Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (15 page)

There are times when I'm doing lots and lots of research, and I'll start gathering words and phrases from various sources—books, conversations,
visual art. I'll start pulling my references out, and I have no idea which ones will prove useful. I'll just start jotting down ideas. I can do that for hours, but a lot of it is a load of crap. I can play piano for myself for hours. It's nonsense, most of it. It's like doodling or doing a puzzle. Exercising. And I just enjoy playing sometimes. But that's not composition. Within a few hours, maybe a rhythm pattern will arise, and I'll write it down in my script, or usually I have a little tape recorder and just put my ideas into that. Then I'll listen to that tape when I'm driving. And I'll go, “Oh, okay, stop the tape, rewind—now that is not a load of crap.” I'll jot it down in some kind of musical handwriting so I don't forget it and notate where to reference this catchy motif. That's how I found “a sorta fairytale.” “On my way up north, up on the Ventura”—I had that on tape, and then I went into a whole other load of crap. But when I heard that line months later, when I was pulling songs together for
Scarlet's Walk
, I thought,
I know that line.
I knew it was potentially a good song because foundationally I was working with marble, not linoleum. I like linoleum, but you have to be a little bit more selective, because linoleum can be a completely bad idea in a lot of structures, whereas marble, if it's good-quality marble, is always useful somewhere, even if only as the kitchen worktop.

It still took me months to develop “fairytale's” musical theme, because it was such an involved theme and I had to build it around a traditional fairy-tale form, to make it a modern rendition of what is known as a folktale. Matt and I recorded it a few times to get it right. Polly Anthony, who was president of Epic at the time, had an instant flirtation with the song, so when it came time to pick a single she was adamant that it be the one for America. My first single for
Scarlet's Walk
was being released in early September 2002, and she felt the nation could use a dose of whimsy, as there would be many heavy hearts still working through the grief from September 11. She called Mark and Marcel, asking them to pull together
an edit from the almost five-minute-and-fifty-second “fairytale” to a four-minute version without losing too much of the story line and its sentiment. Tricky but they did it.

TORI:

Tapes upon tapes upon tapes of ideas sit on the Bösendorfer. I find that this part of the songwriting process takes the most discipline. Playing every day at the piano or the Hammond or whatever keyboard is fun, I get whipped into a frenzy of playing, and of course I tape most of it when I'm in composing mode. I tape it on my little crap tape recorder (the boys are trying to get me to go digital). Anyway, at some stage I have to sit down and listen to the hours and hours of jamming on tapes to find the nectar, the sweet—jeez … it can be painful. I have art canvas books set aside, in which I record the building and development of the motif. A motif is a recurring melody. Sometimes I'll have more than a hundred different motifs going—a motif can last anywhere from a single bar to maybe a six-teen-bar phrase.

Now what happens, do you think, if you keep your tapes in order? Then you can see how a motif develops. I, on the other hand
—D'oh
(that was my Homer Simpson who just showed up for a minute)—clearly don't keep my tapes in order. So wherever I start, I start, but thank God I'm into drawing these silly little maps, sorta like a Yellow Pages, of where the song motifs live. Yes, I make twice the amount of work for myself because I don't keep my tapes in order, but eventually I memorize where everything is. If you do it in order, however, like a clever person would, you can observe how the original motif will change in the hours and hours of tape. Instead of spending days trying to find a sliver of a bass line that's God-knows-where amid fifteen tapes … yikes. While you are writing many songs, writing many motifs, naturally some keep coming back, refusing
to be forgotten. Sometimes they will change in a way that isn't good for the motif—it weakens it. So you go back to the part of the tape where it came together, and this may be for only ten seconds. I transcribe this onto a canvas, catalog it, and keep mining. I call this mining for songs. But hey, I never wanted to be Snow White, more like Glinda the Good Witch mining ancient stones with Grumpy. The motifs begin to have many variations as the weeks go by, but the most powerful ones tend to keep creeping up. There are those treasures that happen only once, only for a moment, and if I lose that tape it's gone forever, because I can't remember thirty seconds of music I played hours and hours ago. I've spoken about when the songs come and the euphoria of that, but the truth is, if I don't go through this painstaking cataloging process, then these pieces of music are just ideas that never become tangible. It will all sort of fade into a hallucination experience that becomes like an ecstasy trip unexplainable to everyone, even yourself. So, I will spend two hours a day just notating what is on the tapes, weaving them together, tracking them down. You see, as I get further into the developing of the song, sometimes I choose the original seed idea and sometimes I find that the motif has improved a few stages in. This might take weeks to decipher, but if you as the songwriter keep a mental file of all of the song Beings, even if you have to associate these new creatures with key words that make them more tangible, you will be able to track those songs down. Track them like a lioness tracks dinner for the whole pride. This is what I call hunting for song frequency.

MARK HAWLEY:

I think it's quite easy for Tori to come up with little melodies and little bits of music. As with a lot of musicians, the hard work is in finishing ideas. Eventually a song reaches a certain stage and comes out and it's beautiful.

But beforehand, whether it's one line of a lyric or a middle-eight section, that's what she works on for hours and hours.

Certain songs, like “Marianne” from
Boys for Pele
, were written, performed, and recorded spontaneously. How long is that song, five minutes? That was how long it took her to write it. She went into the church, played it, wrote the lyrics, and recorded it on the spot. When that stuff happens— well, you know I don't believe in magic, but that's it. That's when somebody
out there
is telling her how to play a song. I would never believe it unless I'd seen it. I've seen that happen maybe five or six times. But I've also seen the hard work, when she's had a song idea and it takes years. She started a song called “Lady Jane” in 1994 and she hasn't finished it yet. She's still working on it.

TORI:

I'm recording today once Hayley, Tash's beloved nanny, who is our resident Mary Poppins, takes her on her playdate. Strangely I'm not recording the first piece for the new album but for the rare B-side portion of the Live DVD
Welcome to Sunny Florida.
Because the Live DVD package will be released soon after Mother's Day in the United States, the song “Ruby through the Looking-Glass,” which I started writing for
Scarlet's Walk
, has signaled to me that her time has come to enter into the mass consciousness. Ruby is in utero, hearing her mother trying to protect her in the womb while her mother is clearly in a fight. Not only is the mother having to defend herself, but by addressing certain things that were done to her as a child, she makes a decision. She at all costs makes a vow to Ruby to be aware as a mother, and promises her a different way of communicating, instead of fighting. It will be almost two years since I began writing “Ruby” …

Do I think songs have a time line? Can a song's meaning and the response
by a listener change because of when it's presented? Well, obviously. “I can't see New York” was perceived and will always be related to the September 11 plane crashes, even though it was written in May 2001. When “I can't see New York” walked into the room, slid into the wood through the strings, claiming the keys, which in turn played me, I did not choose to project actual events onto the song creature herself; otherwise I would probably have superimposed my perception of the TWA800 disaster of 1996. Sometimes you have to order your own pictures to leave your mind, knowing that they are a tainting influence on the translation—talk about being lost in translation. This is a focus, a skill, a meditation of sorts, to keep a clean slate, to keep Tori Ellen's opinions out of the way when a song walks in full force, almost completely intact—this is definitely about taking dictation. These songs happen rarely for me, hearing one pretty much as a finished song for the first time, and hearing it very much how the public will hear it for the first time in a completed form. Only when I was walking down Fifth Avenue on the afternoon of September 11 did I understand—in song language—the subtexts and energy of death and loss from the point of view of a plane victim. As the song played over in my head, I kept walking toward the burning.

CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

There isn't just one kind of song that I write. One side of me loves atmospheric British music, like the Cocteau Twins and Talk Talk, and then there is a side that loves story songs—Springsteen's “Born to Run” and “Thunder Road.” Other times I'll incorporate a burlesque or vaudevillian quality. There's a tradition of pop songwriters who do that—Lennon and McCartney did it quite a bit in songs like “Martha My Dear.” It's supposed to be a release; sometimes you need that humor. In my songs—“Leather,”

“Wednesday,” “Mr. Zebra”—there's a sinister force moving within the song, just as there was in burlesque. But they can definitely have a giggle, those Girls.

What I know I'm not is a “write me a hit at the drop of a hat” type of songwriter. I don't think I could contrive a song that the world would embrace just because it targets a certain demographic. To me one of the best classic pop writers is Carole King. Her songs go beyond the usual limits; they're not the kind you hear one week on the radio and then a year later it's out of there. A part of me wishes I could write like Carole King, but it's not my orientation. I think that my deepest desire would be to dive behind the masks people wear every day and find out who they really are, and then write about it. Now I realize that if I dived behind some masks, certain masks, let's say the Clear Channel mask, then I might just strike a chord, thereby lowering the drawbridge into the castle that is radio-land …or, the drawbridge would stay up and the arrows would come flying from the top of the tower. It's a crapshoot, but I adore rolling emotional dice.

JON EVANS:

The classical influence in Tori's music comes through in her harmonic choices and articulation. Her voicings are very classical. They're not jazz voicings with tight internal work-ins. It's very grand. But it works; it's really beautiful and it's kind of majestic in its own way.

Coming from a jazz background, I was used to improvising, and I have formal training, too, so I get the classical aspects of Tori's work. But I soon realized Tori doesn't write standard songs in any genre or tradition. She begins with her voice; there are meters and bars thrown in that complement her vocal lines. She might leave space to put in three extra words, so then that measure has an extra beat and a half, and that's just life, you
know? Even her singles, like “Spark” from
Choirgirl
, have a ton of time changes.

The first thing I ever did with Tori live was play “Spark” on the David Letterman show. That song just has its own logic. It's hard to get the rhyme and reason of it until you play it a bunch of times, and I just remember I was playing at that taping and looking over at Matt and saying, “What's going on?” It just was funny. You get used to the oddities in her music—you might be sailing along in a time signature, and then all of a sudden there's just an extra beat, or it might switch from one time signature to another without warning. Then some songs are just straight ahead the entire time, or you might have one that's kind of a waltz.

I think her writing style has evolved this way because of how she records; she's always recorded her songs alone first and then brought in other musicians once they're basically formed. It's only since she got together with Matt that the drums and piano parts have evolved at the same time. Before, if she wanted to add extra elements, she would just do it and her band would deal with it later. Her structures emerged organically, almost spontaneously.

There's more time on this new record,
The Beekeeper.
We're all here together and we've been spending a lot of time trying to give every song its own personality. Oftentimes when we are tracking, Matt and I will do something that will support Tori's getting her performance down. Something that she feels very comfortable singing and playing over. Then we'll go back and do something very different afterward. Matt will build a drum track that is completely different from what he did when we were tracking. I'll do something that goes along with that, so things kind of develop in that way. But every song is so different, and since we basically have a full day to do each track, some of them end up completely different from where they started.

CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

Melodies can come at any time. If I'm driving, for example, I might come up with something, and if I don't have a notebook I'll just jot it down in a paperback novel or whatever I happen to be carrying. I scribble on the back of whatever I can. It used to be bills, but that led to a whole set of other problems, so now it's whatever I can get my hands on. I've developed my own form of writing music, because I never did well in music school as far as theory. I had to take Theory IV twice. Mark did really, really well in theory, so he can advise me on those matters, and in the studio Jon charts things out for everybody. I can't do that. I have my own way of understanding rhythm and remembering the melodies I'm working in. I guess you could say that a notation has developed over the years so that I can write my music out and remember it, but it's definitely not a traditional musical form. Verses are setups; choruses are payoffs. They need to be. Music and words often come together when a song Being initially shows herself to me. I don't always get the full story. But usually a thought comes with the melody, or perhaps just the sound of a word that begins to give me clues as to who and what this creature is.