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All Music zine
(www) Take
a dance through childhood and the mysteries of Venus with one of the most
elusive and inspired artists in modern music. By
Robert L. Doerschuk Is it delirium or divinity that bathes Tori Amos in its peculiar light?
Whatever it is, it spins shadows around her and into the whirlwind of holy and
obscene spirits that haunts her songs. The devotion she draws from her
followers differs from simple rock star idolatry; it’s closer, in fact, to the
swooning piety that saints and weeping Madonnas command. This intensity has only built in the nine years since her solo debut, Little
Earthquakes, shook the landscape. From that first release, there was tension in
the crash of intimate lyrics against solid song structures and fluent piano
accompaniment. All of this peaked in her voice, which could swoop with the turn
of a phrase from the bedrock of melody into ecstasies of neurosis and release.
It was, at the time, a unique sound; today, with imitators warbling wounded
hymns in her wake, she remains unmatched in the strength of her art and the
heat of her charisma. All this was anticipated in the opening moments of “Precious Things,” from
Little Earthquakes, with a piano motif whose instability animated Amos’ almost
hallucinogenic imagery and, at the end of each chorus, chilling wordless wail.
On paper, as on disc, her thoughts gushed, unpunctuated, like the urgent
current of an adolescent diary. Even now, on her latest album, To Venus and
Back, it’s hard to discern the meaning buried beneath this flood of images,
which evoke, as always, a fascination and repulsion with the dark hood of
masculinity. Violence, lust, fragility, innocence, and, new to the mix, a kind
of nostalgia for a time beyond childhood: Most of this is familiar to Tori adorers,
who seem able to receive messages loud and clear from this secret language. What’s different on To Venus and Back is the more experimental spirit of the
instrumental tracks. Amos has grown far beyond the old mold of pianist/singer -
although this remains an apparently permanent touchstone in her work. Tracks
such as “Juárez,” a nightmarish account of male hatred against women, and
“Datura,” inspired in part by the psychedelic flower named in the title,
resonate with electronic effects pulled from somewhere way beyond the pop-song
sensibility. But their power is within reach of the mainstream listener,
because of Amos’ reversal of her usual formula: Where typically she leads us
into the maze of her words with reassuring piano figurations, her words on these
works point through the dark woods of her music. The simplicity of the “Datura”
lyric, much of which is just a recital of plant types, helps us along without
necessarily telling us where we’re headed. Amos projects all the contrary energies of her music in her presence.
There’s a tremor in her voice, as if part of her daily struggle is to keep
tears and anger at bay. But there is also humor, more playful than ironic, and
a certain fearlessness in laying out how she feels, as if daring you to disagree.
And for all the terrors and disappointments that she has survived, she shows a
flirtatious nature as well—no surprise, perhaps, considering her fixation on
the dance of male and female. Artistically and, it seems, emotionally, Tori
Amos lives on the lip of the volcano, always trying to see how deep the fires
burn, then coming back to once more tell the tale. Morrison, Hendrix, & the Devil You were already performing when you were four years old. Can you remember
how you first became aware of music and the role it would play in your life? I just remember little things, like standing
over the record player after my father would go to the church every day. My
mother had a record collection in a box, and she would play that: Fats Waller,
all sorts of stuff. She loved shows, so that was always hanging around - West
Side Story and that. [Sings] “I’ve been
around the world in a plane” [from “I Can’t Get Started”], Hoagy Carmichael, Gershwin. So I would hear things from
my mother where the structure became part of my roots. Then Bartók really got
drummed into me at the conservatory when I was five-and-a-half. That really
became my passion: Bartók and Debussy, turn of the century. And the poets from
the late 19th century: Baudelaire, e.e. cummings, Anaïs Nin. If we’re
talking about fertilizing the garden, those were my early years, along with
records that my brother would bring into the house. He was ten years older than
I was, so he would bring in the Beatles records, he would bring in the Led
Zeppelin records, he would bring in Jim Morrison. The Doors would be sent back
out within hours after he had brought it in, because my father said, “This guy
is really of the Devil.” Zeppelin didn’t last very long in the house either.
But there were always neighborhood girls who had Zeppelin and everything else
hanging around in their bedrooms. So you’d sneak over there and do your listening. Oh, sure.
Did you see all of these different styles of music as mutually exclusive?
Was it hard to love Debussy and the Doors at the same time? Well, it was more about the bloodline for me.
I’ve always been fascinated with bloodlines: family trees. I think of music
this way and instruments this way. Like this book that I think is really
stimulating, not just because of the content but because of the family tree, is
Bloodline of the Holy Grail by a guy called Laurence Gardner. He’s quite
the respected genealogist, and it’s the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
But if you did a bloodline of every composer’s life, you could do a similar
thing. Or with the poet or the visual artist who influences you, or the people
who influence on a personal level, who turned you on to what artist. Maybe that
person is out of your life. Like, there are people I don’t really know anymore
who turned me on to, say, Sylvia Plath. It’s strange how I have no idea where
this person is, but my life would have taken a different turn if I didn’t have
it. There was this African-American guy at the
Peabody [Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory] in 1968. It was a funny time, 1968.
He was about 17 or 16, and he was sitting there, playing some Hendrix stuff at
the piano. I think he was really into McCoy Tyner also. I would just sit there,
because I was kind of in love with him. But I was five and a half, and he was
17 and black in 1968. I mean, it was all going on. Even though my uncle was
black - Uncle Bobby; he’s dead now, but he was my father’s best friend - it’s a
whole ‘nother thing to see your five-and-a-half-year-old daughter in love with
this Jimi Hendrix-like jazzer. I think his name was Reggie; I can’t remember. I didn’t know Reggie for long, because
something happened. He went off. But he had such an influence on my life. I
have no idea where Reggie is, but his sense of playing... I would watch him,
with the left hand. This could be in between classes, but I was drinking it in,
going, “OK, this guy is onto something here. I’ve never really heard a mixture
of these things. I don’t know who this Jimi cat is; I’m five years old.” You’ve
gotta remember, I’m getting it together in my brain. But it had an impact on
me, because this guy at the piano was sort of showing me. I think that was a
huge influence on why I started studying Jimmy Page. I’d go to guitar players
to bring it to my need, because I didn’t want to steal. Did hearing that kind of music somehow take the adventure away from other
artists you had come to love? You mean Mozart? It couldn’t. I mean, if you
really have your ears, if your ears are intact, you can’t take away from some
of those guys. You just can’t, because they were the Hendrix of their time. The
horrible thing that happens is that people become like a rod—a lightning rod,
or a curtain rod, or a rod where people hang their clothes. And stinky cheese
starts getting hung on a Mozart rack. You get people who embrace it but
probably wouldn’t have at the time. Because at the time, as we all know,
looking in retrospect and really studying it, Mozart had a hard time. He was
always fighting for his legitimacy as a musician. Some people were in awe, and some
people got it, but some were really vicious. Some of these guys really had to
deal with that. Some were stars: Liszt and everything, and people were blown
away by the expediency of hand-on-note. But with some things, the content
wasn’t really understood or appreciated until you could look back 50 years.
You’d look back 80 years and finally see what you were dealing with. That’s
why, when people say to me, “What’s vital now?,” I say, “You won’t know for 50
years.” I mean, things are vital because they’re affecting us, but things will
have come and gone, and people doing that kind of back-in-time look, some
records that have sold ten million copies will be sort of a blip on the radar
screen. Others may be a blip now, like Ben Harper, but we don’t know yet. Or
Jeff Buckley: Even though he died and had such a young life, he might be no
different from some of the poets who came and went and we’d go, “Wow, this is a
real jumping-off point.” That’s how I was sort of surrounded by a lot
of classical snobs, but there were musicians around me who were drumming into
me, “Look at the content, not at the people who are proselytizing it. You might
not like the person who has kind of latched onto it, but see the work for what
it is. Not the enemies of the work or the preachers of the work. Go to the
work; go to the core.” A Memorable Teacher Did any particular teacher contribute a lot to your musical development? A lady named Patricia Springer. She’s still
around. She’s so funny. She was at Peabody? She was at Peabody, and she was also the
organist at the church where my father was. I liked her, and I like her to this
day. I see her every blue moon. I’ll never forget when I got kicked out of
Peabody and I tried to audition again a year and a half later. I auditioned
with “I’ve Been Cheated” by Linda Ronstadt [laughs]. I think she kind of liked my sense of humor, but she
said to me, “You know, what are you doing?” I said [pulling sweater up
over mouth and nose], “Umm, I dunno?” She said,
“You don’t want to be here. That’s obvious. But you’ve got to find a way to
teach yourself a skill, because you’re not gonna get it here. You’ve gotten all
you can get. You want to be a composer. They’re not teaching you how to compose
whatever you want to compose. They taught you how to go and do research, so
you’ve got to go teach yourself.” I’m sitting there, going, “I’m 12.” My head
was pounding, and my father wanted me to have my doctorate by the time I was
16. I’d been taking pipe organ, but my legs were too short to reach the pedals.
I have really short legs and a longer torso, which helps my voice, actually. It doesn’t do much for your tap-dancing, though. And I don’t look good in a pink tutu [laughs]. So I may be little, but I have a lot of punch and
breath control, because I have an endless torso. Childhood Revelations Most kids these days who are as young as you were then are more worried
about getting their Pokémon cards than mapping out careers in music. But I’m worried now about getting my Pokémon
cards! [laughs] But how can you, or any kid, know that young what they’re going to do with
their lives? It’s my total life. That was my Pokémon. It’s
like, “OK, what’s gonna be on Zeppelin II?” I was obsessed. My whole life was
music. I was a musician first; then I realized I was a girl. It’s one of those
things, looking back, where music sometimes chooses you. You don’t have a
choice. It’s your manna. I had no idea why I was going to school, except for
the social aspect. There were no illusions for me, ever. I knew at six that it
was ridiculous: “I’m gonna have accountants anyway. What am I doing here? We’re
wasting the school system’s time. I don’t know this crap. I’m never gonna know
this crap. Why don’t you let me develop what my gift is? Who are we kidding
here?” Nothing else other than music interested you then? I wasn’t good at anything else. The only
thing I think I was kinda good at was dates, like in history. This is something
I wanted to do in my piano room: I can catalog, around the room, what happened
over 2,000 years, probably from the Christian breaking point. That’s a good
place, although I always think you should go a couple hundred years before,
just for the fun of it. But I’d do an around-the-world [diagram] of different cultures. Mainly European history - eastern
European. Arranged chronologically? Yeah. Certain things would cross paths, like
what instruments were going on in music while, say, the Vikings were invading.
Or the wonderful art world that was going on in Dublin during the ninth
century. Things like that. That was always my love and my passion, along with
music. History dates, but never math. Sonic geometry, yes. Architecture, always
- but always in sound. Milestones You’ve played the Bösendorfer grand piano for years, but you began on a much
smaller instrument in your parents’ home. What are your memories of that
childhood piano? Well, I think there’s a bit of a kindness to
that piano. It was “the little engine that could.” She tries very hard. But
she’s never gonna be a Ferrari - not that you want to be a Ferrari this week!
Have you seen the Formula One madness? They really fucked up! Anyway, it’s not
gonna be a McLaren - how’s that? Bösendorfer, on the other hand . . . you can
get one that slips through the cracks, but it’s a different commitment. So when
I go back and play this piano in my parents’ home, it’s there because of the
memories, and it was so steadfast during so much turbulence of, “She’s gotta do
this, she’s gotta do that, she’s gotta be a classical person.” I was just not
able to make the grade classically. I would do anything to get out of
practicing that stuff, because it wasn’t my passion. I’m a good player, but I’m
a good player when I’m doing my own thing, when I’m making it up - my style.
I’m not a good player when it’s about versatility; I’m much more about jamming. When did you first play in public? Was it at the church where you father
served as pastor? Probably. I’m almost positive that would be
it. Do you remember when you wrote your first song? No, but it was instrumental. Not words, just
music, for those first few years. Then I came up with “Jackass and the Toad
Song.” That had words. How old were you then? Don’t know. Maybe nine or ten. “I’m walking
down the road with a jackass and a toad. Some people say I’m crazy, the way I
choose my friends” [laughs]. That’s because
I had a purple monkey friend named Clunky - and Timmy, who was a boy, and Mr.
Spaghetti. The monkey comes up a lot for me still. Beyond Music: The Power of Sound From your first album to your newest release, To Venus and Back, you seem to
be allowing raw sound to grow in importance within your music. Well, I think that comes a lot from working
with my team Mark and Marcel [Mark Hawley and Marcel Van Limbeek]. They were my live engineers on Under the Pink; that’s
how I met them. [Personal assistant and tour manager] John Witherspoon brought Mark in as front-of-house
engineer, and Mark brought Marcel as the monitor guy; they’re a team. I asked
them to make Boys for Pele with me, but then my whole life changed, and
everybody I worked with... I had a kind of a shift - not that I didn’t like
those people, because I did, but my whole life just changed. I needed an
independence and to strike out on my own, so I pulled this team out. Mark has
had studios since he was an adolescent, which he would build in a barn -
Martian [Studios] now is built in a
300-year-old barn, so there’s the bloodline for that. From what I understand,
Mark, when he was four, he was a drummer. He was studying when he was 11 with
Cliff Richard’s drummer. And he picked up the guitar when he was ten, so he was
multifaceted, but then was drawn into wanting to have a mixing desk as his
instrument. That’s his bloodline. And Marcel is Dutch and was a physicist who
left school. He’s dealing with facts, figures, theories, equations... and
madness. Together, there was a real push from them. They argue with me. They
take a very fierce stand on the engineering thing: “You need to be aware of the
sound of your records.” But sound is an instrument. There’s no room for
musicians to be sonically shut out and turn it all over to a producer. It’s
critical that it works with the composition.
You’re talking about something other than good production, though. Your
point is to allow sound to assume an evolving role in your imagination. Yes, using it as an instrument, as opposed to
making a nice-sounding recording. That was always important to the people I
worked with, that it was a nice-sounding recording. But then it was about using
compression as an instrument, and you start getting into the ant-fucking with
it all. To stretch as a producer, and because I’m not a tech person, I brought
in a tech team. Yeah, I can fiddle with knobs and see what they can do and what
they can’t. But this is not my level of expertise. I love working with a team
where... It’s not that engineer teams can’t go and write songs. Some of them
can. There are engineer teams, as we know, who have written stuff and have
guest singers come on. It can work. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that the
hubris should set in that they are composers. No different than I have no
illusions that I’m an engineer. I can’t sit there and say to you... When we’re
on that line of saying, “OK, look. Tell me where I’ve cooked this 1.5. Where am
I, frequency-wise?”, somebody’s got to turn around to me and say, “You’ve
undercut that low end.” And not the bass player. I can’t go to any of the
musicians - and they are geniuses, all of them are geniuses - and say, “Give me
the holistic picture.” Not until they’re producing and they’re not involved [as
players]. People hear things through their own
filter, and I do not mix by committee. The truth, though, is that you are the artist here. And they’re artists. What I have to be honest
about is, if they were doing it, it would be different. Each person would have
done it differently. And, in each distinctive way, it would have been good. It would be different. I’m sure it would be
good... Let’s not say good or bad. It would be valid. But that doesn’t mean
that it would be about the song. It might be about the groove. It might not be
about compression. So depending on what your aesthetic is... Venus is not about
sounding like a bloody retro ‘70s record. It’s Venus, for fuck’s sake! She
lives with different laws and principles. She doesn’t want to sound like... I
wanted an element of warmth, but I wanted an element of absolute chill. Orchestrating Violence On songs like “Juárez” and “Datura,” sound seems to be as important as lyric
and melody. Without question. That wasn’t the case on your earlier, less sonically adventurous stuff. Correct.
Getting to that creative point can’t have been just about hiring a new team
of engineers. Well, it started to become about how... After
working with them, I started to kind of understand, as I was composing, that I
had to take into consideration, no different from “does this work on the
piano?” or “does this riff come from the left hand?”, that part of the
characterization was gonna be, “OK, what’s the perspective on this song?” For example,
“Juárez” I knew had to come from the voice of the desert. Therefore, sonically,
as we started stirring the pot, with everybody in there together, it wasn’t
working [with] me coming in on the piano.
Finally, it was as the two or three hundred women were mutilated, the engineers
looked at me, I looked at them, and it was like, “I’ve got to mutilate the
piano.” [Drummer] Matt Chamberlain, and Andy
[Andy Gray] the programmer, once the
mutilating-of-the-piano concept was in, then they wanted the violence, the
suppressed violence. . . . I would talk about the picture of what had happened.
It was a real thing. An actual history of violent assaults against women in Juárez. Sure. And everybody would sit there and
listen to it, the brutality of it. And yet because it’s from the desert’s point
of view, there’s the timelessness of the desert. There’s this baking going on,
like a kiln. We really wanted this suppressed track. You would hear the music
that was coming out of the car of the guys who were gang-raping her. That’s
what I wanted, and the chanting of the guys.
And you accomplish that through electronic techniques that “mutilate” the
sonically assuring element of the piano. Yeah, but when people talk about this track,
they’re comparing it to, I don’t know, an “electronica” track. But you’re
confusing your terms here, people. You’re just confused, because it’s a
commentary on the real hardcore misogynistic stuff, done in a way that captures
them with their pants down, literally, mutilating her. Limits of Literalism “Datura” was perhaps a still more adventurous track, not just in its
electronic applications, but also in going beyond song structure. Even the
lyrics are unusual, with an emphasis on just a list of plants. What was the
creative process behind this piece? I was in a mood that day... We were supposed
to be cutting something else, and it wasn’t coming together. Matt [Matt
Chamberlain] was running around, but the band
hadn’t shown up yet - meaning Caton [Steve Caton] and Jon [Jon Evans]
hadn’t come. And I just had this thing about my garden. I got a list from my
gardener about everything that was in my garden that was still alive. That was the list in the lyric? Yeah. So at a certain point, this whole
“Malagueña” ... Why I say “Malagueña,” because it isn’t anything like it, but I
remember playing that when I was eight or something, but it was definitely way
before I got kicked out of Peabody. I loved the more South American - the
tropical - pulse, and datura being a hallucinogen, that’s dangerous stuff. At
the time, though, I was reading the sequel to Bloodline of the Holy Grail,
which goes pre-Jesus, so it’s all Sumerian. [She pronounces this
“Shumerian.”] Some people say “sumerian,” but they
[i.e., the experts] say it’s “shumerian.” So I was
kind of drawn to the theories of what was passing through Canaan and the
division of it. The Venus record was, to me, very much a bridge for my own
work, from this time as we go over to the next numbership [i.e., the
year 2000]. Whether it’s psychological or not, it
doesn’t matter, you’re building a bridge. So Canaan now becomes a planet,
because ... because it is. And the idea of the Apocalypse being that everybody
thinks they own pieces of the sun, even if it’s a little house ... and I’m a
home owner; I have those feelings too. And yet I kept getting this sense of the
patriarchal community for the last many thousands of years, whether it’s the
Judaic God or the Christian God, saying, “You’re expelled from the Garden.”
Whoa, wait a minute: What does she have to say about this? Because it is Gaia.
We realize now that the planet is a living organism, and she’s kind of got a
mind of her own. So we go back to, because “Bliss” starts the
record, and there’s this controlling patriarchal force... Instead of “Father who
art in Heaven,” it’s “Father, I killed my monkey.” There’s a real delineation
about who owns the goods here. Who has the entitlement of a woman’s body, of
the Earth’s body, of the body of the Garden? I just watched the song come in
and give the patriarchy datura, because it exists. It was all throbbing, and
she’s doing a roll call of those now who can come in [i.e., the list of
plants in the song “Datura”]. The second movement [of the song], which is “Is there room in my heart for you to follow
your heart and not need more blood from the tip of your star,” a part of it was
me singing it as the patriarchy, being a woman - me needing a piece of her
essence, all the blood that’s been spilled in the name of who owns the land,
who has the god, who has the access? So it was very much this revelation,
coming from Venus - a camera looking onto Gaia. All of this isn’t easy to discern through simply listening to “Datura.” In
fact, the repetition of “dividing Canaan” at the end tends to diminish, rather
than emphasize, the meaning by turning these words into a sonic event, much as
the Beatles chant at the end of “Hey, Jude” conveys something other than
literal meaning. Or I say it as much as it’s been divided. But even that isn’t as transparent as the meaning of more commercial lyrics
might be. Yeah, but the parables are elusive. You have
to journey with them. I give you perspectives from where I wrote it. They take
on their own life forms. But there’s word association, and sometimes I give
people the bloodline. It gives you a character study of who she is. But then
she has a whole subtext to her that’s going on, that some people read into her
and I haven’t. But I never write it to be literal, until I choose to. If I want
to be literal, I’ll be literal. But when you’re on a datura trip, you don’t do
it to be literal. The literal bit of it is the garden: It’s very factual, being
read, doing a roll call. Traditional Songcrafting The last cut on To Venus and Back, “1,000 Oceans,” is not only more literal
in its lyrical approach than much of the rest of the album, it’s also more
musically accessible. The first few bars even conform to a very familiar
formula for pop chord progression. Did these aspects of the song surprise you
as you were composing? Sure. An old African woman was humming it to
me at 5:30 in the morning in my sleep. I went down to the piano... She was
pretty ancient, and I couldn’t understand a word she was saying, so I had to
figure the words out. What I kind of got from it was the depth of lust that song
had for somebody or something - it could be for this planet, I don’t know. But
the idea that this voice that was coming through very clear, finally I
understood when I got the phrase “through the solar field.” It all completely
aligned, because I knew we were following maps: I was hunting down what the
song was trying to tell me. Why was the solar field reference so illuminating? You know, there’s always galactic reference
going on in this record. There’s a scientific vocabulary going on in this
record. “Suede” is about seduction, but there’s always a science reference, a
physics reference, because that’s the realm of Venus. So I hung maps all over,
and I knew I didn’t have it right, coming up with things. Then finally I got
that whatever dimensions the song had to cross to find the being that she was
devoted to, whether it was her mother or her sister or her lover or her friend,
nothing could stop her. That kind of resilience was a real anchor for the
record. In old-fashioned terms of craft, the chords on “1,000 Oceans” are very
solidly constructed. Was there more of a conscious element of songwriting
technique on this song as you were writing? Sure. Well, there’s usually an element of
that in all the songs. But there was a moment when I knew that [sings
the line “I can’t believe that I would keep, keep you from flying”]. I kept circling that and circling that, never knowing
how I would get out of it. Then to finally go up [sings “and I would cry
1,000 more”], it took me weeks to get there. It was
real tortuous to find that, because I didn’t know how I was gonna get past
“keep you from flying.” I didn’t know, lyrically or musically. So finally, “and
I would cry 1,000 more” - and it had to sound like it. She had to have
progressed to that; she had to have done that musically. And “home”
[from the next line, “to sail you home”] had to be
something. What’s “home”? Well, “home” had to be G minor. What key is the song written in? B flat. Then to E flat [after the G
minor chord], and back to G minor. Men vs. Men Do your songs have to mean something, or can they be elusive even in your
own mind? They have to mean something, even if it’s
word association. I mean, sometimes it can be more like a riddle. The B-sides
usually rely on that a lot more. Sometimes, on the B sides, it becomes very
much about a maze. But with all the songs that made the album . . . like “Riot
Poof.” Really, the homophobic thing is “Riot Poof.” One of the guys on the crew
was coming out—quite a fierce lad. To come out in that world, sometimes it
takes a lot of courage. I think the whole idea of “break the terror of the
urban spell” [from “Riot Poof”], whatever
“urban” means musically... You highlight the word with a lot of emphasis in the rhythm track. With big ass. Not synthetic ass. You build your electronic arrangement around the meaning, rather than
building your songs into a pre-existing concept of electronica. Right, and we don’t take from other people’s
records. We might take some odd yelp or some crazy thing, because it becomes a
characterization; it’s a millisecond of something. But for the most part, we’re
developing a theme from ourselves in our own loops. Even if we want something
to sound like, I don’t know, something that was recorded in 1981 in a linoleum
room with Naf plastic boots on, there is a design element. We are the design
team; we design. With “Riot Poof,” there’s cocoa butter on that golden ass. And
that ass is chocolate. A lot of R&B has no ass right now. Some of it does,
some of it doesn’t. And there’s a sterility to a lot of electronica. Sometimes
you want something to be sterile; that’s your point. But the whole idea of
“Riot Poof” is the concept of when I say “you burn your pagoda through the
Congo,” “pagoda” being a spiritual reference, and we all know what’s happened
on the Congo, and if you want you can use it as black being the shadow, being
the rhythm, being the holder and the keeper of secrets, not the acceptable
material world but the witch doctor who sees what we masturbate to, what we
fantasize about—the things we don’t find acceptable about ourselves, that we’re
always constantly cutting out but sometimes we get tripped up when we drink too
much to keep it down, or we go have an affair with God knows what. You touch on this theme a bit on “Suede” too. That’s why there’s a whole moment there of
lust, and in “Josephine” too. It’s all moving from what is really lust. Lust is
trust. “Suede” is the danger of . . . not always the physical fornication of
anything. It’s the dangerous games that we play with mind control - the power
of seduction, and how so many people put their hands up and say, “I didn’t do
anything,” because they didn’t fornicate.
Where did the phrase “Riot Poof” come from? It’s a Dutch thing. I love that, their idea
of not a drama queen but a poofter. But I love the word “riot” being with it,
because in a strange way it’s a joke. But at the same time it’s not, because of
the unleashing of the gay community. Sometimes it really is a sexual riot, a
frenzy. It’s a real male frenzy, that whole song. But the idea of the
unbelievable judgment that men have against men who desire to be with other
men... But women wanting to be with women is quite yummy to anybody. If you
think about it, the idea of men who love watching women being together, there’s
an erotica. That’s “on the birth of the search/white trash, my native son”
[from “Riot Poof”]. I’m singing “Riot Poof” from
the concept of the mother—the all-inclusive mother, having borne men who want
to be with men, having borne men who want to “break the terror of the urban
spell,” who want to kill men who want to be with other men. Because Venus,
that’s the mother mode. She’s singing it from her point of view: “The sun is
warming, my man is moistening.” A Place for Technology You told me years ago that synthesizers were “not my instrument.” You’ve
changed your view since then. Yeah, from pulling in people who know the
gear. Andy Gray, who’s into programming, has keyboards up the yin-yang, and I’d
be diddling on his old [PPG] Waveform; she
shows up quite a bit. Sometimes I’d be playing synth with one hand and piano
with the other. I love that kind of amalgamating. You’d done that on Boys for Pele, with piano and harpsichord. Well, the harpsichord is very much in “Glory
of the 80’s.” She’s part of the bed; I cut it live, with the piano. You might
not notice it, but she’s there. I love that, because “Glory of the 80’s” could
be the 1780s [laughs]. I love some of the
Minimoogs and those old sounds, and also the new sounds. What I have a hard
time with is a lot of electronica. I don’t like a lot of it, because it’s real
cheesy, [from] people who don’t know keyboard sounds . . . not just the sounds,
but the choice of the notes with the sound; that’s so fundamental. It’s not
just the sound, but how you use the sound.
Rather than rely on sequencing to pound out a dance beat, you bring your
micromanaging aesthetic to the technology. On “Glory of the 80s” you drop a
quick synth gliss behind the words, “the end is nothing to fear.” Whether
phrasing a vocal line or using electronic tools, you’re still aware of the
details. Well, everybody was encouraged to develop
their own characterization. Andy was involved with Matt [Chamberlain] in some of the strange sound effects. The sonic things
came from the engineers—meaning how it gets used in the mix, then moving it
into [Digidesign] Pro Tools and pulling it
back again. Sometimes the musicians put it right dead where they wanted it. So
it was very much about people developing their character. Caton [Steve Caton]
really developed his character in “Concertina”; the guitars are everywhere.
How will music technology affect your development in the years to come? I think that as technology advances, we’ll
pull it in and let it sit next to the harpsichord and the piano. It’s about
pulling the instruments together and, knowing that something that can be
overused can really hurt acoustic instruments, not being afraid to have it in
the same room. We’re not too worried that we’re gonna lose access to the other
instruments. As more things come in, more knobs to twirl and more buttons to
push, you can’t feel like you’re gonna drown in them. |