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Phoenix New
Times Mystic Pieces Tori Amos unloads ethereal baggage at
Choirgirl Hotel By Liz Montalbano “The shocking thing about Oklahoma [is] it was
the only thing I was allowed to play when I was little,” Tori Amos says
from Omaha, Nebraska. She’s at a stop in her tour supporting her latest musical exploration into
the human psyche, From the Choirgirl Hotel, and the prairie city seems to have
inspired her to bring up the 1943 Broadway musical. “I had all of this religious music I was
learning, so I learned the soundtrack at a very young age. But I was watching
it last night with one of my British friends, and I never realized . . . the
S&M references, the feminist references. It’s very overt.” She begins singing, her mind perhaps shuttling back to her childhood in
North Carolina and later Maryland as Myra Ellen Amos, the piano prodigy
daughter of a Methodist-minister father and a part-Cherokee mother. “Okay, here it is,” she finally says,
after singing a few bars. “’Never have I asked the
August sky where has last July gone; never will I.’ It’s in poetry form, but it’s
very clear that she will not crawl for a man on any level—she will not break
for him, she will not be there just to serve him.” Such a feminist deconstruction of a campy musical tune is not surprising
coming from a woman who once sang, “So you can make me come, that doesn’t make
you Jesus” to a gloating lover. That was on “Precious Things” from her 1992
solo debut Little Earthquakes. While Kurt Cobain lyrically prepared the world
for his self-inflicted demise and Eddie Vedder whined about the fame he
willingly sought for years, Amos put her own demons to classical piano pop,
with not a crunchy guitar in sight. One song—a first-person account of Amos’
own rape—even dared to go a cappella. Grunge and Amos did have another thing in common, besides breaking at
roughly the same time—personal angst, and lots of it. “Little
Earthquakes was my diary,” Amos says of that striking first record, a
far cry from a failed attempt to be a classically trained Lita Ford with Y Kant
Tori Read. She attributes that first foray into popular music—glam metal that somehow
compelled her to brandish a saber on the album cover—to frustration. “I had been sending out my tapes since I was 13
- for seven years,” she says. “You have to
understand seven years. That was almost half my life. So I’d gotten serious
rejection, hundreds of rejections. They just kept saying the girl and her piano
thing was over, [that] Carole King was the last.” She eventually proved them wrong, but not before she compromised prodigious
talent, squandered years of training and, even worse, she says, let self-doubt
navigate her professional life. “I started to believe them, that maybe I was on
the wrong path,” she remembers. “That’s
where I just started to say, ‘Well, what do I need to do to get signed, because
I can’t play clubs for too much longer.’ “I thought, ‘Let me see if I can write in
another medium.’ And I really couldn’t. Other people can, because if something
comes from your personality and is a really truthful side of your persona, no
matter how wacky it is, people buy that. . . . I was trying to wear someone else’s
clothes.” Fortunately, Amos shed her corset and carved out her own niche. After
Earthquakes, there was Under the Pink in 1994. Though the lyric material
remained confessional, Pink’s songs were more dramatically orchestrated in a
funky, groove-friendly way, and landed her Top 40 hits with the radio-friendly,
albeit weird, singles “Cornflake Girl” and “God.” On the latter, Amos actualized something she’d only flirted with on
Earthquakes: bringing revisionist myth to the pop song. Lashing out against
phallocentric fundamentalism, Amos mused on radios around the country that
perhaps God “needs a woman to look after” Him, thus giving female voice to the
Big Guy a couple of years before Joan Osborne envisioned Him puking up a
hangover on the bus seat next to you. Then came 1996’s Boys for Pele, Amos’ breakup album. She’d just split with
partner and co-producer Eric Rosse, and retreated to a church in Ireland to
nurse her wounds, something that, from the looks of the record’s inset,
required her to breast-feed a pig. But her relationship postmortem also produced her most effective work to
date: a haunting collection of nightmares and love songs that delves into
traditional myth and retreats even further into the subconscious. Pele, like Earthquakes, also had songs most conducive to Amos’ live shtick:
sexily straddling a piano bench with just her fingers and voice to carry her.
For Amos, it was an effective way to perform since, having attended a
conservatory at the tender age of 5, she was most comfortable at a piano.
Despite Amos’ often indecipherable monologues between songs about her imaginary
life, audiences and critics alike loved it. With her wild red hair and
passionate writhing, Amos reincarnated the piano as a viable commercial option,
and probably caused much consternation among the music execs who’d previously
denied her a deal. Like Pele, Amos’ latest effort, From the Choirgirl Hotel, also was borne of
an acutely painful personal loss. Toward the end of a rigorous tour for Pele,
Amos discovered she was expecting a child with Mark Hawley, her sound engineer
whom she’s since married. “It was a surprise, but we were really thrilled,”
Amos says of the news. She decided to take some time off from music to be a
mother. Unfortunately, she didn’t get the chance. “Around
three months, I lost the baby,” she says quietly, her voice cracking a
bit. “I thought I was out of the woods and
everything, so it was a really painful thing. She was a little girl, and I was
really connected to her. I had to deal with understanding that I’d never hold
her in a physical form.” As any artist will attest, creativity feeds on personal angst, and Amos’
muse took advantage of the crisis of what she calls “being
in no man’s land.” She explains in characteristically mystical terms. “In
a sense, it’s almost as if I was walking with the walking dead. I say that
because she [the baby] was very much alive for me, but my contact with her was
always cerebral, almost intangible. And yet it was so real. “She taught me things that many people in
physical form haven’t taught me, [such as] surrendering,” she continues.
Choirgirl Hotel “came out of the loss of her and
[out of the feeling] that you can’t be the woman you were before you held life
in your body.” The new record clutches to the pain of Amos’ miscarriage like a lifeboat,
and it’s evident the ship’s going down even from the first tune, “Spark,” on
which she laments, “She’s convinced she could hold back a glacier, but she
couldn’t keep a baby alive.” From there the lyrics once again evoke myth, the
masochism of relationships, addiction and even Jackie Kennedy on the day JFK
was killed—not your typical pop fare, but for Amos it’s a walk in the park. Musically, Amos reinvents herself yet again. Tori the Piano Princess has
become Tori the Goth Goddess, ditching her singer/songwriter gig for synths and
a live drummer. If it wasn’t for the signature voice, piano pretzelings and
occasional sparse ballad, Choirgirl Hotel might be mistaken for a languorous
Nine Inch Nails record. Amos said she spent a great deal of time “on the
water” in South Florida before writing songs for Choirgirl, and the push
and pull of tides is certainly evident in her preoccupation with rhythm, which
she also says was inspired by a studio first. “We cut the album live with a drummer, which I’ve
never done,” Amos explains. “Normally I cut
live piano/vocals, and everything then is built around that performance,
whereas Choirgirl was about piano/vocal/synth in one room cut live with the
drummer in the other room.” And that drummer wasn’t just any old session guy. It was Matt Chamberlain,
most recently of Critters Buggin’, and formerly drummer for the spacey,
neo-hippie outfit Edie Brickell and New Bohemians. Having created her rhythms
with “the piano, and the push and pull of the breath” for so long, Amos says
the decision to play with Chamberlain wasn’t made lightly. Ironically, it was Amos’ former partner Rosse who brought the two together. “After the miscarriage when I’d begun writing, I put it
out there to Eric, ‘I’m kind of open to a drummer,’ and he said, ‘Well, I’ve
found him.’ “And Matt came out and within five minutes of us
playing together we just started giggling hysterically, going ‘This is fun!’”
she remembers with a laugh. “If you have the wrong drummer,
the whole thing fails. Most drummers can’t keep time, but he was always really
aware of what the keyboards were doing because he felt the songs know that
medium so well, because that’s what I’ve been doing for 32 and a half years of
my life, so that’s how I define everything.” Despite the instant synergy, Amos says recording Choirgirl Hotel didn’t
always go smoothly. “We would wait for days sometimes for the Muse
to show up, just going, ‘She’s not here,’ there’s just no passion in the room,”
she says with dead seriousness. “We would all know,
you just feel it. You know when the high heels walk through the room, you go, ‘Whooh.’
You just see the leg, you see this ethereal leg stick itself in the studio and
everyone goes, ‘Oop, red light.’” Such a discourse makes talking to Amos like trying to converse with lines
from a book. Her sentences are stories with beginning, middle and end. Which isn’t that unlike how Amos says she wants people to view her work. It’s
why, she says, she’s not afraid to reveal so much of herself and use such
private pain—like rape, personal defilement and losing a baby—for public
consumption. “I really want to explore what’s hidden behind
the heart, whether it’s my heart or my friend’s heart or just observing people
at a bus stop—trying to get what’s hidden because that’s what’s so fascinating,”
she says. “That’s where the magic is, and the
secret that’s the treasure. “Even if it’s stuff that we find, ugh,
projectile vomit, I don’t want to look at that side of myself,” she
continues. “That’s our power. Always, the
shadow-work is our power.” As strange as what comes of out Amos’ mouth may sometimes sound, her moments
of clarity are dead on. In a goofy way, it’s her bizarre juggling of two worlds—an
inner one that produces her belief that her creative force “exists outside of me and it comes to visit me” and
an outer one that’s genuinely nice and talks freely about earthy things like
laxatives and musical theater—that makes her confessions so familiar. “Well, I always hope that people take my music
away and see their own friends and their own faces and their own characters,
that it doesn’t become about my life anymore,” she says, offering a
practical definition for “good” art. “At the end of
the day, I really hope people start to see themselves in it.” Tori Amos is scheduled to perform on Sunday, September 27, at America West
Arena, with the Devlins. Showtime is 7:30 p.m. |