense of poise, to turn outward, beyond confession, with a better understanding of how these patterns affect all women.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  I hadn't had a date with him; he had just been on the sidelines, sort of watching me do all these shenanigans. We didn't have much interaction beyond hello, good morning. I had a crush on him for ages, though. I had sexual feelings for him from the beginning. I wasn't thinking about having a conversation with him. I wasn't thinking about making music. I was thinking about a walk in the rain and getting caught. I was thinking about an affair.

  JOHN WITHERSPOON:

  It sounds really patronizing, but I gave her permission to pursue him toward the end of the Pink tour. She implied she kind of liked him, and I was like, “Look, he's a really good sound guy and we're in the middle of a tour. The last thing we want now is something going wrong because you two got together and you fall out and then he leaves, and Marcel the monitor engineer will go with him because he's his best mate and …” I said, “Can you just like hang on a little bit?” But she couldn't.

  It was actually very well planned, their getting together. It had to be, because nobody else really needed to know except them, and me, and Joel, her bodyguard. So it was a case of trying to get them together but keep it private. It was a day off, I think, in South Bend, Indiana. And they kind of arranged that they were going to go out for a walk. It was funny, 'cause Joel and I had to sort of patrol around. Mark and Tori came down into the lobby and I was in the little gift shop, and I saw Joel hiding behind a newspaper and I had to go out an emergency exit. We were just trying to give them a bit of privacy.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  Eventually Mark and I did become friends and started sort of confiding in each other. And I remember, one time, he said, “Tell me why it is that women invariably pull the same kind of men to them? The one that will taste them, eat them, swallow them, and then spit them out.” In this British accent, I'll never forget it. It's embedded in my mind. That's when I knew this was it. He went on: “Spit them out, leave them at the side of the road, drive away, back up, kick the door open and say, ‘You want to go for another ride?’ ” And I sat there and thought, There are knights in this world. This is the prince.

  ANDY SOLOMON:

  It was a surprise to me. I came around the corner one day—I think we were in New Haven, Connecticut—and I literally, like, came around a drape onstage and I ran into them and they were hugging. I was like, “What's wrong? You guys okay?” I thought they were comforting each other because somebody had died or something.

  A few people knew before I did, but that was when I found out. Later, we would have talks on the bus and I'd say to Mark, who'd been my friend for a long time, “Look. This is not such a good idea, you know. If you're bad in bed your career could be over.” He'd be like, “Don't worry, don't worry. Everything's going to be fine.” And I was wrong, you know. And I'm happy to be wrong.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  I really feel like my husband is my boyfriend. I am having an affair with my husband, and sometimes plates fly. There's no question. This is someone who is tenacious and has his own way of looking at things. I mean, he wanted to get married, but only if we lived in England. To be his wife required serious change for me. And there are serious boundaries. It is about monogamy with him. That's just it. I think marriage takes more perseverance sometimes than any other endeavor. But this suits my skirt just fine, primarily because I've always been reticent about the concept of “Happily Ever After.” The garden will have weeds and pests that may damage crops; it may even have pestilence to contend with once in a while. But with the right combination of elements, including bees and butterflies, the garden will pollinate and become a garden—not an emotional wasteland but a place of sensuality and balance. So it may need a good beekeeper; all complex gardens do.

  ANN: Having found her human partner, Amos is free to refine the expression of sexuality within her art. She continues to make this task the focus of her work, both onstage and in the studio.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  In the beginning I knew that the Magdalene was my teacher. But I couldn't get the information and I didn't know the walk. I didn't know how to do it. So you're casting your lines of questions into what seems a silent, visionless sea, and you know you're stupid because the sea can't be visionless. You're looking for signs all the time … but what do they look like? So there you go again, casting your line, looking for little signs. But do you need X-ray vision to even see them? Well, first of all, I had to redefine the clichéd term freedom for women. I've heard women who do X-rated movies say that they're liberated. That's their right. In a way, it's no different from the way I was approaching sexuality at the beginning of my career. But when a woman is being defecated on emotionally or physically, then we are up to our necks in the Profane, with Sacred nowhere near that casting call. The whole sensuality is gone. It's the brutality of power at its cruelest. We've missed what it's supposed to be about, which is the ecstasy, the coming together. Sex becomes about one person being the subject of somebody else's power, which so often is what Religion is about, too. I've never quite figured out if Sex is in Religion's harem or if Religion is in Sex's harem.

  I've asked myself, Is there a way to reach orgasm and keep your spirituality intact? To me that is the orgasm of all orgasms, which is what I think I'm experiencing in performance. Not literally, but in an artistic sense. And what you ultimately want is to experience this when you join with your man or your physical counterpart.

  We are penalized if we are able to hump energetically like the men. It pisses people off because we don't need them in that case. And it makes people nervous as hell.

  SONG CANVAS:“Lust”

  I had to bring performance to the sacred for myself. That doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of sensuality and sexuality involved, or that you don't get passionate. There is a primal thing that goes on when it's hot, as they say. There's this magnetic quality. It's like you're having an emotional affair with thousands of people, if you look at it like that. It's funny—we do these little meet and greets sometimes before a show, and I'll hear people say, “She's a really lovely lady” backstage before I go on, after they've
just met me. But they're quite surprised that lovely ladies can go do what I do onstage.

  If we can just for five seconds get past Bodily Functions 101, get past that first step of masturbation and into a higher level of eroticism, maybe I can explain it. I think we have to walk into another culture for a minute. Let's talk about the Kundalini being activated. At the base of the spine, the idea of the snake is coiled. And that's what a song like “Lust,” which I wrote after marrying Mark, was really tapping into. The idea of rolling and unrolling, coiling and merging—energy moving through the underworld to the real world. Under flesh into the heart, then taking it back to the real world.

  Similarly the song “Sweet the Sting,” on The Beekeeper, makes my hips sway. This to me is a musical example of the marriage of the sacred and the profane.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  I've realized that my childhood instincts were right. Take Robert Plant, for example. When I met him, I talked with him about what I thought about him when I was a girl. He told me he had been into the white magic thing, as they say. We've joked about how he so famously called himself a Golden God—I said, no, you were the Golden Goddess …

  My whole goal has been to penetrate the patriarchy from the day I was five. Sometimes what you have to do is inspire young men so that they don't want to become a part of the abusive side of all that. We all have to reapproach the question What is a powerful male, a powerful female? How are those roles abused? If you go after that core, you don't have to worry about who is part of the peace movement, who is part of Earth First, who is part of Amnesty International. That will take care of itself. But, if you've got 15,000 kids chanting, “Die, bitch, die” at a concert, you may have just lost the battle. They are not going to vote for a female president in that state of mind. So you have to come back to the question What is political What is social? But if you go for the core, then you will automatically invite both of them to come in and be characters in this play Sometimes I have found that just to be able to permeate the rigid power stance you come up against in a confrontation, the key is not to try to match their venom but instead to crawl inside their psyche. I want to be right back there in that pituitary and crawl in like a snake.

  SONG CANVAS: “I'm Not in LOVE”

  I covered the 10cc song “I'm Not in Love” on Strange Little Girls. Neil Gaiman, who worked closely on the project with me, and I developed this character who was very much based on the film Betty Blue and certain women that have come to my shows—this element of the domina-trix. I did research on dominatrix behavior because I have met a few and I got along with them, but of course I wasn't at the end of their whip and would never be. It just wouldn't occur. We would have tea, preferably Japanese.

  I called Neil about this one gal I met, because he does a lot of research on his characters. As I was going to let this character embody me, I needed to understand all that I was taking on board. My Poppa always taught me that if I were going to shape-shift and let these essences inhabit me, then I really needed to prepare myself and understand the psyche I was going to be taking on. He always insisted on this in order to protect my personal essence before I took on another character's essence.

  So Neil went through the character's different aspects, asking me questions. Betty Blue was one element; that film really had an impact on me, and so she was there somewhat representing the way in which my character was damaged as a female. That's one thing. Another aspect of this character is that she provides a service. A very important one. And I needed to be able to take on board, as a consenting adult, what that service was.

  If we go back into the mythic, as long as there is domination of the feminine, we must have dominatrices to correct that imbalance. You know, I'm told that certain old-school men in the music industry require dominatrices to rebalance them so they can be ruthless in their work and immune to the pain they are inflicting. They're doing their penance, these entertainment industry cheeses who then subjugate their artists.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  I investigated a similar character in “Amber Waves,” on Scarlet's Walk. The Magdalene and America are really good synonyms, because they've both been pimped out, though they always resurface. I'm talking about the land of America now, not the government. She appeared to me as a fading porn star. That character is based on an acquaintance of mine who had turned her life over to a man; I was watching her demise. In part it comes from a film, too—in Boogie Nights, the Julianne Moore character's name is Amber Waves. But in the end, she's another version of the Magdalene. That's why the song is sexy and not just sad. She retains her dignity in her soul by asking the question “Are the Northern Lights drowning or are they just waving?”

  ANN: Whatever form Amos's music takes next, it will, in some way, still serve and reveal the Magdalene. Fervent afternoons in her childhood bedroom, patent

  leather nights in LA., the revelations of Hawaii—these are all part of the seedbed. There, too, plays Natashya, always a presence now, the embodiment of a new generation of girls forced to cross the divides forged by history. For her daughter and all young innocents, Amos hopes to offer a bridge.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  Today I feel as if I walk a line of Mommy and the Sacred Prostitute. It's funny—because of where we live, Tash is going to a Christian school. She comes home with ideas about God. She said to me just the other day “Mummy do you believe in God?” And my instinct was to ask her, “Do you mean the God behind God?” And you know what I did? I said to myself, “Jeez, T, back off, she's only three and a half. This is your point of view, not necessarily hers.” She says she wants to pray. So when I see that what Tash really wants to do is to just hold hands and say grace, “Let's go, I say, let's bless everything.” And we do. She prays for absolutely everybody—dogs, children, mermaids, God, Mrs. God—literally everybody. We're also weaving in dear Mother Earth; she prays to her as well. She understands Baby Jesus and she understands there's God, but she understands there's a Mother, which hopefully for her will be the two Marys united. Since the two Marys have never been subjugated or divided within Tash's Being, then it makes sense that the two Marys were born married in Tash's little world. Mother Earth is sovereign. Mother Earth has awakened her daughters.

  TORI:

  Back in the conference room at Doubleday Books …

  The door opens and my publishers walk into the conference room where I've been waiting, flanked by their twelve disciples who will be covering everything from publicity, marketing, and sales of the book. We all sit down, with Chelsea and Johnny on either side of me, creating the effect of a Honey Baked Ham on rye sandwich, hold the cheese.

  My publisher looks at me and says, “We've read the Magdalene chapter, and whatever you and Ann are doing, keep doing it.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief, because if they hadn't liked it, sure, I may have lots of songs up my sleeve, but I don't have any other books. This is all I know.

  Then he added, “Just keep going. Don't even think about it.”

  I responded, “That's it?”

  They smiled and said, “That is what most authors would love to hear after having turned in their first chapter.”

  I said, “You don't mind the cursing or the profanity? Because we've just had to edit the DVD of any and all profanity, or else they were going to slap a big ‘Parental Advisory’ on it.”

  He said, “This is literature, Tori. Curse as much as you want. And by the way, the Magdalene's been very good to us. We've got no problems with the Magdalene.”

  And as I looked around at all The Da Vinci Code paraphernalia surrounding me, I glanced up at my publishers and asked, “So then why aren't you guys aggressively seeking to publish the Gospel of Mary Magdalene?”

  They looked at me as if I were speaking an alien language and said, “What are you talking about?”

  “I'm talking about the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.”

  With shock they responded, “As in the Matthe
w, Mark, Luke, and John Gospels?”

  I said, “That is exactly what I'm talking about—a real Gospel, from her perspective.”

  “Do you mean it was written by her?” they asked.

  “Well, no one can prove who wrote Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, or any of the Gospels. But yes, there is a Gospel attributed to the Magdalene.”

  “Well, when did this happen? Why didn't we hear anything about it?”

  “It was discovered in 1895.”

  My publisher looked over at one of his twelve disciples and said, “Get on the phone with the religion department.”

  I thought to myself about how people were shouting from the rooftops about Mel Gibson's The Passion, that people were buying The Da Vinci Code in droves, and yet the words attributed to this woman, Mary Magdalene, are still being kept under wraps almost two thousand years later. Her light hidden under a bushel. The question that I have to ask myself, and the question I have to ask you is … Why? Maybe this truly is The Greatest Story Never Told.

  ANN: A lost river flows from the Himalayan peaks of India to the Arabian Sea. Some people believe the Saraswati has been buried for four thousand years, while others claim it never actually existed. What everyone knows is that this mysterious watercourse shares its name with the deity that governs another elusive stream—the force of creativity itself. The goddess Saraswati is the consort of Brahma, lord of creation; she is Vak, the guardian of speech; she nourishes all who make music, write poems, and love to learn. She is usually depicted riding a swan, the symbol of pure knowledge, while in her four arms she holds the implements of inspiration: meditation beads, a book, and a veena, the sacred seven-stringed lute, the tone of which resembles the human voice.