Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (18 page)

This is what the album is about: the different kinds of relationships, healthy and unhealthy, that exist in this woman—let's call her Tori—that exist in Tori's world. So the composing process is everyday. I am composing every day. Do I write a song every day? Of course not. There is a lot of researching. It's a good thing I'm curious, because sometimes I just research how a soccer player kicks a ball and the impact it has on his foot. I haven't used this yet, but I might. This is part of my process. My telling you this doesn't mean that you within your soul are a composer, but if you are, telling you this might light a fire under your bottom so that your palette keeps rotating, no different from the earth, and you keep it topped
up, from chalks to charcoals to watercolors. This is my blueprint as a composer. This is how my process works.

The pollination trail has always lured me in. A friend of mine who's a garden architect dropped a book by the beach house. A few weeks later she asked me about it, which reminded me that I even had the book, and thereby I read it and then misplaced it for several years again, until … Chelsea found it on one of my bookshelves a few months ago, which got me thinking about beekeeping again. Yes, Meg, I'm going to get you your book back. Sorry for the four-year delay. Meg, fondly called Megnolia, designed the exotic garden with me in Florida which has been completely destroyed by Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne.

MARCEL VAN LIMBEEK:

The nice thing about working with Tori is that all the records sound different. To achieve that you need different elements. She's always done piano; it's always something she's come back to at the end of the day. She's incorporated other keyboards—the harpsichord, the Wurlitzer—and now it's time for the organ. It seems like a logical place to go. It's still an organic sound, not a cheesy synth sound. There are proper organs set up with a Leslie tone cabinet. I actually like it better than any of the previous keyboards she's tried. The piano is a percussive instrument and the organ is more of a sustained sound, so she can hold the notes longer. As long as she can physically hold the notes down (because there is no sustain pedal, unlike on the piano), the organ's sound will actually change while she's kicking that Leslie pedal in and out. It's funny watching her change shoes to play the organ. Recording “Not David Bowie” (a song on the latest record that is a nod to the great man himself but a slag to the bad guys), she had one foot on that Leslie pedal and the other foot on a guitar effects pedal that was maneuvering the sound of the Clav (a Clavinet D6, which Tori affectionately calls the “Stevie Wonder keyboard”). There are
no guitars on “Not David Bowie.” I suspect that Tori probably wanted people to realize what these organs can really do. Until Mac Aladdin finishes guitars for the album it's hard to know if he'll be adding to this track as he is on most of the others. And with her swapping between keyboards as she does, I think the B3 and the Clav are a great marriage. It excites me because it's a new sound, another instrument. It's as if she's playing with a different musician, only it's herself.

TORI:

The piano has organs. One just came over the Atlantic Ocean from a Gaelic Christian church somewhere in North Michigan. Another one of the piano's organs came from a source here in the west country of England. One of my close musical mentors, John Philip Shenale, has been pushing me to marry my piano with these booty-shaking organs. And I did. A spruced-up and restored clavichord is being flown in this week from a restoring doctor in California.
Wood made of Woman.
This is a subtext for this new album, compositionally and as a thesis. Therefore, the living organism of this Wood Woman needs organs that serve an imperative function if the piano herself is to make this musical transmutation. Or if we're pushing a thought, it being Sunday when I'm writing this, the piano herself has made her transubstantiation—if my father, the Rev. Dr., were inquiring. Yes, Dad, very simply, She Is Risen. Our Lady of the Wood.

ANN:
Streams become rivers by merging as they move oceanward. Amos can tap into strong creative currents on her own, but as she has matured she has increasingly sought power in the insights of carefully chosen partners. Entering the recording studio with complete compositions, she opens up her work to the influence of the players and engineers whom she considers her soul's companions.

In my music, bass and guitar are often the male characters. They personify the male or provide underscoring for that element. Sometimes I have to choose which instrument represents what. If there are a couple of male characters, if there's a father in there and if there's a lover, or if there's a female who's in there too, and it's a triangle, the way the instruments interact represents that. The musicians I collaborate with have to be able to hold all that and develop it.

The song structures are in place when I bring the musicians in. I bring Matt in first, or Matt and Jon. I sit and sing a new song to them, and I'm always very shy. And they're counting the bars. I listen to the playback and perform it once more, just to make sure I got it right and they're not notating
the wrong version because I was nervous. Then I leave while Mark plays different parts and they notate it. Once it's notated and the sheets are down, then we can go track it. They always have to have a map to go tracking.

I myself never use a score. Never did. For some reason it slows me down and I get trapped in it. I can't get the notation and I find it very confining. I spend too much time sitting there trying to figure it out. And I have quite a good memory. Everyone banks on the fact that I've memorized the song. I've recorded it in my head. I do forget lyrics all the time— everybody who comes to the shows will tell you that—but I rarely forget the music. Sometimes there's a chord change or a voicing, or a left-hand thing that I'll need to record on my little tape recorder, certain details, and the musicians are used to me taking a minute to pull it out.

I invite the players I choose into a collaborative process when it comes to recording. Once the songs are written, then they come and help arrange and develop their parts. Just as they respect me as the songwriter, I respect them as the creative forces behind their parts.

I couldn't imagine somebody calling me in and telling me exactly what to play, and I don't do that with the guys. Why would I be calling in these particular players if I did that? Anyone would do. Artists or producers who dictate their musicians’ parts aren't utilizing them well. Matt will come up with something you never thought of, because you're not a drummer and this is his
life.
But telling Matt absolutely anything that can help give him a clearer picture of the world in which you are trying to frame the song is going to give him immediate jumping-off points. As far as Jon goes, what's easy about working with him is that it's hard for him to get confused when it comes to chord voicings, mainly because he's a bad mamma jamma. So that makes it smooth sailing most of the time.

Many people think they're musicians when they're not. Some producers think they know what's best because they're wannabe players. But when you're pulling in players of the caliber of Matt and Jon to tell them precisely what to do, you won't get the best out of these players and it shows where your ego is. I might give them a line on the piano and say “Let's work around this motif,” and sometimes even with the guitar players I'll say, “Can we work around this line?” and “We need our guitar melody to be contrapuntal,” or “How can we do this so that somehow you are emphasizing a parallel sixth in the B section?”—I'll do that with them. But to say, “Play exactly like this,” when I'm not a guitar player? How offensive.

The first time that I felt I really got to explore was when we were recording
To Venus and Back.
I really felt I could do anything. Some songs contain all these sounds I made on bass, and you wouldn't know it, just weird little sounds and tones that I got to experiment with. Tori always wanted me to do whatever I wanted, and if there was a really strange sound that was fine. She didn't want me to “play bass” in the traditional sense, just to feel free. So every song on
Venus
has something particular to it.

Matt had some electronic drums during those sessions and Tori had a bunch of different keyboards that she programmed, doing a lot of loops. Each of us encouraged the others to come up with some other sound that would add to the mix.

The way Tori writes her music allows me to do things that I like to do. When most people write a song, it'll be verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus. The basic song structure. What are you going to do
to that? You just play through it. But with her it's so open because she's not laying down anything specific rhythmically. You can do whatever you want, you can play percussion, electronics—it's crazy. It's great. To me it seems like improvisational songwriting. She'll have a topic or something in her head that she wants to convey and she'll just put it to music. For example, I think it was on
To Venus and Back
where she said a particular song was about being on an ice planet. She wanted me to play that kind of drum part. So I came up with what I thought was an icy sound.

Every song of Tori's is so different. Some want to be churchy or gospel-flavored, requiring a funky drum kit sound, and then some songs are more electronic in nature and require sound creation as opposed to just plain drums. A lot of her songs are tribal, tom-heavy, and I use bongos and sticks. She doesn't reference things literally in her music, so you can get away with doing things that would sound too literal if applied to another writer's work. I can play bongos and congas on a Tori track and she's not going to sound like Miami Sound Machine. Whatever song it is, I try to do something that seems interesting from a drummer's point of view. That works with her. It doesn't work with any of the other artists I've worked with. I don't know why.

With each record I experiment; even if it doesn't work, it's safe for me to stick my neck out and see what happens. With
Scarlet's Walk
, the first thing I told Tori was “Okay, there are two things I want to do on this record. If you guys agree with me, great—if you don't, then we'll work it out. The first one is, I don't want to use any electronic drums or drum loops. I want to play everything in real time.” And the second one was more of a technical thing; I wanted both the bass drumheads to be on the bass drum. Usually drummers take the front head off and stick a microphone inside, and the drums end up sounding really modular, rather than the complete kit making a unified impact. I wanted the sound to be really
hyperacoustic, a great recording of drums in a room. Just a really great, timeless drum sound that in twenty years you can listen to and go, “Cool, I'm glad we didn't use the technology that was hip at the time.” She had written all these great songs and I really just wanted to stay out of the way. So she agreed, and we got that sound.

On other occasions, I've taken the opposite approach. For
Choirgirl
we tried all kinds of crazy stuff; I brought out some Native American drums and I would just play some grooves into the computer and we'd find little bits and chop them up and make drum loops out of them, and then we'd layer things on top, maybe put some live acoustic drums in on the choruses. And then on
Venus
we ran electronic drums into the guitar amps and miked those amps, so all the electronic drums you hear are completely intertwined with the guitar. In general, I'll just say, “Tori, let me try this,” and I'll disappear for a while and then bring what I've discovered to her and Mark and say, “Check it out, what do you think?” And I'm so lucky because usually she's like, “Yeah, let's do it.”