Tori: It's incredibly sad to come back to my country I've just been in Ireland. People are fighting, desperately fighting, for women to have the right to choose to have an abortion or not. I come back here and I say, we've worked for thousands of years to have some kind of independence and you see it's slipping through your hands. Cause the truth is, this is not about children - cause when you strip away all the layers and you get to the seed - this is not about children. If it were, these people would go to the sewers in Columbia, they would go to the AIDS wards, there's millions of babies, they're throwing them out like trash on the streets like cabbage. Nobody cares about the children once their on the planet. They don't care. They walk around with guns and blow each other up. They have no food, they have nothin'. Nobody cares about that.
This is not about children. This is about having control over woman's sexuality. And some women don't want to claim that power because they feel ashamed, they feel guilty, they're torn of love and lust. Christianity is nothing - absolutely nothing to do with that. Nothing. And it saddens me because these people - the anti-choice people - could be doing so much for the children that are on the planet. This is not about the children. I refuse to play that game because one has to analyze, one must look at what an issue is about. And it's not what it's about and it comes down to that, and everybody's bought it.
Being a minister's daughter means you get a really good poppy seed cake at Christmas time. And you get really wonderful dresses and things made by these really nice old ladies and you also get an incredible amount of confusion. Because my father's not a fundamentalist Christian preacher - he's what you would think liberal. He and I are very close with my mother also. But my father is the minister. You would think that we are at odds. And now that I'm twenty-eight and a half, we've come to a point where we're good friends and we've accepted that we have different views on things. When you're fourteen-years-old and you don't know what your beliefs are, you are taking on everyone's beliefs around you, and you're making them yours. And um, my parents are big believers in speaking how you feel. I've gotten to be really, really close with them as I've gotten older and that's a treasure to me cause they are still alive, and I can tell them that I appreciate them. Even with their beliefs, they said, 'she wants to play clubs, she wants to make records, and she says those things.'
[transcribed by Kristen Loftis]
screen shots
Tori Amos interview and performances
Me and a Gun
Interview
Silent All These Years
Interview
Crucify
Smells Like Teen Spirit
t o r i p h o r i a tori amos digital archive yessaid.com
