Tori Amos - Interviews Archive

Music Revue (US)
August 1992

Tori Amos Shakes, Rattles & Rolls Metaphysically

by Bruce Madden

The music of Tori Amos. Hmm... the words begin to spin in my head. My thought rebel at the prospect of even attempting to convey the purity of feelings Amos' songs flood the senses with. Her lyrics spill raw emotional pictures into our private, subconscious cinemtas. Her imagery pricks, slices and finally hacks away pretense, falsehood, chimera, leaving the listener wriggling on a carpet of self examination. Who has not seen, felt or acted out these life scenes? Who is guilty? Who is inncoent? Her piano is not an instrument. It becomes a second voice penetrating and insistent. All this and more on her debut recording Little Earthquakes.

Amos will be appearing at Club Eastbrook on August 3 sponsored by Vinyl Solution and WLAV as part of a Three For Free series of concerts. Tickets are being given away by the radio station and Vinyl Solution, so don't just show up expecting to get in. Check the radio for details.

According to her bio, Amos was raised in an environment of love and discipline with a healthy dose of sexual repression thrown in, though the atmosphere of her home life was spiritually alive. When she was five years old, she won a scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland. By age 11 she got the old heave ho from the school for playing piano by ear. It seems she got tired of just sight reading. She wanted to create music, not just follow a scre. Eventually she moved to England, as many American artists have, and found a receptive group of people who encouraged her creativity, resulting in the production of Little Earthquakes.

Amos spoke to Music Revue from the offices of EastWest Records in London. Spoke is actually too tame a word. Enthused. Poured out. Flowed. Sparked. All of the above.

There's this catholic voodoo charm mentality that seems to pop up in my psyche and the same type of religious imagery seems to permeate the songs on Little Earthquakes. Can you tell me a little about that?

Amos: My dad is a Methodist minister and Mom is wonderful and Christian. But beyond that my father's parents were both ministers, church of God. My dad was not a fundamentalist minister though. There is a duality there. My dad has a doctorate in theology. He studied all philosophies, so there is a side to him that isn't so closed which has been the basis of our relationship. And my mother was a literature major, so she read Edgar Allen Poe stories to me growing up. (laughs) A lot of this music came out because I had taken on everybody's belief systems. With children we do put our belief system on them even if we're not conscious of it. I've been reading Alice Miller which has been really eye-opening for me. As a child, I developed a false self to deal with everything and the true self got put in the cupboard and never developed. I took on all the fears of the grown-ups around me and they took on all the fears of the grown-ups around them so it goes on and on. It just never stops until you get somebody that says, "Hang on, I just can't accept this anymore." And so they have kids, do you see what I mean?

Sure and the different religious images change.

Amos: It's a bit sad that Jesus had to get connected with all this because he would have nothng to do with all this. It's like he's a commodity.

It's like a big Jesus carnival. Get your Jesus here, Jesus straws, Jesus pickle jars...

Amos: Yeah, it's a carnival where the Penguin is really running the show and the Penguin is really a child that wasn't loved. And so we go around it, it's about power and how religion has been used to gain this power. And all we have to do is pick up the books and see. Just because we have vehicles that can go kind of fast, we think it's fast but it's probably pathetically slow compared to what they've got in some other galaxy.

Oh yeah, we haven't progressed very far past the theory that the sun is going around the earth instead of the other way around.

Amos: Exactly we've only progressed that far and Mexican food worldwide. But back to this religion thing, it has nothing to do with love your neighbor as yourself. It's the antithesis of that, it's been harnassed and abused and it's not ok that it's been abused. The earth is saying it's not ok. The earth is cracking. Some firewords are starting to happen. Just when I say that I'm not bringing up Nostradamus type theories. It's obvious in what's going on right now. There's an upheaval going on and I think what I have felt i my right and my duty to myself to say I've had an incredible opportunity to be a minister's daughter and I've seen it from the inside.

I'm fascinated by how you took on different personalities and became them in a way. But what is very gratifying is whe you begin to shed that and that's what I feel when I listen to your music. You can feel there is something very powerful and emotional going on there. I think I'm still struggling to throw off different childhood cultural baggage that was stuck on my mind when I wasn't even aware of it. And it's just been sitting there weighing me down. Ok there goes that old briefcase. Toss that one off.

Amos: (laughs) Yes!

And before you know it you start to feel a little bit of a floating sensation and you just feel really good, but you know there's a lot more creeping around in there, for me with nuns putting stuff in there or parents who have a light side and a dark side... as we all have a light and dark side.

Amos: Yes, we all do. You know when we're not able to look at our dark side, you can't have one without the other.

It's how you deal with it.

Amos: If I'm able to look at my ability to be violent, and why I'm violent and the energy that is able to be violent, anyone can be violent, pushed to whatever... we all have different limitations. But to suppress it and deny it, it comes out in many ways. That means you can be so judgemental on somebody that is angry and it can really call it to you because you're so self righteous about it. Do you see what I mean? There are so many things. You can be a persecutor of people because you don't want to look at why they're angry, and what happens is you have children who are just raging, who just go out and kill people, because the parents weren't able to deal with their own violence. They were so afraid of it, ashamed of it, that it was so suppressed that it comes out in other ways. So that energy turned into something balanced, that energy that can be so violent can also carry ten people across a river. That's an incredibly energy -- violence. You can choose what to do with it, it's choice at that point. If you're unwilling to look at things, you will be unable to see all your choices clearly, everything will be clouded by guilt and shame and all this stuff going on. At my concerts, what I do is say, "Let's bring all the guilty ones, all the angry ones, all the little fairies that like to pee on people, let's ang out together, this is a safe place. Those awful thoughts you feel so ashamed of thinking, bring them. Let's not be afraid of them." What we need to do is say, "Ok I'm listening to you." Then they don't feel like they have to become these tyrants!

There is a lot of positive energy out there to connect with if you just try to find it.

Amos: Let's say in a distorted way, for example, we just talked about when you suppress those feelings, how it can come out in a real violent way, it can come out in another way -- upholders of morality. I'm not going to mention any names, because I'm not about that, I'm not about having brawls and fights and pointing fingers. I'm the kind of person who says, "Hey c'mon kids, let's hang out and have a pizza and talk about what we're really angry and scared about." And nobody's wrong. It's just if you have the need to suppress what I'm saying, and you take it to law and legislation, and you try to put it in the trash and you try and justify t wih religion or morality or whatever you want to say, that is true evil. That is just as bad as the person who is going and blowing people's brains out and I say just as bad as taking a physical life, because what you're creating with that kind of control is massive anger which incites riots, which incites massive murders, so you're indirectly, but directly linked to that. It's just a bit more devious.

Again the word faith pops up. People that do that, people who feel the need to control others either through legislation, brutality or force really don't have the faith in what they are purporting to have faith especially large religious organizations.

Amos: Of course not!!

And that's why they have to enforce their beliefs through brute force or whatever.

Amos: And if brute force oesn't work they're gonna eat you inside with your own consciousness, they're gonna go inside and say, "If somebody feels a division inside themselves divided between lust and love, divided between their god being and their human being, their spirit and their physical, that there is a division because you can't be sexual and be spiritual. IF you have all these going on you're paralyzed. You're walking plasma. You're kind of glued together with all that goop. We have a right to be all that we are and a part of what we are is responsible, and a part is imbalance embracing the dark as well as the light. There is such an incredible fear of that.

t o r i p h o r i a
tori amos digital archive
yessaid.com