The Myth of Tori

Introduction

My name is Tori Amos and I'm a musician. I never wanted to be anything but a musician. I love making music and never considered another path.

I was called a child prodigy. Those words are hard to come out of my mouth because, you know, you sound like such a freak. I was classically trained by the time I was five. Classically trained means that you spend a few hours a day playing classical music. I kept at that until I was twenty-one. I think music was sort of my key. It was the way that I got in touch with another... you can call it an imaginary world.

I don't see songwriting as therapy as much as storytelling, telling stories of how people really are. Most of my characters, I guess all of them, are based on real people. They're not made up. I mean, you jimmy with time a little bit, but really, just the average person has such a story to tell. And I find I never know it. It's the people that I don't expect. Each person has their own myth, their own mystery.

I'm a pretty disciplined character. I research a lot. If I'm going to write about someone drawn to the dark side, I need to know what they'll face in the Underworld. I like creating bloodlines and word associations. Joseph Campbell is someone I studied. He was a mythologist. I look at archetypes. But you need to look at your work and know what you're doing or you can get into trouble. That doesn't mean the work is going to be warm and fuzzy or necessarily have a happy ending.

Each album has turmoil and magical moments. Each record is a friend. Some friends you'd rather go on holiday with, some friends you'd rather be with when you're going through a bad time. The records are so different.

My “quest” is to get to the young ones, make them remember who they are, that they have access to creativity, to any kind of emotion they want to feel. Healing takes courage, and we all have courage, even if we have to dig a little to find it. There are things that I refuse to deal with except through my music... because I don't trust humanity that much, and I don't know if I trust me that much. But I trust the songs. Within the songs we find the solution as well as the problem. They're a dimensional medicine wheel from the ether realms. This is how they work.

Society gets set up in a way that there are the creative people and the non-creative people, but everybody has access to the creative force. You might express it in a way that's very different from how people think you should do it, but I really encourage people to find that voice. To me, everybody is like a fragment of the Divine. That's what I try to put out there. Everybody has something. I really believe that. Everybody has a uniqueness. And if that were really honored in our culture, we wouldn't feel like, “Why does she have all this and I don't have anything?”

A lot of times we don't look for our own diamonds, and we're not encouraged to look for or find our own diamonds. Sometimes it's just a way that somebody knows how to make you feel comfortable or safe. All those things are diamonds, but they're not considered diamonds in our world.