Phoenix from the Ashes Tori Amos goes inside the songs of men to find seeds of healing and insight Interview by Gregg Shapiro

Although Tori Amos has made a name for herself writing and performing her own songs, in her latest release, Strange Little Girls, she has chosen 12 songs written by men. Some are dark, some are gentle, all are uncompromising.

Amos says she wanted to talk about men: how men see women, how men see themselves–and how the view changes depending on where you're standing. She wanted to talk about violence and identity. So she turned to the words of men. "I've always found it fascinating how men say things and how women hear them," she says.

Adored by a devoted cadre of fans both gay and straight, Amos has also become famous for her activism, especially in her support of RAINN (the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network). Amos’s activist voice rings loud and clear throughout Strange Little Girls, particularly in defense of victims of sexual assault. Her riveting cover of Eminem’s "97’ Bonnie & Clyde" is both terrifying and fascinating, with its tale of a father taking his daughter to the beach, with mama "taking a little nap in the trunk" with a little "spilt ketchup on her shirt."

Amos treats her songs like people. "My songs are my song-girls," she says. "I’m their mother. Some of them, I don’t know where they are in the world. Sometimes, you just go, Where is [my song] ‘Leather’ tonight? I have no idea what havoc she’s creating. I know she’s meeting people and she’s making friends, and I’m not going to know them all."

In creating her songs, Amos employs a whole host of contributing egos and alter egos–some mythological, like "banshees" and "sirens"; some very real, like her father, the Rev. Edison Amos. Amos conceives in terms of myths, such as the archetypal story of Persephone, daughter of Demeter, the goddess of the Earth. In the Greek myth, when Persephone is stolen by Hades, god of the underworld, she refuses to eat anything her abductor offers her–except for six pomegranate seeds. As a result, when rescued by her mother, Persephone must return to the underworld for six months (the creation of winter) forevermore.

Tori Amos will play the Aerial Theatre on Halloween (special guest is Rufus Wainwright). To purchase tickets by phone, call Ticketmaster at 713/629-3700, or in person at the Aerial Theatre box office. This interview was conducted in August.

OutSmart: Doing cover songs is nothing new for you, as many of your singles featured your versions of songs by Nirvana, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin, to name a few. Can you say something about covering other people’s songs?

Tori Amos: It might have started when I was little [with] my dad. To make pocket money, I would do weddings and funerals. I was around 10 years old. I liked the funerals better than the weddings because I didn’t have to play "We’ve Only Just Begun." I started cutting my teeth on them, and I was playing in gay bars when I was 13. You get a very different exposure to music at 13 when you’re playing for other people to sing along at a piano bar. Having to follow people and their style and to crawl into the songs, how other people heard them.

Your rendition of Neil Young’s "Heart of Gold" sounds more like Neil Young and Crazy Horse than the acoustic guitar and harmonica-playing Young in his own version.

When I stripped it back, I saw that there was a sort of fury that the song itself had in it. The "heart of gold" that any of us are looking for as we’re rampaging the earth of all her resources, for bullion and all sorts of things, you have to pull back. I found this song to be this desperate cry for something.

Then these two banshees came to visit me. Whether they were crying for the earth, or they’ve decided, "Okay, you haven’t heard us, you haven’t heard the cry of the Valkyrie, [therefore] it’s war." They chose to go to the heart of some of these establishments that didn’t hear the sirens’ cry and said, "Okay, we’re going to cut you off right there, where it’s really going to be quite painful for you, because you can’t hear anything else. If you think you’re going to destroy our mother, it’s not going to happen."

That’s your father speaking on the CD?

[Speaking] of the second amendment. That’s the Reverend Doctor Edison Amos. [laughs]

Is that the first time that he’s ever appeared on any of your CDs?

Yes. And he threatened me that I couldn’t edit him to prove my point. I said, "I don’t need to edit any of you to prove my point." [laughs again]

You have both a large female and a large queer following, two segments of the population that have taken a verbal beating at the hands of Eminem. What would you say to them about Eminem?

First of all, I don’t think there’s any kind of transmutation when you attack the person [Eminem] directly; I don’t see the strength in that. But, I think that as an activist, you go to the poison to get the antidote, and there’s power in that and there’s healing in that. When you take a man’s words, you take his seed.

So, it depends on what kind of alchemy you want to do. I choose to do the kind that hopefully shakes things up–so I choose to bring some awareness to the woman dying in the back of the car. What I found [was that] with anybody who heard this song–nobody asked about her. Whether people hated his [the killer’s] character or aligned with his character , nobody brought her up. I said, "Okay, she needs to be humanized, because she could be our sister."

You gave her a voice.

She could be you or me. I’ve been in a car against my will. I felt like the way to phoenix out of the ashes was to reclaim that piece of you that people hijack.

There are these amazing images of you, photographed by Thomas Schenk, as 13 different women, all of whom are connected to the songs. Can you please explain that concept?

Each song has become a myth of our time. Whatever you think of these songs or these writers, and even with my own work, certain songs transcend us. When I walked into the myth-land of each song, each [had] a different male seed/vision that I was taking to put into my garden.

What I didn’t realize, when I took their seed, is that I would also have to take a little egg back with me [to them]. [laughs] That’s the tradeoff that happens in mythology. When you eat the pomegranate seed, you have to go visit Hades for six months. The question we always have to ask ourselves is, "But did she eat the seeds intentionally? . . . Did she think Hades was kind of cute?" You have to ask yourself these questions because that’s how the land of myth works. It’s a sort of strange and mysterious world. They were hitting me from all sides, these women [in the songs]. They would just come in and take over.

Was being each of these different women a bit like being a drag queen?

Oh, wow, I never thought of it like that–but it’s a very good thought, isn’t it? Especially when I did "Real Men." [laughs]

Joe Jackson’s "Real Men" is the perfect song to close the album, because it sums up almost everything.

It became the heart of the record, really. "Don’t call me a faggot/Not unless you are a friend"–that song has always been such a mantra for tolerance. What really struck me was the line, "You can wear the uniform/And I can play along." I kind of cocked my head on that one. I giggle. "If there’s war between the sexes/there’ll be no people left."

That’s one of Joe Jackson’s best lines.

"Kill all the blacks/kill all the Reds/If there’s war between the sexes/there’ll be no people left." This was happening when that Chinese debacle with the American plane was going on. I don’t know how much coverage it got here, but in Europe it was getting so much coverage at the time. Our world teeters sometimes on "Is it going to be safe?"

I understand that you are going to be embarking on a tour in support of the Strange Little Girls album. But now you have an additional family member. How do you see balancing motherhood and touring?

Well, right now she’s jet-lagging and she won’t eat her dinner. I’m a crap cook. We’ll have [our chef] Duncan on the road [with us]. But, what a way to wake up in the day, turn around if you get a spare second, there’s just nothing more magical than somebody going "Guh."