Tori Amos: Piece by Piece

by Amos, Tori

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  There isn't just one kind of song that I write. One side of me loves atmospheric British music, like the Cocteau Twins and Talk Talk, and then there is a side that loves story songs—Springsteen's “Born to Run” and “Thunder Road.” Other times I'll incorporate a burlesque or vaudevillian quality. There's a tradition of pop songwriters who do that—Lennon and McCartney did it quite a bit in songs like “Martha My Dear.” It's supposed to be a release; sometimes you need that humor. In my songs—“Leather,”

  “Wednesday,” “Mr. Zebra”—there's a sinister force moving within the song, just as there was in burlesque. But they can definitely have a giggle, those Girls.

  What I know I'm not is a “write me a hit at the drop of a hat” type of songwriter. I don't think I could contrive a song that the world would embrace just because it targets a certain demographic. To me one of the best classic pop writers is Carole King. Her songs go beyond the usual limits; they're not the kind you hear one week on the radio and then a year later it's out of there. A part of me wishes I could write like Carole King, but it's not my orientation. I think that my deepest desire would be to dive behind the masks people wear every day and find out who they really are, and then write about it. Now I realize that if I dived behind some masks, certain masks, let's say the Clear Channel mask, then I might just strike a chord, thereby lowering the drawbridge into the castle that is radio-land …or, the drawbridge would stay up and the arrows would come flying from the top of the tower. It's a crapshoot, but I adore rolling emotional dice.

  JON EVANS:

  The classical influence in Tori's music comes through in her harmonic choices and articulation. Her voicings are very classical. They're not jazz voicings with tight internal work-ins. It's very grand. But it works; it's really beautiful and it's kind of majestic in its own way.

  Coming from a jazz background, I was used to improvising, and I have formal training, too, so I get the classical aspects of Tori's work. But I soon realized Tori doesn't write standard songs in any genre or tradition. She begins with her voice; there are meters and bars thrown in that complement her vocal lines. She might leave space to put in three extra words, so then that measure has an extra beat and a half, and that's just life, you know? Even her singles, like “Spark” from Choirgirl, have a ton of time changes.

  The first thing I ever did with Tori live was play “Spark” on the David Letterman show. That song just has its own logic. It's hard to get the rhyme and reason of it until you play it a bunch of times, and I just remember I was playing at that taping and looking over at Matt and saying, “What's going on?” It just was funny. You get used to the oddities in her music—you might be sailing along in a time signature, and then all of a sudden there's just an extra beat, or it might switch from one time signature to another without warning. Then some songs are just straight ahead the entire time, or you might have one that's kind of a waltz.

  I think her writing style has evolved this way because of how she records; she's always recorded her songs alone first and then brought in other musicians once they're basically formed. It's only since she got together with Matt that the drums and piano parts have evolved at the same time. Before, if she wanted to add extra elements, she would just do it and her band would deal with it later. Her structures emerged organically, almost spontaneously.

  There's more time on this new record, The Beekeeper. We're all here together and we've been spending a lot of time trying to give every song its own personality. Oftentimes when we are tracking, Matt and I will do something that will support Tori's getting her performance down. Something that she feels very comfortable singing and playing over. Then we'll go back and do something very different afterward. Matt will build a drum track that is completely different from what he did when we were tracking. I'll do something that goes along with that, so things kind of develop in that way. But every song is so different, and since we basically have a full day to do each track, some of them end up completely different from where they started.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  Melodies can come at any time. If I'm driving, for example, I might come up with something, and if I don't have a notebook I'll just jot it down in a paperback novel or whatever I happen to be carrying. I scribble on the back of whatever I can. It used to be bills, but that led to a whole set of other problems, so now it's whatever I can get my hands on. I've developed my own form of writing music, because I never did well in music school as far as theory. I had to take Theory IV twice. Mark did really, really well in theory, so he can advise me on those matters, and in the studio Jon charts things out for everybody. I can't do that. I have my own way of understanding rhythm and remembering the melodies I'm working in. I guess you could say that a notation has developed over the years so that I can write my music out and remember it, but it's definitely not a traditional musical form. Verses are setups; choruses are payoffs. They need to be. Music and words often come together when a song Being initially shows herself to me. I don't always get the full story. But usually a thought comes with the melody, or perhaps just the sound of a word that begins to give me clues as to who and what this creature is.

  I work within music and not poetry because in my form the two elements work together. I'm shifting and shaping words as I vocalize, too. Sometimes I don't see it until after it's written. I'll look back and see the pattern of a melody, and what the words are doing; sometimes the melody is doing the complete opposite of what the words are doing, and it creates a contrapuntal line. It gives the story another subtext. You could have a dark lyric with a jaunty tune; the lyrics might not rhyme, but the music might, in a sense. Humor usually comes from the music. That's true in “Yes, Anastasia” and “Mohammad My Friend.”

  It's a mistake when critics focus on lyrics alone. Without vocalizing, a songwriter would just be a poet. But we're different. Most lyrics read terribly on the page. They can be poetic, but a dress can be poetic, a kiss, whatever. When poets try to write songs, that's also usually a mistake. And musicians who think they can publish books of poetry should, for the most part, think again. Some can cross the line and live in both worlds— Leonard Cohen, for instance. His performance of his own compositions has always been its own art form. I imagine that as a songwriter he had a tear in his eye when he first heard the rendition of his “Hallelujah” by Jeff Buckley. Even if you are known as a performer of your own compositions, when someone else puts their heart and soul into a song that you wrote, your mountain has just got to move and you've got to say, “Amen, brotha’.”

  TORI:

  I sit at the piano. We're in preproduction for the new work. The Beekeeper. On tour it would be showtime. 8:50 p.m. I start to play, but as I go into my zone, I don't see the four barnlike walls of the studio painted a shade of Tuscan Madras—I'm on a stage somewhere. Anywhere. It doesn't matter. I'm amped. Body and soul, I am experiencing an otherworldly “tune-up.” My tape recorder is on; I'm playing one of the new songs as I would live, and something new is being played by my hands. A whole new section, a melody, marches out of my mouth over my lips. I feel a bass line, a kick pattern in my hips. I am meeting a piece of this song creature that I never knew existed. Because they change when played live, I've been trying to find the songs in the future and then bring them back in that particular form so that then I can decide which of the song's different forms work better on tape.

  ANN: Just as Saraswati manifests with instrument in hand, so Amos cannot separate the act of songwriting from playing piano and singing. Her voice de-

  fines the often unconventional shapes of her melodies and time signatures, while her beloved Bösendorfer guides her into new rhythmic patterns and harmonic combinations. With each album, Amos has challenged herself as a player and a singer, and in doing so has pushed open the boundaries of her song structures.

  TORI:

  The songs are structures in themselves. Once I'm able to find my way into one of them—and that
might be only a four-bar phrase—that does not mean that I have access to this song creature. Imagine that you have been able to let yourself into this fascinating architectural space but you're in only one room and you do not know how to get to the other rooms because as of now there are no doorways. It becomes like a sonic puzzle. Sometimes it takes months for me to find my way around a song, because I have to find harmonic code, but once I do the song seems to let me into another room. This doorway has been put in place by the song itself. The structures already exist. I'm just interpreting them. Now, can I trick the songs by writing them and imprinting them with any architecture I want? No, but I can trick myself. The songs, though, will never resonate the way they were intended to unless I work with them to crack their codes. It's sorta like … you can say you love this person—everyone wants you to love them and make them your partner, because it's what makes sense to everybody else— but you know somewhere inside whether you truly love them, or whether you are pretending to feel something and you call it love. Because you kind of have a special feeling for this person, but honestly, it's all becoming a bit of a headache … and it would make everybody happy if you just loved this person. Does Venus know you're not really in love? Of course, and so do you. This is what songwriting requires—the ability to listen to the heart of the song.

  SONG CANVAS: “Parasol”

  Sometimes as I'm hunting for songs I get very still and realize that in “real life” I may feel hunted as well. “Parasol” came out of this feeling. The words and music are done, the arrangement is very close. I keep seeing the painting that reached out to me a few weeks ago from an art book and pulled me in through its page into the picture itself. Seated Woman with a Parasol became my protector and still is my protector during times of heightened confrontation—whether that draining, devouring energy is from an outside source or an inside force. Parasol is my friend and I trust her.

  I remember seeing the songs as paintings when I was little. The only place people could not get to me was in the songs. These were my sonic paintings, where I would notate truthful events and save them and store them by threading them into the symbology into chords, the melodies, and the rhythm, the breathing—and it seemed that even my gum-chewing had a backbeat. There was no way that they could extract me (whoever they were). Sometimes I couldn't even extract myself.

  The painting Seated Woman with a Parasol by Georges-Pierre Seurat is a study on his painting La Grande Jatte. I found myself staring at the seated woman with a parasol in yet another painting by Seurat entitled A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (detail: woman and child).

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  Each album I've made represents a period in my vocal development. In Earthquakes, if you listen to the singing, there is a consistency, mainly because I was continually having to find my inner voice. Venus is very consistent—to me, there's a real beauty throughout the album with that vocal. By then I could move into anger and out of it instead of experiencing it as an uncontainable emotion. On Pele I'm almost, you know, burning up. Whereas now, if I wanted to represent a woman in flames, I would detach myself, study it, make the needed shifts, and move the hands on my clock so that I could step into anger without being burned up.

  Pele is really where I think the voice unleashed. And sometimes in a way that wasn't contained. Once I found it, I could move on to temperance. At different times, you write different music for your voice and for you as a player, but you also write music that you can emotionally contain. Your soul—your psyche—what makes your inner world a wasteland or fertile or both, is the deciding factor in what will make up your song garden. With Choirgirl, after the Pele thing, I wasn't in a bloodletting place. I had lived that. There's a lot more containment—I was tracking with musicians who were really skilled, and I needed to be spot on. With Pele I was also in a church, so you can imagine what was going on there—talk about an exorcism, praise Jesus. It was about time. This girl was finding her Kundalini and letting it come forth right at the altar of the church where they would have their sacred communion. I was able to have sacred communion, finally, with the Feminine in the place where she had been circumcised. That's one reason for the haunting background vocal in “Caught a Light Sneeze,” “Inanna Inanna Inanna bring your sons;” it was such a resurrection for she who is Mrs. God, right there in the church. With Choirgirl, and later with Venus, I was home. There was time to let the wife, the lover, the friend, catch up with the part of my woman who was living in these song realms. If your human woman doesn't catch up with what's happening in the song world, then you can't imprint this knowledge and thread it into your living tapestry.

  Working on Strange Little Girls, I found new qualities within my voice. To sing “New Age” like that—there's a lot of power in that chorus.

  To hit the tone I wanted, I needed to come more from the chest. Sometimes I will use that, but I don't always need to; there are many, many ways. For “New Age” I just wanted a certain tone, and I began to explore and realize how power and tone can be used together. So I'd been playing with that a lot, and you can hear that on Strange Little Girls, particularly because in those songs you can clearly see the different characters. That album was so much for me about being a singer and knowing how you use your voice. I did use my voice to step into different parts. I was able to do that because I had done Pele and strengthened my vocal instrument. I could never have sung all these various ways in 1992. No way. I didn't have the experience. I had never sung with a band. In 1998, I sang with a band in front of 15,000 people in Madison Square Garden on a steroid shot, with a concussion. Having done that, you don't sing the same anymore. You have to go out there and get your vocal sea legs.

  This is why I've told people, “You have to tour.” No matter what happens in the world, as a musician, as a singer, you really, really need to do that if you want to keep changing. Because there's a physical change that will happen to you as a singer just because you've done it, and it expands your possibilities as a songwriter. Use it or lose it. That's one reason I do tour a lot.

  Singing, songwriting, and the piano are inseparable for me. I need to play the piano just to be who I am. I don't mean I need to play for people. I enjoy that, but it's a different experience. When I'm playing in our studio I'm not thinking about all the things I think about when I'm performing; I'm not thinking about what I need to take on board in order to project what it is I'm seeing in my head. I don't have to pose in front of the song. I don't have to communicate it just then—it's communicating itself to me and I'm trying to translate it.

  I play the piano every day, with very few exceptions. When my piano is gone from me, there is just something missing. There are periods when it's not around, when it's flying or on the boat. It takes three weeks to get it from New York to England. A long time. An instrument is a friend, and some friends come and go. But if you had to tell me that I could achieve world peace by never playing the piano again—I'd have to think about whether I'd be willing to do it. It's that serious.

  In fact, I rarely sing without playing the piano. If I do separate them, I sing and play differently. I'm not saying that there aren't certain songs for which it's better for me to separate them when recording. I did an over-dub vocal on “Cornflake Girl” because I was playing so hard that you could hear my breathing on the tape, and it was too labored. On some songs I will track the vocals separately because I find that I need to stand up to get the control and the tone I want from my voice. I'll try these songs at the piano first, and if I can't get my body in the right position to get the tone I need, then I'll compromise.

  I did spend one period of my life without my own piano. It was when I was first trying to make my career fly in Los Angeles in the 1980s. I didn't see a lot of other piano players, especially women, doing it at the time. Everybody was saying that the girl-and-her-piano thing is dead. I kind of had a funeral for it with Y Kant Tori Read. We all know how that effort went.

  I was laid low at that point, wondering, How
did I end up here, from the conservatory to this place? I had a friend who was a little bit older, Cindy Marble; she'd been in L.A. for years trying to make it with her band, Rugburns. I was talking on the phone with her, lamenting my life. She said, “You know, when you sit and play the piano and sing, something is real about that. That's when I sit and listen. Everything else just doesn't feel—honest.” She had a piano. I went over to her house that night and she lit some candles and asked me to just sit there and play She was having a smoke, I didn't smoke any because it would harm my voice, but I was hypnotized by the aroma. I just played for her for a while, a couple hours. I got a piano within two weeks. I rented one. I couldn't afford to buy one.

  I was living behind the Methodist church on Highland and Franklin in Hollywood. I was thinking a lot about ethics and morality. And I began to realize that I had betrayed my instrument, the thing that had always been my conscience. I listened to the corporate side of the music industry, and it took me as low as I could go. From child prodigy to being called a bimbo in Billboard? You don't get lower than that. I vowed never to abandon the piano again.

  In Cornwall, the piano room is my workshop. Mark's building me another piano room so that if this one is being used for some other purpose during the recording process, I'll have another place to play The piano is at the center; it's always at the center for me.