Tori Amos (2007)
Interview Background
I’m always reduced to excitable fan status when I have the opportunity to speak with Tori Amos. Few of the hundreds of artists I’ve interviewed show the same level of thought and engagement when conversing with journalists or her followers; when Tori is chatting with you, she gives fans her complete attention. It helps when you show you’ve done your research, too – when interviewers have dug a little deeper than simply listening to Cornflake Girl or going for banal default questions, Tori takes the time to elucidate at length. As anyone who has read her autobiography Piece By Piece will understand, Tori’s reflections can sometimes be a little spiritually cryptic. She’s never less than interesting though, and I’ve been able to slowly chip away at my list of obscure aficionado questions over the years. It was a warm Sunday afternoon when Tori Amos found a moment in her schedule to speak to me a week before her performance at Adelaide’s Thebarton Theatre. Preparing for a talk show appearance to promote American Dolle Posse, it sounded as if a gruelling schedule had Tori questioning how much longer she’d be playing the touring game. Thankfully she’s continued to record and tour since this 2007 interview, albeit working with different record labels. I’ll be looking to upload more of my Tori Amos interviews during future site updates.
The following is an edited version of an interview first published in Rip It Up, September 2007.
Tori Amos - A Sorta Fairytale Ending
by Scott McLennan
Tori Amos is tired. Sitting backstage at Global Studios in Melbourne prior to her Rove Live appearance, the Cornwall-based musician is contemplating the possibility her current world tour in support of her ninth studio album American Doll Posse could be her last.
“I’ve been touring for so many years that I just don’t know if it’s still going to happen,” she begins. “I’ve been touring almost every other year since 1991. You know when you watch people go back to the Olympics and they can’t really run any more and you think, ‘Why didn’t you make another decision?’. While the shows are powerful I think that’s a good way to leave people for a while.”
It’s a remarkable revelation. A child prodigy accepted into Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory Of Music at the age of five, Tori Amos has been performing live for more than 30 years. Whether winning talent contests in the 1970s, playing with Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum in shortlived 1980s rock act Y Kant Tori Read or earning global acclaim in the 1990s via breakthrough solo debut Little Earthquakes and its stunning follow-up Under The Pink, live performance has been a pivotal piece of Amos’ musical puzzle. The current tour finds her alternating performances between the five divergent personalities found performing on American Doll Posse – the sexy Santa, the waifish Clyde, the political Isabel, the confrontational Pip and Amos herself. So have any of the Posse been more prominent in live shows?
“That’s an interesting question,” Amos muses. “I think that Pip is explosive and I think Santa is a lot of fun and I do rely on those two a lot for powerhouse shows. The other two are complex and in some ways take a lot more internal energy. Isabel is the hardest show I do technically. I don’t know if an audience is ready for Isabel, since she’s very political and you have to have an audience prepared to do more than just shake their booty. Each one of them has affected me in ways that are hard to describe. I’m not the same person I was before I made this album.”
In Slovakia earlier in the year, Amos threw her shoes at a brutish security guard manhandling a fan who attempted to watch her show from the aisle. The singer later suggested knowing how to say ‘cocksucker’ in Slovak would have helped her control the situation.
“My goal is to learn how to say ‘cocksucker’ in every language that exists,” Amos says. “I’d like to know it in every Middle Eastern language – I’d like to be able to say ‘cocksucker’ in Farsi. Everybody needs to know that and I’ll tell you why: if you happen to be in that moment where you need that word and you don’t know how to say it, you’re going to start throwing your shoes at people. I don’t know if you heard what happened but the security guards take themselves very seriously. I understand why they need to clear people from the aisles, but when you have a security guard yelling at an audience member to the point that everybody is turning around looking at him – during Winter – then we all stopped and wanted no more. I don’t like it when people are abusing their authority and so I pulled rank.”
Amos’ back catalogue proves her to be an artist at ease with unnerving frankness, cheeky humour, lyrical fragility and moving narratives. Having sung harrowing first-hand accounts of sexual assault and miscarriage, Amos admits that she and her husband, British producer Mark Hawley, avoid explaining some of her songs to their seven-year-old daughter Natashya.
“There are songs that still go over her head, which is good,” Amos confides. “You’re always walking a fine line with answering a child because the idea to tell the truth and nothing but the truth is not always the best thing to do in life. You have to realise that this person cannot compute this information at this time and it’s just going to wreck their world. We don’t always talk to Tash about some things in the music – especially the sexual stuff.”
The warmth Amos conveys when speaking of her daughter indicates her decision to quit touring is firmly based around a commitment to her family.
“Tash said to me, ‘You know Mummy, sometimes kids at school think I have a charmed life and in some ways I do, being your kid and travelling the world. I love you Mummy and I wouldn’t trade it, but there’s a side to my life that nobody understands.’ I think that’s true – this is Tash’s fifth world tour and there are times when she doesn’t see her bed for months at a time. There are sides to her life that people think are glamorous, but there’s another side to it as well.”
In what now seems like an anticipatory signpost to American Doll Posse, a line on Amos’ 1996 track Hey Jupiter states, ‘Thought I knew myself so well, all the dolls I had’.
“Strange, isn’t it?” Amos agrees. “I know what you’re saying and that dawned on me when I was singing it not so long ago. Sometimes as a composer and a creator you might be working towards something but you are not in a place to contain that work yet. I’ve wondered what it would have been like if I had done [Posse] years ago. I don’t think they would have been anything like they are now, as these women are based on many years of experience, disappointment, realisations and explorations. I don’t think until I became a mum I was able to allow myself to really experience some of these different facets.”
American Doll Posse (Sony/BMG)
Unpublished Interview Material
You personally seem serene these days – have the Doll Posse allowed you to bring agitation back to your music?
“Well being able to hold the Posse requires an ability to ground yourself, an ability to be zen. Imagine stepping into these different characters – it takes a lot of precision and if you are highly wired all the time, as I was in past years (laughs) then sometimes it’s more difficult to focus than when you have a calmness about you. When you’re really able to plug into that it’s easier to change quickly into different personas. In a strange way, being in a more calm, grounded place as a human being has made it possible to contain the girls.”
Whereas some artists distance themselves from using image to promote their work, American Doll Posse again shows you embracing image and music together as part of a symbiotic relationship.
“Well everybody’s got an image. An image is the way that you project yourself to the world and people are going to perceive you in a certain way depending on how you present yourself. If you refuse to admit that then I think you’re lying to yourself, even if you just take a shower and throw on whatever you throw on, it’s still your scraggly image. The ‘I don’t put any effort into my appearance’ is still an image – it’s a face they show the outside world. We all make choices as to what that image is. I’ve studied visual artists over the years and I’ve seen how performance art can have an effect. Some people aren’t strong live performers, as you well know. They might make records, but when you go and see them you’re just kind of bored. Not everybody can step onto a stage and grab a few thousand people and make them feel as if you’re talking to each one of them and only them. That takes a certain kind of energy and you have to realise that when you step onto that stage, what might translate in the studio just doesn’t come across in a different context. Once you understand that you can make choices that might not work, but how I project myself on stage isn’t the Tori I take to playgroup. That Tori does not come to school.”
Did your daughter Tash have a big birthday party this week?
“No, and I think she’s bummed about that. We were flying, so she’s trying to take it like a champ and we’ve tried to make it up to her. We were on the plane coming to Australia and we’d just been in Bora Bora, so we had a little celebration there but there were just a few of us and her Daddy wasn’t there. We took her to Luna Park when we got to Melbourne and we’ve tried to give her a birthday, but she didn’t have a regular seven-year-old’s birthday… When somebody says to her, ‘You have everything’, she wants to turn around and say, ‘You don’t know my life. You have no idea what my life is like.’ I said to her, ‘Nobody knows what your life is like Tash unless they live it. There are other people who might feel similar to you, not because they are touring but because they are a child actor or a sports person. People think they have everything but there are sacrifices involved.’ I had to explain what sacrifices mean.”
Girl Disappearing and Ribbons Undone both look at Natashya growing up and mention horses - does she have a pony?
“She doesn’t, but she was riding when she was little because a friend of ours had a horse. She has an unusual relationship with animals in a way I don’t. I have a lot of friends who do, but I have a relationship with wood and keys and a thing called a piano. Watching Tash relate to these creatures does inspire me to write about it.”
Bouncing Off Clouds returns to ice cream for at least your third time for lyrical content. Do you find that some ideas recur throughout your songs?
“I think that every artist has a palette and sometimes you do pick up a certain symbology or reference that is part of your verbal arsenal. You claim these words and ideas like a charm bracelet and they become a part of you like a tattoo. Over the years in a different song they might mean something very different, but you reach for pictures that make up your story. There are other songwriters that mention things over and over again but they’re different things and they are their tattoo.”
Last time we chatted you said you enjoyed the fact that some of your songs were a little hard to track down, but a year later you released A Piano, which brought together a lot of hard-to-find music. Some fans were disappointed it didn’t contain any of your cover songs, soundtrack tunes or duets with people such as Michael Stipe and Robert Plant – is there any chance of a second archive trawl or is that a full stop on the back catalogue?
“I don’t know. You can’t include everything and we had to make some tough choices but I included a lot of things that I thought told the story. There’s always somebody who’s going to be disappointed, but this was my work as a composer as well, so it wasn’t about including somebody else’s work. That’s like having a birthday party for somebody else’s kid. I think that’s crossing the line, personally!”
I’m always reduced to excitable fan status when I have the opportunity to speak with Tori Amos. Few of the hundreds of artists I’ve interviewed show the same level of thought and engagement when conversing with journalists or her followers; when Tori is chatting with you, she gives fans her complete attention. It helps when you show you’ve done your research, too – when interviewers have dug a little deeper than simply listening to Cornflake Girl or going for banal default questions, Tori takes the time to elucidate at length. As anyone who has read her autobiography Piece By Piece will understand, Tori’s reflections can sometimes be a little spiritually cryptic. She’s never less than interesting though, and I’ve been able to slowly chip away at my list of obscure aficionado questions over the years. It was a warm Sunday afternoon when Tori Amos found a moment in her schedule to speak to me a week before her performance at Adelaide’s Thebarton Theatre. Preparing for a talk show appearance to promote American Dolle Posse, it sounded as if a gruelling schedule had Tori questioning how much longer she’d be playing the touring game. Thankfully she’s continued to record and tour since this 2007 interview, albeit working with different record labels. I’ll be looking to upload more of my Tori Amos interviews during future site updates.
The following is an edited version of an interview first published in Rip It Up, September 2007.
Tori Amos - A Sorta Fairytale Ending
by Scott McLennan
Tori Amos is tired. Sitting backstage at Global Studios in Melbourne prior to her Rove Live appearance, the Cornwall-based musician is contemplating the possibility her current world tour in support of her ninth studio album American Doll Posse could be her last.
“I’ve been touring for so many years that I just don’t know if it’s still going to happen,” she begins. “I’ve been touring almost every other year since 1991. You know when you watch people go back to the Olympics and they can’t really run any more and you think, ‘Why didn’t you make another decision?’. While the shows are powerful I think that’s a good way to leave people for a while.”
It’s a remarkable revelation. A child prodigy accepted into Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory Of Music at the age of five, Tori Amos has been performing live for more than 30 years. Whether winning talent contests in the 1970s, playing with Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum in shortlived 1980s rock act Y Kant Tori Read or earning global acclaim in the 1990s via breakthrough solo debut Little Earthquakes and its stunning follow-up Under The Pink, live performance has been a pivotal piece of Amos’ musical puzzle. The current tour finds her alternating performances between the five divergent personalities found performing on American Doll Posse – the sexy Santa, the waifish Clyde, the political Isabel, the confrontational Pip and Amos herself. So have any of the Posse been more prominent in live shows?
“That’s an interesting question,” Amos muses. “I think that Pip is explosive and I think Santa is a lot of fun and I do rely on those two a lot for powerhouse shows. The other two are complex and in some ways take a lot more internal energy. Isabel is the hardest show I do technically. I don’t know if an audience is ready for Isabel, since she’s very political and you have to have an audience prepared to do more than just shake their booty. Each one of them has affected me in ways that are hard to describe. I’m not the same person I was before I made this album.”
In Slovakia earlier in the year, Amos threw her shoes at a brutish security guard manhandling a fan who attempted to watch her show from the aisle. The singer later suggested knowing how to say ‘cocksucker’ in Slovak would have helped her control the situation.
“My goal is to learn how to say ‘cocksucker’ in every language that exists,” Amos says. “I’d like to know it in every Middle Eastern language – I’d like to be able to say ‘cocksucker’ in Farsi. Everybody needs to know that and I’ll tell you why: if you happen to be in that moment where you need that word and you don’t know how to say it, you’re going to start throwing your shoes at people. I don’t know if you heard what happened but the security guards take themselves very seriously. I understand why they need to clear people from the aisles, but when you have a security guard yelling at an audience member to the point that everybody is turning around looking at him – during Winter – then we all stopped and wanted no more. I don’t like it when people are abusing their authority and so I pulled rank.”
Amos’ back catalogue proves her to be an artist at ease with unnerving frankness, cheeky humour, lyrical fragility and moving narratives. Having sung harrowing first-hand accounts of sexual assault and miscarriage, Amos admits that she and her husband, British producer Mark Hawley, avoid explaining some of her songs to their seven-year-old daughter Natashya.
“There are songs that still go over her head, which is good,” Amos confides. “You’re always walking a fine line with answering a child because the idea to tell the truth and nothing but the truth is not always the best thing to do in life. You have to realise that this person cannot compute this information at this time and it’s just going to wreck their world. We don’t always talk to Tash about some things in the music – especially the sexual stuff.”
The warmth Amos conveys when speaking of her daughter indicates her decision to quit touring is firmly based around a commitment to her family.
“Tash said to me, ‘You know Mummy, sometimes kids at school think I have a charmed life and in some ways I do, being your kid and travelling the world. I love you Mummy and I wouldn’t trade it, but there’s a side to my life that nobody understands.’ I think that’s true – this is Tash’s fifth world tour and there are times when she doesn’t see her bed for months at a time. There are sides to her life that people think are glamorous, but there’s another side to it as well.”
In what now seems like an anticipatory signpost to American Doll Posse, a line on Amos’ 1996 track Hey Jupiter states, ‘Thought I knew myself so well, all the dolls I had’.
“Strange, isn’t it?” Amos agrees. “I know what you’re saying and that dawned on me when I was singing it not so long ago. Sometimes as a composer and a creator you might be working towards something but you are not in a place to contain that work yet. I’ve wondered what it would have been like if I had done [Posse] years ago. I don’t think they would have been anything like they are now, as these women are based on many years of experience, disappointment, realisations and explorations. I don’t think until I became a mum I was able to allow myself to really experience some of these different facets.”
American Doll Posse (Sony/BMG)
Unpublished Interview Material
You personally seem serene these days – have the Doll Posse allowed you to bring agitation back to your music?
“Well being able to hold the Posse requires an ability to ground yourself, an ability to be zen. Imagine stepping into these different characters – it takes a lot of precision and if you are highly wired all the time, as I was in past years (laughs) then sometimes it’s more difficult to focus than when you have a calmness about you. When you’re really able to plug into that it’s easier to change quickly into different personas. In a strange way, being in a more calm, grounded place as a human being has made it possible to contain the girls.”
Whereas some artists distance themselves from using image to promote their work, American Doll Posse again shows you embracing image and music together as part of a symbiotic relationship.
“Well everybody’s got an image. An image is the way that you project yourself to the world and people are going to perceive you in a certain way depending on how you present yourself. If you refuse to admit that then I think you’re lying to yourself, even if you just take a shower and throw on whatever you throw on, it’s still your scraggly image. The ‘I don’t put any effort into my appearance’ is still an image – it’s a face they show the outside world. We all make choices as to what that image is. I’ve studied visual artists over the years and I’ve seen how performance art can have an effect. Some people aren’t strong live performers, as you well know. They might make records, but when you go and see them you’re just kind of bored. Not everybody can step onto a stage and grab a few thousand people and make them feel as if you’re talking to each one of them and only them. That takes a certain kind of energy and you have to realise that when you step onto that stage, what might translate in the studio just doesn’t come across in a different context. Once you understand that you can make choices that might not work, but how I project myself on stage isn’t the Tori I take to playgroup. That Tori does not come to school.”
Did your daughter Tash have a big birthday party this week?
“No, and I think she’s bummed about that. We were flying, so she’s trying to take it like a champ and we’ve tried to make it up to her. We were on the plane coming to Australia and we’d just been in Bora Bora, so we had a little celebration there but there were just a few of us and her Daddy wasn’t there. We took her to Luna Park when we got to Melbourne and we’ve tried to give her a birthday, but she didn’t have a regular seven-year-old’s birthday… When somebody says to her, ‘You have everything’, she wants to turn around and say, ‘You don’t know my life. You have no idea what my life is like.’ I said to her, ‘Nobody knows what your life is like Tash unless they live it. There are other people who might feel similar to you, not because they are touring but because they are a child actor or a sports person. People think they have everything but there are sacrifices involved.’ I had to explain what sacrifices mean.”
Girl Disappearing and Ribbons Undone both look at Natashya growing up and mention horses - does she have a pony?
“She doesn’t, but she was riding when she was little because a friend of ours had a horse. She has an unusual relationship with animals in a way I don’t. I have a lot of friends who do, but I have a relationship with wood and keys and a thing called a piano. Watching Tash relate to these creatures does inspire me to write about it.”
Bouncing Off Clouds returns to ice cream for at least your third time for lyrical content. Do you find that some ideas recur throughout your songs?
“I think that every artist has a palette and sometimes you do pick up a certain symbology or reference that is part of your verbal arsenal. You claim these words and ideas like a charm bracelet and they become a part of you like a tattoo. Over the years in a different song they might mean something very different, but you reach for pictures that make up your story. There are other songwriters that mention things over and over again but they’re different things and they are their tattoo.”
Last time we chatted you said you enjoyed the fact that some of your songs were a little hard to track down, but a year later you released A Piano, which brought together a lot of hard-to-find music. Some fans were disappointed it didn’t contain any of your cover songs, soundtrack tunes or duets with people such as Michael Stipe and Robert Plant – is there any chance of a second archive trawl or is that a full stop on the back catalogue?
“I don’t know. You can’t include everything and we had to make some tough choices but I included a lot of things that I thought told the story. There’s always somebody who’s going to be disappointed, but this was my work as a composer as well, so it wasn’t about including somebody else’s work. That’s like having a birthday party for somebody else’s kid. I think that’s crossing the line, personally!”
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