News: Tori Interview in the Melbourne Age (May 11, 2007)

“Women sometimes think that to be liberating, they are going to get their bits out and show these guys a thing or two. But you’re playing right into their hands when you start disrespecting yourself, and it’s not necessarily sexy when you’re crawling out the back seat of an SUV and everything’s hanging out.”

Aunt Sally wrote in to tell us about an article in the Melbourne Age that focuses on ADP, Tori and her career:

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Tori parties with dolls
Tori Amos never was a cornflake girl.
The eccentric Amos gets into character – five, to be precise – for her new concept album, writes Andrew Murfett.

TORI AMOS thinks about sex a lot. Female sexuality, in its positive and negative embodiments, has inexorably shaped and infused all of her nine albums.

And sex, Ms Amos contends, is intrinsically related to religion. Hence her fascination with the two.

“I’m driven to chronicle time from a woman’s point of view as directly and honestly as I can,” she says.

Much of the 43-year-old songstress’ catalogue is drawn from her own (often tumultuous) experiences. Raised in an intensively religious environment, Amos left home at 21 bound for Los Angeles, where she suffered the horror of being sexually assaulted. When she did find happiness, with her British husband Mark Hawley in the mid-1990s, she endured a series of miscarriages.

Writing about these events and their psychological ramifications gives her work unsettling authenticity.

“If I don’t allow myself to excavate my experiences, then I’m writing other people’s stories,” she says. “I’ve chosen to make sure that I’m usually one of the characters, somewhere in the song.”

After relocating from Florida to England with her husband, Amos gave birth to her first child, Natashya Lorien Hawley, in 2000. She often describes how daunting life on the road with a young family can be.

“In the early days of Tash’s life, I was in a really nurturing place,” she says. “I was exploring certain energies that had previously eluded me, having had those miscarriages, which I wouldn’t wish on anybody. Then, to have this creature in your life, that affected my work.”

Although Tash joins most tours, she has largely been shielded from her mother’s work. Still, Amos recently discovered her technologically savvy daughter on the internet with friends unearthing some of the things she has been protected from.

“It was time for us as a family to address the truth of what mum really does,” Amos says. “She knows that when I am on stage, there are going to be grown-up conversations that are not for six-year-olds.”

Still, there are clearly some topics her daughter will have to learn to negotiate at a tender age, notably her mother’s feelings on US politics, the conservative, right-wing nature of which Amos feels has left women repressed and objectified.

“This influence is quite puritanical and morally judgemental,” she says. “Women sometimes think that to be liberating, they are going to get their bits out and show these guys a thing or two. But you’re playing right into their hands when you start disrespecting yourself, and it’s not necessarily sexy when you’re crawling out the back seat of an SUV and everything’s hanging out.”

It’s these concerns that play out on Amos’ sprawling new 23-track album American Doll Posse. Centred around the characters of five conflicted women, it’s a concept album with an eccentric narrative.

“There were songs that seemed to be walking into my life and I was looking for a musical thread,” Amos says.

“There is always something that usually connects the songs, and I realised I was making a record of many different perspectives.”

She chose five of the major female types in the pantheon of Greek mythology to form the loose foundation for her “girls”. So evolved are the characters – Pip, Isabel, Clyde, Santa and, er, Tori – that Amos has been photographed as each character for the album sleeve. In what must be some sort of first for an album, each character has its own online journal.

“The online journals will run until Christmas and the girls are coming on the road,” Amos says.

Each character (aside from Tori) will alternate in opening the show. The tour is expected to reach Australia in September.

One of the most striking tracks on American Doll Posse is Girl Disappearing. While reluctant to tell the stories behind individual tracks, Amos says that in Girl, the character Clyde is running, and what she’s running away from depends on the listener.

In a sense, the release of the album itself is just the beginning.

“Then it’s time for the improvisation to start,” Amos says. “The interconnectivity between the shows and the journals, and how they will be affected by different cities, means the stories will change.”

(May 11, 2007)