Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (16 page)

I work within music and not poetry because in my form the two elements work together. I'm shifting and shaping words as I vocalize, too. Sometimes I don't see it until after it's written. I'll look back and see the pattern of a melody, and what the words are doing; sometimes the melody is doing the complete opposite of what the words are doing, and it creates a contrapuntal line. It gives the story another subtext. You could have a dark lyric with a jaunty tune; the lyrics might not rhyme, but the music might, in a sense. Humor usually comes from the music. That's true in “Yes, Anastasia” and “Mohammad My Friend.”

It's a mistake when critics focus on lyrics alone. Without vocalizing, a
songwriter would just be a poet. But we're different. Most lyrics read terribly on the page. They can be poetic, but a dress can be poetic, a kiss, whatever. When poets try to write songs, that's also usually a mistake. And musicians who think they can publish books of poetry should, for the most part, think again. Some can cross the line and live in both worlds— Leonard Cohen, for instance. His performance of his own compositions has always been its own art form. I imagine that as a songwriter he had a tear in his eye when he first heard the rendition of his “Hallelujah” by Jeff Buckley. Even if you are known as a performer of your own compositions, when someone else puts their heart and soul into a song that you wrote, your mountain has just got to move and you've got to say, “Amen, brotha’.”

TORI:

I sit at the piano. We're in preproduction for the new work.
The Beekeeper.
On tour it would be showtime. 8:50 p.m. I start to play, but as I go into my zone, I don't see the four barnlike walls of the studio painted a shade of Tuscan Madras—I'm on a stage somewhere. Anywhere. It doesn't matter. I'm amped. Body and soul, I am experiencing an otherworldly “tune-up.” My tape recorder is on; I'm playing one of the new songs as I would live, and something new is being played by my hands. A whole new section, a melody, marches out of my mouth over my lips. I feel a bass line, a kick pattern in my hips. I am meeting a piece of this song creature that I never knew existed. Because they change when played live, I've been trying to find the songs in the future and then bring them back in that particular form so that then I can decide which of the song's different forms work better on tape.

ANN:
Just as Saraswati manifests with instrument in hand, so Amos cannot separate the act of songwriting from playing piano and singing. Her voice de-

fines the often unconventional shapes of her melodies and time signatures, while her beloved Bösendorfer guides her into new rhythmic patterns and harmonic combinations. With each album, Amos has challenged herself as a player and a singer, and in doing so has pushed open the boundaries of her song structures.

TORI:

The songs are structures in themselves. Once I'm able to find my way into one of them—and that might be only a four-bar phrase—that does not mean that I have access to this song creature. Imagine that you have been able to let yourself into this fascinating architectural space but you're in only one room and you do not know how to get to the other rooms because as of now there are no doorways. It becomes like a sonic puzzle. Sometimes it takes months for me to find my way around a song, because I have to find harmonic code, but once I do the song seems to let me into another room. This doorway has been put in place by the song itself. The structures already exist. I'm just interpreting them. Now, can I trick the songs by writing them and imprinting them with any architecture I want? No, but I can trick myself. The songs, though, will never resonate the way they were intended to unless I work with them to crack their codes. It's sorta like … you can say you love this person—everyone wants you to love them and make them your partner, because it's what makes sense to everybody else— but you know somewhere inside whether you truly love them, or whether you are pretending to feel something and you call it love. Because you kind of have a special feeling for this person, but honestly, it's all becoming a bit of a headache … and it would make everybody happy if you just loved this person. Does Venus know you're not really in love? Of course, and so do you. This is what songwriting requires—the ability to listen to the heart of the song.

CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

Each album I've made represents a period in my vocal development. In
Earthquakes
, if you listen to the singing, there is a consistency, mainly because I was continually having to find my inner voice.
Venus
is very consistent—to me, there's a real beauty throughout the album with that
vocal. By then I could move into anger and out of it instead of experiencing it as an uncontainable emotion. On
Pele
I'm almost, you know, burning up. Whereas now, if I wanted to represent a woman in flames, I would detach myself, study it, make the needed shifts, and move the hands on my clock so that I could step into anger without being burned up.

Pele
is really where I think the voice unleashed. And sometimes in a way that wasn't contained. Once I found it, I could move on to temperance. At different times, you write different music for your voice and for you as a player, but you also write music that you can emotionally contain. Your soul—your psyche—what makes your inner world a wasteland or fertile or both, is the deciding factor in what will make up your song garden. With
Choirgirl
, after the
Pele
thing, I wasn't in a bloodletting place. I had lived that. There's a lot more containment—I was tracking with musicians who were really skilled, and I needed to be spot on. With
Pele
I was also in a church, so you can imagine what was going on there—talk about an exorcism, praise Jesus. It was about time. This girl was finding her Kundalini and letting it come forth right at the altar of the church where they would have their sacred communion. I was able to have sacred communion, finally, with the Feminine in the place where she had been circumcised. That's one reason for the haunting background vocal in “Caught a Light Sneeze,” “Inanna Inanna Inanna bring your sons;” it was such a resurrection for she who is Mrs. God, right there in the church. With
Choirgirl
, and later with
Venus
, I was home. There was time to let the wife, the lover, the friend, catch up with the part of my woman who was living in these song realms. If your human woman doesn't catch up with what's happening in the song world, then you can't imprint this knowledge and thread it into your living tapestry.

Working on
Strange Little Girls
, I found new qualities within my voice. To sing “New Age” like that—there's a lot of power in that chorus.

To hit the tone I wanted, I needed to come more from the chest. Sometimes I will use that, but I don't always need to; there are many, many ways. For “New Age” I just wanted a certain tone, and I began to explore and realize how power and tone can be used together. So I'd been playing with that a lot, and you can hear that on
Strange Little Girls
, particularly because in those songs you can clearly see the different characters. That album was so much for me about being a singer and knowing how you use your voice. I did use my voice to step into different parts. I was able to do that because I had done
Pele
and strengthened my vocal instrument. I could never have sung all these various ways in 1992. No way. I didn't have the experience. I had never sung with a band. In 1998, I sang with a band in front of 15,000 people in Madison Square Garden on a steroid shot, with a concussion. Having done that, you don't sing the same anymore. You have to go out there and get your vocal sea legs.

This is why I've told people, “You have to tour.” No matter what happens in the world, as a musician, as a singer, you really, really need to do that if you want to keep changing. Because there's a physical change that will happen to you as a singer just because you've done it, and it expands your possibilities as a songwriter. Use it or lose it. That's one reason I do tour a lot.

Singing, songwriting, and the piano are inseparable for me. I need to play the piano just to be who I am. I don't mean I need to play for people. I enjoy that, but it's a different experience. When I'm playing in our studio I'm not thinking about all the things I think about when I'm performing; I'm not thinking about what I need to take on board in order to project what it is I'm seeing in my head. I don't have to pose in front of the song. I don't have to communicate it just then—it's communicating itself to me and I'm trying to translate it.

I play the piano every day, with very few exceptions. When my piano is gone from me, there is just something missing. There are periods when
it's not around, when it's flying or on the boat. It takes three weeks to get it from New York to England. A long time. An instrument is a friend, and some friends come and go. But if you had to tell me that I could achieve world peace by never playing the piano again—I'd have to think about whether I'd be willing to do it. It's that serious.

In fact, I rarely sing without playing the piano. If I do separate them, I sing and play differently. I'm not saying that there aren't certain songs for which it's better for me to separate them when recording. I did an over-dub vocal on “Cornflake Girl” because I was playing so hard that you could hear my breathing on the tape, and it was too labored. On some songs I will track the vocals separately because I find that I need to stand up to get the control and the tone I want from my voice. I'll try these songs at the piano first, and if I can't get my body in the right position to get the tone I need, then I'll compromise.

I did spend one period of my life without my own piano. It was when I was first trying to make my career fly in Los Angeles in the 1980s. I didn't see a lot of other piano players, especially women, doing it at the time. Everybody was saying that the girl-and-her-piano thing is dead. I kind of had a funeral for it with
Y Kant Tori Read.
We all know how that effort went.

I was laid low at that point, wondering,
How did I end up here, from the conservatory to this place?
I had a friend who was a little bit older, Cindy Marble; she'd been in L.A. for years trying to make it with her band, Rugburns. I was talking on the phone with her, lamenting my life. She said, “You know, when you sit and play the piano and sing, something is real about that. That's when I sit and listen. Everything else just doesn't feel—honest.” She had a piano. I went over to her house that night and she lit some candles and asked me to just sit there and play She was having a smoke, I didn't smoke any because it would harm my voice,
but I was hypnotized by the aroma. I just played for her for a while, a couple hours. I got a piano within two weeks. I rented one. I couldn't afford to buy one.

I was living behind the Methodist church on Highland and Franklin in Hollywood. I was thinking a lot about ethics and morality. And I began to realize that I had betrayed my instrument, the thing that had always been my conscience. I listened to the corporate side of the music industry, and it took me as low as I could go. From child prodigy to being called a bimbo in
Billboard?
You don't get lower than that. I vowed never to abandon the piano again.

In Cornwall, the piano room is my workshop. Mark's building me another piano room so that if this one is being used for some other purpose during the recording process, I'll have another place to play The piano is at the center; it's always at the center for me.

I married somebody who understands the relationship I have with the piano. That's key. Mark knows when to leave us alone—I think he'd like to be left alone most of the time anyway. But he really does understand it. He's observed that when I have time to go to the piano and do as I've always done, so many things pass through me that even he doesn't hear, because that's just part of my process. Even if I don't write every day, I'm playing to express myself; that's my time, and, along with being Natashya's mommy, it makes life worth living.

ANN:
The image of Amos alone with her piano is romantic but not complete when it comes to her songwriting. She taps into many springs to feed her imagination—texts she has long loved or ones she only recently discovered during hours of prowling bookstores and museum shops around the world; tales she learned at her mother's knee; and others that came to her from the mouths of the wise women and men whom she has sought out during her adulthood; conversa-

tions within her esteemed circle of friends and fellow players. Music, classical and contemporary, stirs her, too, though she is careful to guard the taps on those fonts. As the connections that figure into Amos's cosmology spark and multiply, she becomes absorbed in the energetic current and loses all sense of time and place until a new work is born.