Tori Amos
I met Tori Amos thirty years ago, on the set of “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.” We spoke for the first time after her soundcheck. Right away I knew this wasn’t going to be your typical Keyboard Magazine interview, not only from studying the music on her first two albums, but also for her only advance request: Do not use any exclamation points in my final draft. Why? I didn’t ask, sensing that any attempt at demystification would spoil the allure of her opinions and composition.
In the years that followed we would do three more interviews, each for a different publication. Somehow we connected, or so I like to claim, as we would speak for hours – in her studio in the English countryside for Musician, over the phone for the Allmusic Zine, and finally a plush Manhattan hotel suite for Relix. There were less formal meetings as well, including one backstage after a Bay Area concert, where I introduced her to my starstruck teenage stepdaughter Jessica. A few weeks later, Tori wrote her a multi-page, personal letter, which stayed taped to the wall next to Jessie’s bed for the next several years.
Even one transcript, from any of our conversations, would be longer than anything else I’ve posted here. In reviewing them, though, I saw that by bypassing discussions of specific albums I could construct a narrative on her writing method and its evolution. It’s still a hefty read but an illuminating one as well.
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Keyboard Magazine, November 1994
Why do you write songs?
[Long thoughtful silence.] I remember walking down the hallways of the Peabody Conservatory and hearing the same piece being played in ten rooms, pretty much all the same. Some people's chops were better than others'; usually the kids from Asia were better, because they were precise and incredibly disciplined. The Jewish kids from that part of Baltimore had a little more humor in their work; you could feel that. But you had to have such good ears to really know, because they all were playing the same piece. I knew that I couldn't play this piece better than any of these people. It would probably be very different: You'd know where the redhead was, you'd figure out which practice room I was in. But I'd never win any competitions, ever, because nobody was interested in my take on Debussy. I never won anything. I always got marked down. Always. I had big arguments with these people, that these guys were pushing the limits of music at their time, just like John Lennon in his time. To understand their music, you have to understand the time. You have to know what's going on around them, especially when there's no lyric, when it's all music. Nobody, I thought, ever got the feel right. So I knew that if I was just gonna be playing some dead guy's music for the rest of my life, I'd probably never get a hearing, because their impression of what the dead guy should sound like was not mine at all.
But going even further back, was there ever a time when something in you said, "I want to make my own notes and words"?
I was seven [at Peabody]. I already knew what I was going to do. It was over when I was seven, a done deal. I was already writing. I didn't know how good or not good I could be. I knew that I could probably figure it out musically, but word-wise I was writing "The Jackass and the Toad Song." But I've always been a bit of a romantic. I'd be five years old, lying on my bed, with the afghan over me, squeezing my legs together and thinking, "Something should go here one day." I wanted to run away with all those guys, with Zeppelin and Jim Morrison and John Lennon. I [recently] told Robert Plant that I really wanted to pack my peanut butter and jelly and my teddy and my trolls and come find him.
“I felt absolutely inadequate when I heard the Sex Pistols and the Clash.”
So even then the power of songs being done by the people who wrote them was something you could feel.
Yeah, I was totally conscious of that at five. It's funny, because I think I'm more affected by those writers than the ones who were happening when I was in high school. I wasn't really affected by what was going on in 1979. I had checked out; I was just listening to my old records. Somebody played me the Sex Pistols after they had come and gone, and I we'ed in my pants. I said, "Shit, my father never showed me that this existed." I felt absolutely inadequate when I heard the Sex Pistols and the Clash, going, "Where was I?" I mean, I made Zeppelin and the Beatles and all those people when I was five. . . . Actually, Zeppelin didn't happen until I was nine or ten, when I started to bleed, so it was totally perfect; I was all ready for Robert.
How did those sorts of influences affect your growth as a songwriter?
First of all, I cannot contrive a song. I'm not nailing people who can. I know some very good writers who I respect a lot. They're called to do something for a movie, and they can come up with it in two weeks. They're not schlock writers; I'm talking about people who don't do hack jobs. They've got two weeks, and they're watching the film, and they're getting inspired. And I'm like, "How do you do that?" I don't care what you offer me right now: If the fairies don't sprinkle their little wee on my head, it's not gonna happen. I can't make it happen. Now, say I'm walking down the street, eating a banana, and something happens—four bars, with a sketchy lyric. If you give me two weeks, maybe I could develop it, just on my skills and craft alone. I'm not telling you it could be great. It might be passable. But there are certain songs I look at and say, "I would not change a breath."
In your performance?
Not my performance. I'm talking about, "That is how the girl wants to be. She's created. So she has seven fingers and 18 toes: She quite likes it, thank you very much." I was having this conversation with a friend recently, another writer, who said, "What happened to some of these great writers?" It's very funny how a woodworker or a cabinetmaker gets better with age. They don't forget how to make a great table. But how come some of these songwriters can't write songs anymore? It goes beyond being a craft. John Lennon talked about being able to tap into a source that's always there. Nobody knows where the freeway on-ramp is. You don't know where to get on and where to get off. Nobody can tell you the formula, because there isn't one; it's not gonna happen. You don't write "A Day in the Life" by a formula; it's not gonna happen.
Maybe the real artists avoid formulas in order for songs to be real.
Well, we have to remember that hit records and good songs are not synonymous. Maybe in the old days, a little bit. But now most hit records are not great songs. I'm not saying that those formula writers cannot stumble on something. But at a certain point, it's not about formula writing. I know I'm going back to the Beatles, just because that's a big point of reference, but how consistent can you get? "Eleanor Rigby"? "Norwegian Wood"? How many great songs and hit songs do you get? "Scarborough Fair" was a big blueprint for "Tear in Your Hand" [from Little Earthquakes]. I remember John Lennon talking about listening to songs that he loved, then changing them to make them his own versions. He would say, "God, I love this song. I wish I'd written this song." Then it would come out totally different. You might not even know what song it is that inspired you to do something, but there is that ingredient. Sometimes I do think that we're really just rewriting songs. There are only 12 bloody notes, you know. So I'll listen to some song and say, "Why didn't I write that?"
Because it speaks to you...
...as if I would have written it. I could name five songs, right off the top of my head, that I would have given my right arm to write. [Joni Mitchell's] "Case of You": You don't get it any better. A better song hasn't been written. I don't care what female singer/songwriter you throw up in my face: None has done anything in the league of "Case of You," me included. I sing "Case of You" almost every night in concert because of that. For a woman to be able to say what that says, with that kind of addiction and yet that kind of grace, is just not done. Even Zeppelin and those guys listened to Joni. They were totally influenced by Joni. It kills me when the metal guys or the hard rocking guys who are more posers than anything will show up and say, "You know, all the guys in my band are embarrassed to like you, because they're into Zeppelin." And I'll say, "That's kind of funny, 'cause I just did a duet with Robert." I don't think people understand that with songwriters, it's not about volume, you know?
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As your world becomes more infected by fame, how do you keep in touch with the reality of life?
Look, if my whole life was . . .
Not your whole life.
Wait. If most of my life was about going into the studio, making the record, doing the video, doing the tour, living and breathing only that, at a certain point, what would I fucking write about? I know that. Now, there are some very good ones out there whose work is still about one kind of energy. Say it's anger: That's all it is. Well, guys, hello? Can we have maybe a different angle on your anger today? All the angry boys out there talk about how they can't have this stuff. Now, I adore angry boys. I'd make 'em all apple pie with cinnamon ice cream. But they all talk about how they can't have this and they can't have that. They've got this whole movement based on what they can't have. And I say to them, wrong. It's a choice. They've chosen not to have certain things. And none of them takes any responsibility for that. Those boys are gonna get interesting when they start to go, "I choose not to have love." Come on, boys. Let's say something interesting for a change, instead of, "I can never have this or that." That's your choice, because you think you're shit. There's very little responsibility for their part in it. They don't own up to, "The reason I can't have love is because I think I'm gonna shrivel when I'm with this woman, because I don't think I deserve her." Let's go into the why. To go into that, you have to live. You have to open up to these things. You're not gonna get to these answers by I-IV-V-fucking-I.
And it's not just the boys. Some of the girls do it too. Ay-yi-yi, can we stop blaming the guys here? We can blame them for what they've done, but then we have to balance what we've done. The work isn't interesting when people aren't constantly discovering. We're stopping our lives as writers because we think we won't make great art. Who has put this thought out there? It's like a virus.
You're saying that there's a loss with respect to the talented writers who could have said so much before getting stuck on a single riff.
Totally that's what I'm saying. It is such a sense of loss. I'm not gonna mention names, but I'll watch something and go, "I know that this is very calculated." Once you've been on the other side, you know what it is and what it isn't. You just smell it. You're like, "This person has so much. They could go further than they ever thought they could go in their pain and their darkness." I've always said that Lucifer understands love better than anybody. You know he's done a mean tango with Greta Garbo a few times. Really understanding love is the only way you get to that side of things. Otherwise, you're just renting videos. It's HBO. These guys and girls who write about one more torture device over and over again? That doesn't scare them. That's not a challenge. And that's not challenging those kids who really are screaming. Talk about pain: If they want to experience pain, they should go hold hands with the little mermaid. Then they'll get scared shitless because they'll have to be real.
The pain industry that you're describing . . .
That's a great term for it. I guess I'm part of it too, in a sense.
. . . strips pain of its validity. When people tire of hearing songs that tell them how miserable they should be, they're stripped of the opportunity to feel real misery.
And they become parodies of themselves. It's so theatrical. Where's the real experience, so that when you take it to theatrics the foundation is still strong? But when it's just about anger for anger's sake . . .
. . . you're describing the fashion rather than the guts.
It is a fashion, and it isn't really that deep. We can all be a bit seduced by it. There's a masochist in me too, but my masochist is getting a little bit bored. It's not getting satisfied by those guys anymore. It's like, "You think that's painful?" My God, Baudelaire and Rimbaud were talking about and experiencing the heart. But it's so easy to contrive something. You know, "We're marketing dismemberment this week. That seems to be what kids want so, no problem, we'll do it." The whole point is that dismemberment isn't darkness, is it? It's just dismemberment. It's like, that's why God created video, so that you don't have to do any work on yourself. It's just a good distraction, an alternative to getting to what darkness is. The music business is packaging darkness, but for the most part, I think it's just a parody of darkness.
Look, I'm just saying that the writer's community has been given a drug. "Tori takes another step in her life, so she won't be able to write songs like 'Silent All These Years' anymore." Guess what? You're right. She'll never be able to write that again. So why is that a bad thing?
Musician Magazine, May 1996
Your beginning as a musician was fairly conventional. At what point did you become aware that something different was going on?
When I was very little. My career as a musician was conventional when I got to the clubs, but it's what preceded it that fights convention. I was playing before I could talk, so I didn't have the same judgment when you learn music. I was playing without anybody's judgment, without anybody's idea of what was good or bad. I just played anything I could hear. It's no different from a little child who learns bilingually. It was very similar for me, because the music was so complex that it wasn't like one language. I learned rhythm, tone, phrasing, all those things from Bartók to Mozart to Sgt. Pepper to Gershwin, through the ear as a very wee lassie, at a very instinctual level.
“Each man in my life represented a need that I wasn't fulfilling for myself.”
But many musicians don't materialize characters as you do. At what point did some other character say, "Hey, I need you to materialize me through music"?
From the beginning. I was communicating with other essences. It was almost like I had a window to communicate through music. They all carried a piece of me in them; we're separate, but we're whole... But eventually, with the loss of the relationship I was in, it occurred to me: "What if I couldn't do this?" Eric [Rosse, Amos's former producer and lover] knows all this. He knows how intertwined we were, or I thought we were. Sometimes I feel like I really shouldn't talk about Eric, yet there's no way around not giving him a nod here and there because he so affected my life at so many levels. The separation was the cliff I jumped off. When that happened, that was the catapult of this record. Then many other things happened, all at once. I'm not saying, "When it rains, it pours." It's more than just one building fell down in the earthquake. It's all around you. In a lot of my relationships, whether friends or mentors or loves or parents, so many things started to become a wall. This was mostly relationships with different men. They were all just showing me different parts of myself that were dependent. Each man in my life represented a need that I wasn't fulfilling for myself. When you're an artist and you're with someone who is artistic, there's almost an invitation to eventual breakdown. Yes. I think on some level, that these men weren't used to being muses.
Yet I was never their muse, because I wonder if they thought I was going to critique their work. The one thing that any man I've been involved with knows is that I know rhythm and tone - yet I just want to go with Oreo cookies and peanut butter and ice cream and garlic; I just want to have a party! That's always been, shall we say, in my weave. The loose thread has been that the musician in me is so ready to play and do a free-for-all, still knowing what felt right or what didn't feel right, the more I developed my music. I had boundaries as a musician, and yet I didn't need boundaries, because I just know we're not going to F#. It's just not gonna happen. But as a woman - and I have to bring this up, because this is where the content of the work comes from - I didn't have this access that I had as a musician. I had separated them from birth: the girl from the musician. For the most part, Pele is about my response. The women really held the space for me to dive into on this one. My women friends knew that only I could go after this. They would be dragging me back by my hair, going, "Hello? Are you aware of what you just did to yourself?" And I'm sitting here with veins ripped open, licking a little blood from my chin, going, "No!"
When did they ask you that question?
When they saw me during this period of time. Some of them would have to converse with the musician in order to talk with the woman. It's almost like I've developed this compositional understanding - and very little else. The musician has had more access than anybody to the different sides, and yet sometimes she's not always completely interested in communicating with the other side. Maybe they'll exchange phone numbers [laughs]. And so the men I've pulled into my life are reflections of pieces of myself. Some were obviously bigger pieces than others: an eight-year relationship is a huge chunk of being. The whole record, though, is a gift to myself. No, let me rephrase that: What's been given by these songs is a gift to me.
Allmusic Zine, October 1999
From your first album to your newest release, To Venus and Back, you seem to be allowing raw sound to grow in importance within your music.
Well, I think that comes a lot from working with my team Mark and Marcel [Mark Hawley and Marcel Van Limbeek]. They were my live engineers on Under the Pink; that's how I met them. [Personal assistant and tour manager] John Witherspoon brought Mark in as front-of-house engineer, and Mark brought Marcel as the monitor guy; they're a team. I asked them to make Boys for Pele with me, but then my whole life changed, and everybody I worked with... I had a kind of a shift – not that I didn't like those people, because I did, but my whole life just changed. I needed independence and to strike out on my own, so I pulled this team out. Mark has had studios since he was an adolescent, which he would build in a barn - Martian [Studios] now is built in a 300-year-old barn, so there's the bloodline for that. From what I understand, Mark, when he was four, he was a drummer. He was studying when he was eleven with Cliff Richard's drummer. And he picked up the guitar when he was ten, so he was multifaceted, but then was drawn into wanting to have a mixing desk as his instrument. That's his bloodline. And Marcel is Dutch and was a physicist who left school. He's dealing with facts, figures, theories, equations ... and madness. Together, there was a real push from them. They argue with me. They take a very fierce stand on the engineering thing: "You need to be aware of the sound of your records." But sound is an instrument. There's no room for musicians to be sonically shut out and turn it all over to a producer. It's critical that it works with the composition.
You're talking about something other than good production, though. Your point is to allow sound to assume an evolving role in your imagination.
Yes, using it as an instrument, as opposed to making a nice-sounding recording. That was always important to the people I worked with, that it was a nice-sounding recording. But then it was about using compression as an instrument, and you start getting into the ant-fucking with it all. To stretch as a producer, and because I'm not a tech person, I brought in a tech team. Yeah, I can fiddle with knobs and see what they can do and what they can't. But this is not my level of expertise. I love working with a team where ... It's not that engineer teams can't go and write songs. Some of them can. There are engineer teams, as we know, who have written stuff and have guest singers come on. It can work. But it doesn't necessarily mean that the hubris should set in that they are composers. No different than I have no illusions that I'm an engineer. I can't sit there and say to you ... When we're on that line of saying, "Okay, look. Tell me where I've cooked this 1.5. Where am I, frequency-wise?", somebody's got to turn around to me and say, "You've undercut that low end." And not the bass player. I can't go to any of the musicians - and they are geniuses, all of them are geniuses - and say, "Give me the holistic picture." Not until they're producing and they're not involved [as players]. People hear things through their own filter, and I do not mix by committee.
The truth, though, is that you are the artist here.
And they're artists. What I have to be honest about is, if they were doing it, it would be different. Each person would have done it differently.
And, in each distinctive way, it would have been good.
It would be different. I'm sure it would be good. ... Let's not say good or bad. It would be valid. But that doesn't mean that it would be about the song. It might be about the groove. It might not be about compression. So depending on what your aesthetic is ... Venus is not about sounding like a bloody retro Seventies record. It's Venus, for fuck's sake! She lives with different laws and principles. She doesn't want to sound like... I wanted an element of warmth, but I wanted an element of absolute chill.
Relix, April/May 2005
A few years later, Relix hired me for another round with Tori. Once again I prepped carefully, took notes on every track of her new album, The Beekeeper. Where we had met at the studio and home that she and her husband owned in Cornwall’s grassy hills, this time we sipped an elegant glass or two at a small table overlooking the cavernous lobby of some New York hotel whose name I can’t remember. I followed the same Tori-talk strategy as before; this time, her musings were a bit more linear. Maybe it was the swanky vibe; more likely it was a “garden” motif that popped up and became the hub of our conversational wheel. Luckily, her gift for elliptical expression remained as beguiling as before. As her answer to my last question in this excerpt indicates, she has a way of communicating that’s analogous to tending a garden: It may take a while, but eventually you’re able to harvest her insights and ideas.
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Each of your albums is initially an enigma or a ride through unfamiliar territory. What does The Beekeeper mean to you?
The songs are a tribute to six gardens, which reflects the hexagonal shape of the cell in the hive of bees. The garden of original sinsuality [sic] is the world in which our character lives. So instead of the Genesis story, where God says, “If you eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge, then you’ll be exiled,” his mother Sophie says, “If you don’t eat from the tree of knowledge, then you will be exiled.” Once she eats of this fruit she begins to experience all of the permutations that a relationship may have. These relationships can be with a “lover,” or they can be with friends, with mother, daughter, father, brother, stranger, not stranger, et cetera. So within all these songs are the possibilities that exist in relationship.
In “The Power of Orange Knickers,” for example, I was curious about the idea of the terrorist. This idea has been painted in a certain way, especially in the past couple of years as the elections were upon us. When you look around in the world, with the war, the picture of the terrorist is usually one of two things. If you’re in one part of the world, it’s an army person from America. If you’re in our part of the world, it’s somebody with a turban.
It was irresistible not to undress this word. So once I stripped the word “terrorist” I began to really look at the idea of when we feel invaded. My daughter can feel invaded on the playground by another girl, which takes over her life. It’s real to her, much more real than a guy in an army outfit or a guy in a turban, as of today. She doesn’t understand how that is affecting, because this is affecting her on a day-to-day basis. So I found the face next to the word “terrorist” changing. Things like that started to entice me and my character as I went through my relationships with all these emotions at the time.
This garden motif suggests a change in your writing process. In the past you’ve talked about how songs visit you almost uninvited. In this case you were exercising a degree of control that was absent in that earlier method.
The songs are still autonomous but I felt like we were co-creating. I really enjoyed spending time with the structures and developing them over the past two years.
How did the garden theme occur to you?
They surround us in England. We’re out in the middle of nowhere. It’s not as if there’s a lot that’s manmade. It’s very much made by the earth itself and by time and weather. What is managed is affected by the weather. The weather is a big character in the play that is Cornwall. You can’t think that you’re in control of it, because you’re not. When you’re in the cities, you just go on about your day. But in the country it’s definitely in the driver’s seat. Because of that, you feel very much in rhythm with the seasons. I wouldn’t have believed it unless I’d lived it. We’re pretty close to the coast and the cliffs. I was caught out in a gale storm one day. I pulled over and “Jamaica Inn” [from The Beekeeper] just sort of walked over into my passenger seat.
I was touring America for so long … We toured Europe too, but we spent a lot of time in the States. This was the opposite of that, the paradox of that. I guess the songs are very much shaped by being out there, where there are no streetlights, yet your mind can wander. Sometimes you’re forced to be indoors for a few days at a time, except just to run outside and back in.
Each part of Britain is unique. What was it about Cornwall, beyond the proximity of the coastline, that drew you three?
Well, Mark [Hawley, studio engineer and Amos’s husband] was drawn there. He used to go there every summer as a boy. Really, he was the one. I would never have chosen this, but we were married, so what are you going to do? So I agreed to be in the middle of nowhere. Once we made the old barn into the studio in 1997, we’ve been touring a lot. We’ve been away a lot more than we’ve been here. Being there for the last while has made me not see it so much in broad strokes but in details. You can appreciate the subtleties of the area. The place is something that either imprints itself on you or it’s on your path to somewhere and you don’t really stop. The land romances you. It’s very hard to define because it’s very covert. There are those holiday places up and down the coast in the summer, but where we are, it’s not really a holiday spot. It’s much more the farmer, much more the working fields, the pastures.
What kind of gardens do you see when you go outside?
I had a really beautiful garden in Florida. It was an exotic garden. I planted it with my friend Meg, who is a garden architect, in Stuart, Florida. Then two hurricanes got it. It’s one of those things. Look, we’re lucky we have a house and we’re lucky no one was hurt. And yes, you have to be thankful to nature for any blessing that you have, and I really want to say that we have a lot of blessings. At the same time, the physical storms propelled the music in a way, as you can hear within “Parasol” [from The Beekeeper], kind of setting us up for the emotional storms that I didn’t know were coming with the loss of Michael [Edison Michael Amos, Tori’s brother, killed by a car crash on November 22, 2004]. Of course, it puts that in perspective. I planted that garden when I was pregnant, and it’s totally destroyed. But that garden gave me so much understanding about what kind of mom I wanted to be and what I needed to do to nurture as a mom. The garden taught me a lot. It’ll take a while to approach that garden again.
In Cornwall, it’s very different. It’s a four-season cycle, as opposed to the tropics. We’re experimenting with different lavender plants. Eventually I’d love to have a lavender farm because I love the idea of growing the oils of lavender in high quality. Right now, we grow the vegetables that we eat. In the summer Dunk, our chef, would drive down in his little Toyota, get food from the garden and bring it up to the kitchen. This garden is more functional than the one in Florida, which was about plants and beauty; “Daytura” was inspired by doing a roll call of all the songs in that garden. Now all of them have been destroyed but I’ll plant again.
That’s part of these birth changes that you go through. Wildflowers are very much a part of Cornwall. I’m learning about what grows in that climate. Having to adapt to two very different worlds, an exotic tropical world as opposed to the Cornish coast, has been a real education. It’s incredibly humbling how you can’t negotiate with the land. You have to listen to it.
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