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Rolling Stone (US)
April 13, 2001

Amos Talks Music, Motherhood

by Lindsay Goldenberg

Baby, new album keeping Tori Amos busy

Motherhood has become the center of Tori Amos' world since she and husband/engineer Mark Hawley welcomed their first child, daughter Natashya last September. It has also led her to produce her first musical offering since 1999's To Venus and Back.

Strange Little Girls, due out on September 18th, is a project that Amos says came about from the long bonding sessions she had nursing Natashya.

"The thing about nursing is, you do have enforced thinking time for hours and hours and hours a day. That's when I formulated the whole thing," says Amos from her home studio in Cornwall, England. "In those hours I started to decide what I was going to do, and it did kind of surprise me what my choice was."

Amos' album is also shaped by a recent Martin Amis piece in the London newspaper The Guardian. The article, about pornography in America, made Amos "put an ear to the ground and hear what people are saying," she says. "The one question that I had to really pull back was: What is it in us, in women, that is OK to be defecated on?"

"I'm just kind of blown away," Amos says about the current climate in America. "A lot of these young [musicians] remind me of grandpas that I used to play for at the Rotary Club, because the grandpas were misogynists and homophobic and right-winged."

Amos, who plans on touring for Strange Little Girls "in a different way than I've toured in a long, long, time," says the core of the album - which features King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew and longtime collaborator Matt Chamberlain - will deal with the dilemma of opposites.

"I think it's a very difficult time in America right now, [for] a heterosexual male," Amos says. "Face it, most of them want to be black, or they have to look over their shoulder at the woman that's going to take their job. It's driven me to do the project I'm about to do."

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