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The Guardian (UK)
June 27, 1998

Hard to avoid...

Tori Amos

Why spend hours reading all the celebrity interviews when the most interesting elements boil down to a few key quotes? This week: Tori Amos, promoting her album From The Choirgirl Hotel just about everywhere.

To Steven Daly in Rolling Stone, on people who laugh at her for believing in fairies.

"You'll get some reporter from Vogue who doesn't know what she's talking about, who paints me as some insipid Tinker Bell character - well, Tinker Bell ain't up my Strasse, baby. I'm not some shivering waif in the forest. Sometimes I want to grab these bitches by the hair and take them to the world of faerie and say, 'Would you repeat that?'"

To Adam Mattera in Attitude, on her dreams and nightmares.

"Someone asked a friend of mine, 'Hey, do you and Tori wanna go see Scream 2?,' and she said, 'Fuck that, Tori lives this every night - she is Scream 2 . . .' I do have a very violent dreamworld. It's not always fun - sometimes I don't make it out of there, you know? Like, I wake up and . . . they got me!!"

To Nigel Williamson in Uncut, on growing up a strict Christian in Baltimore, the daughter of a "controlling" Methodist minister.

"It's made me really take issue with people telling other people what to do .. . Chrissie Hynde is a good friend but if she pushed her militant vegetarianism on me, I swear I'd eat my own arm. You don't convert people by shaming them, like the church."

To Nigel Williamson (again) in the Sunday Times, on being raped at gun point when she was 21, a trauma she sang about in her 1991 album, Little Earthquakes.

"After I moved to LA, I was raped. I wrote the song Me And A Gun about that, but I haven't talked to my mother or anyone about it . . .I have a shrink and I deal with it through that."

To James Bennett in the Times, on her recent marriage to her English sound engineer, Mark Hawley, in West Wycombe.

"I wanted the wedding to be real private, just our friends. But family is tricky. It's like the f**king Waltons, my family - they'll show up like critters crawling out from under the Appalachian mountains and be at your door with a banjo."

To John Dingwall in the Daily Record, on her recent miscarriage, the inspiration behind her new album.

"I got angry with the spirit of the baby for not wanting to be born and kept asking myself why it had happened . . . I was going through the anger and the sorrow when the songs started to come, without me really being aware, until they were coming to me in droves."

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