Tori Amos: Piece by Piece Read online

  Dedication

  Tori:

  This book would not be what it is without my daughter, Natashya Lórien Hawley who has taught me to laugh … and who better not read this book before she's sixteen …

  Ann:

  For my daughter, Rebecca Brooklyn Weisbard

  (To quote my friend)

  Where the words jump off my pen and into your pages

  Pick out your cloud …

  Contents

  Preface

  INTRODUCTION The Soul's Dance

  CHAPTER ONE Corn Mother: Genealogies

  Song Canvas: “Ireland”

  Song Canvas: “The Beekeeper”

  Song Canvas: “Mother Revolution”

  CHAPTER TWO Mary Magdalene: The Erotic Muse

  Song Canvas: “The Power of Orange Knickers”

  Song Canvas: “God”

  Song Canvas: “Marys of the Sea”

  Song Canvas: “Lust”

  Song Canvas: “I'm Not in Love”

  CHAPTER THREE Saraswati: The Art of Composition

  Song Canvas: “Garlands”

  Song Canvas: “Parasol”

  Song Canvas: “Sweet the Sting” and “Sleeps with Butterflies”

  Song Canvas: “Cars and Guitars”

  CHAPTER FOUR Demeter: The Journey into Motherhood

  Song Canvas: “Pandora's Aquarium”

  Song Canvas: “Muhammad, My Friend”

  Song Canvas: “Ribbons Undone”

  CHAPTER FIVE Dionysus: Bringing the Music Forth

  Song Canvas: “Wampum Prayer”

  Song Canvas: “Winter”

  CHAPTER SIX Sane Satyrs and Balanced Bacchantes: The Touring Life's Gypsy Caravan

  Song Canvas: “Martha's Foolish Ginger”

  CHAPTER SEVEN Venus: Creating a Public Self

  Song Canvas: “Goodbye Pisces”

  CHAPTER EIGHT The Lioness: Surviving the Music Business

  Song Canvas: “Take to the Sky”

  Song Canvas: “Hoochie Woman”

  Song Canvas: “Witness”

  Song Canvas: “Barons of Suburbia”

  CONCLUSION Quan Yin: The Art of Compassion

  Song Canvas: “Jamaica Inn”

  INDIVIDUALS INTERVIEWED

  THE CREW

  John Witherspoon, Manager

  Chelsea Laird, Manager

  Mark Hawley, Studio and Live Sound Engineer, Husband

  Marcel van Limbeek, Studio Engineer and Live Monitor

  Andy Solomon, Production Manager

  Matt Chamberlain, Drummer

  Jon Evans, Bassist

  Dan Boland, Lighting Designer

  Joel Hopkins, Security Director

  Duncan Pickford, Chef

  Alison Evans, Tour Documentarian

  Karen Binns, Stylist and Friend

  Dr. Marie Dobyns, Internist/Sister

  Loren Haynes, Photographer

  PREFACE

  The first time I met Tori Amos, during one of her promotional whirls through New York nearly a decade ago, I thought we might continue talking forever, given the right cushy sofa and all the green tea in the world. As it was, we had barely over an hour until I had to hand her off to another journalist. I'd always heard that Tori was a talker, the rare sort of artist who really connects with each interviewer. Much later, I would learn she's the same effusive, engaged person in the presence of her road crew, her daughter's nanny, or the fans who faithfully gather before every show on her endless touring schedule. Yes, this woman is a talker, but never in a frivolous way.

  Tori is one of those people whose life unfolds in conversation. Her main interlocutor is herself: she understands that each human's way of being evolves through the interplay of many different soul elements, and she knows how to make her own inner voices meet, fight, love and co-create. She is also one of the most open collaborators I've known, not only in terms of her music, which she fully claims for herself in order to better welcome key players eventually, but in

  her daily existence. Tori is the woman in your neighborhood who stops by your garden, pauses, and gets you going for three hours on the topic of lilies that grow best in winter sun. Later, you'll walk by her pea patch and discover the most spectacular flower, not exactly what you planted, but something that shows the influence of the tips you shared. That's Tori—open to the world so that she can better create a microcosm of her own.

  When Tori asked me to work on the project now crackling across these pages, we immediately agreed that a typical star memoir didn't make sense. Autobiographies imply finality. You're not dead yet, but you've finished enough of yourself to draw conclusions. Tori knew that her creative life is still unfolding, absolutely. Besides, in her communicative way, she wanted to offer a book that would begin an exchange of ideas, not about her career alone, but about the artist's role in general, and how muse and music survive in circumstances both hostile and ideal. Tori's process, it turns out, is a way of formalizing the push to create while still keeping its mystery alive. She has also confronted the common problems all artists face in a society that both deifies and undervalues that role— thorny matters of image, business practices, working with collaborators, and balancing a personal and a public life. We wanted to find the places where Tori's experience connects to the larger community doing what some theorists fancily call “symbolic work.”

  We hit upon the scheme of an ongoing conversation about Tori's artistic life and how it relates to the larger matter of creativity, especially women's creativity, in a historic moment of great potential and risk. The chapters here emerged first through face-to-face dialogue, then in cyberspace exchanges, where they were challenged and honed by both of us. Some passages are pure Tori; others come from talks edited by me; still others are a mix of her vision and my revision. I've provided a framework that moves beyond personal views, into the realm of myth and archetype, a territory where both of us like to roam. And there are other voices—Tori's inner circle, providing context and perspective.

  This is not your standard rock star's I-was-born-a-poor-genius self-deification, nor is it the opposite, an attempt by an exceptional person to convince people that she's just folks. Tori Amos is not your ordinary girl, but she has much to say to all of us interested in what it means to be a woman, a creator, a nurturer, a fighter, a part of all the universes that merge into a life. I am honored to have been her talking partner, and we both hope that you will find your own voice in the spaces between our words.

  —Ann Powers

  INTRODUCTION

  The Soul's Dance

  ANN: There is no way to capture the image of the spirit that moves creation. The photographer's shutter cannot move fast enough; the writer's pen does not hold enough ink. Men might reduce her to a romantic notion of “the muse,” art's glorified office assistant, but she demolishes those set notions with a single swoop of her hand Look at her for one moment and see a flash of teeth: a lioness. In the next, she becomes a beautiful dancer, laughing with a lute in her hands. She can be as huge as the earth itself, or as quiet as the underworld She wanders like a mother searching for her lost child, like a lover seeking her mate, like a woman made mad with wine and her own power, free in ecstasy. The force of creativity manifests in innumerable ways, and those who serve her as artists give themselves over to her constant transformations.

  Systems have been devised over time to describe the dazzling change and deep consistency that combine to form the human soul In ancient days, people spoke of gods and goddesses; today, psychological jargon often substitutes for belief in divine rock stars. Call them archetypes, icons, or avatars—these modes of being lend order to existence and character to artistic expression.

&n
bsp; As part of a long tradition of artists, Tori Amos calls the path of archetypes her way. In her songs, she draws the thread between her own life and the stories she draws from the underground river of myth; through her voice and her piano, she connects with the music, celebrates. Amos has found a way to sustain herself and her work, despite the lousy odds on the pop music betting floor Since childhood, over four decades of composing and performing, Amos has scrutinized and renewed herself, piece by piece. She has been that feline queen, that graceful dancer, that sorrowful matriarch. Through it all, she remains somehow herself. This is the story of her unfinished evolution.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  I've always told you the songs are separate from me. Yes, I write them; I gather the elements. But I do so by going around and listening to other people's stories. I watch the audience; I study how people react to what I've already created, and that also goes into new songs. It's like being a chronicler, instead of just somebody who invents. I research and put what I discover together in a form—which is what every artist really does. In every songwriter's suitcase there is a kind of musical paint box that we take with us everywhere we go.

  The romantic myth of the artist says that you are the Source. I have no illusion about that. I think this goes back to my grandfather. That was his great gift to me—Native Americans don't believe they are the Source. They have access to the Source. Endless access. But don't get confused.

  I can access, but so can a librarian. They can tell you what you'll find in the seventeenth aisle. It took me years of figuring out how my own creativity operates until I finally realized that it is what I'm comfortable with, and that's my role.

  Another way I often think about creation is in architectural terms. We say archetype, and that makes me think of architecture. The songs don't spring whole into existence; they are built. It's a structural process. A life is structural too, or at least the story we construct from our lives as we go along. In my music, I use texts—history, mythologies, my own stories—to construct other texts. I go to something very tangible, like a book or a visceral experience, to create something intangible.

  Since recordings have existed, it may seem that music is as tangible as anything else, but in its essence music is ether. Before writing existed, people had to sit and listen; you couldn't bottle it up and take it with you. Songwriting is, in a way, a return to that state, through the maze of texts that define how we live. You make something ethereal out of materials that are often all too solid.

  So I am immersed in the architecture of texts. I came to this place very young. When I was a child, my mother would read to me every morning. Children's books at first, but then there was a point, and I wasn't that old, when she would read her favorite poems and short stories—Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Browning, William Faulkner. She had been a literature major in college and stopped after two years to become a minister's wife. She transferred that love of the book to me. As a minister's wife she was surrounded by the Good Book, but Eastern Cherokee was very much in her soul and she was inspired by my grandfather Poppa's stories. And then my father was a preacher, a man of The Book, working in an oral tradition. My mother gave me the text and my father gave me theology. I often think that if I'd been stolen and brought up by somebody who didn't read to me, I might have music, but I might not be a songwriter. I needed my mother to give me the keys to the library.

  The root or the structure of my songwriting is the voice that comes out of the piano, and, of course, my mother's books. She was reading me stories that were fairly airtight. I mean, talk about structure. Take a look at Poe's “Telltale Heart.” So the structures of the Western musical tradition were imprinted on my brain in tandem with the structures of fiction and poetry. The literary tradition may now commonly be viewed as separate from music, but I didn't experience them that way. Instead I was taught to build bridges between them—no musical pun intended—early on.

  When I try to define my work, I keep going back to the language of architecture, because it is multidimensional. I've always been drawn to books by architects; I try to look at building plans, to discover the secret passageways architects devise to allow entry and exit, to understand how they might create solidity or flow in a building. These choices resemble those that songwriters must make. When I want to learn from other writers’ songs, I spend a lot of time examining their frameworks, stripping them down in my mind, listening over and over. I feel as though I'm sitting with another architect's blueprints. I see the patterns within the songs, the word choices they make, the voicings within the arrangements, all that. The most important ingredient might not be the most obvious. An incredible melody might be hidden within a distracting arrangement, or by a dissonant chord structure.

  Houses, pianos—these inanimate objects are alive for me. They are made of primal materials: wood, stone, metal. Within such objects you can find an animate soul. If you gathered together a geneticist, an architect, a physician, a historian, a geologist, an archaeologist, and somebody who works with the psyche and said, “Define the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem,” what would they say it's made of? Is it only the mortar and the stone, or does it contain what people have projected onto it? It has taken something on. It has taken something on that cannot be defined just by using visual perception. You can “put it under a microscope” and you still won't be able to prove scientifically what it is that people are feeling when they stand facing this Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. I'm interested in the composition of an object as it goes beyond the obvious. I feel the same way about musical composition. Songs, texts, are alive. I'm not saying they have two arms and two legs and a head like an alien. But there's a consciousness there, an autonomy. I'm a co-creator, of course, but this hubris that a lot of writers have in which they think that they're the Source—that's a lie. This is one reason I'm so drawn to a song's architecture, to studying what a song is made of and why it works, how a sonic space is created that invites people in, what makes a listener start to listen. I'm interested in the moment in which a creation begins to live.

  CHELSEA LAIRD:

  There's a kind of enigma that people pick up on surrounding Tori's aura, her presence, and some people get it and some people read it wrong. She's very spiritual—not necessarily in a religious sense—and it's more for strength and inspiration. Doing this day in and day out, writing hundreds of songs every year, you have to have a source for inspiration. She got labeled a fairy princess early on, which she finds amusing. That has influenced, not to mention limited, how people choose to see and hear her. Don't ask me where that came from: some journalist decided they couldn't define Tori's relationship with certain theories, gods and goddesses, and yes, fairies? Not sure. I suppose it was easier for people early in her career to label it “freaky” so they didn't have to admit they didn't understand. But seriously, have you listened to the lyrics? Are you having trouble with them? Don't worry, so do I. But do your research. It's really this sort of odd thing for me, knowing her as well as I do, that people really have some interesting explanations of who she is and what she's writing about. As a result we have gotten every single frickin’ fairy trinket you can imagine.

  ANN: Through sometimes irritating experience, Amos has come to understand how reductive most contemporary forms of expression can be when it comes to archetypes.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  In the West, we have a culture that's unaware of myth; it's not really taught, though it's ingrained on some level. In so many films and so many books, the same stories are told over and over and over again. These are just different patterns from which artists pull. But in every case, myth is the blueprint. Tori Amos is not the blueprint of a nurturing mother. That archetype already exists. Myth is the fabric of our psyche. It's our cultural DNA.

  In the space of performance and composition, I am not above the law. I follow strict law. I've done a lot of reading and studying, and the Jungian way was my way. That's the way that worked for me, with shadow. Taking on
some of these different myths, I create a space for them to enact something. I'm in service to them. What do I say to people who don't know how to interpret my songs? You don't read the Bible literally. I thought parables were very clear, yet a lot of people have problems with them when they pop up today. I can't tell people that maybe they need to read some books, brush up on their archetypes. They could probably go on a web site and figure it out. But literalizing is very much part of the patriarchy. If you want something made concrete, I'll give you some shoes and pour some cement in them and we'll drop you off in the river.

  Are there new archetypes being created every day as a result of new developments? Things have changed in a way. I understand that certain things haven't existed before as we know them on this planet, stemming from technological advances, for example. And it'll be intriguing to see how it plays itself out. Maybe in a few hundred years we'll see what new myths arise from the experience of computer viruses, for example, or bio-genetics. But what, as a songwriter, I see now isn't a new paradigm; it's combinations of the old stories. And those combinations can be endless.

  We have pop stars, actors, and rock stars who become the modern archetypes, but neither the artists nor their fans necessarily integrate what they're bringing into play. They don't always explore the depth of the patterns that operate in the specific archetype they are “dancing” with. Sometimes an artist is dancing so intently with an archetype that they have one foot on the curb and another foot in the air. If as an artist you forget to disengage with the archetype, then when you “come back down to earth” you can fall off that curb. Falling off the curb is not impossible for any artist, and it's a scary prospect. We all know artists who have fallen off that curb and self-destructed. The fatal thing artists can do is to begin believing they are these archetypes, even if the press does and even if the public does. These archetypes are beyond time, are beyond the rules of life and death. We will die and Aphrodite will live on as we are decrepit; the next young piano player a hundred years, two hundred years, three hundred years later, will sway her own hips, sing her own song, and dance the timeless dance with Aphrodite.