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Musica Magazine
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Musica Magazine
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Alberto e Leda sent me an article on Tori that appeared in the April 23, 1998 issue of the Italian magazine 'Musica'.
Here's the article that appeared in the Italian magazine 'Musica' on April 23. There are two pictures. One is already on the Dent, the other is a close-up I haven't seen anywhere yet, but I'm sure it will turn up soon in some US magazine. I cut bits of the article where the author was just going on and on about stuff that doesn't really seem to have much to do with Tori. Even where she speaks it doesn't sound like Tori too much, I suspect what she said was loosely translated into Italian. The wrong quote from Spark is a good example of how messy this article is. Anyway, here it is.
Tori Amos - Story of a Wound
By Enrico Sisti
She got married, but she lost her baby. Myra Ellen Amos, 36 years old, American but not completely, tells us about the pain that made her new album possible
London Waiting, for her, is always unnerving. Between one album and the next, between one tour and the next, Tori eats the arm-rests of chairs, getting to the heart of wood that every chair hides more or less well. Tori opens and closes the drawers of her past as if it's the only thing she really cares about. [the author goes on in this style until he mentions old tapes that Tori finds in strange places, with this quote: once I listened to an old tape of mine and I was surprised by the songs I had recorded just for fun. I must have been 18, maybe younger. Then at the end there was the ending of a Thin Lizzy song, a group I used to like a lot. I like them less now.]
Tori has thousands of trapdoors, She speaks with inanimated objects, saying it's what stimulates her most. She does not accept the conventional art of communication. So she doesn't speak of marriage, even though she just got married. Before this record, in fact, there was a little event. A crazy change of which Tori really doesn't like speaking: she got married to Mark Hawley, and before that she miscarried. But that didn't affect my artistic life. She says this almost immediately, through her teeth, but she repeats it more than once. As if really it did count very much. In fact Spark, the first single off the new album, clearly refers to the painful event that forced her to lose the baby, speaking of herself in rather cinical terms: [here they have the verse of Spark translated incorrectly in Italian, saying: she moves like a glacier/ but she couldn't keep baby alive]. The meaning of her last record, from the choirgirl hotel, is in the alternation of courage and a sense of defeat, the latter well explained in songs like Cruel and iiee. A record that makes me laugh, but that was born as a band-aid. As for the style, with this band-aid, and not really for the first time, Tori confronts her Western world, that strange cultural centrality we think we've deserved only because Bach was born in Germany and the Beatles in England. But our vision is short-sighted. We think in terms of decades, but we should think in terms of thousands of years. On the record Tori unravels subjects with the usual ability, softening when the subject is thorny, roaring when she walks down more common roads, that everyone sooner or later walks down. But most of the ideas this time come from geographically distant lands. Tori lets her piano dialogue with rhythms that seem almost to contradict it, to neutralize its effects, sweet and dreamy with a good amount of tribal sounds. It is the world that advises us to doubt everything that we are. It's better to not waste time by convincing ourselves that we've found the Way. Tori starts from the music and ends up somewhere else. Traditional guidelines are too narrow for her. I remember having a nervous passion for music, a wrong way to dedicate myself to art. I played but I felt the weight of duty, never the lightness of pleasure. Tori comes >from a family immersed in puritanism. I couldn't even masturbate in peace: God was my worst enemy. Every natural feeling was frustrated. The hand of censorship, with time, freed the hand on the keys. But I'm still instinctive, always too explosive. Even the process of recording has become a bother, so the new album was recorded with a strange technique: in one room Tori on the piano, in another her drummer, Matt Chamberlain. For the whole time the two of them communicated through a monitor, they could see each other, but they had to work in separate spaces, almost disinfected: This technique might seem like an excessive search for virtuosity. Instead the contact was immediate. Much more so than if we had done things the usual way.
The article goes on about the Tower Records Merman offer, and mentions her Letterman appearance, the club tour, and the European tour.
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