songs | interviews | photos | tours | boots | press releases | timeline

JAM (US)
Florida's Music Magazine
March 24, 1998

Tori Amos talks about her miscarriage

By JOHN SAKAMOTO
Executive Producer, Jam! Showbiz

Tori Amos says a miscarriage she suffered at the end of her last tour was the seed for her new album, from the choirgirl hotel.

"I wasn't going to write this record as soon as I did. But at the end of 1996, I was near the finish of a tour and I was pregnant," she says in a startlingly candid interview included in her record-company bio, not usually the forum for anything weightier than a gushing sales job. (Amos, needless to say, is not your usual recording artist.)

"I had known from very early on -- within a week -- that I was pregnant. So I lived with the feeling and got attached to the soul that was coming in. And then at almost three months, I miscarried. It was a great shock to me, because I really thought I was out of the woods and I was really excited to be a mom.

"I went through a lot of different feelings after the miscarriage -- you go through everything possible. You question what is fair, you get angry with the spirit for not wanting to come, you keep asking why. And then, as I was going through the anger and the sorrow and the why, the songs started to come. Before I was even aware, they were coming to me in droves. Looking back, that's the way it's always happened for me in my life. When things get really empty for me -- empty in my outer life -- in my inner life, the music world, the songs come across galaxies to find me."

One of those songs, "Spark" (the album's first single), appears to centre around Amos's miscarriage, as she sings: "She's convinced she could hold back a glacier/But she couldn't keep baby alive."

"People had a very hard time talking to me about what had happened. And I had a hard time talking about it. But the songs seemed to have such an easy time talking to me. And I began to feel the freedom of the music.

"Each song would show me a certain side of herself because of what I was going through. So a song like 'Cruel' came to me out of my anger. 'She's Your Cocaine' and 'iieee' came out of a sense of loss and sacrifice. And other songs celebrated the fact that I found a new appreciation for life through this loss.

"There's a deep love on this record. This is not a victim's record. It deals with sadness but it's a passionate record -- for life, for the life force. And a respect for the miracle of life.

"This record got me through a real bad patch. But I can laugh with this record, and I can move my hips to this record, which is really good for me. It's very sensual -- that's the rhythm."

NOTE: All of the quotes above are taken from Tori Amos's bio, provided by Atlantic Records.

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