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Los Angeles
Times Brazen. Precious. Poetic. Profane. Tori Amos is some bundle of contradictions. But after a misguided swing away
from her girl-at-a-piano roots, she found a way to make it all work, turning
her passion for the instrument into success as a New Age punk By Chris Willman, a frequent contributor to Calendar. If they ever want to do a modern-day remake of The Piano, Tori Amos
is their woman. And not just because she says in all earnestness that through most of her
life the instrument has been her “lifeline,” or because she proves it
repeatedly by packing her old-fashioned instrument back and forth on journeys
between her apartment in England and her boyfriend’s in New York. It’s not so much the packing logistics as the sensibilities—personal
intensity, resentment of religion, pride in sexuality, a near-spousal
attachment to her 88s—that make it seem as if maybe writer-director Jane
Campion picked Amos’ brain. She scares people sometimes onstage, seeming to
forge an overt erotic connection with her instrument (and bench) usually
reserved for guys and guitars. Her focus on the instrument makes her a bit of an anomaly in the
contemporary rock realm. Amos’ new album, “Under the Pink” (see review, Page
55), is, at heart, a piano and vocal record, even more than its popular
predecessor, “Little Earthquakes.” Never mind the guitar, orchestration, et al.—those
are mostly expressionist embellishments tacked on to the elemental core that
Amos sets down. “My piano and vocal performances were done first
on everything,” she says of the album. “Then
everything else started to come in, and the songs were pretty clear about what
they’d allow on and what they wouldn’t. I’d start to get sick when I heard
something that just wasn’t gonna work. It was like an immediate
to-the-bathroom,” Amos says, feigning a throw-up motion. Anyone too associated with the piano nowadays begs to be considered an overly
earnest sort or, worse, a New Age artist. The 29-year-old Amos, on the other
hand, is at least as profane as she is precious and as likely to write a song
about wanting to kill someone as about faeries. Forthright, in-your-face and almost exaggeratedly brazen, but not without a
classic sense of the pretty and poetic, she just could be the missing link between
Carole King and Kurt Cobain, New Age and hard core. Amos aspires toward the
truer sense of the terms, given her penchants both for the confrontational and
the cosmic. On her upcoming tour the New Age punk will be traveling sans band
again, finding the uncluttered approach the best flight path toward her stated
goal of “wanting to shake some emotions loose
inside.” “I like the freedom of being alone because there’s
an intimacy that I develop with the audience that I wouldn’t otherwise,”
she says, munching on popcorn in her record company’s West Hollywood offices. “I mean, they could just as easily bond with the drummer.
And the more distractions I give them, the easier it is for them to avoid what
I’m talking about.” Only at one point in her life did Amos more or less give up the piano. It
was also, not coincidentally, the point at which she gave up her principles. “I’ll show you a place where I ended up on my
kitchen floor of my flat,” she says - quickly adding the substitute word
apartment, suddenly mindful of the fact that she’s not in England right now. Where
she is is Hollywood, driving around the area near the Chinese Theatre where she
lived for several years in the late ‘80s. During the latter part of her
seven-year residence, she labored under the band name Y Kant Tori Read,
releasing one album even she says is awful. It disappeared with such little
trace that Amos cultists now pay a premium for rare copies. At the time, the
record’s failure had her laid out on the floor in a depression for weeks. Amos has no problem admitting she sold herself out, at market value, to get
that record deal: “Seven years I would turn in tapes to record
companies; after seven years of rejection of my own music, I believed them when
they said, ‘This girl-at-her-piano thing is never gonna happen... Get a band,
do metal, do dance, do whatever’ - and I did them all. I had my limit of how
much rejection I could take. I didn’t believe in myself enough. “So I turned over my opinions to everybody else
and refused to express what I was feeling in music anymore and invented this
character for myself... I forgot that if it isn’t in my heart or if I’m not
getting off on it, maybe people could tell. I didn’t think about that one. When
‘Y Kant Tori Read’ bombed, I didn’t have any respect for myself.” Finally her depression was eased by more therapeutic writing. “I didn’t even have a piano in the house. I’d trashed
that before. So I rented this old upright and just started to write what I was
feeling, and it became ‘Little Earthquakes.’ But it took Atlantic
(Records) by surprise, obviously, when I turned in
this music.” From all indications, Amos is the pride of Atlantic now, a critically respected
artist who is a smash in Britain and whose last album eventually sold half a
million copies in America. Insiders maintain that “Little Earthquakes” almost
never got out of the gate, though, so dismayed were some label execs when they
first got wind of its quirkiness. Fortunately for all involved, she stood her
ground. Amos developed a flair for defiance early in life, chafing against what
was expected of her both as a Methodist minister’s daughter and a musical child
prodigy in her native North Carolina. “I couldn’t become the concert pianist the
teachers and parents wanted me to become,” she says. “I couldn’t sit playing somebody else’s music for 12
hours and be told that my interpretation was wrong and be OK with it. How do you
know how Debussy would feel about my interpretation of his music? “I would sit and tell Bartok secrets. I would
play him some John Lennon, and then I’d play something that I wrote and go, ‘So
this is what I wanted to tell you,’ and then I’d play some of his music and
feel like he was telling me something. “I felt like I had relationships with these dead
icons that, to me, would have been just hanging out in a house with loads of
people, making music and probably having sex with most of ‘em. Their music
became a champagne social thing, when these guys were the Nirvana of their day.”
Fundamentalism is still a sore point with Amos too. References to the symbols
and trappings of Christianity are a constant in her work, usually with an
irreverent bent—as in the new album’s “Icicle,” which portrays a very young
Amos masturbating while the family sings hymns downstairs, or the first single,
“God,” an archly intoned protest against the patriarchal. “Lust and love were two separate things and
should never and would never meet” is how Amos characterizes her
upbringing. “What that means is you will always be
at war with yourself... I was a walking dividing symbol... I was so ashamed of
my passion.” In typical preacher’s-daughter fashion, when Amos rebelled, she says, she “became a rock chick. Which I had to do. If I hadn’t
become a rock chick, I would be dead today, so long live hair spray.” Amos’ post-“chick” previous album, but one that does, “Baker Baker,”
acknowledges that “I was the one that wasn’t
emotionally available,” she admits. “We’re
always blaming the guys, saying, ‘You’re not sensitive enough; why can’t you
just be more understanding?’ And then when they are more sensitive, we kick ‘em
in the face and go for the hockey player. It’s like ‘Dominate me, just dominate
me. Not long - I’ll time you - just a little!’” She says she’s come to believe that the battle isn’t between the sexes but
between those willing to grow and those not. That’s brought out in several new
numbers, including “Cornflake Girl,” “Bells for Her” and “Waitress,” that deal
with “ female betrayal,” or the shattering of the illusion of the sisterhood. Amos is constantly defying preconceptions: She speaks of different songs she
has written taking on their own life and holding conversations with her as if
they’re spirits, yet she’ll make light of people who have had too many “crystal
suppositories.” She holds evolutionary ideals but admits that she can come off
seeming personally ruthless. She’ll mock modern feminism in one breath and get
almost tearful talking about Alice Walker’s last book and the history of
patriarchy in the next. So, not surprisingly, the two most constant criticisms of Amos among her
detractors are seemingly oxymoronic ones: that she’s precious, or that she’s
overbearingly aggressive. She doesn’t strain too mightily to deflect either
barb. “I guess I’m both,” she says. “It just depends what day you find me. I’m Sven the Viking
on one hand, and then I’m Miss Mollusk.” She goes reflective for a moment, and comes up satisfied: “I don’t know - if I were hitchhiking, I’d liked to get
picked up by me.” |