Neverending Tori

Your name’s Olaf!” declares Tori Amos, with a peal of delighted laughter. “Fantastic! I always have time for a Viking!”

This may well be the case, but the 50-year-old, North Carolina-born star still sounds a little tetchy when I ask her to sum up her new album, Unrepentant Geraldines.
“Well, I don’t know,” she says. “It’s not my gig to do that, that’s your gig. My gig is to write it. I think it’s something you listen to and decide what it is for yourself.”
Fair enough. But perhaps a little history lesson is in 
order first…
Since the release of her 1992 debut, , Amos – who had previously fronted the unsuccessful, woefully named poodle-rock act Y Kant Tori Read – has had an extraordinarily varied and experimental career. Little Earthquakes smashed apart boundaries and won the distinctively redheaded, classically trained, American songstress worldwide fame for its piano rock and raw, confessional poetry.
Although her signature remains swelling, filigreed piano rock, Amos has experimented with different musical styles and instruments over the last two decades, from the baroque dusk-pop of Boys For Pele (1996), the electronic experimentalism of From The Choirgirl Hotel (1998) and To Venus And Back (1999) to her return to the classical world with the classically inspired song cycle Night of Hunters (2011).
Never predictable, she managed to achieve the rarely possible with a successful concept album (2007’s American Doll Posse) and an acclaimed Christmas record (Midwinter Graces, 2009) while still retaining her artistic integrity. Her 13th studio album, 2012’s Gold Dust, was a selection of works from her songbook all newly arranged for vocals, piano and orchestra, recorded with the Metropole Orchestra for Deutsche Grammophon/Mercury Classics.
Which brings us to the soon-to-be-released Unrepentant Geraldines. Recorded in her Cornwall studio with long-time collaborators Mark Hawley (also her husband) and Marcel Van Limbeek, it’s a collection of songs on which Amos once more hones in on the writing of brightly melodic, deftly evocative chamber-pop.
“The arrangements were something we paid close attention to,” she concedes. “Making sure the mid-range was working within itself so the melodies and the chord structures and counter melodies were all having a conversation amongst themselves. So that was really fun to work on in that way. We approached the arrangements in a different way from most pop records and that was really inspiring. The storytelling was inspired by working with all these amazing storytellers from the theatre world. Each song is its own story.”
Amos has been involved in a couple of extracurricular projects in recent years, most recently 2013’s The Light Princess, a musical she co-created which was staged in partnership with London’s National Theatre. That experience naturally fed into the making of the new album, which is predominantly piano-led.
“I think the last few projects were very influential, whereby I was exposed to lots of classical music in order to write Night Of Hunters, and I was exposed to an incredible amount of musical theatre in order to work on The Light Princess with my writing partner [playwright] Samuel Adamson. So I guess I stepped away from pop music for a while in order to really immerse myself in these other types of structures.
“While I was doing that I was under contract with Deutsche Grammophon and the National Theatre, neither of them commercial ventures, as you well know. So the belief was never dumb it down, or follow what’s on the radio or follow what’s happening on Broadway. That’s not what happens in the National and that’s not what happens at Deutsche Grammophon, so there was a lot of freedom as an artist. Therefore, contemporary songwriting just starts to come without being under any type of contracts or obligations out of these other experiences.”
Amos has always been a strong and strident feminist voice, and a number of the new album’s songs deal with women feeling trapped by their life circumstances.
“Yeah, I was fascinated to hear different stories from different women around the world as I was travelling on the Night Of Hunters tour,” she explains. “Sometimes they're trapped with their own projection of themselves: what they need to be in their life and when. I was really surprised to hear the struggles that 20-year-olds were having with being 20. Having finished university and not being able to find a job and feeling like their future was over.
“When I was hearing these stories in New York City, I’d say to these young women, ‘My God! I’m on the precipice of turning 50 and the idea that you think your future is over is really disheartening’, and they would say to me, ‘We can’t see another way!’ I have to tell you, when I was hearing that it just sounded really tragic. Then hearing the 30-somethings talking from a very different perspective about not knowing if they should go and start a family, what that meant, because if they did they felt they wouldn’t get the promotion they felt they deserved – and so, because of all that, I was just beginning to see the balancing act of wanting to be a mom and have a family and be a wife and yet be vice president or president of a company.
“I was turning 50... and then I was also waking up and hearing even from teenagers the idea that they felt they had to pick a career path for the next 30-40 years to even get into university and some of them had no idea about they wanted to do. None at all! So I began to hear pressure from all kinds of ages. These weren’t just girls feeling that pressure, these were boys feeling that pressure as well in high school. Having the family was definitely a female pressure, though.”
Having struggled for more than a decade, Amos was a relatively mature 28 when Little Earthquakes broke her through to the mainstream. Does she think it would have changed her as an artist if success had come sooner?
“For me, yes. I don’t think that’s true of everybody. I think everybody is different and it depends on how you are brought up and what you’re exposed to in your life. I can’t be generic with it because there are all types of actors who've been acting for a long time, all the kids in Harry Potter, for example, they’ve been exposed to art and success at such a young age and they all still seem to be creating. So it doesn’t affect everyone in a way that’s destructive.
“For me, as a songwriter, it was good that I had a failed record in the 1980s,” she continues. “It made me realise how important it was to be clear on a vision. I really do think that great art can be embraced by the public, but I do also think you have a lot of battles on your hands because the commercial world of art, and even what I’ve been exposed to with musicals, sometimes they’re not always original in their thinking. They’re following things that have been successful instead of being something original that becomes successful and that’s a bigger risk that has to be taken. You have to be really clear with your vision and strong, very strong.”
What’s her opinion on TV shows such as The X Factor and The Voice?
“Well, as we all know, voices get heard that might not have gotten heard,” she avers. “Potentially they get an opportunity to get out there. Some of them plot out a career for themselves, some of them don’t – for all kinds of reasons. I think it’s good for the song-writing industry, those people that don’t write for themselves or did but couldn’t get a contract so become jobbing songwriters. I think it’s healthy for that side of the industry. Very healthy for the producers also.
“But for the singer-songwriter? I reckon there’s not as many getting signed as there were in the ‘90s. I think the person writing for themselves and performing... perhaps there hasn’t been as many signings. You’d have to fact-check that. It’s different times, a different culture. Swings and roundabouts, though.”
Her 13-year-old daughter, Tash, sings on a song called ‘Promise’.
“She and I were talking about relationships between girls and their mothers. She’s at boarding school – honestly she ditched us when she was 11. She wanted to go Hogwarts but that didn’t work out! She found a school in London and she really likes it. She’s at Sylvia Young Performing Arts School for the last couple of years. So she was talking to me about girls and their mothers who do get along very well and girls and their mothers who don’t. So we were trying to figure out the complex issue of that.
“When is a mom asking too many questions and when is a mom not asking enough questions? That was what I said, of course; when is a mom asking too many questions and trying to figure out the answers for the kid instead of the kid figuring out the answers for themselves? I said, ‘Oh, fair point’, but then I said, of course as a mom does, ‘When is a mom not being heard by the kid when the mom can see the emotional train crash coming?’ and she and I agreed
“Where is that line? When does a parent cross it too much in order to tell a kid what to do all the time so that they don’t make any mistakes, and yet, when does a kid refuse any type of experience from the parent who unfortunately might have had that experience and it all went terribly wrong but the kid is not open to hear it? So we agreed it’s very complicated so we tried to promise to listen to each other.”
The gorgeous track ‘Rose Dover’ sounds like a lullaby for Tash…
“Her and her age group,” she agrees. “I think that the world the way it is is really coming along quickly. Sometime the peer group doesn’t always encourage each other to be creative or to develop the imagination. That’s something that young children are encouraged to do but as people enter their teenage years sometime ‘make believe’ or as I would call it ‘creative thinking’ isn’t always supported by the peer group. And a peer group is a very, very powerful thing as well, as we all know. So ‘Rose Dover’ is about a person who begins killing off their own imagination in order to fit in.”
Another standout track, ‘Giant’s Rolling Pin’, takes a light-hearted look at the Edward Snowden/NSA affair.
“On one hand we believe that our security forces somehow protect our liberty in order to have our ideas and our thoughts. I began thinking that if I’m not going to try to destroy civilisation, or any writers that I know, if that is not their intention, is there a world, and this is happening now, where our government would make it difficult for a writer to ask those questions just by putting them under enough pressure? Perhaps that pressure comes from the taxman. We all know how it could play itself out, there are many ways it could play itself out and I think it’s pretty tough to go up against the government.
“So the question that ‘Giants Rolling Pin’ is kind of poking at is how far could those lines be crossed. If you have the information to not uphold liberty, but to make it difficult for people that are just asking questions, that aren’t threatening civilisation, but might be asking questions that make people very uncomfortable. It’s not setting up Snowden as a hero. I think it’s a complex conversation, the song is a bit of fun in a not very funny reality. I think the questions have to be asked and the subject needs to be talked about. I think that’s important.”
Do you engage with social media much?
“Not really,” she says. “We utilise Twitter as a place for information – it’s a place where tour information can get to people. I don’t use it to proselytise though, no. Instagram and that sort of thing I use to share pictures from when I’m travelling. It’s great to be able to share images from a tour where there are so many things you’re exposed to.”
Speaking of which, there’s an 80-date world tour planned for Unrepentant Geraldines. Is that a gruelling prospect?
“Yes, but you get an energy from performing. There’s an incredible energy that you get from the audience so it’s not all one-sided. There’s a discipline that has to be there, you have to be in really good shape to do it. So, looking at it that way, 80 cities is a tall order. But performing is magical and the audiences are truly energising.”
Does Tori Amos have a motto in life?
“My own mom said something to me a little while ago,” she says. “She’s 84 and she survived colon cancer a year ago and went through the operation and everything, and she said to me, ‘I’m in a situation I can’t get out of and for those who can, I just want you all to see the possibilities of each day’. Sometimes it’s too easy to only see the negative or see the blocks of why not to do something, but she said, ‘If I could only be in my 50s again, nobody could stop me!’ and I thought, ‘Wow, coming from an 84-year-old, I think that’s pretty good wisdom’.”