Tori Amos: Piece by Piece

by Amos, Tori

  Throughout her mythology, Saraswati stands for the unstoppable, yet of en seemingly untraceable, flow of the mind at play. She guides her faithful to embrace the form their inspiration takes. Legends abound of her ability to nourish eloquence, restore memory, and help bring hopes to fruition. The Mahabharata call her “the mother of the Vedas,” the source of India's foundational sacred texts. She can be impetuous, even cruel, as in the legend of when Brahma settled an argument between her and Buddhi, god of the mind, in favor of the latter, and she condemned her consort to never again being able to hear his own name said in prayer. She can also be warmly generous, as when she nourished one sage in a land stricken by drought so he could preserve his land's history, or restored the damaged memory of another so he could recite the Vedas and find peace. The Jain sect named her the Remover of Infatuations, the patron saint of getting serious about what you really love. Some archetypal beings represent our cravings for power, erotic connection, or material success. Saraswati stands for respect. Only by learning to respect herself and earn the respect of others can the dreamer become the doer.

  Like the Saraswati River, running now on imaginary shores, the sources of creativity can often be frustratingly obscure. Many artists experience a productive rush early in their careers but lack the skill and discipline to sustain the quality of their output. True creativity, not just the shapeless splatter of expression, demands structure, attentiveness, and time. The artists who sustain themselves are those who overcome their addiction to the thrill of emotion and ego, define a larger vision, and keep working.

  Over a lifetime of learning to compose, Tori Amos has perfected her own methods for transforming raw creative material into art. Her process takes her from preliminary, inspirational wanderings throughout the world and within her well-stocked library to the calm space of her workroom and then into the recording studio, where she leads her small crew of collaborators in realizing her compositions. Each song that Amos generates becomes its own environment, sustaining elements of myth and legend, of her musical forebears and her own innovations, of autobiography and fiction, wildness and precision. Asked the secrets of her trade, she shares not merely a handful of tips but a spirit of adventure, the exhilarating sensation of diving in.

  SONG CANVAS:“Garlands”

  I've been by the sea on and off for a few weeks now. The girls are coming in on Jet Skis. The songs seem to know where to find me. Writing a work through the changing of the seasons—autumn, winter, spring, summer—has an impact on the work. If you figure in the tastes and the aromas that go along with the changes, the seasonings—the herbs growing in the garden, which then make their way into Dunc's kitchen; the burning of fires that happens in autumn; or just the budding of spring … all of that is woven into a song's tapestry. “Washington Square” or “Garlands” (I'm still wavering on the title: clearly you will know as you read this which one I chose in the end) was written when we were frozen in—sorta like when it's too dangerous to drive because of icy roads here in the west country of England. I started this song in the autumn, when we were in Boston doing a big radio show in October 2003, and then I couldn't find its foundation until we were iced in down in Cornwall. I bundled up and took a walk with my boots on, bundled up in Husband's ever-ready big bomber jacket, until I wandered back around, not to the house, but the barn, smelling fires on the way, making a beeline for the Böse. Isabella was waiting there for me in a shaft of light by the piano and she said, “Write me in a song. I want access to this dimension.” I said, “Talk with me awhile.” I just started playing something random so as to not lose the moment. Then she said, “You're still hurting.” I asked her, “To what are you referring?” She said, “I was there that day.” I asked, “What day?” “That day when you walked through Washington Square and I saw a tear you were hiding, and I held up a candle to guide you.” I looked at this glorious vision of light, and I giggled softly. “Well, Isabella, we know which song you are in, then, don't we?” She held me a moment and then danced back into the shaft of light from which she had come. I finished “Washington Square” (or “Garlands”) that day.

  The word garlands had been married to this melody since its inception, had wanted to be used but had eluded me for months, mainly because I associated it with the ancient custom of wreaths and flowers for weddings, funerals, and celebrations as old as Beltane and May Day. Then that day after Isabella sparked my … I guess you call it my sixth sense—she had turned up the volume on that one—I started to have a funny feeling that my definition of garlands was the reason that I couldn't weave this tapestry together. I sat down on this old couch that supposedly came from Russia in the nineteenth century; I've had it recovered at least three times because of coffee stains and baby dribble, but it's my thinking spot, and it's my dolphin couch because of the two brass dolphins on either side. I have it in a sagelike material, which reminds me of New Mexico, that plateau covered with white sage right by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I looked at the color of the wall, which I had painted to remind me of those New Mexican skies, this creamy tangerine, or as Tash would say, vanilla Satsuma pudding color.

  It drew me to pick up a book that would have drawings in it. I had just that week opened a box of art books that I had gotten on my travels. Many were still in their plastic wrappings on the floor. One caught my eye, and there it was. A book of Chagall lithographs. These garlands of lithographs—bundles bursting in color—are what the lovers in the story use to chronicle their love affair. Our lovers meet in Washington Square and go uptown to see the Chagall exhibition. As they walk in and out of these pictures, we get a vision of their love for each other, some of the beliefs that they're wrestling with, and a dark force in their relationship that seems to be coming between them, whether it's his father or her professor at art school who seems to be wanting to control the path her talent takes, a little too possessive in Isabella's opinion. I decided to notate the lyrics in this CD booklet so that Chagall's painting titles were italicized and that way people could go and reference the lithographs visually, which also influenced the phrasing of the music.

  Penelope, wife of Odysseus, the hero of Homer's Odyssey

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  I am a songwriter twenty-four hours a day. I'm not a performer twenty-four hours a day. I'm not a wife twenty-four hours a day. Even Mommy— to be honest, when I'm on that stage and channeling, Mommy's taking a break. But the writer in me is always present.

  As a songwriter, I'm gathering clues and possibilities all the time, whether I see a piano that day or not. I've tried to explain to people how I collect these dispatches, because I think anybody can do what I'm talking about. Once I do plug in, I might get only one line and two bar phrases of the melody. I always have elements of songs around that may never ever get recorded. As far back as Little Earthquakes, I began to realize that I needed to have a library of notes, phrases, words, things that might prove useful at any given time. Within a few months’ time I'll gather hundreds of those fragments. Half won't be used. And then the craft comes in, the part that is about painting a world. You want listeners to smell the lavender, to feel the point of those knitting needles in a handbag of the granny who happens to harbor a loyalty to Madame Defarge. You want the listener to know the wood's burning in the stove when they walk into the song with me. Music is about all of your senses, not just hearing.

  I think of the structure of any particular song as a house. The bathroom is the bathroom, and you have to understand the shape of the bathroom and its needs. The kitchen's the kitchen. Sometimes you want the chorus to be the kitchen in a song. Sometimes you want the chorus to be the shower, very cleansing. Sometimes it's the bedroom. Or sometimes the chorus is that shower, but instead it's about being naked and soap and it's sexy—or it's not sexy at all, but an eradication of someone or something. It could even be akin to “I've gotta wash that God right outta my hair,” depending on what sticky archetypes have been prodding through the night. The point is, even i
n terms of the emotion expressed, the shape matters before the story does. Without the structure, there's nowhere for the story to live.

  Peter Gabriel taught me, when I worked with him a bit in the early 1990s, that attention to structure is what you have to develop if you're going to be a composer/songwriter generating effective work throughout your life. He said to me in 1995, “Look around you—you have these engineers. You could build a studio, a workshop. Tori, you never know: your workshop studio may be the only way you can keep your art from being tampered with if you are at war with your label but they still want product.” (Little did I know that he was reading my tea leaves, forewarning me of an ominous battle that was yet to ensue, but we're not there in the story yet.) Everybody's got one good record in them if they're half decent. But then once you've done that, you've used the best of your picks. That's your style. People know your style after the first time and then you have to develop skill as a songwriter. Do I write a lot? Yeah, I write a lot. I write hundreds of songs for an album. Fifteen or twenty get chosen. I have hundreds I've forgotten now. I have at least 150 that are complete but just didn't quite work.

  There are times when I'm doing lots and lots of research, and I'll start gathering words and phrases from various sources—books, conversations, visual art. I'll start pulling my references out, and I have no idea which ones will prove useful. I'll just start jotting down ideas. I can do that for hours, but a lot of it is a load of crap. I can play piano for myself for hours. It's nonsense, most of it. It's like doodling or doing a puzzle. Exercising. And I just enjoy playing sometimes. But that's not composition. Within a few hours, maybe a rhythm pattern will arise, and I'll write it down in my script, or usually I have a little tape recorder and just put my ideas into that. Then I'll listen to that tape when I'm driving. And I'll go, “Oh, okay, stop the tape, rewind—now that is not a load of crap.” I'll jot it down in some kind of musical handwriting so I don't forget it and notate where to reference this catchy motif. That's how I found “a sorta fairytale.” “On my way up north, up on the Ventura”—I had that on tape, and then I went into a whole other load of crap. But when I heard that line months later, when I was pulling songs together for Scarlet's Walk, I thought, I know that line. I knew it was potentially a good song because foundationally I was working with marble, not linoleum. I like linoleum, but you have to be a little bit more selective, because linoleum can be a completely bad idea in a lot of structures, whereas marble, if it's good-quality marble, is always useful somewhere, even if only as the kitchen worktop.

  It still took me months to develop “fairytale's” musical theme, because it was such an involved theme and I had to build it around a traditional fairy-tale form, to make it a modern rendition of what is known as a folktale. Matt and I recorded it a few times to get it right. Polly Anthony, who was president of Epic at the time, had an instant flirtation with the song, so when it came time to pick a single she was adamant that it be the one for America. My first single for Scarlet's Walk was being released in early September 2002, and she felt the nation could use a dose of whimsy, as there would be many heavy hearts still working through the grief from September 11. She called Mark and Marcel, asking them to pull together an edit from the almost five-minute-and-fifty-second “fairytale” to a four-minute version without losing too much of the story line and its sentiment. Tricky but they did it.

  TORI:

  Tapes upon tapes upon tapes of ideas sit on the Bösendorfer. I find that this part of the songwriting process takes the most discipline. Playing every day at the piano or the Hammond or whatever keyboard is fun, I get whipped into a frenzy of playing, and of course I tape most of it when I'm in composing mode. I tape it on my little crap tape recorder (the boys are trying to get me to go digital). Anyway, at some stage I have to sit down and listen to the hours and hours of jamming on tapes to find the nectar, the sweet—jeez … it can be painful. I have art canvas books set aside, in which I record the building and development of the motif. A motif is a recurring melody. Sometimes I'll have more than a hundred different motifs going—a motif can last anywhere from a single bar to maybe a six-teen-bar phrase.

  Now what happens, do you think, if you keep your tapes in order? Then you can see how a motif develops. I, on the other hand—D'oh (that was my Homer Simpson who just showed up for a minute)—clearly don't keep my tapes in order. So wherever I start, I start, but thank God I'm into drawing these silly little maps, sorta like a Yellow Pages, of where the song motifs live. Yes, I make twice the amount of work for myself because I don't keep my tapes in order, but eventually I memorize where everything is. If you do it in order, however, like a clever person would, you can observe how the original motif will change in the hours and hours of tape. Instead of spending days trying to find a sliver of a bass line that's God-knows-where amid fifteen tapes … yikes. While you are writing many songs, writing many motifs, naturally some keep coming back, refusing to be forgotten. Sometimes they will change in a way that isn't good for the motif—it weakens it. So you go back to the part of the tape where it came together, and this may be for only ten seconds. I transcribe this onto a canvas, catalog it, and keep mining. I call this mining for songs. But hey, I never wanted to be Snow White, more like Glinda the Good Witch mining ancient stones with Grumpy. The motifs begin to have many variations as the weeks go by, but the most powerful ones tend to keep creeping up. There are those treasures that happen only once, only for a moment, and if I lose that tape it's gone forever, because I can't remember thirty seconds of music I played hours and hours ago. I've spoken about when the songs come and the euphoria of that, but the truth is, if I don't go through this painstaking cataloging process, then these pieces of music are just ideas that never become tangible. It will all sort of fade into a hallucination experience that becomes like an ecstasy trip unexplainable to everyone, even yourself. So, I will spend two hours a day just notating what is on the tapes, weaving them together, tracking them down. You see, as I get further into the developing of the song, sometimes I choose the original seed idea and sometimes I find that the motif has improved a few stages in. This might take weeks to decipher, but if you as the songwriter keep a mental file of all of the song Beings, even if you have to associate these new creatures with key words that make them more tangible, you will be able to track those songs down. Track them like a lioness tracks dinner for the whole pride. This is what I call hunting for song frequency.

  MARK HAWLEY:

  I think it's quite easy for Tori to come up with little melodies and little bits of music. As with a lot of musicians, the hard work is in finishing ideas. Eventually a song reaches a certain stage and comes out and it's beautiful.

  But beforehand, whether it's one line of a lyric or a middle-eight section, that's what she works on for hours and hours.

  Certain songs, like “Marianne” from Boys for Pele, were written, performed, and recorded spontaneously. How long is that song, five minutes? That was how long it took her to write it. She went into the church, played it, wrote the lyrics, and recorded it on the spot. When that stuff happens— well, you know I don't believe in magic, but that's it. That's when somebody out there is telling her how to play a song. I would never believe it unless I'd seen it. I've seen that happen maybe five or six times. But I've also seen the hard work, when she's had a song idea and it takes years. She started a song called “Lady Jane” in 1994 and she hasn't finished it yet. She's still working on it.

  TORI:

  I'm recording today once Hayley, Tash's beloved nanny, who is our resident Mary Poppins, takes her on her playdate. Strangely I'm not recording the first piece for the new album but for the rare B-side portion of the Live DVD Welcome to Sunny Florida. Because the Live DVD package will be released soon after Mother's Day in the United States, the song “Ruby through the Looking-Glass,” which I started writing for Scarlet's Walk, has signaled to me that her time has come to enter into the mass consciousness. Ruby is in utero, hearing her mother trying to protect
her in the womb while her mother is clearly in a fight. Not only is the mother having to defend herself, but by addressing certain things that were done to her as a child, she makes a decision. She at all costs makes a vow to Ruby to be aware as a mother, and promises her a different way of communicating, instead of fighting. It will be almost two years since I began writing “Ruby” …

  Do I think songs have a time line? Can a song's meaning and the response by a listener change because of when it's presented? Well, obviously. “I can't see New York” was perceived and will always be related to the September 11 plane crashes, even though it was written in May 2001. When “I can't see New York” walked into the room, slid into the wood through the strings, claiming the keys, which in turn played me, I did not choose to project actual events onto the song creature herself; otherwise I would probably have superimposed my perception of the TWA800 disaster of 1996. Sometimes you have to order your own pictures to leave your mind, knowing that they are a tainting influence on the translation—talk about being lost in translation. This is a focus, a skill, a meditation of sorts, to keep a clean slate, to keep Tori Ellen's opinions out of the way when a song walks in full force, almost completely intact—this is definitely about taking dictation. These songs happen rarely for me, hearing one pretty much as a finished song for the first time, and hearing it very much how the public will hear it for the first time in a completed form. Only when I was walking down Fifth Avenue on the afternoon of September 11 did I understand—in song language—the subtexts and energy of death and loss from the point of view of a plane victim. As the song played over in my head, I kept walking toward the burning.