Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Tori Amos in Concert, July, 2007. Photo by Anrie

Tori Amos is one of my favorite Alt-​​rock divas. Of course, the word “diva” doesn’t really fit her. In our pop cul­ture, it has too many neg­a­tive over­tones to apply to such a refresh­ingly eccen­tric woman. It has too many neg­a­tive under­tones to apply to a tremen­dously cre­ative artist who con­stantly evolves, sheds old skin for new, and never seems afraid. Of anything.

I’ve been a big fan since 1992 when her sec­ond album came out. One lis­ten to her Little Earthquakes and I could tell that she was “for real” and uniquely capa­ble of merg­ing clas­si­cal piano, deeply emo­tional and per­sonal song­writ­ing, with ethe­real har­monies and mov­ing melodies. It also helped that she was a home­town girl in a sense. She spent much of her youth in Maryland, as did I.

Tori Amos was the youngest per­son ever admit­ted to the Peabody Conservatory of Music, at age five. She won a full schol­ar­ship which lasted until she was eleven, when she was asked to leave. There is some dis­pute regard­ing the rea­sons for her depar­ture, but Amos says it was because of her love for Rock and Pop and her reluc­tance to read sheet music. This set­back did not seem to slow her down.

(It seems a com­mon­al­ity among young, suc­cess­ful stars that they started train­ing for their future at a very young age. I often won­der what would have hap­pened to me if I had been an aggres­sive lit­tle mon­ster as a kid, push­ing for my own space in spe­cial art schools, music schools, writ­ing programs.)

It didn’t slow her down and soon enough she was in LA (at age 21) act­ing in com­mer­cials, singing in bars, form­ing a band … and then in the UK (at age 28), with a great record deal and her sec­ond album in the bag .…

Watch the video: angel with a hint of some­thing much, much darker. Possessed by some­thing the music tries hard to hide and express. Her body on the verge of explo­sion and rap­ture. Cool about that explo­sion and that rap­ture. Cool about los­ing con­trol and never los­ing it …

Tori Amos would take many more jour­neys after that, and con­tinue to make beau­ti­ful music alone or with her many alter egos, her audionyms. She describes some­thing about her jour­neys here. From a 1994 inter­view with Michael Pearce:

“The most influ­en­tial jour­neys I have had have been with Ayahuasca, the vine from the Amazon, the com­bi­na­tion of that and mush­rooms. They give me the trots and such! It’s very much a med­i­cine woman, med­i­cine man’s jour­ney drug, where you go inside. It’s not a social thing. It’s an inter­nal expe­ri­ence. I exper­i­ment with things that are usu­ally an inter­nal expe­ri­ence, because that’s just what excites me. And yes, it does some­times give me visions. But my inten­tion when I am doing it is very dif­fer­ent than recre­ational. I don’t do it recre­ation­ally. I do it to go do inner work, and I’m very clear before I do it what I’m search­ing for. That way, there’s no abuse suf­fered and I don’t rely on it. It’s just one more tool that I use sometimes.”

This reminds me of the exper­i­men­ta­tion of Henri Michaux, who painted after he used mesca­line, and wrote about the process. But Tori is dif­fer­ent. She’s dif­fer­ent about everything.

Magical. Just mag­i­cal. From The Beekeeper.

And her last album? Reminds me of what Fernando Pessoa did. He wrote under sev­eral het­eronyms, cre­ated actual biogra­phies for his dif­fer­ent poetic voices. Tori cre­ates five audionyms, based upon Greek Mythology, for American Doll Posse. She dresses up in con­cert for each char­ac­ter, sep­a­rates them, sep­a­rates their stories.

“What I’m try­ing to tell other women is they have their own ver­sion of the com­part­men­tal­ized fem­i­nine which may have been repressed in each one of them. For many years I have been an image; that isn’t nec­es­sar­ily who I am com­pletely. I have made cer­tain choices and that doesn’t mean that those choices are the whole story. I think these women are show­ing me that I have not explored hon­est exten­sions of the self who are now as real as the red­head.^”

Provocative, star­tlingly orig­i­nal, sur­pris­ing always, Tori Amos shocks us with sweet­ness and magic, dark­ness and audac­ity. She’s America’s reign­ing fairy princess with an edge.

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