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Many thanks to Lucy
for this article!
Tori Amos
travels through post-Sept. 11 America in new album, Scarlet's Walk
Tori Amos is consumed
with other people's stories. Volumes of intimate tales are stored
inside her head.
The
singer-songwriter, who startled music audiences with her 1992 debut
by casting the sordid tale of her real-life rape to the soothing
sounds of a Bosendorf piano, collected the stories while touring in a
post-Sept. 11 America.
After shows, fans
waited by stage doors to tell her deeply personal narratives about
loved ones. Others sent letters recounting anecdotes and memories
"that you don't say when tomorrow's coming,'' Amos, 39, recalled
during a recent stopover in Toronto. "It was a time in America
where the masks were down, the makeup was off, the resumes were blown
away, forgotten somewhere, not relevant because people didn't know
what tomorrow, if it came, what it would bring.''
Amos, curled on a
couch in a posh downtown hotel room, says their stories were spawned
from a spiritual source rudely awakened by the terrorist attacks.
"America itself
came back to the round table with all the other countries and
realized that it was part of the world instead of this isolated
bubble,'' she said, gesticulating wildly.
"She's calling a
lot of people right now and she's getting through,'' Amos added,
personifying her home country.
Her response was to
walk in another's shoes.
Scarlet's Walk, the
singer's latest album, is a sonic novel that takes listeners through
an introspective road trip across the United States in the aftershock
of the attacks.
"(The record) is
where I was at the time and where I've been through the last
year.''
Like many Americans,
last year's tragedy shook Amos. She was in New York City that fateful
morning, away from her two-year-old daughter.
The event caused the
singer to pause and reflect on her life, especially her new role as a
mother. A few months later she lost a close friend, famed makeup
artist Kevin Aucoin.
"From a national
world event to a personal event to just maybe as a writer realizing
that America is at a crossroads on every level, whether it knows it
or not,'' she said.
The concept for the
album was inspired by aboriginal stories sung by Amos's mother about
her Cherokee ancestry. Scarlet's Walk probes westward expansion, porn
culture and America's concept of democracy through the eyes of a
woman trying to find herself.
"Scarlet's my
character in this. I get to hide behind her, I guess,'' Amos said. A
scrapbook of semi-abstract photographs of herself taken while on the
road sits on the coffee table in front of her. Many of the photos
accompany the album.
"She's busy in
this . . . but there's a place of reality where she begins to see
within her travels that her fantasy of what a good day was, or a
strong relationship was, is changing. There is an impact that this
has on her, it does define certain parts of her. It's written on her
body, it's a body map.''
While the album is
rich with symbolism, Scarlet's trip can be actualized with any
Perley's road map of the United States.
Travelling coast to
coast, some 4,800 kilometres, the album records Scarlet's many
stirring, romanticized encounters: the Mississippi River site of a
massacre of Apache people; Austin, Texas where a Latino revolutionary
is fighting U.S. intervention in Central America; and New York City
where a woman tries to cope with a plane crash.
"The soul of
America and the native Americans made it very clear to me while I was
on the road that the time has come (for change), she's tired of being
Miss-represented instead of Miss America.''
Ever since her 1992
debut, Amos has been a very confessional and political songwriter,
casting her personal tragedies such as being raped and a 1996
miscarriage to the sounds of her sharp yet erotic piano melodies.
It comes as little
surprise that she would turn her feelings of despair after Sept. 11
into prose. Scarlet's Walk, perhaps her most emotionally moving album
to date, is a far cry from last year's Strange Little Girls, where
Amos reinterpreted a dozen songs written by men and give them a
female spin.
Despite unfolding in
story format, the album need not be listened to in any particular
order.
"The work
hopefully works on a few different levels. That's how she (Mother
Earth) presented it to me at a certain point,'' Amos says. "But
once in your lifetime it would be fun to take a drive and do it.''
BY ANGELA PACIENZA
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