|
Dallas Morning News By Thor Christensen “Rebel, well...” Tori Amos tires of her unconventional
stance Tori Amos- the queen of confessional angst-pop- has a new confession to make:
She’s sick of being a rebel. “I was a rebel for such a long time...to the
point where I put on these sexual shows for the sake of shock value,” she
says. “I’m tired of being a rebel. Now I just want
to be me.” That doesn’t mean the new Tori has started following the beaten path. Her
latest and most ambitious album, Boys For Pele, features a jaw-dropping
photo of the singer-pianist suckling a piglet. The music on the CD is an
oft-bizarre brew of rock, opera, new age and Broadway styles, and the lyrics
sound like Alice in Wonderland channeled through Erica Jong. But while she’s still weird after all these years, Ms. Amos, 32, says her
life and music have changed drastically in the wake of her 1994 split from Eric
Rosse, her longtime boyfriend and producer. “I hit bottom
while I was out on the road for Under the Pink,” she says, referring
to her last album. “I separated from a soul mate,
and for the first time I started to look at my beliefs about men, women,
equality, honor, disrespect, passion, sensuality- all these things. As I wrote
the songs for Boys for Pele, I started valuing myself through my own
eyes, instead of valuing me through the eyes of others, like the press or a lover
or whatever.” Eyes have been fixed on Ms. Amos for most of her life. A child prodigy at
classical piano, she enrolled at Baltimore’s prestigious Peabody Institute at
age 5, but later lost her scholarship when she insisted on performing her own
pop songs. She also grew up trying to elude the rigid outlook of the Protestant church,
she says. “As a minister’s daughter, shock value
was part of my palette as a painter. I was the girl who taught the boy’s choir
in red leather pants...It was the way I survived serious Victorian Christianism,
the way I managed not to become their projection of what a Christian woman is.”
Today, her music boasts more references to God than a Billy Graham speech -
only she’s not exactly singing the Lord’s praises. In “God” for example, she sings, “God sometimes you just don’t come through/Do
you need a woman to look after you?” For the “God” video, the singer rolls on
the ground and lets a symbolic plague of rats scurry over her body and face. On
Ms. Amos’ new album, a character says, “Honey, we’re recovering Christians,”
while another questions the sex of Jesus: “It’s time to tell the world/It was a
girl back in Bethlehem.” And on her current tour, she’s been singing R.E.M.’s “Losing
My Religion”. But while she continues to question religion in her music, the singer says
she’s distancing her career from her other noted obsession: sex. In the past,
her concerts were libido-crazed affairs in which she used her piano bench like
a marital aid and talked about performing acts of self-love while listening to Led
Zepplin II. But that was the old Tori, she says. “God knows what I was up to [onstage] a few years ago. I was just not comfortable with my
womanhood, and I had other stuff going on that I’ve since worked through. Now
it’s shifted from being a sexual show to just being a passionate show, on a
physical level, a mental level, and a spiritual level,” she says. Spiritual lyrics are Ms. Amos’ trademark. But because she often writes them
in cryptic fashion, fans demand to know what her songs “mean”- which misses the
point of her music, she says. “People will say
things like ‘Is “Muhammed My Friend” about a cat?’ and I’ll reply with something
like ‘Well...I’m sure someone has a cat named Muhammed.’ I try to write lyrics
that don’t have a literal translation. They’re like dreams, where the lamp isn’t
always the lamp and the sea represents something other than the sea. It’s like
when you’re trying to figure out what a mental patient is thinking by looking
at their art. Sometimes you have to go through another doorway to find the
essence of something.” Many of her devotees think the essence of Ms. Amos is that of a “girl who
thinks really deep thoughts” (to borrow one of her lyrics), and the singer
plays up that image in interviews. She speaks in a whisper, as if her ideas are
too intense for passersby to hear. She punctuates her sentences with deep
breaths and sighs (sort of like her singing style), and she answers no question
without first mulling it over. Asked about the misconceptions she thinks people have about her, she pauses
for 20 seconds while cooking up a response. “People
think I don’t have a sense of humor at all, that I don’t know how to have a
laugh over a margarita,” she says finally. “But they’re just not feeling what I’m saying.
My humor is like a butter knife, not a butcher knife. My humor is there - it’s
just not very obvious.” |