Tori Amos: Different Sides of Self
Words: Becca Nelson
Photo: Courtesy of Girlie Action
It is with a slightly wistful tone that Tori Amos says, speaking to me from chilly England, “I bet it’s warm there … ”
“There” being Florida, it is of course, warm, and while the sticky heat of a June morning doesn’t seem a typical thing to long for, Amos has never been a typical girl.
Her story is well-known: born in North Carolina as the daughter of a reverend, she began playing piano as a toddler, and began composing by the time she was five. Her musical education took her in and out of a series of music schools, including the Peabody Conservatory, from which she was finally asked to leave at age 11, the result of a growing interest in rock music coupled with a dwindling interest in sheet music.
Thirty-four years after her expulsion, the sheet music doesn’t matter so much. And while she currently resides in Cornwall, England with her husband, producer Mark Hawley, and eight-year-old daughter Natasha (“Tash”), her heart is still tied to warmer places.
“Florida is my home, it’s where my parents are and I have a house there … I’m a southerner.”
Amos returns stateside soon to begin the tour for Abnormally Attracted to Sin, her tenth studio album, released in May of this year. The record, which is accompanied by a DVD of 16 “visualettes” that correspond to each track, was conceived while the singer was on the road promoting 2007’s American Doll Posse.
“When I’m on the road, and it’s a cichéd phrase, but triggers happen … you are meeting different people and you are experiencing so much in one day, you’re exposed to so many different senses through other cultures, and you get news in a different way, and you get perceptions from all over the world,” she says. “You travel quickly, and sometimes what you experience is conflicting, but for songwriters, this all adds to your palate, I collect my observations as I go along.”
Collecting experience, and especially observing the experiences of others, is a huge part of Sin, and the stories the record tells are preoccupied with individuals examining their own sense, whether bred or cultivated, of what is right and wrong. On her website, she elaborates:
“I wanted to really investigate how we’re controlled by the threat of despair. I wanted to look at power and how we think and how you can reclaim the right to think for yourself, to uncover what you believe in as a spiritual, sexual creature. You don’t need the approval of your family, or of their religion. You can think, ‘Wait a minute, I’m a spiritual being. Just because I like gold handcuffs doesn’t mean I’m not a spiritual being.’”
The past several years have seen Amos release overtly conceptual records: 2002’s Scarlet’s Walk told of a trip across America as experienced through the album’s namesake alter ego, and 2007’s American Girl Posse found the singer literally assuming a different character for each track.
“The last record was about expanding my personality to include different sides that might not have been tapped into every day,” she explains. “I would say that this record is a bunch of songs sung by a redheaded person.”
When I ask her to elaborate on this “redheaded person,” the answer doesn’t seem to come easily. After a moment, she says, “It’s just me.
“Look, when you go to work, there are different sides of yourself that you choose to present, and when you are with your friends, you present a different face. But when I make records, I open up. There are not a lot of secrets. When I make records, it’s all there.”
This is quite obvious on the early recordings that launched her career: Little Earthquakes and Under The Pink are woven together with raw and brutal displays of emotion. Earthquakes’ “Me and a Gun,” her most notorious, if not most popular song, is a starkly delivered account of a rape at gunpoint that occurred in her 20s. The unmediated delivery of deeply personal experience coupled with the singer’s reputation for intimate and sexual live performances became Amos’ trademark characteristics, and the shock value of her work at times overshadowed her talent.
But the exposed rawness of “Me and a Gun,” or the plaintive sadness of songs like “Playboy Mommy,” written after Amos suffered a tragic miscarriage, has faded, because, as she explains, she doesn’t need to write those stories anymore.
“I’m not in that space now so those songs aren’t going to be here, and I’ve healed those wounds,” says Amos. “But when you’re singing about the loss, like in ‘Playboy Mommy,’ or the painful very long pause bloodletting of ‘Me and a Gun,’ on all levels, I think those experiences are tough to listen to sometimes.”
The sonic starkness of early records is now fleshed out with heavier production, and richer instrumentation. But the softer delivery only slightly buffers tracks that still explore painful phenomena of American culture. Sin’s “Maybe California” was inspired by accounts of women publicly threatening suicide in desperate emotional appeals aimed at helping their recently laid-off husbands get their jobs back. The song also anchors a strong theme of the album - motherhood, an idea that has preoccupied the majority of her records on some level.
“You face different challenges when you become a mom, just as you face different challenges as you go from 40 to 45,” she says. “You have different experiences, and they demand that you reach deep as you grow. This record is about a woman being a mother, singing about moments when she doesn’t feel powerful, or singing to somebody she recognizes, such as on ‘Ophelia.’ And ‘Fast Horse’ is about the moment she knows she has to value and appreciate her life instead of always thinking that it’s not the way it should be.”
From a rebellious North Carolina preacher’s daughter to a mom and married woman in England, Amos’ experience, pre- and post- domesticity has provided ample material for the 100 songs in her catalogue. As she embarks on the Sinful Attraction Tour, though, fans may rest assured that along with the new material, old favorites will emerge.
“I’m always revisiting,” she explains when I ask if she plans on performing old work on the upcoming tour. “Any show I’m going to perform is about the ‘song girls’ in a catalogue working together.”
Tori Amos’ Sinful Attraction Tour comes to Orlando’s Bob Carr Performing Arts Center July 28, and The Fillmore @ Jackie Gleason Theater in Miami July 29.
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