Tori Amos: Piece by Piece

by Amos, Tori

  TORI:

  The piano has organs. One just came over the Atlantic Ocean from a Gaelic Christian church somewhere in North Michigan. Another one of the piano's organs came from a source here in the west country of England. One of my close musical mentors, John Philip Shenale, has been pushing me to marry my piano with these booty-shaking organs. And I did. A spruced-up and restored clavichord is being flown in this week from a restoring doctor in California. Wood made of Woman. This is a subtext for this new album, compositionally and as a thesis. Therefore, the living organism of this Wood Woman needs organs that serve an imperative function if the piano herself is to make this musical transmutation. Or if we're pushing a thought, it being Sunday when I'm writing this, the piano herself has made her transubstantiation—if my father, the Rev. Dr., were inquiring. Yes, Dad, very simply, She Is Risen. Our Lady of the Wood.

  SONG, CANVAS: “Sweet the Sting” and “Sleeps with Butterflies”

  Yesterday I spent hours on “Sweet the Sting;” from playing the piano riff over and over to listening to it on my crap tape recorder, to making changes and incorporating them. The story started evolving soon after the B3 Hammond organ, whom I have named “Big Momma,” was delivered. Every time I entered the room in the morning to begin my practice time, Big Momma would be humming. Yes, of course her power had been left on, but I'm talking about the kind of humming you detect in a girlfriend after she's had a romantic evening. Turns out Big Momma has a boyfriend. Another organ, specifically another B3 organ. This romance led me to the story of two B3 players, one female, the other male, whose erotic dance revolves around each impressing the other by how well they play their own organ.

  I've been researching and listing words that I like the sound and look of for the pollination stakes competition. There is a list of hundreds, so to give my mind a break, I had a wander down the back field to the vegetable garden and the greenhouse. I just hung out there, deciding with Husband where to plant the lavender—anytime there is sun about in England you can't take it for granted, you must bake in it, making yourself the sacrifice, if necessary—just to maybe make it last all day. So, since it was one of those glorious English summer days in the middle of spring, I played hooky from playing piano and flirted with the sun. On my way back from the field, with flower choices in my head, Husband headed off for the Arsenal game and I headed for the picnic table where my gardening book was. I passed the studio with the huge barn doors of the big recording room painted in Madras, a Tuscan Peach, which I had open all morning while I was practicing. Then Bam. There it was … After all these months, I looked at Böse, she looked at me, and I went right up, turned the tape recorder on, and Bam … the chorus to “Sleeps with Butterflies” was spilling over the keys and I knew she was complete. So after weeks of trying to write my idea of a chorus, the real chorus stepped right up and said, “T, honey, you just take this down and I'll be off to enjoy some flirting with the sun myself.”

  Did the day effect this? Did the weather? Sure. If I were in another space, then something as simple as a bird's song changes things. Having started a song at one place in the world, say in Bumfuck on the road, then finishing it on a winter's day—with that soft muted Cornish light putting the M in Moody, bringing with it its own references, senses, and perfumes … All of these elements get included in that ever-rotating palette.

  ANN: Streams become rivers by merging as they move oceanward. Amos can tap into strong creative currents on her own, but as she has matured she has increasingly sought power in the insights of carefully chosen partners. Entering the recording studio with complete compositions, she opens up her work to the influence of the players and engineers whom she considers her soul's companions.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  In my music, bass and guitar are often the male characters. They personify the male or provide underscoring for that element. Sometimes I have to choose which instrument represents what. If there are a couple of male characters, if there's a father in there and if there's a lover, or if there's a female who's in there too, and it's a triangle, the way the instruments interact represents that. The musicians I collaborate with have to be able to hold all that and develop it.

  The song structures are in place when I bring the musicians in. I bring Matt in first, or Matt and Jon. I sit and sing a new song to them, and I'm always very shy. And they're counting the bars. I listen to the playback and perform it once more, just to make sure I got it right and they're not notating the wrong version because I was nervous. Then I leave while Mark plays different parts and they notate it. Once it's notated and the sheets are down, then we can go track it. They always have to have a map to go tracking.

  I myself never use a score. Never did. For some reason it slows me down and I get trapped in it. I can't get the notation and I find it very confining. I spend too much time sitting there trying to figure it out. And I have quite a good memory. Everyone banks on the fact that I've memorized the song. I've recorded it in my head. I do forget lyrics all the time— everybody who comes to the shows will tell you that—but I rarely forget the music. Sometimes there's a chord change or a voicing, or a left-hand thing that I'll need to record on my little tape recorder, certain details, and the musicians are used to me taking a minute to pull it out.

  I invite the players I choose into a collaborative process when it comes to recording. Once the songs are written, then they come and help arrange and develop their parts. Just as they respect me as the songwriter, I respect them as the creative forces behind their parts.

  I couldn't imagine somebody calling me in and telling me exactly what to play, and I don't do that with the guys. Why would I be calling in these particular players if I did that? Anyone would do. Artists or producers who dictate their musicians’ parts aren't utilizing them well. Matt will come up with something you never thought of, because you're not a drummer and this is his life. But telling Matt absolutely anything that can help give him a clearer picture of the world in which you are trying to frame the song is going to give him immediate jumping-off points. As far as Jon goes, what's easy about working with him is that it's hard for him to get confused when it comes to chord voicings, mainly because he's a bad mamma jamma. So that makes it smooth sailing most of the time.

  Many people think they're musicians when they're not. Some producers think they know what's best because they're wannabe players. But when you're pulling in players of the caliber of Matt and Jon to tell them precisely what to do, you won't get the best out of these players and it shows where your ego is. I might give them a line on the piano and say “Let's work around this motif,” and sometimes even with the guitar players I'll say, “Can we work around this line?” and “We need our guitar melody to be contrapuntal,” or “How can we do this so that somehow you are emphasizing a parallel sixth in the B section?”—I'll do that with them. But to say, “Play exactly like this,” when I'm not a guitar player? How offensive.

  JON EVANS:

  The first time that I felt I really got to explore was when we were recording To Venus and Back. I really felt I could do anything. Some songs contain all these sounds I made on bass, and you wouldn't know it, just weird little sounds and tones that I got to experiment with. Tori always wanted me to do whatever I wanted, and if there was a really strange sound that was fine. She didn't want me to “play bass” in the traditional sense, just to feel free. So every song on Venus has something particular to it.

  Matt had some electronic drums during those sessions and Tori had a bunch of different keyboards that she programmed, doing a lot of loops. Each of us encouraged the others to come up with some other sound that would add to the mix.

  MATT CHAMBERLAIN:

  The way Tori writes her music allows me to do things that I like to do. When most people write a song, it'll be verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus. The basic song structure. What are you going to do to that? You just play through it. But with her it's so open because she's not laying down anything spe
cific rhythmically. You can do whatever you want, you can play percussion, electronics—it's crazy. It's great. To me it seems like improvisational songwriting. She'll have a topic or something in her head that she wants to convey and she'll just put it to music. For example, I think it was on To Venus and Back where she said a particular song was about being on an ice planet. She wanted me to play that kind of drum part. So I came up with what I thought was an icy sound.

  Every song of Tori's is so different. Some want to be churchy or gospel-flavored, requiring a funky drum kit sound, and then some songs are more electronic in nature and require sound creation as opposed to just plain drums. A lot of her songs are tribal, tom-heavy, and I use bongos and sticks. She doesn't reference things literally in her music, so you can get away with doing things that would sound too literal if applied to another writer's work. I can play bongos and congas on a Tori track and she's not going to sound like Miami Sound Machine. Whatever song it is, I try to do something that seems interesting from a drummer's point of view. That works with her. It doesn't work with any of the other artists I've worked with. I don't know why.

  With each record I experiment; even if it doesn't work, it's safe for me to stick my neck out and see what happens. With Scarlet's Walk, the first thing I told Tori was “Okay, there are two things I want to do on this record. If you guys agree with me, great—if you don't, then we'll work it out. The first one is, I don't want to use any electronic drums or drum loops. I want to play everything in real time.” And the second one was more of a technical thing; I wanted both the bass drumheads to be on the bass drum. Usually drummers take the front head off and stick a microphone inside, and the drums end up sounding really modular, rather than the complete kit making a unified impact. I wanted the sound to be really hyperacoustic, a great recording of drums in a room. Just a really great, timeless drum sound that in twenty years you can listen to and go, “Cool, I'm glad we didn't use the technology that was hip at the time.” She had written all these great songs and I really just wanted to stay out of the way. So she agreed, and we got that sound.

  On other occasions, I've taken the opposite approach. For Choirgirl we tried all kinds of crazy stuff; I brought out some Native American drums and I would just play some grooves into the computer and we'd find little bits and chop them up and make drum loops out of them, and then we'd layer things on top, maybe put some live acoustic drums in on the choruses. And then on Venus we ran electronic drums into the guitar amps and miked those amps, so all the electronic drums you hear are completely intertwined with the guitar. In general, I'll just say, “Tori, let me try this,” and I'll disappear for a while and then bring what I've discovered to her and Mark and say, “Check it out, what do you think?” And I'm so lucky because usually she's like, “Yeah, let's do it.”

  The new record is actually a lot of everything we've done so far. A little Venus and Choirgirl and Scarlet combined. Electronics, a bunch of percussion, a bunch of acoustics. She was saying the title was The Beekeeper, so keeping that pollination factor in mind I could go anywhere. It's just combinations of things—acoustic drums with electronics or electronics with percussion or a B3 with her Granny, her Hammond chord organ. A combination of instruments we haven't gotten into specifically. There is one song, the title track, “The Beekeeper,” it's all electronic drums pretty much, until the end bit, when we shift to acoustic. We haven't really done that kind of combining since Choirgirl, where it can change that drastically—organs, electronics, drums. There is a lot of stuff going on. A lot of cross-pollination kinds of things. Most of the stuff as far as the drum kits go isn't traditional, either. I'll piece things together and end up with a hiphop-style drum kit. Smaller drums instead of the big rock drums we use for a more acoustic sound. So now these drums are really small and focused and the sound is more focused.

  There is definitely a sound to this record. More focused and stripped down. It's organic yet electronic, a lot of different things. Songs like “Hootchie Woman” and “Sweet the Sting” are total percussion, full-on Afro-Cuban. But it's definitely different from the last album. Less Americana and more pulling in all sorts of sounds. It's everything we've all learned, all at once. Marcel and Mark, Tori, Jon and I. Everything everybody has ever learned about making a record together is all being laid out on the table for everyone else to grab from, different influences. Everyone has a big enough vocabulary now because we've worked together so many times. Someone can say, “I want to do this.” I'll want to go electronic. She'll want to go with the organ. Jon will grab his stand-up bass. Put some percussion on it. Everyone just goes, “Cool, we know how to do that, let's go.”

  TORI:

  You cocreate with an infinite source …

  There are songs coming right now that are exciting to me as a player because they are a bit different for me. I've increased my rhythmic ability since working with Matt and Jon for hundreds of hours. When I got the organs, the B3 (Big Momma), the A100, and the Granny, I would just spend time finding my way around them—jamming on them, developing my own kind of relationship with the organ itself. Then I began to be able to interpret these creatures differently from how I would have three years ago. But these particular song creatures didn't come to me three years ago. And I have to ask myself if that is because I didn't have the ability, as an organ player, to interpret them. With “Witness” coming in, and “Ireland”—they reveal a side of my playing that some people won't be as familiar with. But I don't think that it will surprise Matt and Jon at all, because after all these years, I've been put through their Booty Camp. Funnily enough, I had Booty Camp T-shirts made up for them in January 1998.

  When these song Beings first started coming in, I would look at them and say, “Hey, I'm glad you crashed my party, but are you sure you don't want to be traveling over to hang with the seventies funk band, Rufus?” But the message I keep getting is “Our time is now, and you'd better deliver us. Because we are ready. And we will groove your world, Miss T.”

  I believe that the songs choose you, but you have to be willing to develop and stretch as a player, or your repertoire is only going to be of a certain type.

  MARK HAWLEY:

  Tori has learned to leave more space in her music. And she likes the results. This comes from Marcel and me saying to her, “Yeah, it's great to have a loud vocal, and we want to have a loud vocal, but there's got to be room for a loud vocal.” And if there's less stuff in the mix, so that everything really counts, then it makes for a much more spacious arrangement, and you know every element will be heard well. It's not that she just took our word for it; she sees the results in the mixes. So when she goes back to writing again, she's clever enough to be able to incorporate that.

  JOHN WITHERSPOON:

  Tori learned how to be a producer making Boys for Pele. There were certain people around her who were saying, “You can't produce your own record, you've got to do it traditionally, you have to go to the studio, you can't do it in a church, you can't do it in a house. Go and do it the normal way.” In the course of making that record I certainly learned something, and she did as well, which was that the traditional way of making records involved big kickbacks from the labels to the suppliers they worked with, and half your money went nowhere, as far as you could tell. That's when we took over all of the finances. Basically we said, “Just give us the money and we'll make a record.” And that's what we've done ever since, on every record. We pay the bills and the musicians and just do it ourselves.

  MARK HAWLEY:

  I think we spend a lot of money making a record, but we put it into the record. We live very well, but the point is that record labels will blow a lot more making one video than we do making a whole album. And you're lucky if that video gets played ten times on MTV. But the people who are telling you how much the budget is are the same people directly involved in marketing. Videos, photo shoots—they want to spend money on what they're doing. We spend it on the music.

  CHELSEA LAIRD:

  In
the studio, Mark and Tori have a relationship that's like any working relationship. And like any working relationship there are occasional fights. A producer is telling her engineer, “No, this is the way I want it,” and naturally he'll respond saying, “Well, I think you're wrong.” But there is no hesitation. She's not thinking, I have to go to bed with this man tonight—do I really want to piss him off? It's all for the art in the studio. They'll fight it out and work it out. But at the end of the day we all have dinner together, no matter what. It's a big round table; Duncan cooks and we all eat together. Whether it's the band, the mastering engineer, Jon Astley Marcel, Adam Spry—our resident tech, Helen Gilbert—the Martian accountant, or whoever happens to be working at the studio that day, we all have dinner together every night, and by then whatever's happened in that day has been left there. In a sense it's another cleansing ritual.

  MARCEL VAN LIMBEEK:

  Mark and Tori are my best working friends. Their relationship isn't a factor when we are working. Of course, it's Tori's product and she's the boss. The way it works within our triangle is that none of us can live with either of the others being unhappy with any piece of the project. I can't stand it when Tori doesn't like something and she can't stand it when something is bugging me. The way it works is that we always have to agree. It's Tori's record and she'll always have her end say, but she always listens to Mark and me. She won't let anything slide by knowing that I don't like it or Mark doesn't like it. The fact that they are married doesn't come into it. It's good. It's something I'm very proud of.