Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (2 page)

I've always told you the songs are separate from me. Yes, I write them; I gather the elements. But I do so by going around and listening to other people's stories. I watch the audience; I study how people react to what I've already created, and that also goes into new songs. It's like being a chronicler, instead of just somebody who invents. I research and put what I discover together in a form—which is what every artist really does. In every songwriter's suitcase there is a kind of musical paint box that we take with us everywhere we go.

The romantic myth of the artist says that you are the Source. I have no illusion about that. I think this goes back to my grandfather. That was his great gift to me—Native Americans don't believe they are the Source. They have
access
to the Source. Endless access. But don't get confused.

I can access, but so can a librarian. They can tell you what you'll find in the seventeenth aisle. It took me years of figuring out how my own creativity operates until I finally realized that it is what I'm comfortable with, and that's my role.

Another way I often think about creation is in architectural terms. We say archetype, and that makes me think of architecture. The songs don't
spring whole into existence; they are built. It's a structural process. A life is structural too, or at least the story we construct from our lives as we go along. In my music, I use texts—history, mythologies, my own stories—to construct other texts. I go to something very tangible, like a book or a visceral experience, to create something intangible.

Since recordings have existed, it may seem that music is as tangible as anything else, but in its essence music is ether. Before writing existed, people had to sit and listen; you couldn't bottle it up and take it with you. Songwriting is, in a way, a return to that state, through the maze of texts that define how we live. You make something ethereal out of materials that are often all too solid.

So I am immersed in the architecture of texts. I came to this place very young. When I was a child, my mother would read to me every morning. Children's books at first, but then there was a point, and I wasn't that old, when she would read her favorite poems and short stories—Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Browning, William Faulkner. She had been a literature major in college and stopped after two years to become a minister's wife. She transferred that love of the book to me. As a minister's wife she was surrounded by the Good Book, but Eastern Cherokee was very much in her soul and she was inspired by my grandfather Poppa's stories. And then my father was a preacher, a man of The Book, working in an oral tradition. My mother gave me the text and my father gave me theology. I often think that if I'd been stolen and brought up by somebody who didn't read to me, I might have music, but I might not be a songwriter. I needed my mother to give me the keys to the library.

The root or the structure of my songwriting is the voice that comes out of the piano, and, of course, my mother's books. She was reading me stories that were fairly airtight. I mean, talk about structure. Take a look at Poe's “Telltale Heart.” So the structures of the Western musical tradition
were imprinted on my brain in tandem with the structures of fiction and poetry. The literary tradition may now commonly be viewed as separate from music, but I didn't experience them that way. Instead I was taught to build bridges between them—no musical pun intended—early on.

When I try to define my work, I keep going back to the language of architecture, because it is multidimensional. I've always been drawn to books by architects; I try to look at building plans, to discover the secret passageways architects devise to allow entry and exit, to understand how they might create solidity or flow in a building. These choices resemble those that songwriters must make. When I want to learn from other writers’ songs, I spend a lot of time examining their frameworks, stripping them down in my mind, listening over and over. I feel as though I'm sitting with another architect's blueprints. I see the patterns within the songs, the word choices they make, the voicings within the arrangements, all that. The most important ingredient might not be the most obvious. An incredible melody might be hidden within a distracting arrangement, or by a dissonant chord structure.

Houses, pianos—these inanimate objects are alive for me. They are made of primal materials: wood, stone, metal. Within such objects you can find an animate soul. If you gathered together a geneticist, an architect, a physician, a historian, a geologist, an archaeologist, and somebody who works with the psyche and said, “Define the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem,” what would they say it's made of? Is it only the mortar and the stone, or does it contain what people have projected onto it? It has taken something on. It has taken something on that cannot be defined just by using visual perception. You can “put it under a microscope” and you still won't be able to prove scientifically what it is that people are feeling when they stand facing this Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. I'm interested in the composition of an object as it goes beyond the obvious. I feel the same way about musical composition. Songs, texts, are alive. I'm not saying they have two
arms and two legs and a head like an alien. But there's a consciousness there, an autonomy. I'm a co-creator, of course, but this hubris that a lot of writers have in which they think that they're the Source—that's a lie. This is one reason I'm so drawn to a song's architecture, to studying what a song is made of and why it works, how a sonic space is created that invites people in, what makes a listener start to listen. I'm interested in the moment in which a creation begins to live.

There's a kind of enigma that people pick up on surrounding Tori's aura, her presence, and some people get it and some people read it wrong. She's very spiritual—not necessarily in a religious sense—and it's more for strength and inspiration. Doing this day in and day out, writing hundreds of songs every year, you have to have a source for inspiration. She got labeled a fairy princess early on, which she finds amusing. That has influenced, not to mention limited, how people choose to see and hear her. Don't ask me where that came from: some journalist decided they couldn't define Tori's relationship with certain theories, gods and goddesses, and yes, fairies? Not sure. I suppose it was easier for people early in her career to label it “freaky” so they didn't have to admit they didn't understand. But seriously, have you listened to the lyrics? Are you having trouble with them? Don't worry, so do I. But do your research. It's really this sort of odd thing for me, knowing her as well as I do, that people really have some interesting explanations of who she is and what she's writing about. As a result we have gotten every single frickin’ fairy trinket you can imagine.