Tori Amos: Piece by Piece

by Amos, Tori

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  During my career, I've learned from making mistakes on both ends of the spectrum. I've not been present as far as what's happening in the studio, with terrible results, and I've been too pushy, too. I've learned to be a little more democratic without abandoning my authority. You have to be able to delegate the details, so that you can keep your focus on the architect's plans.

  The one tricky thing I've learned from being a producer is how to be able to walk in and out, keep my ears fresh so that I could pick up on things. That's the best thing a producer can do in a mix room: come in, come out, come in, come out. And you have to find ways to keep your mind rejuvenated. If you stay in the room all the time, you're in the exact same space as the engineers. You always need an outside force to be coming in and out of that mix room. We decided, the three of us, that that would be me. Because I'm not an engineer, it would be silly. Some producers are engineers, so then they have to have another person who walks in and out. It is really vital that somebody has that role. Because then that person's able to say, “Well, you know, the drums are a little bright.” Or “The EQ isn't right on this—we'll need to go after a different effect.” Things jump out at you because you haven't gotten used to them—you're not dulled to them. It's a lot like being an editor.

  ANN: What kind of tale does a song tell? On one level, it tells of its own making, capturing the thrill of that first inspirational rush, the more difficult progression of choices that gives it structure, and the give-and-take of its blossoming forth from a single artist's vision during collaborative performance. One thing is for sure: though they have authors, songs do not tell stories that belong to one person. Songs, those puzzle boxes of memory, longing, and bliss, speak beyond their makers’ intonation, breathe beyond their realities. They could not possibly stop at only one story.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  The story world is always running parallel with my world. I've allowed myself to be okay with taking hikes into that world and then coming back. Tash will go with me into story world, which is great. Sometimes Mark will say, “Okay, guys, I'll see you back in our reality in a few minutes.” It's wonderful to have a little friend who will go with me. She's very much about, well, let's play school, or let's take on this character, take on that character. The latest permutation of this is her playing Mommy and me playing Baby. It's gotten to the point where Husband will say, “Excuse me, Baby, I need to talk to my wife a moment.” Tash will say, “Go ahead, Husband.” Then Husband will say, “No child, my real wife.” But the great thing about this is that I hear Tash rehash phrases that Mark and I have said to her. So when she's playing Mommy I get a sense of how what I say is heard by her and the effect it has on her developing tapestry. We learn from our role-playing.

  So much of what you do in songwriting is role-playing. That's how you develop your different characters within the song. It's not as if the stories merge to a point where you think they are your life, but you do let them in through the front door and the back door, and it's okay that sometimes certain characters stay for dinner.

  The songs give me the ability to live a thousand lives. That's why people keep trying to connect real life with our songs. They ask, “Did this really happen to you?” Well, all of it did, on some level. And none of it did, on another. Meaning, not exactly as I write it. Because I wouldn't be a writer then. I'd just be keeping a diary. And also, I'm cocreating with a song, with its soul—talk about a soul song …

  In a way that's the most misunderstood thing about my work: where and even whether I am in the songs. I don't think anybody really and truly knows what character I am in a given composition. They can presume, but even Husband doesn't know. Somebody said to me the other day, “Don't you need something to happen in your life to be able to write about?” I said, “Are you nuts? Have you just missed the whole boat of what I do?” You think this is about me, and I've made you think that, but you don't know which “me” I am within my work. I may not be the benevolent character in every scenario. Sometimes I'm exploring sides that I see in somebody else. It strikes a chord in me and I play it out in the song world.

  SONG CANVAS:“Cars and Guitars”

  One morning not long ago, I was driving into town in Cornwall, and a scenario occurred to me that involved a woman who just keeps driving.

  She gets up in the morning, has to go to work, has to get the kids ready for school, has to deal with the in-laws, the husband, everybody's needs. She becomes completely depleted, and hormonal—God knows what's happening that day. So she just says, “I can't do this anymore” (sound familiar?) and keeps on driving. She doesn't pick that kid up from school—she makes a call and says, “I need you to pick him up, take care of him until I get home.” Then maybe she just walks out of her life. She doesn't necessarily kill herself, but just decides, “I can't do this anymore.” Now, this story probably happens every day. It's not me—I didn't keep driving. But I want to explore that. I think it's hard for the audience to accept that an artist they love, who is one of the good guys, as they see it, would even explore one of these archetypes—in the case of this story, Kali, goddess of destruction, is at play here—and that can be scary. Certain archetypes are scary because they bring up specific qualities within us that maybe we have buried deep, deep down. And sometimes these qualities erupt, and this is where Pele comes in, and she can be quite a 50-Percent-Off-Your-Personality-Clearance-Sale type of

  teacher. But I can hang around for that.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  I'm usually in my songs somewhere because I can understand the subject matter only if I've had some kind of experience that helps me get it. But the work transcends my own experience. I've tried to explain this to people. I'll say so many times after telling a story to someone, “It's not necessarily about my own experience but someone else's, and yet I've had a similar experience that brings up the same reaction that this someone might have had. How many of you have had the experience I've explored in any given song? How many of you haven't experienced that exact set of circumstances that occur in the song, but you still have an emotional response to that song, because it has triggered something you can't explain?”

  Sometimes I'll be in a public place, eavesdropping on another table. The way the person I'm listening to tells her story is putting her friend in Snoozeland. This would especially happen when I was playing piano in lounges. It's not as if the elements of the story aren't crackin’, but there is just no framework to allow the listener to dive into this story painting. I'd just see someone, blah blah blah blah, and I'd be playing and listening and remaking the story in my own head. Because such people don't know how to weave a tale, unlike Scheherazade. They can't bring you into it, or push you away from it, which could make you want to be let into the story— sometimes that's a tactic, too. Another tactic is, you just leave everybody on the outside. Don't open that museum door, let them stand outside the Louvre going crazy because they can't get in. There's an exhibition in there, and they can kind of catch a glimpse of it, but they're irritated because they want to see more and yet still they won't leave. Why? Because they are tantalized. I've written songs like that.

  Then there are occasions when you have to mask your characters. You can't reveal who a person is in a song, even to that very person. I have songs, I must be honest, that to this day people don't know are about them. They'll say, “God, that character is really awful. I would never want to meet them.” And it is them. But I won't give it away. Because once you blow your source, you're blown forever. No one would want to be around me. Plus, I might not agree that the character is awful. Certain archetypes will push it, and, let's face it, sometimes changes are painful at first.

  Since I was three, I've been writing songs and changing certain elements so nobody could find out whom I was actually writing about. I started writing about the church and what was going on and who was diddling whom, the chat you get in choir. I wrote about the puri
tanical witchburner old prunes that were holier than thou. The Freak, whose daughter was in the choir, masquerading an upstanding-citizen image, all the while drooling behind his hymnal every time we sang the word “virgin.” My friend Connie and I would be like, “Here it comes, here it comes,” and, bingo, Freako's drool just misses the hymnal. I began to learn very early that there were a lot of shenanigans going on. And it did really shock me, and my mother's the type of lady who would not discuss that kind of stuff. She would not be drawn in.

  But even as a kid, I knew that I was a composer and that I had to put this information somewhere in order to keep a record of the truth, because ninety percent of what was really going on got turned around and swept under the carpet. Soon certain events just faded, like paint does on walls; consequently you can't remember why you have such a bee in your bonnet about certain things that get brought up in conversation. So I decided to avoid being a loose cannon. My only choice was to put what I saw into the music. When you're a kid you can't just leave the house and move away—well, for me that wasn't an option, mainly because I adored my mother. But sometimes I felt as if “those who are they” and their need to control were trying to infuse me with their belief system and their opinions so that I would cease to be a heretic. Knowing that I couldn't do anything about my surroundings and everyone's beliefs around me, that as far as Christianity goes there was one Book, and one Book only—there was no place to run, there was no place to hide from being inundated by what I considered to be not the whole truth. But I had no proof. To survive Christian boot camp for twenty years, and I don't mean Gnostic Christian, I had to create sonic paintings that I could step into just so I could nurture my own beliefs while surrounded by the Puritanical Christian Army's “Gospel of Forward March” and “Holy Communion of the Inverted Rope Descent.”

  The people I love, and even those who just happen to be around a lot, unquestionably make it into the work. They're like ghosts. They walk through songs; they come in and out of doors. But I've always said that the songs have their own lovers, and birthplaces, and beliefs. Maybe I did feel something with Mark on the second verse or the seventeenth bar, or something he says will show up in a song that's actually about women arguing with each other. There are moments of Mark in songs. He's part of “Lust,” obviously. But that's also about a story of Jesus and the Magdalene being lovers. Lovers throughout time. I think all of us carry the Lover. That's true of many archetypes. How could I possibly own any of them?

  ANN: Few stories that mark the long scroll of myth are as moving as that of Demeter and her daughter Persephone. The virgins kidnapping and forced marriage to Hades, the god of the underworld, is traumatic enough on its own, but the tale's truly woeful figure is Demeter, the mother whose grief is so great at the sudden loss of her child that it plunges the entire earth into barrenness. Hers is a

  fate of wandering and rage, of a pain so great that it destroys everything around it, and—when the males who run the show grant Persephone the right to return

  for only part of each year—of a maternal fulfillment forever tinged by loss. This story, which probably originated in a simple need to explain the turn of the seasons, exposes such basic qualities of the soul—the fear of death that can never be

  fully mitigated by the acceptance of life's cycles and the unsettling, indeed sometimes perilous magnitude of maternal love—that it became the basis for the Eleusinian mysteries, the central religious rites of ancient Greece.

  Demeter's spirit continually resurfaces in the modern world. Motherhood, always an affair that pulls open the heart, has become complicated by women's changing sense of themselves and their place. Some, having put off pregnancy in

  favor of self-fulfillment, endure years of struggle to conceive. Once children do come, mothers must fathom how to give them everything possible without losing their own identities in the process. The work of motherhood remains obscured by ideas of what should come naturally to women, its joys trivialized by sentimental renderings.

  Tori Amos came to motherhood on a hard and treacherous road. Before giving birth to her daughter, Natashya, she had to face her own physical limitations, the duplicity that can surface within the “fertility industry,” and the disconnect between the hard-driving entertainment world and the more cyclical demands of starting a family. Natashya has brought Amos a sense of peace, but also made her fiercer than ever. Growing into motherhood has given Amos new ways to think about music, love, loyalty, and her own heritage. Now, along with other women artists of her generation, she is working to create a new balance between the “public” dominion of work and creative expression and the “private” enclave of child rearing. Acknowledging the unified nature of these efforts without being willing to compromise either, she offers a very personal perspective on the feminine coming to terms with itself.

  CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  My mother taught me about sovereignty, a sense of your own authority. She was the most educated person in our family. She wanted to be a college teacher. On one level I think it's unfortunate that she didn't continue with her career once she had her kids, but what she did get from the world she brought back to me. She showed me how to create my own realm, a realm of the word, without owning any terrain myself. For women like us, who are working, her example still inspires: we go out and own what we own, but when we come back to our children and tell them our stories, we teach them how to possess themselves, however they choose to later take on the world.

  I remember being five and hearing about the women burning their bras. I remember this movement. And I remember my mother watching from the sidelines, quiet, as the minister's wife who'd given up her literary career. She had missed that generation. Unless she was willing to give up everything, she couldn't find a place within feminism. It would have been too much to ask her to abandon her life. At the end of the day she really loved my father and her family more than she wanted a career. Yet as the years went on I could see in her a burning, a desire that could not be fulfilled as long as she held the mother role the way women had to at that time.

  As a minister's wife, my mother did do something similar to what I do as an artist. When she met somebody walking through that receiving line in church, she would portray what that person wanted to see. This had nothing to do with who Mary Ellen Copeland was. She read a lot of literature and began to become other pieces, reflecting back what that particular person needed to see in a minister's wife.

  The conflict I sensed in my mother was one reason I was willing to go on the artistic and spiritual search that became my life for so long. I got drawn in as a really young child, Tash's age, when I was starting to spend all my time on the piano. There was something brewing in me, drawing me to the Magdalene, never the Mother Mary, which is unfortunate. I became more drawn to the mother aspect later.

  Waiting to have children is a risk, as I discovered, but there are good reasons to do it. Medical science is trying to catch up with the changes that the feminist movement helped make for us. Our bodies haven't quite caught up yet to help us achieve that. Mentally and responsibility-wise, many of us aren't ready to be mothers and put somebody else first at twenty-five, because in our society we're taught to find out who we are first. I know a lot of twenty-five-year-olds who are not ready to put another Being first. Talk to Chelsea. When she's here with Natashya and me, sometimes she'll just say, “I can't believe how much a child needs.” And I say, “Chels, I can't believe how selfish we can be.” But we're just in different places right now.

  ANN: Amos was finally ready to enter motherhood in her early thirties. She felt strong in her music, and her soul connection with Mark Hawley had begun. Like so many female high achievers, she thought she would accomplish this next goal as confidently as she had so many others. She soon discovered that the goddess guide who walks you through life's passages might not be the one you d hoped you'd meet.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  Not long before my first miscarriage
in 1996, I had my chart done by mythic astrologer Wendy Ashley. I'd had my chart done many times, but I was beginning to figure out who the charlatans were versus the credible people, and this woman is at the top of her field. It's not like you're dialing 1-800-PSYCHIC; this woman studied mythology under Joseph Campbell. I was beginning to see myth in my life.

  I didn't want my myth, the one the charts revealed to me. This was when I was making Pele, Mark and I were together, and I thought I might be pregnant. I had this first reading and was given the Rhiannon myth. Rhiannon was a Welsh queen who lost her child under horrible circumstances: he was kidnapped and her subjects accused her of not only killing him but also eating him alive. She was then forced to serve penance within the court for seven years, until her son finally returned.

  I didn't want to know about that. Are you kidding? Who wants to hear that? I was not even concerned about the other meanings of Rhiannon in popular culture, the fairy thing, the fact that Stevie Nicks had claimed her in a song—I simply did not want to hear that I could even possibly lose a child. I was sitting there, saying, Wait a minute, where's Dionysus, where's Sekhmet? I cant believe this. It was a bitter pill to swallow.

  Really, at first, I couldn't take it. I said, That's not going to happen to me. And of course it didn't happen just once—it happened three times. But I think I was missing the importance of the archetype. What mattered wasn't that Rhiannon lost Pryderi, her son, or even that she was accused of destroying him. What I needed to notice was her willingness to serve, for seven years, when people had accused her. It's a story of survival with dignity, and concentration on work rather than on your own ego. During this time, when I was having so much trouble carrying a child, and also going into dark places in my music with Pele and Choirgirl, I really needed to have Rhiannon's guiding spirit to help me make it through.