Tori Amos: Piece by Piece

by Amos, Tori

  SONG CANVAS: “Pandora's Aquarium”

  Because I have a lot of songs in my life that come with archetypes intrinsic to their own myths, I feel as if I've been able to try on many different archetypes. So much so that it feels like a Pandora's box of archetypes sometimes. But not all of them figure in to my personal myths. Of course, they do when I step into the jeans of a song and take on that archetype in performance, whether in the studio or onstage. But I had to separate archetypes that I play with and that, yes, may affect me but are not foundational in my personal myth. Just as I had to accept Rhiannon as one of the pieces that make up my core person, I also had to realize that I am more aligned with Demeter than with Aphrodite, or even Persephone, who seemed like an archetype that I could claim. Even though there is a violation and a rape involved in my life, that story isn't my core. For example, Persephone is Beenie's myth. (Beenie is Nancy Shanks, one of my closest friends. We've developed the habit of calling each other “Beenie,” stemming from the expression “Do you know what I mean, bean?”) Beenie has been not only a best friend, but at times the nurturing force in our friendship. At other times, I've been the nurturer. Beenie was molested by her father from the age of two through the age of seven, a nightmare that recalls the rape of Persephone and the betrayal by Persephone's father, Zeus, and her entire life has been devoted to healing the deepest, most invasive unseeable scar that one can ever have. She has truly made a journey through the depths—the madness of bipolar anxiety disorder, which now is still a day-to-day struggle. But by making her wound her wise wound, she has transmuted her multiple rapes and betrayals into a fabric that is a piece in the rich tapestry of Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. Beenie is no longer only the ravished, victimized Kore (Greek for “maiden”). Together Demeter and Persephone are maiden, mother, and crone.

  TORI:

  According to Goddess: Myths of the Female Divine by David Leeming and Jake Page, Demeter “had become the Grain Goddess of the fertility mysteries celebrated and practiced at Eleusis. Her daughter had become the menarcheal Grain or Corn Maiden seed of life … Demeter was the giver of the fruit of the earth. She was the sacred Womb Mother of all … With her always, and within, was her daughter, as a seed is encased in the moist flesh of the peach. Demeter's law, her nine mysteries, were well known in the land, and it flourished. With the coming of Zeus

  Pandora

  and his legions to Olympus, Demeter and her daughter, Persephone, came to be seen as two—mother and daughter, separate but inseparable.” Beenie has lived to radiate and teach with grace, love, and clarity the sa-credness of a parent-child bond and the horrific effects for child and parent when it has been penetrated. To see how incest can shred and divide a Being is the scariest thing I've witnessed in my life. “Bells for Her,” “Cornflake Girl,” and “Carbon” have been inspired by Beenie.

  Because of the work that she had done to heal her complicated and painful path, she was able to recognize what work I needed to do in order to heal the snags in my Being's embroidery. I've had to deal with the devouring since I was very little, the devouring of everything I believe in and the devouring that comes from being a possession. That is different from a rape, when we talk about it archetypally Going back to my Native American heritage, I'm more connected to the myth of someone pimping the land and not understanding the land has its own sovereignty. Back to my mother, too, her need for sovereignty, and finally to my own journey toward motherhood, which felt so much like the scourge that Demeter endured as the goddess of the seasons, that autumnal loss of life.

  I had to surrender to my circumstances. I felt a driving force to become a mother and it took over my life. I didn't achieve it for a few years and I wore it around. Do you know that some journalist came up to me and said the word going around was that I was a drug addict? I said, “What?” He said, “Well, everybody is saying that the mood swings and the depression could only mean one thing,” and I said, “Didn't you think about what a miscarriage could do to a woman, and not just one, but three? Did you think that I was pregnant when I did that tour with Alanis—did you think that maybe I could be?”

  I had to go get my personal life in gear, and that's what I spent a few years doing. I generated music that reflected that time. And it wasn't necessarily stuff that the masses could ingest, but if you're in that particular place in your life, I think those records are a good place to go. And once I had Natashya, I moved into a more nurturing place. And I surrendered to the fact that I'm not the ingenue anymore. I'm not the desired object. I had to accept Rhiannon, and now I know I am in the Demeter role.

  ANN: As painful as her first miscarriage was, Amos had more to endure in her quest to give birth to a daughter. Soon she ran across a chilling situation that far too many women encounter—an unscrupulous member of the medical profession. As she juggled work, her health, and the demands of her muse, she found herself having to take drastic steps to avoid unexpected peril.

  SONG CANVAS: ‘Muhammad, My Friend”

  I was working with the dark goddesses during and after making Boys for Pele. Pele herself, and the Sumerian goddess Inanna (also known as Ishtar/Astarte), whose name I cry out singing on the song “Caught a Light Sneeze.” Then, naturally, Lilith, niece of Inanna, as well as Demeter, because of the loss of a child with my first miscarriage. I had gone to the underworld to try to claim my daughter back. I went to the edges, the parameters of what I know about consciousness on this plane, to try to make deals with the Christian God, with the Islamic God— a relationship I explore in “Muhammad, My Friend.” I was willing to do whatever it took to bring her back, anything, anywhere. I was negotiating. Just saying, If you will, give me my daughter, thinking I would get pregnant again and her spirit would come back. Not accepting that she'd moved on and picked another mommy, which is very hard to come to terms with.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  Then something happened, and it was far more frightening than what I'd gone through before. I'd been invited to collaborate with the composer Patrick Doyle on the soundtrack for the film Great Expectations. I really liked his work, and I came up with “Siren” based on his theme. I also liked the film's director, Alfonso Cuarón; although we didn't always agree musically, he was the ultimate charming man. The whole concept for the album was to call in songwriters of a certain level to make the soundtrack a real collaboration. We were completely committed to making it work. But while I was working on this, I started hemorrhaging.

  It was a three-week project, and the whole time I was bleeding a lot. Twelve pads a day. I was weak, and trying to not be too grumpy. I'd gone through female things before; you develop a bit of an attitude that this is your lot in life. So I was just pulling it all together, even though I didn't know what was wrong with me. I had already been operated on for endometriosis and a precancerous cervical condition. I was thirty-four at this time.

  Eventually I called my sister, who's an internist in the Washington, D.C., area and one of the smartest doctors I know, and she said, “You need to see a doctor. I want you to come back home.” I said, “I can't, I'm in the middle of this movie project; we're at Air Studios in London and about to do strings.” I was singing with this huge orchestra, and besides my song I was going to do vocalizations for the soundtrack. Day by day I was getting a bit worse, but I was still trying to get up every morning and go. Nobody knew about the bleeding at the time, besides Mark, who was with me.

  After finishing the soundtrack I was scheduled to take a trip partly organized by Ahmet Ertegun's office, to go to Romania and Turkey and research vampirism. Ahmet seemed to understand the deep-seated need I had to search out clues that maybe Eastern Europe and Turkey held, to fill the harrowing emptiness that had become my solar plexus, my womb. I had been drained, literally drained. I was researching a lot at the time and trying to understand creation—destruction of creation and the missing pieces in the Genesis creation story that seemed to be found mysteriously in texts that had been hidden for ages. Obv
iously, blood plays a part in creation and destruction, in birth and in death, in a broken hymen as gift to a lover or a shredded vulva in a rape. My next work was going to be about that subject, ironically enough, the sanctity of creation and destruction. Choirgirl did end up having a lot about emotional vampirism in it; it's one of the layers. So is creation and destruction. I know this trip would have taught me a lot. It was a three-week trip. We were going to see the Sufi dancing if we could. I was opening up to the esoteric Islamic traditions.

  I really wanted to go on this trip. But after talking to my sister, I decided to act on my health instead of just enduring it. I went to a doctor who was supposedly one of the best. Little did I know, this guy would later be questioned for removing women's body parts. There was a major British television documentary about it. I went to this guy not knowing that he was going to book me that afternoon to take out my fallopian tube. He said I had an ectopic pregnancy. I knew it was wrong when he examined me, shoving this huge thing up me—talk about a piercing, talk about pain. It was just this old medieval kind of instrument he shoved up, and blood gushed everywhere. I knew I had to be in the studio in a couple of hours, singing in front of a seventy-piece orchestra. Johnny was at the studio kind of holding ground for me.

  My sister, Dr. Marie Dobyns, had said, “Get me on the line when you're with that doctor. I will be up at four a.m. waiting for your phone call before I go to the hospital to do my rounds.” So that morning, after I had tests, this doctor character got my sister on the phone while I was sitting there, and he made some kind of negative comment about a female doctor. She just cut right through that and demanded, “What are Tori's hormone levels?” He told her what they were and said, “She has an ec-topic and I want to take her today.” My sister didn't say anything to him at that moment, but when he handed me the line, she said, “Baby, you listen to me like you've never listened to me in your life—calmly you are going to have to run for your life … he's going to destroy your insides. I don't care what you tell him, but get out of there now and call me as soon as you're outside in your car. I will be waiting right here, and I'd better hear from you in five minutes. I'm calling Johnny to alert him of the danger that you are in since he's just across town in case you need help getting out.”

  My hands were shaking, which is unusual for a piano player, as I put down the phone. I knew that this was one of the most important performances of my life. I told the doctor I couldn't go in that day but I was ready to come back the next day. I even reserved a room at the hospital for the next few days. The doctor had to check me out so I could go back into the studio. He was expecting me to come back and sleep in the hospital that night; I had a bed. The nurses had given me pain pills; I had them in my back pocket. As I was leaving, he said, “So, Miss Amos, you know I dealt with one of the Beatles before.” It was just unbelievable. My heart was palpitating. And I said, “I'm going to go do strings at the studio,” and he said, “I know where you'll be and you'd better be back tonight—releasing you is against my better judgment.” Obviously he knew I didn't have an ectopic, so he knew it wasn't quote-unquote life and death for me. He was just going to take my fallopian tube and had talked to me about in vitro. He told me not to worry if I lost a fallopian tube, that there was in vitro. And little did I know, he had a huge in vitro practice.

  As soon as I got into the waiting car downstairs, the driver said John Witherspoon needed me to call him immediately. I did. Johnny said, “Jesus, T, Mark and I should've been there with you; we had no idea you'd meet the resurgence of Jack the Ripper. Call Marie so that we can figure out the next step.” I call my sister and she said, “Sweetheart, you're gonna be okay, just hang in there. I've called Johnny, and we're getting you on a flight tomorrow and you're going to see Dr. Marlow”—he's the surgeon who had done my surgery for the other two conditions, he's the big woman's doctor in Washington, D.C.

  So I left the hospital and went to the studio and sang. When I didn't come back, this butcher even called Johnny and threatened to call the airline to stop me from getting on the plane. This is where our strategy really made a difference—you give people information, just not the key information. We threw him off the track by telling him I never fly under my own name. Which isn't true. What is true is that I didn't fly under the name Tori Amos. I flew under my Christian name. And he didn't know to look for that. He didn't know how to track me down.

  My sister and my parents met me at the airport, and as soon as I got off the plane they took me right to the hospital. I went in and was diagnosed with a bleeding cyst. Dr. Marlow took care of it. They also felt that something had occurred but didn't work—a pregnancy that didn't attach. So I got a D&C. And I flew back to England. Then I was sick for three months. There was the month of not feeling well, the month of hemor-rhaging, and the month of recovery. So that was a big deal. Mark asked me to marry him after this ordeal. It was like, We're in this for the long haul, and you re okay, and I want to be there.

  Going through this horror, I was completely humbled by what it was to be a human woman. I could be a female icon and channel that and hold that and bring the songs in—really, I felt the songs were iconic. But at this point I realized that if you put yourself at the center you've stopped becoming part of the cocreation. You have to understand that you're a piece of it. To not behave that way is to be like a doctor playing God.

  It is amazing that I eventually would be able to carry a child, considering all that had happened, but it wasn't over yet. Dr. Marlow wouldn't let me go on the Turkey trip; he told me I could finish the soundtrack and that's it. That was when Mark was building the place in Cornwall, and I went from D.C. to the Florida beach house. Beenie came with me, and I just walked on the beach every day and wrote for a few hours. I was really disappointed about not being able to go to Romania and do the album re search. I said to Husband, who wasn't yet officially Husband, that I really wanted to go and immerse myself in Vlad the Impaler, and he said, “My dear, clearly you've already been impaled!”

  ANN:Humor helped Amos and Hawley bear their losses, but it wasn't always enough. Like Demeter gazing toward the underworld in search of her daughter's vital spirit, Amos, especially, found herself in affinity with a host of lost spirits. They came to her because she could give them a voice, but in the end they surprised her by giving her an even more powerful gift: solace.

  Demeter, the Greek goddess of agriculture and fertility,” and her daughter, Persephone

  CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  After the second miscarriage, I made from the choirgirl hotel. I took on the subject of my loss directly in those songs. The album clearly came from a place of grief, but also from deciding that instead of fighting the patriarchy and expressing rage and defiance, I had to do something new. That was not what I needed then. Those emotions and insights didn't offer the clues to get me through the game of Myst I was playing at that point.

  Then the songs started to come, and they held my hand in such a beautiful way. I felt as if I were surrounded by these women and children that somehow knew what I had faced. The songs that came were all the children that couldn't be with their mothers. They were ghosts. It's okay in literature, in a novel like Toni Morrison's Beloved, for example, to talk about ghosts, but the idea that there's a consciousness beyond us that can express itself in a song seems weird to many people. I say, though, how can you not believe that? Especially if you're an artist, it's pretty egocentric not to give credit beyond your own talent and intellect—basically that means claiming that you are the sole source of your own inspiration. I don't accept that. I know that my role as an artist is to provide an opening for voices and stories that go beyond my own small, private existence. I knew this with Choirgirl because the songs brought me something I needed that I couldn't provide for myself. These songs were children who had found another plane, or mothers who had gone before who had experienced this loss, and they came to share my grief.

  Choirgirl was the antithesis of “Cornflake Girl,�
�� because it was a case of women coming together to support each other. These songs were the supportive, nurturing women. We walk into Demeter, not Aphrodite. This was an unbelievable mothering I was getting.

  ANN: Taking the hands of spirits who walked her through darkness, Amos also found new ways to view other archetypes in the feminine pantheon. Her next work, To Venus and Back, approached the fabled goddess of love, but Amos's deepest sense of that emotion was changing, and her new songs reflected that.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  As the live recordings from the Choirgirl tour were being completed at our home studios, and it became clear that I should record some new material as well, I had to figure out what I wanted to emphasize. We were nearing the millennium, and I began to see the earth itself as a mother who was losing her children every day. And so I thought she needed a friend, and a good girlfriend. I felt Venus was really important to the culture at that moment. There was so much Mars—so much aggressiveness, especially in music, with the explosion of hate rap. Though I thought the music was really powerful, I couldn't help but notice the violence that filled so much of it.

  Venus has a fierce and competitive side, but there's more to her than that. Many writers have felt that such a beautiful woman was unable to hold a space for other women, and some beauties can't. But we know some who can in the music business. I also felt that this was a real healing time, a shifting time for me. What Venus meant to me was changing. She wasn't just this narcissistic goddess. Some women tap into that, there's no question. But I think they miss the point. In our culture we so often turn these archetypes into someone sentimentally cartoonish, and cliché, narrowing the scope of the goddesses in question—their descent and resurrection and true role in the mythical pantheon.