Tori Amos: Piece by Piece

by Amos, Tori

  TORI:

  As some of these songs were coming to me, I asked the gospel choir arranger, Wayne Hernandez, to come down to Martian and lend his vocal magic. He and his singers, the girls who I call “the gangsta-rinas,” are on four songs on The Beekeeper, including “Witness.”

  SONG CANVAS:“Witness”

  Betrayal happens in strange ways and comes from strange corners sometimes. Some days life can feel pretty normal, so to speak. Then there are other days that make you think you've walked into something sinister, into a Hermann Hesse novel. I wish I could tell you that nothing surprises me anymore. But unfortunately that isn't true. Fame and money expose people for who they really are. Some are willing to do anything to keep it. “Witness” is a song written about this betrayal, and betrayal is always one of the seeds in the Garden of Sin-suality …

  Phone rings.

  “Hey, T.”

  “Hey, you.”

  “I need to give you some news.”

  “Give me the bad news first.”

  “It's all bad.”

  “Okay I'm standing. Shoot.”

  “They want —— from you.” (Some issues are locked up in confidentiality agreements.)

  “Hmm.”

  “Are you there?”

  “Yep.”

  “What's our response? Do you want your team's advice?”

  “Yes, I want your advice, but not today. My response is—tell the team no one responds. I will not dignify their insult.”

  “Understood.”

  “I suspect they'll call back within six days.”

  “Six business days?”

  “Yeah, weekends count only for musicians and crew.”

  “And accountants.”

  “Fair enough. But never suits. I haven't seen a suit at a gig in a long time.”

  “I wear a suit,” says Philip-the-Good.

  “Nothing personal.”

  We say our goodbyes and I hang up. And, sure enough, within six business days I get a call from Philip-the-Good.

  TORI:

  Having been in the music business since I was thirteen years old, there are things I've been exposed to that I haven't seen, or that the accountants and investment bankers I've worked with haven't seen, in any other business. Which leads me to something I'm quite convinced about, and it's very unusual for me, but in this case I must argue with the playwright Congreve when he pronounced, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” I must rectify this by saying, “Hell hath no fury like a rejected entertainment executive scorned.”

  SONG, CANVAS:“Barons of Suburbia”

  This song is about takers. We all know them, either as people we have to work with or friends we find out about eventually, and sometimes it's a real shock to realize that when push comes to shove, all these people really care about is what's in it for them. In the end they don't even pretend to care if you're okay. Not if you're okay, or if the friendship is okay, or anything else. Can somebody tell me what is wrong with the idea of a win-win? Why does somebody always have to bite the dust?

  Jeez. These days it seems as if it's getting harder and harder to get people on the team who really want to show that they value one another. People might say that they want to, but at the end of the day most of them care only about what they get out of it.

  I remember a couple of years ago when one of the musicians said to me, “I think music should be free.” And I was just not in the mood to deal with yet another genius, but I did, and I said, “Well, you have made the question about where to send your check easy for me to answer.” “Um,” said the musician, “what do you mean?” I answered, “We weren't sure whether to send your check to your address or to your girlfriend's address, but now you've answered my question for me.” “I'm not quite following you, Tor,” he said. “Well, obviously since you believe that music should be free, then we won't need to send you your check.” The musician looked at me incredulously, and with shock in his voice said, “But I've just played my heart out.” I looked at him very calmly and said, “So you think you should get paid but music should be free?” “Well, yeah,” he said. “And so who do you think is going to pay you if music is free?” I asked. And therein lies the problem—everybody wants free stuff but nobody wants to work for free.

  The truth is, all the people who have ever told me that music should be free still believe that they should be paid for their job, whatever that job may be. They are completely insulted when I suggest that they work for free as well. People usually get quite defensive at this point and say, “If I don't get paid for a day's work, then basically I'm being cheated.” And I look at them and say, “That is basically right.”

  This musician sheepishly looked at me and said, “I guess I sound pretty hypocritical … but Tor, you're kidding, right?” And I said, “You mean about you not getting paid? Of course I'm going to pay you, because I value what you do. But do you want to know what scares me, and I mean really scares me?” And he looked at me completely baffled and said, “No, what really scares you?” “The fact,” I said, “that you weren't kidding.”

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  It is personal.

  When you care about your team, when the bonds have been formed and somehow this big ball of tape starts unraveling and tangling. I weep and would walk to Japan to fix it, but after you walk to Japan and it still isn't fixed, you begin to realize that each person has to want to look at his or her part and say, “Okay sorry—so that rupture is mine and I don't want you all tripping over something that only I can fix.” Unless you have the inner desire to walk the extra mile with your creative circle, then the circle will be breached. It will break. The circle's breaking aches. And it is personal. Sometimes we enter into a forgetfulness, thereby treating companions, creative compadres, as if they are taking from us when they are giving. And the decomposing of the harmonic structure that was in place has begun. And the cords pull—no, yank— in your gut. Oh my God, it feels like your ovaries are being yanked out with tweezers. Then every time it happens, you realize that you cannot make others want to look at their part in the discordance. You can say how it's affecting your relationship and what you're willing to do or not do. Then it's out of your hands. Completely out of your hands.

  Kali, Sekhmet, Pele, Oya, Sedna—these mythical goddesses have taught me about not being intimidated by a destructive force. This can be a person on the crew. This can be someone working closely on a project. This can be administrative, management, the record company, or the agency. This can be someone in the audience. I've sat in the stink, the spewing of someone's negativity. The Piss Christ was made of urine. Can a negative experience spark and inspire the Passion that is in us, maybe suppressed inside us, to rise up and out of “their” thoughtless remorse? Can we build something better? You know you must descend to ascend. Pass through the eye of the needle … If it's too loud, then turn it up. Yes. Sometimes a negative attitude that has spread can make everyone question and improve and reach for excellence. Value the opportunity. Sometimes it is just negativity in the end. The creative tribe cannot shoulder the negative cancer if at its core it chooses to stay malignant.

  The intriguing thing about conflict in the creative world and the business of the creative world is what it brings out in people. You really don't know what a person is made of until conflict enters the picture and people are forced to choose sides. If there hadn't been people who went over and above what a friend should be, then I wouldn't be here writing this book. A lot of times projects get accomplished because of the tenacity, not of the big record Cheeses, but of the girls and guys who do the busywork at the record company. Without the Vicky Germaises, the Elyse Taylors, the Lee Ellen Newmans, the Linda Ferrandos, the Patti Contis, and the Matthew Rankins of the world, it would have been a very different story from what it turned out to be.

  I call on Sekhmet when I need to stand in my own authority. She is the one who acts until certain policies are changed. Her spirit leads me when it comes to be
ing able to have force—and I don't mean like Obi-Wan Kenobi. I think the patriarchy would say that Sekhmet's plan of action was a rampage, whereas I say that it was about saying no to wrongdoing. If someone who already has power is going to hold people hostage, well, two can play at that game.

  I am always willing to discuss things before laying down the line. If you don't want to take the high road, it doesn't mean I'm going to go away.

  If you don't want to come to the table and define terms, which I feel Sekhmet was willing to do, we can play another way.

  I can definitely be a battle-ax. That's a side of it. Madonna has that side; so does Chrissie Hynde, even successful women who project a sweet image, like Sarah McLachlan. The women who have impact must be willing to pounce when it's appropriate. If you're going to take on the music business, you need to find that red energy somewhere in you.

  The aggressiveness and strength I've cultivated can make me open to criticism, and not just from the men I've had to confront. Women have also challenged my decisions. I've run across a certain attitude from women who took another path. Feminism did not really make it okay to have it all. I've met women who've essentially said to me, Tori, you have the houses, you have your empire. It might be a small empire, but you ve got one nonetheless. You don't have to look to a man to provide. You can bring home the bacon. You made that choice, whereas we chose to be the nurturers and the mothers, and you have to respect that, too. Admit it—you cant have it all.

  At times I did feel very guilty that I went after the chance to be the best and to negotiate with the big boys. To someone who's not an artist, the fights I've gone through might seem unnecessary. And this business doesn't necessarily reward compassionate behavior. I know women in the business who are very competitive, and I've been very competitive. But now that I have a little girl, I see how in popular music, where all the lads get to have their chance, there can be room for a win-win among women, too. There can be room for more than one of us at a time. Many different archetypes are needed to complete the pantheon. Aphrodite can't be Athena and vice versa. To be jealous of Athena when you're Aphrodite is ridiculous. To envy Artemis’ abilities when you're Athena is not the right use of energy—it's emotional cancer. I've learned the hard way.

  Being able to determine your own identity—that's what makes the struggle worthwhile. After going through the embarrassment of Y Kant Tori Read, letting people who claimed they had my interests in mind turn me away from myself, I said I would never again become something I wasn't. I was playing a role then, and I learned from that. I decided, no, that doesn't fit me very well. There are other ways I need to express myself as a woman and as an artist.

  What we have to realize as women in the music business is that the old-boy network wants us to compete with one another. Divide and conquer. And no matter how many times the media declares it “the year of the woman” in music, right now things are only getting worse for anyone who wants more than momentary success. The window is getting very small. Years ago you had women who could go four records deep, like Joni Mitchell or Linda Ronstadt, and continue to be supported by their labels, radio, and the press. But now the corporations dominating music run through an artist in one record and move on to the next one. Stick around and your label will probably try to get you to do something that's a real loss to your dignity, just to make a shock statement. My heart goes out to those women who've exploited themselves. Ten years ago I would have had a smirk on my face about it, but I see now that we're all forced to deal with that moment. It's one of the steps you go through to survive.

  Wrath is a force that should be conjured strategically. I'm beyond the fury of youth at this point. I love it when I see young women who are angry—they're our wild mustangs. But if you don't transcend that at some point, you become a very disturbed forty-year-old. You're just mean and mad at the world.

  TORI:

  Today I turn forty-one. Dunc said something to me today that has got me thinking. He knows I've been writing this chapter for days and days, and he said to me, “Don't you think that it's kind of poetic justice that on today of all days you are finishing the music business chapter?” I guess I should have gotten the hint at Tash singing Gloria Gaynor's “I Will Survive” off her disco classics CD. Dunc talked about an idea—you start collecting all kinds of things from the age you're old enough to. You collect rocks, you collect ideas. You pick up these rocks, these ideas, and you place them in a bag that you carry with you wherever you go. These rocks represent events and experiences that you take with you. Sometimes, though, these rocks become too heavy to carry around. After all, there are only so many rocks that you can carry in your bag before they weigh you down so much so that you can't even move, much less walk. Some rocks you just have to take out of your bag.

  The Greek goddess Athena

  ANN: Archetypes survive because they are both consistent and adaptable. The goddesses who continue to inspire us, even those who have survived the civilizations from which they arose, are no strangers to change: their legends, their outward appearance, even their names, have evolved to serve the needs of whatever communities call upon them. Corn Mother speaks of respect for the land that bears us; Saraswati honors the flow of creativity; Sekhmet stands for the fierce inevitability of fate. In other circumstances these deities had other names: Ceres, Minerva, Kali. But the qualities of the soul each represents remain consistent.

  In Asia, one goddess thrives whose spirit is adaptability itself, as it manifests in the act of extending kindness to others. However you spell her name, Quan Yin, the beloved avatar of compassion, remains the spirit of refuge, the comforter of sorrows whose name means “the one who contemplates the supplicating sound of the world.” Quan Yin is called Kannon in Japan, the Green Tara in Tibet, QuanAm in Vietnam, and Kanin in Bali. She manifests as a male as well: as Avalokitesvara, the keeper of the mystical Lotus, and as Guan Yin, the guardian of the sea. She has been pictured as a thousand-limbed, thousand-eyed dancer and a white-robed queen who rides a celestial dragon upon the streams of life. Consistency in multiplicity is Quan Yin's essence, for compassion must manifest uniquely to suit whoever seeks it, though the gift of peace it brings is ultimately the same.

  As above, so below: it is the human mission to become an eye within the storm, to remain grounded while responding to life's sometimes baffling variety. Artists, who cultivate openness in service of a vision that encompasses the world, must become particularly adept at this balancing act. Yet the mundane world of material survival—not to mention the ego—can sometimes mire an artist in a rut. The tempo of success can change again overtime; it takes wisdom to move along with it.

  At midlife, Tori Amos understands that she cannot rule life's tidal shifts, only navigate them. She is a rider of the waves, her sense of the future defined by an undiminished faith in music's power. Like Quan Yin, she learns from listening, and finds her power in leading those who listen to her back to the answers within themselves.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  One deep purpose of music is to present a holistic version of what has been broken. There is a tradition of this that goes back thousands of years. Writers and artists have gone deep, deep inside; some have been killed because of this work, because it is perceived by many as a threatening act. There has been a deep belief that the masses are controlled because they have been separated from themselves at the core. They have been separated from the voice in their own soul. This is how you control another person, and this control gets perpetuated by those who don't even know they're passing this behavior on to their children. And at some point in my life, I really believed this was a war artists waged, a battle between people separated from their wholeness and those who saw that the only way forward was to eliminate the curse, the hierarchy, and redefine power.

  I've felt music's integrating effect throughout my own life. Music more than anything else is what keeps me on the planet. I don't know if in another life I would be given music. So I'm going to cre
ate with it as much as I can. It is the only universal language that's tangible. Love is a universal language, but that's a much more abstract concept than being able to communicate with anyone in the world because the two of you can dance to a rhythm that we all innately understand without having to say a word. Music is more than a privilege; without it, I really don't know how I would cope. It's one reason I haven't gone off the rails.

  As I've grown older, I have realized what a debt I owe to creativity. I can't say it enough: this force is not something that I own, or generate by myself, and as I've learned to embrace its profundity, I have been able to let it guide me into new phases.

  The Native American way of thinking says you have to move on the medicine wheel. Too many people, especially women, are trying to stay in a place that they can't sustain physically and emotionally and spiritually. Thinking in terms of the Four Directions—the south, realm of innocence; the west, seat of power; the north, territory of hard-earned experience, and the east, frontier of enlightenment—you cannot remain within a direction that has blown you out. The west has said, “That's all now.” And you have to move to the north. You're approaching middle age.