Tori Amos Interview

By Chad Bowar

Tori Amos began her music career at a very young age. She started playing piano and singing in her father’s church choir at the age of 4. She later attended Baltimore’s prestigious Peabody Conservatory. She started performing in clubs in the Baltimore/D.C. area and moved to Los Angeles at age 21.

Led Zeppelin was a big influence on Amos, and her first album was actually as the lead singer of a pop/metal band called Y Kant Tori Read. That album disappeared into obscurity, and five years later Amos re-emerged with her current style. Her 1992 solo debut Little Earthquakes was released to critical acclaim and sold over a million copies. After several platinum albums with Atlantic Records, Amos moved to Epic Records for her latest release. I had the pleasure of speaking with Tori a couple of days before a concert here in Rapid City, South Dakota in April, 2003.

Chad Bowar: Describe your latest album, Scarlet’s Walk.

Tori Amos: It’s a sonic novel. It’s a story about a woman who’s crossing the country, asking questions, seeing what it is she truly believes in.

Is Scarlet all you, mostly you, or partly you?

My husband asks me that sometimes. Being that Scarlet had four lovers he wants to know. I don’t really commit to this. It took me 15 years to cover the country, so I guess I’ve been writing this for a long, long time.

How did September 11th play into the equation for recording the album?

I was in New York that day, and I started touring soon after. I began to see people asking questions that they hadn’t really asked before, and you’re seeing it more now than you’ve seen in a long time. Who is our spiritual mother that we call America? What is our relationship to her, and is she in the right hands? Is she being protected? These are questions I started seeing from East Coast to West Coast, on whatever side of the politic you’re on. People just saying I see my relationship with the country different since 9/11. I think that people began to feel that she was alive, more akin to the Native American belief that America is alive and a soul, and not an object that’s controlled by any government. So the Native American way of thinking influenced the record quite a bit.

One of the songs on Scarlet’s Walk, “Carbon”, takes place at Wounded Knee, which is near here in South Dakota.

There are two things happening in that song. Because real events, historical events are happening through all the songs, and Wounded Knee is the historical event that we’re referring to in this song. They’re also real women that sort of personify America. The woman is a manic-depressive and she’s facing madness because she realizes what has happened to her in her life, the dishonoring in her life, and she historically goes to what happened at Wounded Knee and the dishonoring there. That’s the bridge between a personal life and a historical event and how they’re held in the same song.

What inspired the song “A Sorta Fairytale”?

It’s the second song on the album, and Scarlet thinks she’s met her soulmate. I guess she did meet her soulmate, but then they went to New Mexico and took their masks off and decided “Oh my God, you’re not my fantasy.” It was going really well when they were in San Francisco, but then of course when you go to the desert sometimes you see things in each other that you might not want to see. He certainly didn’t want to see it in her, so it sorta ended.

There’s a special boxed set of Scarlet’s Walk, and the regular CD also has enhanced content, right?

The boxed set has a map that is quite large, and it shows you where she went in detail form. In both CDs you can put the CD into your computer and it will take you to Scarlet’s Web. There are layers to Scarlet’s Web. There is a Native American layer so you can see where the nations were hundreds of years ago, who held the land and what occurred there. The students at Haskell University, which is in Lawrence, Kansas, have been helping with that. They’ve been working with us to make sure that it’s all the best information we can get.

Did you put the bonus material on the CD to help prevent some of the illegal downloading?

You can’t really control that. That is something within somebody. I’m the type of person that will go to a wine tasting and taste and then I’ll buy a wine if I like it. But I don’t taste 27 bottles of wine and get drunk. That’s a reflection of a person. You can’t change the way people see that issue.

Your last album, Strange Little Girls, was a cover album of you doing songs originally done by male artists. I think the most compelling song was your version of Eminem’s “Bonnie and Clyde”.

I’ve always said to my male friends, if you’re going to do your wife in, you better be careful the friends she makes when she’s dead. I was just drawn to the woman dying in the trunk as her daughter is sitting in the car while the girl’s father is telling his side of the story while the mother’s body is in the trunk. So my perspective is she’s not quite dead yet, and the final thing that this woman hears is her ex-husband, father of her child, telling her daughter this, knowing that her daughter will become a strange little girl one day. And her daughter is being drawn into the horrible crime, this murder. So I thought it was really important that people heard the mother’s side of it. Fair is fair.

You started playing piano at a very young age. When did you decide you wanted to pursue music as a career?

I was doing funerals and weddings when I was 8 or 9. I was cheaper than the organist, so my dad could cut me a deal. I realized funerals and weddings were intriguing, but I needed to stretch. I’ve playing clubs since I was 13 or 14 in Washington, DC where lobbyists and Congressmen would come in and have their cocktails and I played piano bar for them, their requests. I think being exposed to that political side of things maybe influenced my work, because I was intrigued on what went on, how it worked. As a piano player you just there and listen for six hours and people say things that they probably shouldn’t be saying, and eventually part of these people have become characters in my stories. When I moved out to L.A., in some ways it was child’s play compared to what goes on in Washington. It’s a lot more glitzy, but it’s definitely not as conniving. L.A.’s much easier to see what people are up to.

You’re going to be here in concert Wednesday night. What should a fan expect to see at a Tori Amos concert?

We love playing live, and every night it’s a different story. I don’t write the setlist until about an hour before I go on, depending on what’s occurring in the world. The songs change their meaning depending on which song occurs first, so you try to weave a tale. And by the end of it, hopefully people feel like they’ve heard a story that is topical. I should come with a warning. I’m not G rated.

As a postscript, her concert in Rapid City was incredible. She had the crowd in the palm of her hand from the opening notes of “A Sorta Fairytale” to the final encore. She played a mix of songs from all her albums, and her voice is even more powerful and haunting live than on CD. If you’re a Tori Amos fan and haven’t seen her in concert, you are missing out!

Article courtesy of http://www.suite101.com.