Tori Amos: Piece by Piece

by Amos, Tori

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  I've said it before—that was a Christmas card for my dad. It came from a real place for me. It's not What can I do to shock you? It started with the fact that my dad was really getting on my case; he was asking how I could stray so far away from Christianity and my roots that I couldn't even do a Christmas song. I told him he could get me to do a Christmas card. And this was it. Maybe it was me saying, I'm going to give all the good Christians something to think about. People didn't get that image, because most aren't raised as intensely Christian as I was. Those who were might have understood that this was a Madonna and child, but one that brought in the non-kosher, the unacceptable, back to the fold.

  I don't really think that everybody involved in the shoot necessarily got what we were trying to achieve. Obviously Cindy understood the necessity of a photograph that forced the question to Christians: Do you truly practice the Golden Rule, “Love Your Neighbor As Yourself”? “Judge not that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the same measure you use, it will be measured back to you.” “First cast out the plank in your own eye; and then you shall see clearly to cast out the stye that is in your brother's eye” … I'd been noticing a shift away from a liberal way of thinking, heading toward where we are now. It was the beginning, just on the periphery. I was experiencing the hypocrisy of people who would say they were liberal thinkers but were making comments about “bitches” and “fucking faggots.” The backlash from an open-minded culture to a mob mentality—with no regard for another human's basic rights—was hard to take.

  I took a lot of heat for that photo, I guess, but I didn't care. I was laughing my head off. I knew the power of that image and exactly how it would hit.

  KAREN BINNS:

  For Boys for Pele, Tori was a witch doctor. Cindy did all those great photographs. New Orleans is where it went down. I mean, with the pig and the drama of that shoot. We talked about it. Tori said, “What do you think works style-wise for this music?” I said, “Let's take it back to the range.” But it wasn't a Western thing; it was more of a Gone With the Wind thing. You know how those Southern belles had to hold on to their homes after the disaster was over? We all go through a Civil War in some way. So we just took it to the Civil War theme and made it trendy. We noticed afterward that the trend stayed at least for a few years. The Edwardian thing. Going back, getting the heirlooms that your grandmother actually wore, bringing them into modern society, making them hip, which is quite Gothic. You can always move in and out of the Gothic scene, because at least you're understood by the kids. Once you start going the other way, if you start wearing pretty dresses and trying to be like the nice wife thing, then you lose the kids. Gothic is strangely flexible. It's quite a classic rock look.

  ANN: The period that produced from the choir girl hotel and To Venus and Back—the double album Amos actually named for the goddess with whom she'd delicately dance for so many years—was not an easy one. Confronting her own mortality, fearing that she would never be able to bear a child, Amos had to renegotiate her relationship with her own body. A time of tremendous personal growth, her midthirties demanded much rethinking from Amos regarding the face she offered the world.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  I had done all kinds of photographs with Cindy from the box on the cover of Little Earthquakes to the gun and the pig on Pele. She'd been an important part of the team for a long time. At this juncture, she was delving into different artistic projects, some that had nothing to do with photography, which I had to respect. And when we approached Choirgirl, I had just come to a place where I was stripped, brought to my knees about my image. I was going through my miscarriages and the pregnancies and the gaining of the weight and the losing of the weight—I mean, it's not like I was obese, but I was in a pregnancy process. Once I had Natashya I was back on track again. Then, you lose your weight and you get healthy. But when you're in that middle zone trying to get pregnant, miscarrying, you're not on a low-carb diet. I mean, my real crisis in life came from thirty-two to thirty-six, until I was able to carry a full-term pregnancy.

  During the Sneak Preview tour in early 1998, the first tour with the band, which seemed colossal and endless, I still felt that to show up in jeans and a T-shirt wasn't enough, but I did it. That was Mark's suggestion. He said, “You're part of a group of musicians just playing together right now, your persona is more stripped down, and to wear some kind of gown looks silly to me as a guy.” It was very casual then, and it was about the music. And honestly, all I could really do was wear what I wear to get up in the morning and then be in it and change before the show, but basically change into the same thing. I don't even think I wore makeup. There's a time in every performer's arc where it's just about getting back to the music, and that was the case for me during that tour.

  Karen was very understanding about it. I said, This is what I'm doing right now, and she said, Whatever, and she just waited until I came back around. She didn't beat me up for it, as my friend; instead, she'd bring in these beautiful flowers to the dressing room and I'd feel beautiful. Even though my body was tired. And then soon after that for the Plugged world tour she came up with the glamour aprons—these cutaway dresses I would wear over the jeans and T-shirts. I was crazy about them; they were a little like a body helmet. And they were funny—I'd always had a waitress fantasy, so a glamorized apron worked perfectly.

  Before that tour, recording Choirgirl, I'd had to nurture myself. I was eating whole grains, lots of protein, because I'd lost so much blood. I'll be honest—I put on more weight than I'm comfortable with, and maybe that was ten pounds, but for me that's a lot. On the one hand, I did feel sexy because I was with Mark and very happy, but as far as putting an image out into the world, I didn't feel so good.

  So my image then had to connect with how I felt as well as the music's content. I'd been talking to Elyse, as I always did before any visual artists could be chosen, about the girls in the songs: How could we use photography to capture girls who'd been lost, who weren't there? The daughters and mothers on that album are no longer in their bodies. Elyse brought in the artist Katerina Jebb, who creates photographs using a Xerox machine, very ghostly, ideal for the project. We were able to create a strong visual, avoid the problem of conventional glamour, and stay true to the text. Lesley Chilkes was a pillar of strength, as she had always been, having done my makeup more often than anyone in the world since 1991.

  Cindy had brought me Lesley and then Karen, and as I'm writing this I have just completed a shoot with them and will work with them on the cover for The Beekeeper, with Kevin Mackintosh at the helm as photographer and Shona Heath as set designer. Having women developing seed ideas from the womb makes them the midwives in a way. This is the ninth project for which Lesley and Karen are the two women who consistently have been there with me—in the womb where the sonic world and the creative world have intercourse, in a way, to create what I term “the project child.”

  Through the years many women have been very influential in the changes and the choices that I, as Tori, have made regarding my public image, thereby influencing my private self. In 1999 Lesley brought in the hairdresser Cim Mahoney—the three now, Lesley, Karen, and Cim, are the latest configuration of “the Glam Squad.” Before Cim came into the picture, the hairdresser Jimo Saleko had been part of our visual groove. Cim and Jimo offer a needed male perspective.

  At the time of Choirgirl, there were two photo shoots. The Martina Hoogland-Avanov shoot involved the team of Karen, Jimo Saleko, and the late Kevyn Aucoin. The Katerina Jebb shoot, which included the cover shot, came from the teamwork of Lesley, Karen, and Jimo.

  When we decided to make a live album from the tour for Choirgirl, I called the photographer Loren Haynes. He came to Pittsburgh, where we were live on the road. I felt the shots needed to be about us, the band, because we were doing a live record. Berta Camal (who, with Tony Lucha, made up the American version of the
Glam Squad) came to Pittsburgh to do makeup, and in this instance hair as well, because Tony couldn't make the shoot. Loren, Berta, and I really did fly by the seat of our pants on this one. I didn't choose to have another shoot once we added the new music; I looked at the photographs from Pittsburgh and felt they were as close to the truth as could be captured, so I let it stand and it became the Venus double-CD package. Of course, I did press shoots with different photographers, naturally having Lesley, Karen, and Cim there with me, stirring the visual potion in the cauldron.

  I love Loren's art. We've made powerful covers for magazines, particularly one for Spin not long after Little Earthquakes. He's good at capturing me at my most sexy, and I guess I was feeling sexy that day.

  LOREN HAYNES:

  I've been working with Tori for years; I shot her the very first time she was featured in Spin. Then the next time it was for a cover. Her popularity had just exploded. At that point, I felt that Tori had really given enough to that quirky princess fairy identity and image, but she was still being photographed that way. I've always thought and still do think Tori's incredibly beautiful and sexy in photographs. I said to Tori, “I want sixteen-year-old boys to drop to their knees when they see this photograph.” And Tori got that. Kevyn Aucoin did the makeup, and we were shooting in the studio and I was playing the Latin jazz artist Gato Barbieri. She fell in love with one song, it's called “Ruby Ruby”—sexy saxophone. And boy, did she feel it! But she was already a professional at this point.

  When I joined her late on the road, for the tour that became Venus, I saw her change gears. I directed the video for “Bliss,” using live and behind-the-scenes footage. What was interesting was that, judging from the comments on my web site and various Tori fan sites, her fans felt that “Bliss” was her best video, because it was the most honest and self-exposing. I think it was very smart of her to lead me in that direction with the video. People were getting tired of the whole surreal, quirky Tori, and her image at that time gave her fans a sense of her as grounded.

  ANN: After the earthiness of the Venus period (ironic, in a way, because of Amos's invocation of that heady goddess) and the birth of her tiny muse Natashya Lórien, a rejuvenated Amos was prepared to take on the most ambitious image-oriented work of her life: the covers project, Strange Little Girls. For each song she recorded on this album of songs written and previously recorded by men, Amos conjured an anima, a female voice to recast the song's meaning. Working with her creative partner in crime, the novelist Neil Gaiman, Amos invented biographies for these “girls.” Then she brought them to Binns and the late, legendary makeup wizard Kevyn Aucoin, who worked with her to make each girl flesh The fashion photographer Thomas Schenk immortalized Amos's anima on film.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  You cannot come up with this portfolio until you know the story of each girl in each song. So it was character building in a lot of cases. I had my think tank, and I talked extensively with each member of the team about each character before we staged the shots. Neil Gaiman wrote stories for each of the girls; they're great. They were published in the Strange Little Girls tourbook. Neil, Mark, and I really felt, as I was nursing my little girl child in my arms right before Christmas in the year 2000, that a generalized image of the antiwoman, antigay heterosexual man had hijacked Western male heterosexuality and brought it to the mediocrity of the moment. At its core, this perverted male image was filled with malice and getting high off swallowing its own violent ejaculation.

  I did huge research on these songs. I didn't just sit down and record them. I knew the characters. Before I sang them I walked into who these people were. No different from if you're talking about theater. We take it to Emma Thompson doing King Lear, playing the Fool. It's the same thing, but sonic. Instead of becoming an actor, you become a “singtor,” because those songs represent roles, not pieces of me. The female characters in my songs do become a part of me, when all is said and done, but I approached songwriting differently after working with the men's song children. Not only were the songs changed on this “covers album,” but I was changed by having these songs hold my hand.

  I was able to channel and work through the anima of these songs, so it became important that I bring in somebody that could transform my physical image to emulate them: the makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin. He could determine how each woman would express herself with makeup, and then physically I would move into who this was. Karen, imaginative as usual, had a different look for every single character, which we'd been working on together almost daily for months and months and months. I had my interpretations of the men's music there in rough mix form, and during the photo shoot, the woman that I was trying to embody would have her song played over and over and over and over while I was getting made up. I was preparing myself to walk into her, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. Karen and Kevyn were there the whole time. I loved the photographer, Thomas Schenk, who brought in Ward Stegerhoek to be the hair and wig master. Thomas held a wonderful space just knowing that I needed to do this. He made the choice to do each photo on a blank background. We felt that props weren't the point. It was more like these women each came in and did a sitting for a photographer. And I was moving from anima to anima very fast, though it was at least an hour between each shoot.

  Kevyn and I talked on the phone about this project three times a week for six months before doing it. I'm so thrilled that we got to do this before he died. I'd never spent so much time working with him and his genius— he transforms people, that was his genius. It wasn't necessarily bringing out something from the person. He could work from his subject's own psychology, but more often, I think, he could transform you into an archetype. That was his genius, to turn you into a 1930s film star or a Native American princess. Into somebody else.

  I sent Kevyn and Karen the songs early on. I'd call Kevyn and say, “I'm thinking about doing this one, let's listen.” Karen would come down and listen, because she was in England, while Kevyn was in New York. Sometimes I would just tell her about the song. Kevyn had to hear it. Karen sometimes doesn't need to hear it. She can say, “Tell me when she was born, tell me what's her love life.” They would both ask me questions and we'd be bouncing things off each other.

  I had a sense of what each visual would be when I tracked the songs. I knew the girl in the Stranglers song “Strange Little Girl” was the daughter of the mother character whose voice we hear in Eminem's song “Bonnie and Clyde.” The daughter of this horror—her mom killed by her dad, sings “Strange Little Girl” as a young woman. Lennon and McCartney's song “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”—that's the call girl who visited Mark David Chapman before he killed John Lennon. In Neil Young's song “Heart of Gold,” those are the twins; they're up to all sorts of shenanigans. The person in Joe Jackson's song “Real Men” might be a lesbian or a transsexual, I never was quite sure. I knew that Lou Reed's song “New Age” represented that moment when the girl takes her glasses off— my god, you're beautiful. She's that girl who does research in New York City the smart publishing type. But she has fetishes. I knew the showgirl in Depeche Mode's song “Enjoy the Silence”—she was an older woman now, and a mother presence; she was not the victim. She understood things because she's been there. I loved her nurturing. We needed a nurturing presence and she was it.

  With Slayer's song “Raining Blood,” I chose to do the song partly because of what was going on with the Taliban destroying ancient sculptures of the Buddha in the Bamiyan Province of Afghanistan. Like many people, I had tears in my eyes that day. I had had a personal experience with bloodletting and just the information of what was going on with women in Afghanistan … the image was so clear when I heard the Slayer song.

  I just immediately thought it was a wonderful feminist song, and I saw this huge vagina ring of blood and fire, swallowing the Taliban. I thought Slayer would love to be part of that, whether they knew it or not. Because talk about alternative—that's alternative, let's get a big old pussy. Then in the vi
sual image, we went for a World War II French Resistance heroine posing as a German agent, representing a different reign of blood.

  Finally, with Tom Waits's song “Time,” I knew she was Death. Until we knew she was Death, Kevyn did not come up with the gold makeup. She has that Swedish thing going on. But we loved the Victorian aspect— you can't negotiate with her. Still, she's very compassionate. She would say, “It's time” to you, in a very gentle way.

  ANN: The extreme transformations of Strange Little Girls prepared Amos for her next character, the titular heroine of her 2002 album, Scarlet's Walk. This persona is the most sophisticated yet for Amos—fully fictional and yet partly herself, naturalistic while still embodying the mythos of America itself. In the artwork accompanying the album, Amos realized an image that would carry her forward into the next phase of her career.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  For the Scarlet's Walk cover, we worked with Kurt Markus, a very American photographer who's made great images of athletes, cowboys, and the Wild West. Lesley wasn't involved in the cover art for Girls or Venus, although she was right there with me through all the press shoots for those particular projects, so she was ready to dive into this next project, Scarlet's Walk.

  Lesley, Karen, and I were in New York City, Midtown, on September 11. Karen stayed with her family in New York while Lesley and Tony Lucha came down to Florida with me so I could see Tash briefly before driving back up on a tour bus again with me twenty-four hours later, if you can believe that, to do David Letterman. Because we were the first musical guest after the attack, I thought it was essential to work as a team and express ourselves as a team since we had lived through it as a team. That particular configuration was Karen, Lesley, and Tony, so you can see that Lesley and I had a lot of time together.