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Aloha (Dutch music magazine) From Venus to Tori and back “This place has something special,” Tori
Amos says. “The country has so many secrets. The
trees know things.” We are in Cornwall, the most southern point of
England. The residence of King Arthur used to be just a few miles ahead, and
currently also Tori’s. We sit on a cliff and stare at the sea. And the wind
tries hard to blow us into her. “It’s strange oh, hello, how are you doin?” An old man, together with some
other persons are (successfully) applying for little supporting acting roles in
this Aloha interview, saunters along with his dog. The little white
terrier stands still, holds his head tilting to one side, and looks with
surprise at Tori, a bit provocative and with a mix of confidence and curiosity.
Like the way Tori observes journalists “Years ago,” she continues while she
points at a beach that lies hidden between the rocks, “I
recorded the video clip for China down there, in that bay. When it became high
tide, I almost sat with my ass in the water. I tried to avoid that, because it
was January and it was freezing. And then I slipped and fell in the sea. At
that time I didn’t come here that often. I had no intention at all to live
here.” Last year Tori married her English sound engineer Mark Hawley. That also
wasn’t planned. When the little Myra Ellen Amos grew up in Maryland, she swore
that she would always be single. She happened to have a major crush on Robert
Plant and was realistic enough to see that her chances with him were limited.
But Mark stole her heart and she fell in love and married despite her earlier
promise. They moved to Cornwall, a place that is known for her gnomes (the
local mascots), pies (the famous local pies in the shape of a hippie-shoe,
filled with cooked vegetables and a until further notice specified animal from
meatloaf), Camelot (the local legend) and tourists (the local curse). Hawley
wanted to live here because he came here when he was a kid with his parents and
family on holidays. The newlywed couple bought a picturesque old English house,
along a winding country road, complete with cats, a source, garden walls
covered with climbing roses and a paved inner courtyard. The 300-year-old barn
that also belonged to the property was rebuilt to a hypermodern recording
studio, baptized as “Martian Engineering.” “It would make a much nicer article if I could
tell you that I personally built it with hammers and nails. But to be honest, I
was sunbathing in Florida,” the singer laughs, who knows better than
anyone how cold it can get in Cornwall in January. “I
always have a packed suitcase in the hall, in case I have to leave all of a
sudden. Well, as the matter a fact, it is never unpacked, I never unpack it,
although I know that those clothes should be washed. I always give them to the
dry-cleaners at the next place.” The last time she left, she toured with
Alanis Morissette through the United States (“There’s
a lot of mutual respect. She has this lovely dirty laugh; I really love it.”)
and she left her husband in the barn to put the last hand on her new album To
Venus and Back. She never intended to come with a successor of last year’s From the
Choirgirl Hotel. “The original idea was to
release of live recording from the Choirgirl-tour, along with an album of
b-sides plus one or two new bonus tracks. But when I started writing all the
new songs just came all of sudden, very quickly. It was like a herpes attack.”
That resulted unexpected in a new studio album, combined with the earlier
referred live recordings. “The live-cd was recorded
without any overdubs, completely live in the stage. The songs as it were,
selected themselves. We made a sort of competition out of it, like the struggle
for the World Cup - they had to compete with each other to get in the finale.”
Tori got this sudden attack of creativity by different reasons: the magic of
Cornwall, the blessings of marriage, the Choirgirl band, she liked that much,
that she wanted to make more music with them, the quietness and peace of the
countryside and considerable amount of red wine. But the most important reason
the urge to throw herself completely in the music, to deal with the loss of the
miscarriage, which was the red line through her previous album. “You don’t have the necessities to deal with
that sort of loss. I kept thinking, if I just could have popped a cork in it.”
Tori stares in the distance and looks so pitiful like a little girl that
accidentally stepped out of a Victorian fairy tale. “I
had so many questions, I raged at every possible God I could imagine, I scolded
them all. But now, I can much more easily cope with it. I learned to live with
it, I think. You have to. To perform live, night in night out, the songs from
Choirgirl helped me to fit it back into my life.” “That album had everything to do with a quest
for the primitive woman deep in me. At the time, I really felt as if I had
failed. I didn’t succeed in the most normal thing women do,” Tori says. “Later, I started to realize that some women are good at
having babies, and that there are others who fight better, tell better stories
or write songs. I have a creative uterus that gives birth to songs. When I’m
feeling bad I flee to the music. If I hadn’t had my songs, I really don’t know
if I would be mentally sane - although some people already think I’ve lost it.” Another mysterious man passes, this time with a dog under his arm. Tori’s
look brightens up. The dog barks, the man concentrates his look forward and
just passes through. “You know what this environment reminds me of?
The X-Files. You’re just talking to someone who’s born here and ask, ‘Have you
ever experienced something unusual here?’ And then they say, ‘Well, there
happened once this really strange thing.’ But in the next breath they ask, ‘You
think Arsenal is winning the cup?’ That’s why I take the people here so
seriously. There is no frill around their stories. The mystic and the common go
hand in hand.” Has Tori, who dedicated her last album to the fairies,
ever had a mystical experience? “When I’m driving
here with you in a Land-rover, we might not meet some ghosts, but the place definitely
has some mysticism. It may be intangible, but if you look with your ghost-eye,
you will see. I would like to say to all the cynics who read this: everything
you want to believe in is here if you want to believe it.” Tori, who claims to be Sven the Viking in one of her past lives, married
Mark in a church built on a place in a small English village where pagan
rituals used to take place. Her father, a Methodist minister, flew in from
America with her half Indian mother to attend the ceremony. To say that Tori
has an ambivalent vision on religion is euphemistic. That’s because she was
raised under the guidance of her grandparents, also ministers, in a
fundamentalist cult. “Instead of following the
usual baptism rituals of sprinkling a couple of drops of water on my head,”
Tori once said, “they held my head under water for
thirteen God-forsaken years.” It was this way that she met the dark side
of Christianity. “With two minister grandparents
and a father with the same profession, I became a rebel against all of that,”
Tori says. “That had been there, deep in my, as
long as I can remember, in every cell of my body. Especially my grandmother was
a very dangerous woman. My grandmother was considered by everyone to be holy,
but did not have one good word for anybody. She found that you have to remain a
virgin until your marriage. Then you grant your body to your husband and your
soul to God. In fact, you’ve got nothing, nothing that is considered to be for
yourself. She was the enemy and I knew that already when I was a child.” It’s hardly surprising then, that God is regularly performing as a guest in
Tori’s songs. Her struggle with religion has lead to a whole new vision on it: “What makes me horny lately, is the thought of melting
the two Marys - Mary Magdalene and Mary, the Holy Mother of God. I refuse to
call her the Virgin Mary. The Christian Church has raised many questions by disowning
Magdalene all the wisdoms and Mother Mary all her sexuality [something
once referred to as the hot pussy versus holy being-dilemma]. Well, there will always remain things that I cannot
change and don’t want to change.” Tori smiles and says, “And that is not good, nor bad.” Still, she likes to call her creativity a gift from God. It was in any case
her father who gave her the push for her career: by the age of five, minister
Edison Amos send her to the famous Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, to study
classical piano. When she got kicked out, five years later, he took her to bars
to play Gershwin for homosexual customers. “I knew
very early that I would never become a classical pianist. I heard Sgt. Peppers
Lonely Hearts Club Band, and took him with me to let it play for my teachers. I
said, ‘That’s it! This is it!’ And they listened to it and said, ‘No, this is
not it at all! Take it back and go study Mozart.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, you
don’t understand, this is Mozart if he had lived now. They are exactly the
same.’ And they said, ‘No, they are not. Go back to that stool.’ Since that
day, it was war between us. From that moment on the enemy consisted of my
grandmother and the people of the conservatory.” “My father always loved everything that had something
to do with entertainment. When he was a little kid, he once ran away from home
for three days. He hitchhiked some twenty miles to a movie theatre to see Gone
With the Wind. And so he was beaten with the belt, because he stole a
chicken from a farm to see Vivien Leigh.” Tori’s father is now taking care of her daughter’s copyrights. She’s clearly
very fond of her old man. “You know, sometimes I
sit with my father on the fishing pier, with dangling legs above the water… We
now have a much better relationship than we used to have, and I say, ‘I know
that you have dreamed of things that had nothing to do with the function of a
minister.’ And then he says, ‘I have never had anything to complain about.’ And
then again I say, ‘I know that you’ve never complained, but you actually wanted
to become a scriptwriter, you wanted to go in the entertainment industry.’ And
he again, ‘Well, I do your copyright business now, don’t I?’ And he’s right,
because he finally found something that he enjoys doing, so... I think he had a
great deal of respect for the fact that I’m so dedicated to my music.” At home, in the parsonage, Tori cherished a secret obsession for John
Lennon, Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. “I was
totally freaked by Led Zeppelin. I wasn’t allowed to have posters on the wall,
because we didn’t own the house and the walls had to stay clean. But all over
those album covers were my sticky fingers.” She imitated Pat Benatar in
front of a mirror. Easy enough, you only need to swing with your hips. So she
knew already some things when she went to Los Angeles to make her rock record Y
Kant Tori Read. It wasn’t a big success, but then again, it was a very moderate album. She
didn’t lose her faith and went back to her piano to compose the songs that
became the American double platinum album Little Earthquakes. “My diary,” was the name she gave to the record.
The following CD Under the Pink sold one and a half times that much. Not
bad for something that Tori described as “an
impressionist painting.” Boys for Pele became the ordeal, while
the next album From the Choirgirl Hotel - “my
song-babies” - was a reaction to the biggest test in her life. Her new album is all about passion. “About the
power that flows from the passion,” she explains. “Power that you can use for the best or the worse. Like
the evil in the song Juarez, which deals with the monsters we turn into when
our hearts are broken. It’s about the murder of two hundred women in a small
town at the border of Mexico. When I was touring through Texas, I was really
near it, and the story grabbed me. I immediately wrote the song, on the bus.
The song gives you a different look on the things I wrote years ago in Me and a
Gun. But both songs are about the things you can do, when your heart thinks
there is no other choice. There’s a line in 1000 oceans: ‘I’ve cried a thousand
oceans and I would cry a thousand more / If that’s what it takes to sail you
home.’ If you know you’re capable of feeling that for somebody you know that
the bodysnatchers don’t have you yet.” According to her experiences throughout the years, dealt with in her songs,
then passion wasn’t that nice all the time for Tori. What again did she say in
the period of Boys for Pele about the men in her life? “I realized that I sometimes crawled on my hands to the
phone. That I humiliated myself. One moment I was signing a million dollar
deal, the other moment I led me beat into the dirt by some fellow. “ Are those thing left behind now when you got married? “I didn’t used to know that passion could grow to friendship
and love, she says after a long pause. I had the feeling that it might be
possible, but I wasn’t sure. I once wrote a song with the lines: I’ve got 50
hearts in 50 different drawers. Somebody can not welt these different parts, in
all these different drawers. You are the only one that had to do it. In fact, I
think that’s reason I became a songwriter.” “Gee, I haven’t thought about that song for a
long time. You know, I probably use too much deodorant: my head starts to leak
as a sieve. I don’t believe that song ended up on one of the albums, did it? I
will have to check it with the kids on the internet, perhaps they know what
happened with that song. The thing I also learned was that something always can
happen. The people in your life come and they go. Mark has lost his father this
year and you know what the strange thing is? I found it very difficult to help
him. Sometimes, there’s just nothing to say. You can not just take away
someone’s pain.” Tori stares pondering in the distance and then follows
a mind-twister she’s famous for. Inimitable, as the matter a fact completely
incomprehensible, but at the same time you get the impressionist idea of what
she had in mind: “To be the flame that warms the
both of you, to be capable of loving someone that much I think that is the
reason that this record finally became the Venus record. It’s about all these
aspects of the heart. Here, in the country, where you don’t have those lights
that distract you, I begin noticing the rise of that planet to the sky. And it
seemed appropriate to make a trip to Venus, in this stage of my life, wherever
it may be. You understand?” The fact that she considers her songs as her children, makes that she guards
them as if she was the mother. Her co-musicians also don’t have to come near to
the children and try to abuse them. “I work most of
the time with men, whether you like it or not: most of the big musicians are
men. They love their instrument and always want to jam. Most women can’t jam,
they don’t have something like: The hell with everything, everybody can drop
dead for five minutes, were gonna play Black Dog. Anyway, I love to tour with
men, but once in a while my nails appear of a sudden. I then become some sort
of a women-beast that wants to protect her song-children. And then I get really
from these guys with their comments as: Are you having your period or
something? And then I reply: No, if there is any blood in the picture, it’s the
blood that I scratch out of your throat. Because these songs are like living
creatures for me.” By the way, not only for Tori. On the internet for example, there is an
unhealthy doses of attention to the person Tori Amos and her songs. Fanatic
American Tori fans appear to build out the whole internet with discussion
forums on her lyrics and her references to food, sex, literature and so on. “It turns out that there are people who have a
much closer relation with the songs than I do. That’s so strange,” Tori
says. “Some of them are explaining the songs in a
way I never imagined, and that’s needful. With others you get the feeling of:
If I start thinking in that direction, I’m never gonna play that song again.” She moves aside to clear the way for the two men passing through. Surprise:
they also have a dog with them. As the sun slowly goes down, she looks around
her, searches the horizon with her eyes and says, “You
know, space is a common good. Although I think the city has a certain richness
of experiences. If you look long enough around you, there are always characters
you can write about. But cities are also choking. Sooner, you will find the
self-side of existence. When you are not packed on each other, like here, you
have the space to think. In the city, someone trashed your idea through the
toilet even before you have had the time to play with it.” “You know the children’s tale about the Grinch
who stole Christmas? How his heart turned 70 times the original size that same
day? That is the same feeling I get with living here. And when I’m touring
through the south of America where you are humming Deliverance, because you
know uncle Billy is doing something really odd with little Tommy, I think of
this place. And then you can deal with things for a while, in the knowledge
that you always can come back here.” |