Winter

“I wrote this song for my Dad when he was ill.” [Down Under the Pink, disc 2]

“I was leeching off the men in my life; don’t get me wrong, they were leeching off me, but I didn’t like who I was. So my Dad and I were walking out in the old farm, my grandmother’s farm, she really wasn’t a nice person. Now my Dad, he’s like James Dean or Billy Graham, though there’s no real difference there. I was telling him how bad I felt cause of the first album being so bad and Dad said to me (he’d never said it before), ‘Tori Ellen, When are you going to accept you are good enough for you?’” [VH1 Storytellers - October 24, 1998]

“Summoned to the piano, this Russian music box round played me over and over til I was wrapped in a blanket with the memory of cinnamon apples on my tongue and boys that didn’t ‘We.’ Went back to where I felt no time - it was all happening again, presently.” [Little Earthquakes songbook]

"It's always shifting. When I sing "Winter" now, I don't necessarily get the same pictures I did on the last tour or the tour before or the tour before or the tour before. When I was writing that song, I was considering a relationship between a girl and her father, or a grandfather. Or any male who held that space. Because as we know, some fathers don't hold that space. My perspective isn't always about a girl and her father. "When you gonna make up your mind? When you gonna love you as much as I do?" There was a moment for me when those lyrics were referencing Kevyn Aucoin. Especially when he died, that was my need. The song allows me the space to have my perception of it as I go through my changes, and yet I still hold the integrity of a girl and her father when that songs enters my body in live performance. But I, as Tori, will feel what I feel, and see the pictures I see, and the songs have always allowed me that as long as I retain their DNA integrity.

"It can even come back to parenting. I will do something, say something to Natashya, and I'll just realize I have created a space that I did not want to create for her to walk into. Say she was very naughty and I said something like (and I am cringing as I write this), "Because you did this, this is why Mommy's going to London this weekend." So then she thinks that when Mommy leaves it's because she's naughty. I saw that happen once, and it was as if a thousand prisms were shattered -- I began to see in my own being how the tape plays, what I hear when somebody makes a rhetorical move like that. I did something that I'm going to have to deal with and work with now a lot, whenever I leave her. So when I sing "Winter," sometimes now I see a girl walking over that hill with a mommy. Yet the pictures can still be of my Poppa, and my father. It's not always an either / or when I'm singing a song live. I can liken it much more to snapshots or Polaroids that I can flip through in a book, that tug and pull on my emotions with every turn of a phrase. But now other experiences affect me when I sing, "When you gonna make up your mind? When you gonna love you as much as I do?" [Tori Amos: Piece by Piece]