Here's how it works when you're invited to come down and play with Tori Amos. "She told me to come with whatever you want to paint with," says Belew, who quickly developed a routine. Have breakfast at the hotel where he stayed, overlooking the garden, head over there to do some work, and at the end of the day have a home cooked meal, sit around, talk politics, music, etc. It resembles an old-fashioned artistic saloon, a practice that has all but died out in the past hundred years. "It was a real camaraderie there," he remembers.

By the time Belew arrived most of the album was already done. "All of the tracks were completed, in fact, most of them had vocals and everything. That's unusual, most people call me at a stage where they hadn't put the vocals onSo when I played, I was trying to answer her voice, which is not something I usually do. But as I understand it, Tori makes it a performance all at once."

Which you have to do when the French Resistance gal from "Raining Blood" shows up and taps you on the shoulder, as Amos notes. "Most of the songs are one take," she says. "That's how I do it as a performance. And when she shows up, you've got to take action."

She's also left in her vocal mistakes, preferring to let the "voice" speak in each song, rather than do a second take and possibly lose the feel for her subject. "In the Depeche Mode song, I forgot to say forgettable so the line 'Words are meaningless and forgettable' turned into 'unforgettable', because this is where I've been for the last six months. They're not forgettable.

Belew might well agree. "It was really quite an experience. I'd go back."

For a particular Tori Amos fan, the only thing better than sitting on her hotel room bed and talking is sitting on her hotel room bed and talking porn. She keeps one foot on the floor at all times.

"I think porno, having enjoyed it myself -- this is my thing," she meanders, having wandered back to the Amis article subject matter. "Peope are buying women getting violently raped to get off. That's not pornography. Pornography used to be erotic sex. Violence has now become equated with pleasure. Neil [Gaimen, author and friend who contributed blurbs about Tori's characters to the CD and upcoming tour program] and I have talked about this for hours an dhours. I do believe consenting adults should do what they want, but you find at times it's not just with consenting adults. I have hundreds and hundreds, into thousands of letters that say it doesn't stay with consenting adults. Part of my life is trying to create a safe place so that rape is not something that happens because you're a woman. It's not a thing that's ok."

Themes of male violence and power have always flowed through Tori Amos' work, even people who don't know more than "Me and a Gun"[from her 1991 album Little Earthquakes' know that she had her own particularly nasty experience at age 22 that's been called rape -- so any discussion of such things automatically gives hera moral leg up [even if the foot is on the floor]. But even among her most loyal fans, Tori's rape has been put under a microscope. Although she approaches the topic from several directions going into specifics is at the same time salient and useless. Tori is heavily into myths ("For you to be able to really make a modern myth come ot life, you have to be able to play that character, be that character. You can't have Lady MacBeth coming into the Jesus myth."), and it is the myth of her rape that has been making important, life-altering connections with rape and incest survivors, with rapists themselves ("I get letters from rapists going, "I never though about it from your point of view before") and, of course, with her establishment of RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.

So does it matter that (by her own admission in a 1994 interview) she wasn't sexually penetrated? Does it matter that it was her and knife, not Me and a Gune? Not a bit. Is it important that she was held at knifepoint for hours with the threat of being cut up and saved herself by singing to her captor and ultimately ended up pissing herself? Yes. And if the only definition people have these days of "rape" is the legal one, they need to spend a little more downtime with their dictionary. "I really do feel as though I was psychologically mutilated that night, and that now I'm trying to put the pieces back together again," she said in that 1994 interview. "Through love, not hatred. And through my music."

Is Tori Amos handing out nonsense sent to deceive?

Nonsense -- so far from it. Intended -- questionable. Deceive -- too strong a word, but yes. If it makes the myth that much stronger to say so, if it opens up the song so that others, not just Tori, can listen to the voices inside of it, then so much the better. That is what makes her one of the more difficult to interpret, yet powerfully resonant songwriters America has ever produced. With Tori Amos the myth is the message.

The character Tori is best playing these days is her most authentic -- that of mother. Two years ago she doubted whether she had the capacity (psychological no physical) to even have children: "I'm at this stage where, as I think about it, I'm becoming fulfilled just as a woman. So much of the time is you're the daughter of somebody, or the wife of somebody, or the friend of somebody, or the mother of somebody, you're always trying to find your girlhood to partnerhood to adulthood, and its nice to just have womanhoodI'm enjoying finally not having to be the seal throwing the ball on my nose. What's the next trick out of my hat?" the trick turned out to be little caesarean-born, Tash, and when speaking about her Tori is far more straight forward an down-to-earth than when discussing her "song children." "She's one of those people who will mimic you," explains Tori when asked what kid of kid it is she's raising. "She observes people and starts mirroring them back to them. She's got her giggle when you tickle her, but when I laugh, sometimes she'll go 'heh, heh, heh." And you look at her and go "Tash" The delight she takes in discussing her daughter is evident. "She'd into Pan-Asian cuisine. She's got a taste for salmon and broccoli," but she acknowledges that "While I was ready a long time ago [to have a child], I wouldn't have made a good mommy."

Whatever it was that changed her mind, Tori now says, "I realized you cannot put her needs and your needs first at the same time. There is no negotiating on that one. I didn't have the patience before to get baby behavior. You have to watch them every second. And it takes a lot to play blocks for five hours. Parenthood isn't for everyone. For some people, it's animals or traveling or being out on the ocean. Whatever it is, there's that thing that opens up these windows for you where everything lines up."

Tash will be touring this time out with her mommy, and for Tori, leaving Tash at home was never in question, "although we'll have to adjust the schedule a little to fit her," she notes. "You've heard about letting sleeping babies lie? If you're sure that tornado is not going to hit your house, do not wake them." Three months, she says, should be a good test period to see if Tash tours well. "Then we'll need to get her back to something she knows." And get here mother back, too - once that tour winds down, Tori will again be deep into her next record. "I've been working now for two and a half years, doing all these strong songs, crawling in and out of structures and seeing how they resolve things." Want more specifics? Nothing doing, yet. "I'm in the thick of it as a writer. Rewrites," she says, and closes the subject.

As is, most likely, the subject of further children. Though nothing is ever set in stone, her encroaching fifth decade has helped solidify at least one thing for Tori -- that at heart and soul she is a storyteller and a musician, sometimes working with the myths of other song-parents, most often inventing her own. Some will see it as genius, others as a load of, wellAnd either way, she's going to keep making it, down in Cornwall in her homemade salon, dancing while the session players lay down tracks. "It's not my intention to have more children," she says, "Look, some women are great homemakers. I'm no good at that. I'm a crap cleaner; I'd get fired. But I can fucking bring home the bacon. I'm a musician. This is what I do. I'll be a better mom if I can continue to be a musician. That's my passion."

New Age -"She's a writer," says Tori, "an observer. She'd doing research; she's documenting like an Encyclopedia Britanica of life and experience. Her big line is, 'Well I'm doing research.'"

97 Bonnie and Clyde - This song is told from the point of view of the mother who is about to be dumped off a bridge by her husband and baby daughter. "The big thing is, she's hearing that her daughter has been pulled into the crime and it's very very difficuly when you're helpless and can't intercede. She knows that her daughter will carry this forever."

Strange Little Girl - "This is the little girl whose father killed her mother in Eminem's song, all grown up, having to deal with the fact that she was an accomplice to the murder. She's a dichotomy of things because shes divided -- even when parents divorce, if they turn one child against one parent, you're dividing that child at the core"

Enjoy the Silence -"She's a showgirl, and I call her Isis. She might moonlight over in Vegas. She's the oldest of the showgirls there and has been around awhile. There's a mothering quality in her, she sees the other women who come through the door and get extorted. She sees who the puppeteers are, and she sees when they're lying there bleeding."

Rattlesnakes-"She's one of my favorites, shes an enigma to me in so many ways. I have cups of coffee with her sometimes, and we have really good chats. But shes very hard to penetrate. She has these dreamy eyes; she loves to drive into the desert."

I'm Not in Love - She's a little fetish girl - she's into BDSM. It's all about power with her. And shes not really in love; she really isn't. She was at one time and shes having a different adventure in life. She will walk down many roads."

Time -" She's death. I think everybody gets to pick how they see death., So to me , she is the Grim Reaper, and I saw her. Because time is ticking-Tori."

Heart of Gold - "Here are our twins. They're economic espionage gals - their saying is, 'It's not glamorous, it's just business.' They infiltrate corporations and access information and send it somewhere else. Good or bad, it depends what side you're on. They're not out protesting with a sign, they're playing chess with these corporate big boys. Its not about peaceful protest, its about being very effective, getting the job done."

I Don't Like Mondays - "This is told from the point of view of the Texas Ranger [who] goes to the school, finds the first body in the stairwell [after the shootings described in the song], then finds the girl who's killed everybody and kills her. [The Ranger] is licensed to do this; you would think that she's justified in her act, but she's having a difficult time with it because she doesn't think this particular girl is a bad seed."

Happiness is a Warm Gun - "One of the last people Mark David Chapman called before he killed John Lennon was an escort service. And we don't know if they had sex or if they just talked, but he told her to 'be silent.' So this is sung through the eyes of that call girl."

Raining Blood - "She's a French Resistance women whose sister was killed. She went to the underground after the death of everyone she knew. Shes calling on certain powers, no different than the ones Himmler and the Nazis were calling on, only they used the dark forces. Our French Resistance woman knows myths and is calling on power and working on alchemy"