Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (27 page)

ANN:
For many years, Amos needed only her piano to carry out her enlightening enchantments. Yet a real musician craves two things: companionship and challenge. Amos eventually exhausted the possibilities of solo performance. She had always experimented in the studio and wanted to widen the musical possibilities of her live show. She worked through several approaches before settling on her current setup: a jazz-style trio that rocks like a thunderstorm.

People say that when you're touring you have no time and no space. Actually, I do have space. The stage is my space. With Matt and Jon, it becomes our space, our music space, which is sacred space. Those two are in that sacred space with me. That's when they're free, too. Nobody can call them. If there's an argument going on with friends, family, whomever, they cannot get to those two guys. It's impossible. We're in a sacred space up there. That's why we're so close.

I think Tori can, without trying to, make a musician very nervous. A lot of pop musicians play by ear—they don't even read music. Because of her training, Tori's got her theory down. She can tell a musician exactly what notes he played right after he played it, and she can tell him what notes she wants him to play Jon is very accommodating, but he's also very sure of his abilities. Tori doesn't faze him at all. He's on her level, and there aren't that many people in pop on that level these days.

To play with Jon and Matt means chops, chops, chops. Gotta get 'em up … Fingering. Practice. Fingering. Left hand. Shake booty. Right hand. Plié. Left hand. Shake booty. Right hand. Start again. Let's face it: artists who dictate their musicians’ parts aren't utilizing them well. Especially someone like Matt who has played on so many records. Because I promise you, he will come up with something they can't. This is his life. You don't need to be the sharpest knife in the drawer to figure out that if Matt Chamberlain walks in the room, you don't tell him, hit the snare on two and four. He'll come up with something that they couldn't in a million years think up. Do I honestly think that if you give me a piece of clay I'm going to give you a Rodin? I have no illusions: I am not Camille Claudel. As a musician I have no illusions—I am not a drummer, I am not a bass player. It always puts me in a fit of giggles when an artist tells a musician what to contribute without even hearing what the musician is moved to play In order for there to be improvisation onstage, you cannot keep such a tight leash on your musicians or they won't be able to be spontaneous. In order to do this, however, you must be able to keep up with them. Which brings me back to chops, chops, chops, practice, practice, practice.

Tori's the only person I'll tour with, unless it's some really bizarre and cool project or my own band. I hate to tour. It's usually a boring drag. With Tori, though … she's so strong and musical, it's different. You feel like a better musician after being with the tour.

The way we've been touring lately, it's a traditional trio—piano, bass, and drum. It's not unique in jazz; it's unique in rock or pop. We don't even have a rhythm guitar, so all the melodic information is coming from Tori. I don't really contribute to the melody; I contribute more to the color. I'm like the context and texture person, who helps determine whether a song is going to be earthy, light and ethereal, funky, or rock. Jon gets to do a lot of stuff that a bass player doesn't often get to do— he gets to play chords and other melodies besides just the bass line, because there are a lot of guitar parts he's trying to cover at the same time. The fact that the instrumentation is so limited and you have to make it work makes the experience unique. There's a lot of room for everybody. I don't need to just play a basic backbeat; I can add a few things here and there. The structure forces you to play to fill up the sound. But then, a lot of times it's great just to be really minimal because we can be. There's so much space.

I think it's really good for us to be playing without a guitarist. For me there's a lot more to play, and I just like that sparer sound itself. There's more opportunity just to hear everything that's going on. Guitar takes a lot of room, especially Steve Caton, who worked with Tori for many years. He added so much—it was a really big part of the sound. He used a lot of orchestral effects that really filled up the whole sound. It was like a blanket. It was really beautiful, but you take that away and there's
a lot more opportunity for subtle colors to come out instead of a big color.

The other keyboards bring in another tone, to add dimension to the piano. The piano does a lot of things, but there are things that a Rhodes does, that these old Hammond organs do, that are great. Like a Stevie Wonder influence. And I believe in incorporating that. Even if it's simultaneously one hand on one—the piano—and one hand on the other—the organs— which is kind of my thing. I've been developing that, straddling the piano bench in the middle like a horse and playing on both sides. It's quite challenging, but it also brings the male and female together, because to me the piano represents the feminine and the organs represent the masculine. It is the
hieros gamos
(sacred marriage) of the two that makes me feel as if I'm the link in the middle of this love affair. Like Hermes, sending messages back and forth between two passionate lovers who can only touch each other through a human.

She's very much a part of the rhythm section. It's not about bass and drums and then this thing that happens on top. Ultimately she doesn't even need us to be there; she's done it all her life by herself, you know. She has bass lines and she has inner voicings and she has melodies, all on her piano, and they all work in a certain way and they create a rhythm. It's really about making all that happen at the same time.

Tori has a heavy left hand; she knows it, and that's something that we've had to work out since day one. There are some times when she's just pounding away in my zone. That's fine. The piano goes higher and lower than I can. I'll just find a line that's rhythmically contrapuntal, or I might
just completely get out of her range and do something totally guitar-oriented, because she's doing a full-on bass line. Or I might do exactly what she's doing, just to reinforce it. There are tons of different options, and there are no rules. She's never saying, “Do this;” it's just more like, “This is what I'm doing, so you figure it out.”

Just the drums can really change a song in concert. If she plays a song like “God” live, it's totally different. On
Under the Pink
, “God” has all electronic drums. Live, it can become way funkier, an almost improvisational thing. And she'll work off that. She reacts to the rhythmic choices I make as if it were a jazz gig. I've played with the jazz pianist Brad Mehldau, and he's like that, too. Most jazz musicians are always reacting to the other players. Tori does that, but within a pop song. We'll be playing a song we've played a million times, “Girl” or something like that, and I'll just add an extra little tom thing and she'll do something different on the piano. Or “Cornflake Girl”—the last part is a piano solo, which for her is sort of prearranged, it's all worked out, but I can react to it in whichever way I want. And then she'll change it a little bit, too, in response to me. You can always get a reaction out of her. She'll smile and go, “Yeah!” And do something interesting. I react to her lyrics or her vocal rhythms, too. Her vocals make you do bizarre drum phrasings that you wouldn't normally think of, but somehow it works because it's part of the music.

I just find different things every time we play a song. She likes that, which is great for us. With bandleaders who like to write parts and don't encourage people to improvise, it's a drag, because you want to react to it and you're not allowed. I feel completely satisfied at the end of a gig. I feel I've played some music. I don't feel I'm up there just
bam bam bam
, chopping
wood, which is what drummers mostly get to do at pop gigs. It's a satisfying musical experience.

Even in live performance the songs are like moving paintings, and I—I as a person and performer that may be changing inside and outside at different times during a performance—cannot change who and what the songs are: they are sovereign. However, there is backstory to a song, there are conversations that the songs have with me from day to day—in that way they are alive. But “Leather” will be “Leather” whether I become an old granny who has become a vegetarian or a celibate carnivore. “Leather” will not change herself for me, and I cannot ask her to and would never. But in live performance—because of, let's say, current circumstances in the world that day, in the city where I'm playing that day, in me that day, in Jon and Matt that day, in the people that will come to the show that day, the perspective of “Leather” can change that day, and that is because how we look at her is constantly changing. For instance, there were these working girls in Vegas who sent me a note (through a person who knew a person who has a sister, yada yada yada). These gals worked as a duo act, and apparently while doing what they do best they would put “Leather” on repeat. This is a part, a piece of “Leather's” exposure to other people that has pulled her into their lives. So when the duo act comes to one of the shows, clearly they will be having a different sensory feeling experience from one had by, say, my mother. The duo act will have pictures in their memory banks that will rise to the surface, no different from my mother, when “Leather” is played.

The difference is only what the pictures are. My mom always tells me, “You know, darlin’, I just love the swing of that piana. I used to sell a lot of honky-tonk records back in Carolina.” So as you can see, these factors,
compounded with how “Leather” is used in the narrative of the show that night, may change my relationship to the song itself and how I feel about her. Because a live show is sonic theater, for a few simple hours in my life or in the life of a person in the audience, we are descending to the underworld. Here, very personal internal feelings about ourselves, other people, and issues can take off their masks and show us where they truly stand. Then, as we ascend into the fifth and final act of the show, we can choose what we want to take back with us: a piece of our underworld self that, frankly, the cheating boyfriend may need to meet, or the boss that doesn't appreciate you, or the terrorizing Bitch at school—or maybe you're the terrorizing Bitch, maybe I am. Some fragments that took their masks off while we were on this underworld journey sometimes walk quietly with me. Only I know that after the show they will be staying with me as my figurative New Renter in my seafront condo, down the street from Pituitary Lane, behind Heart Terrace. Then again, some unmasked Beings that I see during a performance find me once I'm back in my dressing room and receive from me the “Okay you, thank you for the perspective and the vision, but in this century you can't just chop people's heads off and feed them to your cats, and I know these guys are bad guys, and thank you for the vision. So you can haunt me during the show again in Indy”

Songs can be used as an exit door from an ideology that might not be working for the people. Songs can become the getaway car from a relationship, especially if you are in a relationship with a guy who is driving the physical getaway car. Songs can penetrate when hours of talking with a parent only seemed to build up walls. Songs can tear them down in minutes if the parent and the child are willing to listen. Songs can remind you that you don't want to leave this space, although your bags are packed and ready to go. When we think of space, some of us stand outside at night and think of
it as this endless outer space. For me, the songs are that space we can walk into. For me, songs are a state, a state of being that can make you see your physical place completely, in a new fresh way—or a state so vast and varied, like the state of New Mexico. The belief that the songs are a space doesn't change. When I walk in it, though, what I choose to hang on the walls and bring into the room can change. But whatever the space, the challenge is to find the root of what and who the song Being is. It might be a lullaby, or a waltz. If I can go back to the song's original form and retain the core of that form, then I can still thoroughly justify the interior decoration, what I call the rearrangements of the song, in whatever the space is.

When she sings certain songs now, they come from a very different place, and they've evolved into completely new arrangements. “Hey Jupiter,” for example. You listen to the version she plays live next to the one that's on the album—the lyrics are the same, but the arrangement is entirely different. I think that's just because that song kind of became something else for her. That's true for basically any song from
Boys for Pele
, because she wrote that album when she was going through a dark time in her life. When she sings those songs now they naturally come from a different place, because her life has evolved on so many levels since she originally sang them. She's retained the integrity of the songs but sings them from a different perspective.

Some songs are easier than others to apply to my life now. “China,” for example. It doesn't have to be about the same people who inspired it.
I can feel the distance getting close …
That situation can be with a girlfriend, or with a different man than the one I wrote it about. With other songs, it's hard for me to connect them to my situation. But the songs aren't
overly sympathetic with me about that. They sort of imply “Look, T, we're not just existing for you to relate us to just your little life. If you can't relate to us on a specific day then try to see our narrative occurring in someone else's life who is going through what we're talking about.”