|
Philadelphia
Daily News Monday, she’ll be featuring material from both albums at a
sold-out Keswick Theater show and is likely to return to play a bigger venue
like the Tower or Mann this summer, she says. Much of the first solo album, Amos says, was sparked by
bitter experiences with men. It is most
dramatically revealed on an autobiographical song of violent rape called “Me
and a Gun.” Ironically, that’s also the
number that first attracted a significant following for Amos in Great Britain,
where this North Carolina native resides. On songs like “The Waitress” and “Cornflake Girl,” her new
album delves more into “violence between women,”
she explains. “Women can be hardest on other
women. There’s a deep betrayal between women, a viciousness and a lying. We
don’t own up to our part in it, how we treat each other badly and how we blame
the men. Until we can look at that realistically, we’ll never be as strong as
we could be.” Another new Amos song, “Bells for Her,” is about “girlfriends who turn on each other because they can’t take
responsibility for the fact they’ve turned their power over to a man,”
Amos says. “I don’t want to hear about all the excuses
anymore. That’s not gonna make us heal.” Amos has never had therapy, she volunteers. She works out
her angst in her music and live performances, and in backstage conversations with empathetic fans and the press. She
says “one out of every three women I meet” has
endured a harrowing sexual experience like her own. She credits a “wise woman in New Mexico” with leading her out of the
darkness. “She
told me ‘You can’t change what’s happened to you. But there’s a man here with
love and desire for you. First you’ll have to let go of your Victims Anonymous
badge.’” Amos has been speaking through her art practically from
infancy. At age 4, this brash daughter of a Methodist minister was composing
her first songs. A year later, while
studying the cover of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” album, she sent her parents
into fits with the declaration, “This is what I want to
do.” A self-proclaimed “freak child who had really good rhythm,” Amos trained
between the ages of 5 and 11 at the acclaimed Peabody Conservatory in
Baltimore, only to be dismissed for “irreconcilable
differences” - a passion for pop and a too-easy gift for piano noodling. “I came in playing by ear and
could play almost everything I heard. The whole idea was that to be a classical
pianist you had to learn to read music.
I knew that, but the way they did it was to try to break the ear so that
it would force me to read.” Making the best of her dismissal, Amos’ father told her, “If you’re not going to play in a conservatory, at least be
good at popular music.” “The only thing he could equate
with pop was Judy Garland, with cabaret performing. Mention Joni Mitchell and
he’d say, ‘What?’” That’s how Amos found herself, at the tender age of 13 and
14, playing weekends in Washington, D.C., at a gay bar called Mr. Henry’s and
at a “mixed clientele” spot called Mr. Smith’s. “My parents chaperoned. The experience
was fantastic. I played standards - a little Gershwin and Cole Porter, your
Billie Holiday stuff. I’d also do
whatever was current - Zeppelin, Carole King, Billy Joel, Elton John. Gloria
Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ was a biggie. You had to do ‘Send In the Clowns’ and
‘Feelings’ at least five times a night. Plus your Beatles and Stones catalog.” Most musicians never escape lounges. Performing “covers”
dulls them for more creative work. “What I got from playing so many
different kinds of music was the possibilities,” says Amos. “You see what can be
done with 12 notes and you start developing your vocabulary.” Amos finds it funny that she’s compared to ethereal
singer-songwriters like Kate Bush. “Women get compared… for surface reasons rather than
from the interior motivations that drive our work. A lot of women are talking
now about emotional things, but guys are very emotional, too. They’re
raging all over.” In fact, she admits to being a closet Jimmy Page fan who
once aimed to duplicate his guitar feel on piano and tried to yell “like I had razor blades down my throat.” Amos veered
in the mid-‘80s with a hard-rock
band and an album called “Y Kant Tori Read.” A Billboard magazine review that
dismissed her as a “bimbo” still causes her grief, but she learned from the
experience. “You can dress like a rock chick
and pump the hair spray. But people smelled the dishonesty. My intentions weren’t to make music but to
get attention.” “The bottom line for me is that I
play the piano and sing like a choir girl. I learned to accept it and stopped
trying to do plastic surgery on my instrument.” Copyright Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. 1994 |