Tori Amos is not your average interview. One minute she'll be talking about where she draws inspiration for her soul-baring songs, the next she's questioning the virginity of Jesus Christ, or talking about her past life as Sven the Viking. When I caught up with Amos in late January, the one-woman tornado had been working herself silly for the past week, running from interview to interview, appearing with everyone from David Letterman to Rosie O'Donnell.
"I'm so tired," she replies when I ask her how she's feeling. "I've been up since five o'clock, doing morning shows. But anyway, we'll have fun," she reassures me. Given her penchant for going off the deep end, while speaking as though you're her oldest friend, I know we will.
Amos isn't publicizing a new record, but rather RAINN--the Rape, Incest and Abuse National Network--a crisis hotline which she and her record company, Atlantic, founded in 1994. Amos' journey toward establishing RAINN began in 1984, when she was sexually assaulted by an acqaintance not long after she moved to Los Angeles. Seven years later, when she was penning the songs for her debut album, Little Earthquakes, she found the courage to express her feelings about the rape in an a capella piece, "Me And A Gun." She vowed to perform the song on every stop of every tour as a reminder to herself and her fans that healing from sexual abuse is an ongoing process.
"The strength it takes to get up and sing that song every night is more than I ever imagined," Amos told Time Out New York last year. Fans flocked to her stage door, begging for advice or asylum, resonating with Amos' experience. "RAINN got formed because we were tired of feeling helpless," Amos explains.
"Me And A Gun" revealed only one of Amos' many aspects. Little Earthquakes was very much about this pianist's struggle to find her own voice. Throughout the record Amos divulges her personal discoveries in snatches of metaphor and unflinching honesty. In "Silent All These Years," she sings, "And I don't care, 'cause sometimes I hear my voice and it's been here--silent all these years." Other songs find Amos recognizing her own strength and purging her demons. "And my heart is sick of being in chains," she sings in "Crucify."
But this golden-throated minister's daughter was just getting warmed up. While Earthquakes helped Amos come to terms with her victimhood, her sophomore work--1994's Under the Pink--dealt with woman-on-woman betrayal in songs like "Cornflake Girl" and "The Waitress": "So I want to kill this waitress / She's worked here a year longer than I / If I did it fast, you know that's an act of kindness." Meanwhile, she took serious digs at Christianity in songs like "God" ("God sometimes you just don't come through / Do you need a woman to look after you?") Amos had found her voice, and now she was discovering her anger.
Anger turned to fire in 1996 when Amos released Boys for Pele, an ambitious and heavily coded record in which she explored her relationships with men--especially with former longtime boyfriend and producer Eric Rosse, with whom she split in 1994. Amos produced the record herself, choosing to include harpsichord (and, in concert, a pump organ called a harmonium) in her repertoire. The results were startling--on "Caught A Lite Sneeze," Amos' lyric about mistaken commitment is given added irony though the airy notes of the harpsichord, while on "Professional Widow" the keyboard is a roar of blues-noise.
Not that Amos is any stranger to noise. She says her first crush was on Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant; she's covered songs by the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, and weds a verse of "American Pie" to her somber rendition of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in live performances. She's released dance remixes of several singles from Pele and recorded a tune with DJ artist Brian Transeau (BT).
Despite Amos' personal gains, in the middle of 1996 she discovered that RAINN was in dire financial straits. Although RAINN had already helped some 125,000 people, if it couldn't raise the necessary money, the country's only toll-free rape crisis hotline would have to declare bankruptcy. Thankfully, someone was paying attention. On December 4, Calvin Klein announced he would be launching a year's worth of programs whose proceeds would benefit the foundation, including a line of T-shirts and other clothing items which would sell in his stores. And on January 23, Amos herself took the stage at New York's Madison Square Garden, the final stop on her year long tour. The concert raised $250,000 for RAINN. Today, the hotline runs full-time, and can be reached at 1-800-656-HOPE.
When I spoke to Amos a week after the concert, she was contemplative despite her exhaustion, digging deeply into rich metaphor as well as her signature offbeat humor. In the course of this conversation she discusses her intense love for touring, her friendship with Tool's Maynard James Keenan, her rocky relationship with the piano and her plans for the future. As always, talking with Amos is enlightening, challenging and more than a little fun.
Addicted to Noise: How did the RAINN benefit go?
Tori Amos: When I was playing the songs, the night seemed to be like a celebration. And I really didn't know that it was going to feel that way. I think that sometimes when you walk into the moment in time you think you can sort of second-guess what you might feel like. You can't, right? Because first of all, there are 5,000 people there changing the energy and the tone of the evening.
I'd been working, kind of preparing for about a week before I came into New York, just sort of sitting with different phrases. One of the phrases I've been sitting with is, "Nobody is anybody else's property." And obviously for a long time, if you weren't the person in power, or the race in power, or the sex in power, or the religion in power, you were somebody's property. Women and children have been property, predominantly. And men that aren't of the right race or religion have been property.
As I was sitting with that phrase, RAINN started to kind of grow more roots into the ground for me. Because what is the program that I was really trying to break in myself? It's the concept that I'm anybody's property or that anybody's my property. And that's a real big thing, you know, when you start thinking about how deeply embedded that thought is. If that was truly understood as a law of the universe, and respected, this would be a very different place.
I began working with that idea. That's how a lot of my work comes. There'll be a phrase, or a picture, or a sound. I'll see something and it'll strike a chord somewhere. And then I begin to follow that chord. And I'll follow it to the ends of the earth. Or maybe I'll just follow it down to the pizza parlor (laughs).
ATN: How did the duet with Tool's Maynard James Keenan, who sang with you on "Muhammad My Friend," come about? Amos: I wanted to do something a little different, since it was the last concert, that hadn't been done. And Maynard is... well, first of all he makes the greatest cookies I've ever had. And Maynard's so wonderful. He just really is. And he's a good buddy, so I called him up. Maynard's got a lot of interesting ideas about many things. I forget how we met exactly, but once we did we got on like a house on fire.
ATN: How do you feel that your upbringing has shaped the way you think about and write music?
Amos: Well, you can't get away from your upbringing. That's just the end of the story right there. Obviously you are exposed to whatever you've been exposed to: where you lived, who your friends were, what your parents did, where you went on holiday, where you didn't go on holiday. That's part of your dream. If you go to lunch in Paris every week with your mom, on an airplane from Baltimore, it probably won't be your dream to go to Paris for lunch with your girlfriend. That's not bad. You've had that experience. You'll have a different dream. Maybe your dream is to sell cotton candy at a baseball game.
ATN: As a little girl, what made you want to go to the piano at the age of two and start playing?
Amos: I don't really know. I just know that I looked at this big upright piano--it was tall, not like the little shorties--it was a large upright. And I just kind of pointed at it like, "Friend. piano, friend." I always knew that that was my friend. And it really is my friend. There's something, the energy of the piano is... Wow.
ATN: Has your relationship with the piano changed over time?
Amos: Over the years, my identity got very confusing. I think sometimes I wasn't just a piano player, I was part of the piano. I was so dependent on it for my identity that I got a little resentful of it. And I just didn't know how to develop a personality without having to bring up the fact that I was a piano player. So, with a lot of help from friends and people that have really cared, and wanted to help me develop an identity that wasn't just a piano, I've been able to do that.
ATN: What's songwriting like for you?
Amos: To really answer that we would really just have to do it. Because there isn't a "This is how I put on makeup. I put the moisturizer on, da da da..." It doesn't work like that. Because it's really about being open a lot of the time, and not missing the tricks. And you gotta figure you miss loads of tricks. So you've gotta be a good observer, because otherwise you never grow.
Hey, come on, the greatest we have to give each other is to be inspired by each other. If you're not inspired by anybody, then how boring. Inspiration comes from everywhere. Everywhere. And that's why when you travel, or take a walk down your little lane--North Carolina was very inspiring to me growing up, spending the summers there. I can remember the smell of the forsythia bush and those kinds of things. But life is an inspiring place, and whether people want to admit it or not, everybody's inspired by something or someone.
I mean, thoughts don't come from me, right? I might interpret them a certain way or put them in my own language, but no thought is anybody's. It all comes from somewhere. How you interpret it can be uniquely your approach, or your vision. But concepts can't be. They're just everywhere. For example, everybody's concept of what the Goddess is, is everybody's free will and right. Nobody owns that concept--how to express the Goddess in your life, how to express healing, how to find pain, how to find nightmares. Everybody has their own nightmare. Joy--joy is quite an elusive one, isn't it? I think joy is something quite scarce. Joy is probably one of the scarcest resources we have right now.
ATN: Why do you think that is?
Amos: I think it's just been like that for a few thousand years, but I think it's changing slowly-quickly-slowly-quickly. People are beginning to break the pattern and programming of domination. There's no joy in domination for either party, there's really not. There might be a distorted kind of get-offingness, but I don't know. Maybe if you can find true, pure joy in everything, then wow. And pure pain in everything, then wow. Then I think it's sort of exhilirating. But these concepts are really difficult because so many things we're talking about are so distorted. Even with myself.
ATN: You were talking about other people being an inspiration to you. You're an inspiration to an awful lot of people--what do you think of that?
Amos: That makes me really happy. That gives me loads of joy. I mean, that's just the best, isn't it? You can't harness that. You can't measure that. When you know you give people inspiration it's like, "Wow." I don't know, it's just the yummiest thing. ATN: Your songs have been evolving, especially on this latest tour. Some have different refrains added in, and others have been totally reworked. Have any of the songs surprised you in how much they've changed?
Amos: Well, "Professional Widow" at the organ was sort of a surprise. (laughs)
Part of my crew told me that when they would tour with other bands, the show would start and be an hour and twenty-six minutes every night. Every night, for like fifty shows. Do you realize what it takes to get it on like that every night? I think that's quite a skill. But it's also about being a machine.
I think you get bored when you've stopped letting the material shapeshift. And if you figure that we can shapeshift, you have to figure that a song can shapeshift. I'm really into this shapeshifting idea. People have been talking about it for centuries, whether it's Native American or Celtic, Egyptian or Mayan or whatever. You are you, but yet you're not just you anymore. That's really fascinating to me. That's where this whole idea, one plus one equals eight, comes in--the outcome being greater than the sum of its parts.
ATN: How did you feel about working with BT?
Amos: Originally I thought I was singing on a twelve-inch. And Brian basically said, "Do whatever you want." So I sang to this twelve-minute whatever, and when I heard a four-and-a-half-minute version, I sorta was surprised. And I think he did a brilliant job, because originally I sang to this really really long thing that was quite different than "Blue Skies" ended up being.
But it's always interesting working with other people because when it's not just yourself anymore, there are things that will come up that could never come up when you're working on your own. Because you are dealing with someone else, with their perception of things. You're dealing with their dream. You're dealing with their wants, desires and needs. And that's fascinating. It's a real leaning place. Playing by myself is much, much different from that. There are things that I've learned because of working with people that I could have never learned working by myself.
ATN: You've been talking about taking some time away from music. What are you thinking about doing in the future?
Amos: Well, I'm getting to this space where--you know when people say they need to go into sweatlodge? I need to go into sweatlodge. And also the spa, too. (laughs) A bit of both. A bit of the spa and a pedicure and the sweatlodge. Because things need to kinda cook, and not cook too long, but cook long enough so that you can taste and go, "Mmmm... I didn't get that right." Or, "I did get that right."
I'm just allowing this next work to not be rushed. It's time. I think that people who are creative on any level--and I think most people are, even if they don't realize it--you have to know that if you're talking to somebody who is a lover of gardens, it's great when you don't feel rushed, when you're racing against the season, when you haven't missed the seeding. If you're racing because you started late, that's no fun. I think if you ask any artist, one time in their life I bet they'd say they'd love to not be rushed. Even from your own self. So that's where I am right now. I don't want to rush this work.
ATN: Are you surprised at the amount of success you've found with your music?
Amos: Sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not, if that makes any sense. And it's not about anything more than a vision I had when I was five years old. I remember having visions that I would be at parties that I had never dreamed of in my life. And I didn't get invited to a lot of parties when I was that age. I was younger than some of the other girls in the neighborhood and I was like the drag because I was the youngest. And so I can remember having these visions of being at parties that were better, groovier than Susie's birthday party that I didn't get invited to.
Now maybe that was a fantasy, I don't know, or maybe it really was a vision, kind of a knowing that one day this would be happening, and that's what happens to me every night on tour. I'm at a party that I always wanted to be at, with like-minded people, having an experience together. Exchanging thoughts, feelings, putting lots of balloons up and it goes to the tenth power. We're back to that one plus one equals eight.
That's why I love touring so much, because it truly is--when we talk about a powwow or we talk about sweatlodge or we talk about a party or we talk about a journey--it's an intimate experience that a lot of people are having together. And that is very sacred and incredibly special. For me it is, every night is special. And just to be a part of it--that is, to me, heaven. There's nothing more wonderful than people sharing.
This article was originally published in Addicted to Noise.