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Mojo magazine (UK) Tori Amos MARRIAGE. It fucks you up. Lust dies and you start wearing pyjamas.
Conventional wisdom also holds that, for musicians, matrimony can spell
creative death. After tying the knot w/her sound-engineer Mark Hawley, seems
Tori Amos just shook off the confetti and kept writing. Still more likely to
suckle a piglet than do the vacuuming, she’s apparently emerged from the
nupitals, with all her gifts and kinks intact. While BFP utilised brass and FTCH featured the London Sinfonia, TVAB is a more
Spartan affair. Intricate vocal melodies and Tori’s piano hold court, and in
the absence of other lead instruments much of the drama comes from vocals miked
close enough to violate privacy laws. If this sounds like a partial-reversion
to Tori’s modus operandi circa Little Earthquakes, think again. Amos rarely
re-traces her steps, and her fifth album reflects an ongoing commitment to
innovation. For the most part, textures predominate. Several drum-loops are willfully
distressed, and Steve Caton’s guitars are rarely more than bit-players in the
sonic wash. Guest backing-vocals on Lust seem to be courtesy of Darth Vader,
and on the big, emotive ballad 1000 Oceans, the final “home” that concludes the
lyric is part shudder, part sigh. Elsewhere, the meandering, Joni-like melody
of Glory of the 80s might betray Tori’s lineage, but by using assonance,
dramatically varying timbre, and twisting pronunciation of certain words to
suit her own needs, she’s further refining a unique voice. This is something
which those ubiquitous comparison to Ms Bush tend to overlook. Lyrically, Amos still has her pet threes; sex, sex and sex, to name three. “Get
out of my garden,” she warns at the start of Datura, before listing such flora
as the “golden shower tree” and the “clitoria blue pea”. Even the ostensibly
about a time in LA when “people were more honest and less PC-obsessed” -finds
Tori asking, “Who do I gotta shag to get outta here?” On these songs, Amos is playing with sex and sexuality, but there are others
where she indulges her own need to “chase the dark”. Juarez, for example, is
about the murder of a young Mexican woman in the desert, and marries sex with
its old sparring partner, death. Further in, Lust explores issues of trust
within a sexual relationship with unflinching honestly. In a recent interview with The Times, Amos intimated that dealing with the
psychological ramifications of her well-documented past was a long and
intricate process, rather like threading a necklace one bead at a time. This is fine, complex record finds her a little calmer, but no less
challenging or controversial. She’s threaded a few more beads, several of them
gems. James McNair talks to Tori Amos. James: Certain lines in Bliss
suggest that you’ve been reassessing who you are in the light of who your parents
are. Have you? Tori: “I
guess my parents are in there, but to me it’s not just about the biological
father, but also the authority figure, whoever it is that I put in that
position. Bliss is really about control, and about certain things in our DNA that
you can’t use a strainer to get rid of. You can’t separate completely from
whoever made you, because they’re a part of you.” James: You’ve always seemed
acutely aware of the pressure that’s sometimes put on a woman to be both
Madonna and whore. Tori: “I’ve
spent a long time trying to marry the two Marys; the Magdalene with the Mother
Mary. In the myth, Magdalene is severed from her spirituality and wisdom, but
she has her sexuality and her sensuality. Mother Mary has her spirituality, but
not her sexuality, even though we know that whether or not she had Jesus, she
did have other children through intercourse. When I was younger I didn’t
understand that you could have lust in a marriage. I didn’t see how you could
combine the sacred with the sexual. For me, trust is a huge issue, and if I
trust I can walk into areas that might be dangerous.” James: Concertina and Glory of
the ‘80s read well as blank verse. How do you approach lyrics nowadays? Tori: “Usually
I have a blood-line going for a song, so there are certain marriages of words
that happen. Sometimes I try and become the words, so I’ll take on the
properties and characteristics of a squeeze-boy say. Am I still a woman as a
squeeze-box? Obviously. With something like Suede, which is about seduction, I
picture jets revving and I was walking round the studio with a physics
encyclopedia. The guy character in the song thinks the girl character is really
evil, yet he’s there to be seduced. Sometimes people act quick to see my evil
twin, but they don’t detect their own.” |