Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (14 page)
Read Tori Amos: Piece by Piece Online
Authors: Tori Amos,Ann Powers
They looked at me as if I were speaking an alien language and said, “What are you talking about?”
“I'm talking about the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.”
With shock they responded, “As in the Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Gospels?”
I said, “That is exactly what I'm talking about—a real Gospel, from her perspective.”
“Do you mean it was written by her?” they asked.
“Well, no one can prove who wrote Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, or any of the Gospels. But yes, there is a Gospel attributed to the Magdalene.”
“Well, when did this happen? Why didn't we hear anything about it?”
“It was discovered in 1895.”
My publisher looked over at one of his twelve disciples and said, “Get on the phone with the religion department.”
I thought to myself about how people were shouting from the rooftops about Mel Gibson's
The Passion
, that people were buying
The Da Vinci Code
in droves, and yet the words attributed to this woman, Mary Magdalene, are still being kept under wraps almost two thousand years later. Her light hidden under a bushel. The question that I have to ask myself, and the question I have to ask you is …
Why?
Maybe this truly is The Greatest Story Never Told.
ANN:
A lost river flows from the Himalayan peaks of India to the Arabian Sea. Some people believe the Saraswati has been buried for four thousand years, while others claim it never actually existed. What everyone knows is that this mysterious watercourse shares its name with the deity that governs another elusive stream—the force of creativity itself. The goddess Saraswati is the consort of Brahma, lord of creation; she is Vak, the guardian of speech; she nourishes all who make music, write poems, and love to learn. She is usually depicted riding a swan, the symbol of pure knowledge, while in her four arms she holds the implements of inspiration: meditation beads, a book, and a veena, the sacred seven-stringed lute, the tone of which resembles the human voice.
Throughout her mythology, Saraswati stands for the unstoppable, yet of en seemingly untraceable, flow of the mind at play. She guides her faithful to embrace the form their inspiration takes. Legends abound of her ability to nourish eloquence, restore memory, and help bring hopes to fruition. The Mahabharata call her “the mother of the Vedas,” the source of India's foundational sacred texts. She can be impetuous, even cruel, as in the legend of when Brahma settled an argument between her and Buddhi, god of the mind, in favor of the latter, and she condemned her consort to never again being able to hear his own name said in prayer. She can also be warmly generous, as when she nourished one sage in a land stricken by drought so he could preserve his land's history, or restored the damaged memory of another so he could recite the Vedas and find peace. The Jain sect named her the Remover of Infatuations, the patron saint of getting serious about what you really love. Some archetypal beings represent our cravings for power, erotic connection, or material success. Saraswati stands for respect. Only by learning to respect herself and earn the respect of others can the dreamer become the doer.
Like the Saraswati River, running now on imaginary shores, the sources of creativity can often be frustratingly obscure. Many artists experience a productive rush early in their careers but lack the skill and discipline to sustain the quality of their output. True creativity, not just the shapeless splatter of expression, demands structure, attentiveness, and time. The artists who sustain themselves are those who overcome their addiction to the thrill of emotion and ego, define a larger vision, and keep working.
Over a lifetime of learning to compose, Tori Amos has perfected her own methods for transforming raw creative material into art. Her process takes her from preliminary, inspirational wanderings throughout the world and within her well-stocked library to the calm space of her workroom and then into the recording studio, where she leads her small crew of collaborators in realizing her compositions. Each song that Amos generates becomes its own environment, sustaining elements of myth and legend, of her musical forebears and her own innovations, of autobiography and fiction, wildness and precision. Asked the secrets of her trade, she shares not merely a handful of tips but a spirit of adventure, the exhilarating sensation of diving in.
CANVAS:
“Garlands”
I've been by the sea on and off for a few weeks now. The girls are coming in on Jet Skis. The songs seem to know where to find me. Writing a work through the changing of the seasons—autumn, winter, spring, summer—has an impact on the work. If you figure in the tastes and the aromas that go along with the changes, the seasonings—the herbs growing in the garden, which then make their way into Dunc's kitchen; the burning of fires that happens in autumn; or just the budding of spring … all of that is woven into a song's tapestry. “Washington Square” or “Garlands” (I'm still wavering on the title: clearly you will
know as you read this which one I chose in the end) was written when we were frozen in—sorta like when it's too dangerous to drive because of icy roads here in the west country of England. I started this song in the autumn, when we were in Boston doing a big radio show in October 2003, and then I couldn't find its foundation until we were iced in down in Cornwall. I bundled up and took a walk with my boots on, bundled up in Husband's ever-ready big bomber jacket, until I wandered back around, not to the house, but the barn, smelling fires on the way, making a beeline for the Böse. Isabella was waiting there for me in a shaft of light by the piano and she said, “Write me in a song. I want access to this dimension.” I said, “Talk with me awhile.” I just started playing something random so as to not lose the moment. Then she said, “You're still hurting.” I asked her, “To what are you referring?” She said, “I was there that day.” I asked, “What day?” “That day when you walked through Washington Square and I saw a tear you were hiding, and I held up a candle to guide you.” I looked at this glorious vision of light, and I giggled softly. “Well, Isabella, we know which song you are in, then, don't we?” She held me a moment and then danced back into the shaft of light from which she had come. I finished “Washington Square” (or “Garlands”) that day.
The word
garlands
had been married to this melody since its inception, had wanted to be used but had eluded me for months, mainly because I associated it with the ancient custom of wreaths and flowers for weddings, funerals, and celebrations as old as Beltane and May Day. Then that day after Isabella sparked my … I guess you call it my sixth sense—she had turned up the volume on that one—I started to have a funny feeling that my definition of garlands was the reason that I couldn't weave this tapestry together. I sat down on this old couch that supposedly came from Russia in the nineteenth century; I've had it recovered
at least three times because of coffee stains and baby dribble, but it's my thinking spot, and it's my dolphin couch because of the two brass dolphins on either side. I have it in a sagelike material, which reminds me of New Mexico, that plateau covered with white sage right by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I looked at the color of the wall, which I had painted to remind me of those New Mexican skies, this creamy tangerine, or as Tash would say, vanilla Satsuma pudding color.
It drew me to pick up a book that would have drawings in it. I had just that week opened a box of art books that I had gotten on my travels. Many were still in their plastic wrappings on the floor. One caught my eye, and there it was. A book of Chagall lithographs. These garlands of lithographs—bundles bursting in color—are what the lovers in the story use to chronicle their love affair. Our lovers meet in Washington Square and go uptown to see the Chagall exhibition. As they walk in and out of these pictures, we get a vision of their love for each other, some of the beliefs that they're wrestling with, and a dark force in their relationship that seems to be
coming between them, whether it's his father or her professor at art school who seems to be wanting to control the path her talent takes, a little too possessive in Isabella's opinion. I decided to notate the lyrics in this CD booklet so that Chagall's painting titles were italicized and that way people could go and reference the lithographs visually, which also influenced the phrasing of the music.
Penelope, wife of Odysseus, the hero of Homer's
Odyssey
I am a songwriter twenty-four hours a day. I'm not a performer twenty-four hours a day. I'm not a wife twenty-four hours a day. Even Mommy— to be honest, when I'm on that stage and channeling, Mommy's taking a break. But the writer in me is always present.
As a songwriter, I'm gathering clues and possibilities all the time, whether I see a piano that day or not. I've tried to explain to people how I collect these dispatches, because I think anybody can do what I'm talking about. Once I do plug in, I might get only one line and two bar phrases of the melody. I always have elements of songs around that may never ever get recorded. As far back as
Little Earthquakes
, I began to realize that I needed to have a library of notes, phrases, words, things that might prove useful at any given time. Within a few months’ time I'll gather hundreds of those fragments. Half won't be used. And then the craft comes in, the part that is about painting a world. You want listeners to smell the lavender, to feel the point of those knitting needles in a handbag of the granny who happens to harbor a loyalty to Madame Defarge. You want the listener to know the wood's burning in the stove when they walk into the song with me. Music is about all of your senses, not just hearing.
I think of the structure of any particular song as a house. The bathroom
is the bathroom, and you have to understand the shape of the bathroom and its needs. The kitchen's the kitchen. Sometimes you want the chorus to be the kitchen in a song. Sometimes you want the chorus to be the shower, very cleansing. Sometimes it's the bedroom. Or sometimes the chorus is that shower, but instead it's about being naked and soap and it's sexy—or it's not sexy at all, but an eradication of someone or something. It could even be akin to “I've gotta wash that God right outta my hair,” depending on what sticky archetypes have been prodding through the night. The point is, even in terms of the emotion expressed, the shape matters before the story does. Without the structure, there's nowhere for the story to live.
Peter Gabriel taught me, when I worked with him a bit in the early 1990s, that attention to structure is what you have to develop if you're going to be a composer/songwriter generating effective work throughout your life. He said to me in 1995, “Look around you—you have these engineers. You could build a studio, a workshop. Tori, you never know: your workshop studio may be the only way you can keep your art from being tampered with if you are at war with your label but they still want product.” (Little did I know that he was reading my tea leaves, forewarning me of an ominous battle that was yet to ensue, but we're not there in the story yet.) Everybody's got one good record in them if they're half decent. But then once you've done that, you've used the best of your picks. That's your style. People know your style after the first time and then you have to develop skill as a songwriter. Do I write a lot? Yeah, I write a lot. I write hundreds of songs for an album. Fifteen or twenty get chosen. I have hundreds I've forgotten now. I have at least 150 that are complete but just didn't quite work.
