Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (19 page)

The new record is actually a lot of everything we've done so far. A little
Venus
and
Choirgirl
and
Scarlet
combined. Electronics, a bunch of percussion, a bunch of acoustics. She was saying the title was
The Beekeeper
, so keeping that pollination factor in mind I could go anywhere. It's just combinations of things—acoustic drums with electronics or electronics with percussion or a B3 with her Granny, her Hammond chord organ. A combination of instruments we haven't gotten into specifically. There is one song, the title track, “The Beekeeper,” it's all electronic drums pretty much, until the end bit, when we shift to acoustic. We haven't really done that kind of combining since
Choirgirl
, where it can change that drastically—organs, electronics, drums. There is a lot of stuff going on. A lot of cross-pollination kinds of things. Most of the stuff as far as the drum kits go isn't traditional, either. I'll piece things together and end up with a hiphop-style
drum kit. Smaller drums instead of the big rock drums we use for a more acoustic sound. So now these drums are really small and focused and the sound is more focused.

There is definitely a sound to this record. More focused and stripped down. It's organic yet electronic, a lot of different things. Songs like “Hootchie Woman” and “Sweet the Sting” are total percussion, full-on Afro-Cuban. But it's definitely different from the last album. Less Americana and more pulling in all sorts of sounds. It's everything we've all learned, all at once. Marcel and Mark, Tori, Jon and I. Everything everybody has ever learned about making a record together is all being laid out on the table for everyone else to grab from, different influences. Everyone has a big enough vocabulary now because we've worked together so many times. Someone can say, “I want to do this.” I'll want to go electronic. She'll want to go with the organ. Jon will grab his stand-up bass. Put some percussion on it. Everyone just goes, “Cool, we know how to do that, let's go.”

You cocreate with an infinite source …

There are songs coming right now that are exciting to me as a player because they are a bit different for me. I've increased my rhythmic ability since working with Matt and Jon for hundreds of hours. When I got the organs, the B3 (Big Momma), the A100, and the Granny, I would just spend time finding my way around them—jamming on them, developing my own kind of relationship with the organ itself. Then I began to be able to interpret these creatures differently from how I would have three years ago. But these particular song creatures didn't come to me three years ago. And I have to ask myself if that is because I didn't have the ability, as an organ player, to interpret them. With “Witness” coming in, and
“Ireland”—they reveal a side of my playing that some people won't be as familiar with. But I don't think that it will surprise Matt and Jon at all, because after all these years, I've been put through their Booty Camp. Funnily enough, I had Booty Camp T-shirts made up for them in January 1998.

When these song Beings first started coming in, I would look at them and say, “Hey, I'm glad you crashed my party, but are you sure you don't want to be traveling over to hang with the seventies funk band, Rufus?” But the message I keep getting is “Our time is now, and you'd better deliver us. Because we are ready. And we will groove your world, Miss T.”

I believe that the songs choose you, but you have to be willing to develop and stretch as a player, or your repertoire is only going to be of a certain type.

MARK HAWLEY:

Tori has learned to leave more space in her music. And she likes the results. This comes from Marcel and me saying to her, “Yeah, it's great to have a loud vocal, and we want to have a loud vocal, but there's got to be room for a loud vocal.” And if there's less stuff in the mix, so that everything really counts, then it makes for a much more spacious arrangement, and you know every element will be heard well. It's not that she just took our word for it; she sees the results in the mixes. So when she goes back to writing again, she's clever enough to be able to incorporate that.

JOHN WITHERSPOON:

Tori learned how to be a producer making
Boys for Pele.
There were certain people around her who were saying, “You can't produce your own record, you've got to do it traditionally, you have to go to the studio, you can't do it in a church, you can't do it in a house. Go and do it the normal
way.” In the course of making that record I certainly learned something, and she did as well, which was that the traditional way of making records involved big kickbacks from the labels to the suppliers they worked with, and half your money went nowhere, as far as you could tell. That's when we took over all of the finances. Basically we said, “Just give us the money and we'll make a record.” And that's what we've done ever since, on every record. We pay the bills and the musicians and just do it ourselves.

I think we spend a lot of money making a record, but we put it into the record. We live very well, but the point is that record labels will blow a lot more making one video than we do making a whole album. And you're lucky if that video gets played ten times on MTV. But the people who are telling you how much the budget is are the same people directly involved in marketing. Videos, photo shoots—they want to spend money on what they're doing. We spend it on the music.

In the studio, Mark and Tori have a relationship that's like any working relationship. And like any working relationship there are occasional fights. A producer is telling her engineer, “No, this is the way I want it,” and naturally he'll respond saying, “Well, I think you're wrong.” But there is no hesitation. She's not thinking,
I have to go to bed with this man tonight—do I really want to piss him off?
It's all for the art in the studio. They'll fight it out and work it out. But at the end of the day we all have dinner together, no matter what. It's a big round table; Duncan cooks and we all eat together. Whether it's the band, the mastering engineer, Jon Astley Marcel, Adam Spry—our resident tech, Helen Gilbert—the Martian accountant, or whoever happens to be working at the studio that day, we all have dinner
together every night, and by then whatever's happened in that day has been left there. In a sense it's another cleansing ritual.

Mark and Tori are my best working friends. Their relationship isn't a factor when we are working. Of course, it's Tori's product and she's the boss. The way it works within our triangle is that none of us can live with either of the others being unhappy with any piece of the project. I can't stand it when Tori doesn't like something and she can't stand it when something is bugging me. The way it works is that we always have to agree. It's Tori's record and she'll always have her end say, but she always listens to Mark and me. She won't let anything slide by knowing that I don't like it or Mark doesn't like it. The fact that they are married doesn't come into it. It's good. It's something I'm very proud of.

During my career, I've learned from making mistakes on both ends of the spectrum. I've not been present as far as what's happening in the studio, with terrible results, and I've been too pushy, too. I've learned to be a little more democratic without abandoning my authority. You have to be able to delegate the details, so that you can keep your focus on the architect's plans.

The one tricky thing I've learned from being a producer is how to be able to walk in and out, keep my ears fresh so that I could pick up on things. That's the best thing a producer can do in a mix room: come in, come out, come in, come out. And you have to find ways to keep your mind rejuvenated. If you stay in the room all the time, you're in the exact same space as the engineers. You always need an outside force to be coming in and out of that mix room. We decided, the three of us, that that would be
me. Because I'm not an engineer, it would be silly. Some producers are engineers, so then they have to have another person who walks in and out. It is really vital that somebody has that role. Because then that person's able to say, “Well, you know, the drums are a little bright.” Or “The EQ isn't right on this—we'll need to go after a different effect.” Things jump out at you because you haven't gotten used to them—you're not dulled to them. It's a lot like being an editor.

ANN:
What kind of tale does a song tell? On one level, it tells of its own making, capturing the thrill of that first inspirational rush, the more difficult progression of choices that gives it structure, and the give-and-take of its blossoming forth from a single artist's vision during collaborative performance. One thing is for sure: though they have authors, songs do not tell stories that belong to one person. Songs, those puzzle boxes of memory, longing, and bliss, speak beyond their makers’ intonation, breathe beyond their realities. They could not possibly stop at only one story.

The story world is always running parallel with my world. I've allowed myself to be okay with taking hikes into that world and then coming back. Tash will go with me into story world, which is great. Sometimes Mark will say, “Okay, guys, I'll see you back in our reality in a few minutes.” It's wonderful to have a little friend who will go with me. She's very much about, well, let's play school, or let's take on this character, take on that character. The latest permutation of this is her playing Mommy and me playing Baby. It's gotten to the point where Husband will say, “Excuse me, Baby, I need to talk to my wife a moment.” Tash will say, “Go ahead, Husband.” Then Husband will say, “No child, my real wife.” But the great thing about this is that I hear Tash rehash phrases that Mark and I have
said to her. So when she's playing Mommy I get a sense of how what I say is heard by her and the effect it has on her developing tapestry. We learn from our role-playing.

So much of what you do in songwriting is role-playing. That's how you develop your different characters within the song. It's not as if the stories merge to a point where you think they are your life, but you do let them in through the front door and the back door, and it's okay that sometimes certain characters stay for dinner.

The songs give me the ability to live a thousand lives. That's why people keep trying to connect real life with our songs. They ask, “Did this really happen to you?” Well, all of it did, on some level. And none of it did, on another. Meaning, not exactly as I write it. Because I wouldn't be a writer then. I'd just be keeping a diary. And also, I'm cocreating with a song, with its soul—talk about a soul song …

In a way that's the most misunderstood thing about my work: where and even whether I am in the songs. I don't think anybody really and truly knows what character I am in a given composition. They can presume, but even Husband doesn't know. Somebody said to me the other day, “Don't you need something to happen in your life to be able to write about?” I said, “Are you nuts? Have you just missed the whole boat of what I do?” You think this is about me, and I've made you think that, but you don't know which “me” I am within my work. I may not be the benevolent character in every scenario. Sometimes I'm exploring sides that I see in somebody else. It strikes a chord in me and I play it out in the song world.

I'm usually in my songs somewhere because I can understand the subject matter only if I've had some kind of experience that helps me get it. But the work transcends my own experience. I've tried to explain this to people. I'll say so many times after telling a story to someone, “It's not necessarily about my own experience but someone else's, and yet I've had a similar experience that brings up the same reaction that this someone might have had. How many of you have had the experience I've explored in any given song? How many of you haven't experienced that exact set of
circumstances that occur in the song, but you still have an emotional response to that song, because it has triggered something you can't explain?”

Sometimes I'll be in a public place, eavesdropping on another table. The way the person I'm listening to tells her story is putting her friend in Snoozeland. This would especially happen when I was playing piano in lounges. It's not as if the elements of the story aren't crackin’, but there is just no framework to allow the listener to dive into this story painting. I'd just see someone, blah blah blah blah, and I'd be playing and listening and remaking the story in my own head. Because such people don't know how to weave a tale, unlike Scheherazade. They can't bring you into it, or push you away from it, which could make you want to be let into the story— sometimes that's a tactic, too. Another tactic is, you just leave everybody on the outside. Don't open that museum door, let them stand outside the Louvre going crazy because they can't get in. There's an exhibition in there, and they can kind of catch a glimpse of it, but they're irritated because they want to see more and yet still they won't leave. Why? Because they are tantalized. I've written songs like that.