Tori Amos: Piece by Piece

by Amos, Tori

  I married somebody who understands the relationship I have with the piano. That's key. Mark knows when to leave us alone—I think he'd like to be left alone most of the time anyway. But he really does understand it. He's observed that when I have time to go to the piano and do as I've always done, so many things pass through me that even he doesn't hear, because that's just part of my process. Even if I don't write every day, I'm playing to express myself; that's my time, and, along with being Natashya's mommy, it makes life worth living.

  ANN: The image of Amos alone with her piano is romantic but not complete when it comes to her songwriting. She taps into many springs to feed her imagination—texts she has long loved or ones she only recently discovered during hours of prowling bookstores and museum shops around the world; tales she learned at her mother's knee; and others that came to her from the mouths of the wise women and men whom she has sought out during her adulthood; conversa-

  tions within her esteemed circle of friends and fellow players. Music, classical and contemporary, stirs her, too, though she is careful to guard the taps on those fonts. As the connections that figure into Amos's cosmology spark and multiply, she becomes absorbed in the energetic current and loses all sense of time and place until a new work is born.

  TORI:

  The song appears as light filament once I've cracked it. As long as I've been doing this, which is more than thirty-five years, I've never seen a duplicated song structure. I've never seen the same light creature in my life. Obviously similar chord progressions follow similar light patterns, but try to imagine the best kaleidoscope ever—after the initial excitement, you start to focus on each element's stunning original detail. For instance, the sound of the words with the sound of the chord progression combined with the rhythm manifests itself in a unique expression of the architecture of color-and-light. Some are dark. But their beauty astounds me. They are pure form, and when I'm able to travel through them I feel as I've never felt otherwise. My cells change; I feel as if I'm walking through a different dimension, and yet I haven't left my piano bench. It's quite humbling. Sometimes I don't feel I've translated them correctly. I listen to other songwriters and think they have translated their Sonic Light Being more concisely, so I study them and try to gain the tools to become a better interpreter of light into sound. Because this lives in a dimension where there are no real estate agents of light—at least not yet, thank God— I know it seems intangible to some people. But the sonic world can be visited. I started visiting this world when I was three, listening to a piece by Béla Bartók; I visited a configuration that day that wasn't on this earth. My toes were curled up in worn Methodist carpet, and I knew I wanted to take more journeys like this. It was euphoric. It is euphoric.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  For years I've gathered various books, sources. When I was little it might have been Tolkien, and so I would have just four books around me. I couldn't afford many books at the time, so I'd have what I had. Maybe I'd tear out ten or twenty pictures from magazines because I couldn't afford art books. I would check out library books and try to keep them as long as I could, but I couldn't jot my notes in them. For any particular song, I can't tell you the books that were on the floor, the photographs on the floor. I don't let anybody keep a record of that. Those are the secret ingredients.

  Some sources are continual and obvious. I use myth; I use fairy tales. Fairy tales can be quite harrowing, especially if you go back and read them in their earlier editions. Information is hidden in these tales—they deal with incest, violence, rape. They also deal with cause and effect. And a very difficult truth, which is that stories don't always end the way they should.

  Sometimes I like the word folktale rather than fairy tale because fairy tale has become a pejorative. That's shifting now. With Harry Potter, you have a whole generation so immersed in magic that kids believe they can go to wizard school. There's a whole new crowd. But people still get confused, because they haven't gone back to the original. Take leprechauns. People think of them as red-headed fellows chewing on corncob pipes. But I've lived in Ireland, and it was made clear to me that the Irish hold the Tuatha Dé Danann and their myths as sacred as any religious texts. These ancient stories are so deeply rooted in their fabric as a culture that Brigid—the goddess of music, inspiration and poetry—was adopted by the Christians and was made St. Brigid in 450 A.D. Here in Cornwall, Tintagel, King Arthur's birthplace, according to the locals, is just down the road, and it's a ruin of a massive, great castle. So it's a real thing, though historically I think it's more related to the story of Tristan and Isolde, not Arthur. What I notice is that when I'm in a place where these things have occurred, as when I spent time in France and began to understand the Black Madonna myth, I get such a better sense of them. Then I can go back and do the reading. Getting a read on Native American stuff over here is just impossible—that's why Scarlet's Walk came out of time spent touring the States.

  As for being influenced by more contemporary sources, especially other pop songs, it's tricky. When I'm in heavy writing mode I usually keep my ears pretty clear, so I don't listen to too much music from the outside world. Dunc is always playing something in the kitchen, but other than that I try to stay away from it because I don't want to unconsciously weave a melody in that I might have heard on the radio, or off the iPod. Sometimes I'll describe a new song Being to Mark, Marcel, Matt, and Jon by referring to the vibe of another record. This is a reference point for me, a jumping-off point. It's necessary to keep checking that you're not subconsciously weaving someone else's song Being into yours. It's no different from superimposing certain qualities of your daughter's friend onto your kid. Yes, the two girls might have some things in common, but they each need to be treated as a unique entity. You can't borrow qualities from another child and give them to your own. You can, however, be inspired by how another child is taught or even disciplined by their parents and borrow this tactic, but then you might have to redesign it for it to apply to your kid. No different with songwriting: you might be inspired by the way the rhythm and melody fit like a hand in a glove, so you might borrow this tactic, but then you need to apply it to your song Being, which has a different makeup, because all songs are unique or should be. Let's remember something here—there are only twelve notes, so sometimes you have to be careful that you don't borrow too much, because according to copyright law, if you borrow too many notes in a row in a melody line, then the judge will think you've borrowed a bit too much. Sometimes I'll have Mark listen to a song, too, and he can tell me if he hears someone else too much in it. I am meticulous about it. It's not something you want to be doing.

  I flirt with other people's songs sometimes. Even if I hear it only one time, there can be a flirtation going on, where I say, “I can do this, but I'm going to approach it in another way.” A couple of bands inspired my riff on “Precious Things.” But my song is so different from theirs. You can't necessarily make the connection.

  I was taught very strictly at the Peabody to be extremely careful about borrowing. This is a difficult subject because it can be such a gray area for all creators. That's probably why I want to talk about it. I adore shades of gray, and I find that there are so many shades of gray within the spectrum itself. As more and more songs are getting created, more things are sounding similar, because unless you have compositional theory deeply ingrained in your brain, it's hard to write new combinations of notes. Naturally, I get exasperated with Elton John and Bernie Taupin simply because they wrote many of the great songs that just might have come to visit me if Elton and Bernie had been abducted by aliens. On the other hand, studying their song structures was sort of like being an architect apprenticing to one of the great songwriting teams of the twentieth century. Elton knows the doors we had to break down, and the preconceptions people have had because we play these big classical-looking whales called pianos instead of a hot little sexy strap-on Gibson. But let's face it. I think it's much harder to be me than Elton (g
iggle), because after all, I'm having to come in twenty years after he and Bernie wrote a lot of the good stuff …

  Recently, because of sampling, some of the new composers need to be careful about knowing when they are taking too much from an original piece as opposed to what is considered to be acceptable. When I say acceptable, I think we all have recognized a similar melody from an older song in a newer song—even some of the notes may be the same in short sequences. But c'mon, guys—not half of the song note for note … There are going to be similarities in songs, because, like I said, there are only twelve notes. It's truly overwhelming when you think that we have all this music coming from only twelve notes.

  I think it's a cheap shot to take too much from the public domain, because those guys were those guys and their work should be treated with respect. I've heard some showtune writers directly lift Mozart's melodies. I'm talking note for note, people, not just a hint of a famous theme. Unfortunately, some get away with it, and I don't think that's right. I think you need to hear his operas in their original form, because I do think they get bastardized. It's different if someone's using a little motif and turning it around—of course you're going to do that. But when it's almost a direct rip-off of a whole song, not just a phrase, that's just bad.

  CHELSEA LAIRD:

  She's constantly doing research. The passageway between the outside world and what's inside her, processing things creatively, is constantly open and working. She's open to being inspired by anything. Having spent every day with her for this past year on tour, I now see very clearly that she takes in the “how and what” of a situation very differently from the way I do. For example, we'll be sitting at whatever coffee shop we might find ourselves in that day—doing research, working on an upcoming project, building the set list—and the next thing I know the woman sitting next to us has become a song. That woman—maybe the way she wore her scarf—has inspired a whole story inside Tori's mind about where she came from and how she found herself here. Of course, that story will be woven together somehow with another story that Tori may have read the day before in the paper from the last city we were in. And those elements will be woven together with a hint of the lavender left in her dressing room two nights earlier. That song may never be recorded, it may just be something fun to play around with during sound check, but it's just one example of Tori the storyteller, weaving her web. Of course, then there is me, half noticing this woman in the café.

  Not to say that it's always like that: a lot of times it's all about research. She'll write lyrics down here and there. On whatever is available. On tour she'll leave them with me to keep track of and when the time is right we'll break them out and do some research. Finding, ironically, that they all seem to tie together in some kind of interesting way. The common thread becomes an amazing foundation for a song.

  Of all the questions that Tori gets asked, the one that crops up most often from budding songwriters is “How do you continue to write so many songs?” Even the Peabody Conservatory, where she studied piano as a child, continues to ask her to come speak to their students on the subject of song composition. I'll look at her and say, “How can you even begin to formulate an explanation for that one? I live with you and I still don't get it.”

  TORI:

  You're asleep or you're awake or a bit of both—it doesn't matter. You're always composing … in the shower, watching a special on the global development of football (soccer), listening to the farmers herding the cattle through the mud, falling out with a friend, getting a call from someone whose lover committed suicide with a chicken, staring forever and a day out of those windows on the train to London, in Selfridges as the cashiers talk about what almost happened the night before … If you are a composer in your soul, you are constantly gathering details for characters that could be an extension of yourself, which all become seeds to plant in your song garden. If you are a composer in your soul, you chase frequency, sound, melody, rhythm, chords, the word, and if you're lucky, once in a while they chase you. This is musical shem-an-na (the ancient word for the ultimate food, for the Light-body or Ka). Even before what we read in the Old Testament, in the Bible, about this magical food they call manna—coming seemingly down from heaven—the ancient Sumerians, more than a thousand years prior to the biblical reference, were partaking in their own version of what is shem-an-na. So here we have this musical shem-an-na, traveling from God knows how far, unlocking portholes to bring Divine Essence. Miraculously, we as composers get to cocreate with these sound compounds that can activate us spiritually as well as physically. Because tone is so vital in this kind of form, the tone of the word combined with the tone of the note, combined with the tone of the chords—all this creates a sonic alchemical marriage. How long does this alchemical marriage last in song time? Maybe it lasts two seconds, maybe it's half of a bar at the most sometimes, this alchemical joining. But don't you see, everything in the piece is designed to set up this two-second, five-second, ten-second, whatever it is, magical moment. It's all about how you fill space. It's similar to making love: setup, payoff, basking. I believe this occurrence lives on in your body. You can access this any time—as you do with pictures that live on because you've filed them to be saved in you, a human computer.

  Before I go into how I see the songs, let's begin with the idea of a discipline. You have to spend a couple hours every day building up an arsenal of ideas. I call it a song palette. As a composer, you have to bring in different materials to inspire you. It could be books of photographs, books of wood carving, different web sites you go to; it could be a TV show you've gotten hooked on—something that sparks some story in your head. Whatever these things are that stimulate you, you don't devour them like a locust devours and leaves nothing in its wake. You do bring it into your metaphorical paint box—whether you're writing it down, highlighting words, developing character traits: your metaphorical palette can exist in your notebook with chalks and pens or on a computer. But you are keeping a book of this, a record of this, without it being either a book or a record necessarily. This way, over weeks and weeks and weeks, you will have sifted through the information that you've pulled in, and you've extracted the honey. You've extracted where it comes together and fertilizes. You may have one-liners that are random, on their own. You may have one word on its own. You may have a melody that you've written down, that you sang in the shower, and it's only four notes, but it's included in the paint box. This is being a collector of ideas. Great composers are collectors of ideas first. They are able to unite different ideas that might not work on their own but together are complete, a pollination of ideas. This alone was the budding idea that led to my latest project being called The Beekeeper. Then, as with dominoes, the beekeeper concept precipitated a myriad of other related concepts that all deal with the male and the female, the union, birth and death, and the art of relationships stripped to its foundation.

  This is what the album is about: the different kinds of relationships, healthy and unhealthy, that exist in this woman—let's call her Tori—that exist in Tori's world. So the composing process is everyday. I am composing every day. Do I write a song every day? Of course not. There is a lot of researching. It's a good thing I'm curious, because sometimes I just research how a soccer player kicks a ball and the impact it has on his foot. I haven't used this yet, but I might. This is part of my process. My telling you this doesn't mean that you within your soul are a composer, but if you are, telling you this might light a fire under your bottom so that your palette keeps rotating, no different from the earth, and you keep it topped up, from chalks to charcoals to watercolors. This is my blueprint as a composer. This is how my process works.

  The pollination trail has always lured me in. A friend of mine who's a garden architect dropped a book by the beach house. A few weeks later she asked me about it, which reminded me that I even had the book, and thereby I read it and then misplaced it for several years again, until … Chelsea found it on one of my bookshelves a few months ago,
which got me thinking about beekeeping again. Yes, Meg, I'm going to get you your book back. Sorry for the four-year delay. Meg, fondly called Megnolia, designed the exotic garden with me in Florida which has been completely destroyed by Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne.

  MARCEL VAN LIMBEEK:

  The nice thing about working with Tori is that all the records sound different. To achieve that you need different elements. She's always done piano; it's always something she's come back to at the end of the day. She's incorporated other keyboards—the harpsichord, the Wurlitzer—and now it's time for the organ. It seems like a logical place to go. It's still an organic sound, not a cheesy synth sound. There are proper organs set up with a Leslie tone cabinet. I actually like it better than any of the previous keyboards she's tried. The piano is a percussive instrument and the organ is more of a sustained sound, so she can hold the notes longer. As long as she can physically hold the notes down (because there is no sustain pedal, unlike on the piano), the organ's sound will actually change while she's kicking that Leslie pedal in and out. It's funny watching her change shoes to play the organ. Recording “Not David Bowie” (a song on the latest record that is a nod to the great man himself but a slag to the bad guys), she had one foot on that Leslie pedal and the other foot on a guitar effects pedal that was maneuvering the sound of the Clav (a Clavinet D6, which Tori affectionately calls the “Stevie Wonder keyboard”). There are no guitars on “Not David Bowie.” I suspect that Tori probably wanted people to realize what these organs can really do. Until Mac Aladdin finishes guitars for the album it's hard to know if he'll be adding to this track as he is on most of the others. And with her swapping between keyboards as she does, I think the B3 and the Clav are a great marriage. It excites me because it's a new sound, another instrument. It's as if she's playing with a different musician, only it's herself.