"The piano was excited - so excited because she
didn't have to masturbate for the first time in a long
time!" Tori Amos is talking about the making of her
new album. She's talking about it in that explosively
disarming way she talks about things that excite her,
too. "This was our chance to go to the playground
and meet the other kids," she adds.
"from the choirgirl hotel" is Tori's fourth album
proper, following on from the multi-million-selling
"LITTLE EARTHQUAKES" (1991), "UNDER THE
PINK" (1994) and "BOYS FOR PELE" (1996). Those
albums established the singer as one of the most
strikingly talented song writers around today.
Unorthodox, uncompromising and unashamed to
follow her own unique musical instincts wherever they
might lead, Tori also emerged as a phenomenally
supple and brilliantly complex piano player. No-one
wrote songs, sang songs, or, most importantly, played
piano quite like the girl who had first sat down at a
keyboard at the age of two and a half. Now, with the
recording and release of her new LP, again self
penned, Tori is coming at her music from a new
angle.
"I developed this record around rhythm," she says. "I
wanted to use rhythm in a way that I hadn't used it
before; I wanted to integrate the piano with it. The
whole record had piano and vocal cut live with a
drummer and a programmer. I didn't want to be
isolated this time round " I've done the girl and the
piano thing " I wanted to be a player with the other
musicians, with guitar, bass and drums."
The results, though unmistakably Tori, are
unquestionably different. Compelling lyrics are
coupled with pulsing, polyrhythmic patterns of beats
to dramatic and sometimes disorienting effect. And
although ultimately still more of an evolutionary
musical change than a revolutionary one, this self
imposed shift of focus has certainly been one to keep
Tori on her toes. "The piano player knew her head
was on the chopping block with this one." she says
with a smile. "She really had to practice hard to be
able to play with these guys!" The line-up on "from
the choirgirl hotel" includes long-time collaborator
Steve Caton on guitar, Matt Chamberlain on drums,
George Porter Jr. (Meters) and Justin
Meldal-Johnsen (Beck) on bass. The touring band will
be the same, apart from bass duties which will be
handled by Jon Evans.
If Tori had long known that she wanted to use rhythm
and live recording in a way she hadn't done before,
she couldn't have foreseen the wider source of
inspiration for her new songs. Nor would she have
wanted to. "I wasn't going to write this record as soon
as I did." she says. But at the end of 1996 I was near
the finish of a tour and I was pregnant. I had known
from very early on " within a week " that I was
pregnant. So I lived with the feeling and got attached
to the soul that was coming in. And then at almost
three months, I miscarried. It was a great shock to me,
because I really thought I was out of the woods and I
was really excited to be a mom.
"I went through a lot of different feelings after the
miscarriage - you go through everything possible. You
question what is fair, you get angry with the spirit for
not wanting to come, you keep asking why. And then,
as I was going through the anger and the sorrow and
the why, the songs started to come. Before I was
even aware, they were coming to me in droves.
Looking back, that's the way it's always happened for
me in my life. When things get really empty for me -
empty in my outer life - in my inner life, the music
world, the songs come across galaxies to find me."
This event was the seed of the new album. The loss
of her baby was what Tori calls "the egg of her
music." "People had a very hard time talking to me
about what had happened," she says. "And I had a
hard time talking about it. But the songs seemed to
have such an easy time talking to me. And I began to
feel the freedom of the music."
That freedom revealed itself in a variety of different
ways. "Each song would show me a certain side of
herself because of what I was going through," Tori
says. "So a song like "Cruel" came to me out of my
anger. "She's Your Cocaine" and "iieee" came out of a
sense of loss and sacrifice. And other songs
celebrated the fact that I found a new appreciation for
life through this loss."
Perhaps it's surprising, but "from the choirgirl hotel"
" as spiky and spirited and even barbed as it often
can be " is never sombre in the way that Tori's last
album, "BOYS FOR PELE," was. "I crossed the River
Styx on that record," the singer says of an album that
charted what she calls "a change in my relationships
with men for good." And the new album is different too
from "LITTLE EARTHQUAKES" ("a diary") and
"UNDER THE PINK" ("kind of an impressionistic
painting"). This album emerges as, somehow, a much
more complete record than the singer has made
before. Tori agrees: "Each song to me is complete.
They're not as interconnected; they're not dependent
on each other to work. They get to hang out together
and you get to know them together, but they exist
quite happily without each other."
What does perhaps unite the songs is their passion.
"There's a deep love on this record," says Tori. "This
is not a victim's record. It deals with sadness but it's a
passionate, record - for life, for the life force. And a
respect for the miracle of life."
"from the choirgirl hotel" could mark further
changes in the career of a star whom so may have, in
the past, encouraged to court controversy. Listeners
and observers straining to hear or see the effortlessly
provocative, apparently "kooky" Tori Amos of legend
may be a little unsettled today with the eloquent ,
honest woman whose definition of girl power is
simply: "The power is in the people being moved."
Tori seems no longer interested in playing up to
people's expectations or seeing her words twisted into
oddball shapes for the amusement of others. "I've
already given God a blow job," she says. "After you've
done that there are other things that interest you."
"This record got me through a real bad patch," she
concludes. "But I can laugh with this record, and I can
move my hips to this record, which is really good for
me. It's very sensual - that's the rhythm." Long may
the beat go on.
