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The Calgary
Straight Tori Finds Her Inner Berserker Tori Amos’s new recording, from the
choirgirl hotel, comes with all the usual trappings of stardom: lots of
moodily intriguing photographs and drawings of the artist; all the lyrics,
carefully transcribed for sing-along buffs; a listing of who played on which
tracks; and an address for Take to the Sky, her U.K.-based fan club. But there’s
one extra thing that this CD has that most others don’t: a map. Carefully drawn
in a spidery hand, the chart suggests a physical landscape to accompany the
emotional terrain Amos delineates so well in song. The style of the illustration seemed familiar to me, but it wasn’t until I
started reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s “the Hobbit” to my six year old daughter that
I realized where I’d seen it - or something very much like it - before. On the
inside back cover of that fantasy classic you’ll find a similar piece of
cartography; Amos seems to have appropriated the conical tress, meandering
rivers, and craggy mountains of Tolkien’s Wilderland for her own nameless
territory. The singer laughs when I raise the comparison. “Yes,
I was a big Ring Trilogy follower,” she says, on the line from a St.
Louise, Missouri, hotel room. But Tolkien would never have decorated his maps
with such cryptic notations as “valley of the Duel of the gentlemen that weren’t”,
“Hum of the Amazing Echo Plex Shrine”, “Ballerinas that just wander around
endlessly shoeless”, and “Cocaine Lip Gloss sale stand”. Amos may have borrowed
her mapmaking style from the inventor of Middle Earth, but her sense of humour
and her cartography myths are all her own. In fact, there’s little that isn’t singular about Tori Amos. The singer
might have endured repeated comparisons to Kate Bush during the early years of
her solo career - the two women do share an interest in mythology, and similarly
acrobatic vocal styles - but since the release of 1996’s Boys for Pele, Amos
has moved toward an even more idiosyncratic and satisfying fusion of words and
music. “Pele was a real turning point for me,”
she says, adding that both that record and choirgirl hotel were inspired by the
lessons of a Native American “medicine woman”
she studied with. The singer, who is part Cherokee on her mother’s side,
credits the Native healer with putting her in touch with the darker side of their
nature - and giving her a way to use that energy in her art. “She basically taught me that many women pull in
. . .well, she calls them ‘baby demons’. I think a lot of women are trying to
conjure up the prince of darkness - and, as you know, a lot of women pull in
men that are a bit didgy. And she felt that women are trying to access that
side of themselves through these people, instead of realizing that Lucifer is
actually a woman, wears white, and drives an ice cream truck . . .It was a big
realization that I had to kind of go into myself and find the violator in my
own being, and it took about a year of intense work. But I found her, and that
was a real . . .um, big turning point for me. “Before that, I couldn’t really look at the side
of me that is capable of violence,” she continues. “I come more from the victim side, so I couldn’t really
look at that potential in myself. God knows what the circumstances would be to
create that, but I’m sure I made that choice - and maybe did, on some other
plane. And when I was working on the Pele stuff, I began to really see that
there was a killer in me, and there was an abuser in me, and there was a line
that could be crossed where I could become the berserker, or the madwoman. Not
crazymad, but angry mad. Bloodthirsty mad.” Amos has yet to attack anyone with an axe, so it’s relatively safe to assume
that she’s found a way to sublimate her killer instincts in her music. It
certainly seems like that on choirgirl hotel, which - to borrow a phrase from
another fearless female singer-pianist, Veda Hille - is both beautiful and
fierce. There’s a lot of naked emotion here:Amos suffered a miscarriage last
year, and the physical and emotional trauma of that experience is reflected in
both “Spark” and “Playboy Mommy”. Other lyrics seem to address relationships
ranging from the passionate to the perverse, and although Amos’ oblique,
imagistic words aren’t exactly diary frank, they’re obviously heartfelt. Amos has also managed the difficult task of coming up with music that is
both more complex than anything she has written before, and more organic. In
part, that’s because she’s now working with a full-time band - drummer Matt
Chamberlain and guitarist Steve Caton. But it’s also because she’s been brave
enough to try another way of writing. In the past, most of her songs were based
on her virtuosic, if occasionally over-ornate, piano, but many of the tunes on
choirgirl hotel started out as little more than a vocal melody and a rhythmic
pulse. “I would just be playing the wood of the piano
in rhythm, and it was very sketchy,” she explains. “Obviously, when Matt Chamberlain walked in the room
things started to shift in a wonderful way, but I wasn’t tied to the piano as
much as I have been in the past. She was there, but sometimes I would just tie
my right hand behind my back. “You have to create space sometimes,” she
adds. “And cutting live with a drummer was a huge
thing, because you can’t try and be [funk bass guitar star] Bootsy Collins and all. You have to create room for the
other players, which was a new way of approaching it for me. Before, on all the
other records, everything worked around the piano and vocal, which were cut
live. Now, it was drums, programming, piano, and vocal, all cut live.” The result is a record with incredible presence, captivating tunes, and
intriguing words. But best of all is that the songs possess a strange. Almost
incantatory power: they awake in listeners a sense of their own emotional
possibilities, of thier own hopes and fears. “I’m glad you feel that,” Amos says. “I always hope that it becomes that, because, as a
writer, you really don’t just want people to see you in it. You really want
them to see themselves in it. That’s when alchemy begins to happen.” |