Tori Amos

Jake Brown

Description

Featuring exclusive interviews with her producers, sound engineers and backing band, as well as in-depth research into the singer herself, Tori Amos: In the Studio explores this groundbreaking artist's career album by album. From performing as a child prodigy pianist to her first bands, her breakthrough album as a solo artist to her prolific years of recording and touring, Tori Amos has refused to play by the rules of the recording industry and fearlessly forged her own path and musical identity.

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554909704
• Langue: English

Extrait

TORI
AMOS
IN THE STUDIO
JAKE BROWN
ECW PRESS




Copyright © Jake Brown, 2011
Published by ECW Press
2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2
416-694-3348 / [e-mail]
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Tori Amos: In the Studio is not authorized or endorsed by Tori Amos, her management or representation.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Brown, Jake
Tori Amos : in the studio / Jake Brown.
ISBN 978-1-55490-970-4
Also issued as:
978-1-55490-945-2 (PDF); 978-1-55022-945-5 (PBK)
1. Amos, Tori. 2. Rock musicians—United States—Biography.
I. Title.
ML420.A586B878 2011 782.42166’092 C2011-900666-9
Editor: Crissy Boylan
Cover and text design: Tania Craan
Typesetting: Troy Cunningham
Photo credits (based on page numbers in print edition): front cover © Frederic Dugit/Maxppp/Landov; back cover © Reuters/Lucas Jackson/Landov; page 4 © Dave Allocca/Retna; page 42 © Jay Blakesberg; page 76 © Michel Linssen/Redferns/Getty Images; pages 110 and 113 © James Cumpsty; page 124 © Jeffrey Millman; page 134 © Grant Scott/Camera Press/Retna; page 148 © David Atlas/Retna; page 160 © Lawrence/Starface/Retna. All album covers © their respective owners.





To my aunt Heather and my dear friend Helen Watts, two shining examples of the kind of strong women Tori has spent the last 20 years singing for



CHAPTER 1
Those Formative Years
“All the church hymns were coming through one ear, and The Beatles were coming through the other. I thought that if these are my two choices in life, then I definitely want what’s behind door number two.”
— Tori Amos ( Time Out , 1994)
According to the Reverend Dr. Edison Amos, Methodist minister and father to the woman now known by millions of music enthusiasts as just “Tori,” at five years old Myra Ellen Amos was already well on her way to becoming “a twenty-first century Mozart.” Born August 22, 1963, to the Reverend Dr. and Mary Ellen Amos in the small city of Newton, North Carolina, little Myra didn’t take long to reveal her gift for music. “[My mother] says I played music before I could talk,” said Tori Amos, who lived with her family in Washington state and later the Baltimore, Maryland, area.
The former child prodigy — who calls music her first language, not English — shared some of her earliest impressions of the instrument that would come to be such an integral part of her life and career with Performing Songwriter in 2006: “In my dad’s study, where he would write his sermon, there was a big black upright [piano] that somebody in the church had given my family. I remember crawling up onto this windy stool — you could wind it and it would get taller — and I would barely reach the keys. I remember feeling that this was my antenna to the galaxy, that I could cross dimensions through sound and hear back from the outer reaches of the universe. . . . The songs were alive to me, as alive as the human beings around me that weren’t making a whole lot of sense. But the songs were making sense.”
Her childhood perspective on the piano was that of friendship and love, and she told Rolling Stone in 2002, “I knew I was a musician before I was potty-trained. I just always remember playing the piano.” From the age of two-and-a-half, Tori was playing the piano and considered it her “best friend in the world. That was the only thing that understood me and that I understood. . . . When you’re young, you’re being told what to think. But I’d go to the piano and that’s where I was comforted. It was my protector, the protector of my thoughts.” In music, Tori found a sanctuary of sorts as well as an identity: “I knew I was a musician before I knew I was a girl. You know if you are a musician because I think music chooses you in some way. It’s very hard to say no to it — it just envelops you.”
Her mother, Mary Ellen, saw the connection her daughter had to music. In an interview with the Sunday Times Magazine , Mary Ellen recalled, “Before Tori could even talk, she hummed. By the time she was two-and-a-half, she would walk over to the piano and copy exactly what her brother or sister had just been practicing. She used to get up in the morning before anyone else and play. The piano was her playmate, and she could reproduce anything she heard by ear, songs on the radio or even entire scores.” Tori was known as the little girl who played the piano; her innate musical ability shaped her identity as people always asked her to play for them. Her father said he wasn’t “aware of [her talent] like the sun coming over the horizon, but we were noticing she would come in and play the piano right after [her brother and sister] had finished and it would sound a little better than them. But I think when we were astounded was when we took her to Oliver! or The Sound of Music . I’m not sure which one it was, and then after seeing that, she came in and sat down, and it seemed to me she could play the whole score.”
Musical scores were among the first non-religious music Tori was exposed to. As she told the Phoenix New Times in 1998, “The shocking thing about Oklahoma! [is] it was the only thing I was allowed to play when I was little . . . I had all of this religious music I was learning, so I learned the soundtrack at a very young age.” As if playing entire musical scores by ear wasn’t enough, young Tori also began composing her own music and developing her vocal ability, singing what she wanted to communicate instead of simply talking. Still, while Amos’s talent as a pianist evolved rapidly, she explained that, by contrast, her voice “came with age. I was no Shirley Temple. It took years and years to develop. Like you know how some little kids have great voices at first but get worse later? Well, I was the opposite. I vocally developed much later.” Speaking to iGuide in 1996, Amos recalled an incident from school when she was just shy of 10 years old: “I was a really good piano player, but the teacher would have other girls sing while I played. When I tried to sing, I remember this one boy, Kevin Craig, wrote a note to a girl named Peggy and he said Ellen — which is what they called me — sings like a frog. The teacher read it in class in front of everybody, and I was never going to sing again. I had to develop my voice and I worked really, really hard developing it. The playing came easier at first.”
From her earliest years, Tori spent her summers down in Newton, North Carolina, with her maternal grandparents, Calvin and Bertie Copeland. (It was on a trip back home to visit her family that Tori’s mother gave birth to her; falling ill while there, her doctor advised Mary Ellen not to travel for the remainder of her pregnancy.) Tori’s mother felt it was important that her daughter know about her Cherokee heritage and about the line of strong women she descended from. Amos’s time spent with her grandparents shaped her, particularly by connecting her to her Eastern Cherokee heritage, an influence that would surface later in her music. Tales of her great-grandmother, Margaret Little, who “escaped the Trail of Tears and ran off into the Smoky Mountains in 1839” and who “married a plantation owner where she was a surrogate slave,” and stories about the life of her people had been passed to Tori’s grandfather, and he sang them to her. Michael, Amos’s older brother, told the Raleigh, North Carolina, News and Observer in 1996 that “Tori really was the apple of my grandfather’s eye. She was his last grandchild and came along after he had retired, so he spent a lot of time with her. I think she does get some of her musical ability from him.”
Though her grandfather died when she was nine-and-a-half years old, his influence on her was lifelong. “I would sit on the porch with him,” Amos told Buffalo News in 2003. “He’d smoke the sacred tobacco and tell me these stories. I don’t think I realized at the time how profoundly he was changing me.” The tradition of oral storytelling was passed down to the future songwriter by her grandfather who spent “a lot of time with me as a little kid, trying to explain to me about not needing to change another person to fit my own needs, and how that was breaking a deep spiritual law.” Said Tori, “My grandfather made these memories come alive by telling me stories of his people. I felt an amazing sense of compassion toward what had happened to them, and I’m convinced that before he died, my grandfather hid a remember-the-stories chip underneath my skin.”
In addition to fostering a love of storytelling, music, and creativity, Tori believes her grandfather “instilled in me [the idea] that spirit is in all things. I’ve always believed that. . . . It was a real natural way of looking at life.” Speaking with Newsday in 2001, Tori explained, “He would try to teach me how to be a container for a different frequency that didn’t seem to be your own. He would get frustrated with me because I would just want to watch Scooby-Doo , but he really had a huge impact on my life. Everything he tried to teach me, I didn’t necessarily achieve it all, but he is like a tape recorder. I do remember. Sometimes I can hear him clear as a bell.” On long walks together, Tori’s grandfather would challenge her to look past the o