"I hope I die at the piano."
In terms of acquiring interviews with musical royalty, it doesn’t get much bigger than this, folks. At least not for me. If I could go back in time a few years, interrupt my teenage self – who, at the time, was busy flogging From The Choirgirl Hotel harder than a jockey does his Melbourne Cup-winning steed – and tell him that one day I’d be interviewing the one and only TORI AMOS, I think I would have freaked out. Hell, I’m freaking out now. I had the honour of meeting Amos at a meet and greet she conducted on the Canberra leg of her last Australian tour and had my heart pretty much hanging out of my mouth the entire time. I recounted to her a personal experience of loneliness and insignificance that I felt as I stood atop the Empire State Building a couple of years ago, where everything suddenly seemed to make sense to me as I listened to her compelling 9/11-inspired track, I Can’t See New York. I was a blubbering mess. And that was just a conversation piece I came up with to fill up the two minutes it took for her to sign my Scarlet’s Walk poster and get a photo before she had to be whisked away by a burly security guard to prepare for the show. What chance in hell did I have to maintain an intelligent discussion with the Goddess of Piano for 20 whole minutes?
Thankfully, my nerves prove to be unfounded. Despite her reputation for at times being, shall we say, an eccentric interviewee (listen to her notorious chat with triple j’s Richard Kingsmill and you’ll see what I mean), Amos was in fine form the night we spoke. Her responses were direct and intelligent and her enthusiasm and warmth radiated down through the phoneline, despite the fact she was calling from thousands of kilometres away.
Amos will soon be in the country to promote her latest record, her eleventh, entitled Midwinter Graces. It’s a Christmas record, which at first glance seems an odd choice for an artist of her calibre – a child prodigy who began playing piano at the age of three and one who has remained in the public eye for over two decades. Call me cynical, but aren’t Christmas records the domain of the over-the-hill and/or the mundane? Neither of which I would attribute to Amos. “Doug Morris, chairman of Universal Worldwide and the man who broke Little Earthquakes,” Amos explains, “said to me ‘look, with your background as a minister’s daughter and yet your feminist viewpoint and the fact you’ve made all this music and travelled the world, I’ve always wanted to know what you would present if you were going to do a seasonal record,’” she says, elaborating on the origins of the project. “He said ‘I’m hoping you’re going to write your own standards, do a different read and make some of the carols your own.’”
Midwinter Graces offers up a collection of 12 songs, evenly mixed between traditional carols and Amos’ own compositions. She reveals that she drew inspiration for the album from Charles Wesley, a leader of the Methodist movement who was known for his hymn-writing abilities. “He would take some of the songs from the bar room – sea shanties and drinking songs – he’d take hit folk melodies of the day and put Christology to it,” she says. “So what Doug was encouraging me to do was, ‘why don’t you do what they did and claim it back?’ And I said ‘you’re funny... you’re funny.’” Perhaps not as funny as the concept of a White Christmas-style album to us southern hemisphere dwellers, where a typical Christmas day is spent frolicking at the beach as opposed to making snowmen in the backyard. “Yes,” she laughs. “I was thinking about doing a Midsummer Graces for you guys instead.”
2009 has been quite the prolific year for Amos, with the release of Midwinter Graces following hot on the heels of its predecessor, Abnormally Attracted to Sin. Following this frenzy of creative activity, I ask how she manages to continue to find new inspiration after all this time. “I think the creative force is this endless well and if you’re able to tap into it and co-create, it’s a wonderful thing,” she says. And what happens if the creative well runs dry one day? “Well, I don’t know if it will run dry but I might just become old and then I hope that I will wilt and die at a piano. I’m serious!” she enthuses. “I just hope that I say ‘I need to take a little nap for a minute’ and then just rest my head on the Bösey and just fall asleep and that’s it.”
Considering Amos’ longevity in the music business, I put it to her that she must be an inspiration for the current crop of emerging left-of-centre female songwriters, including the likes of Regina Spektor, Amanda Palmer and Bat For Lashes. “It’s a wonderful place to be in because you can hold a space for the ones that are up-and-coming,” she says. “When I was making Under The Pink, my sophomore record, I wasn’t competing with people like Kate Bush or Joni Mitchell at that time. Those women were legends, you see; they’d already carved their place in history. I think my contemporaries would be more like Polly Harvey and Björk, women who were out in the early ‘90s and are still touring and making music. The ones you’re talking about are contemporaries for each other and we’re sort of like the big sisters.”
As our conversation comes to a close, I feel quite ecstatic with how it’s played out. I actually managed to carry out an intelligent discussion with one of my biggest musical idols without fainting or sounding too dorky! I think I kept it together pretty well, which is definitely an improvement on the last time we spoke at the meet and greet a couple of years ago. Speaking of which, one final question I have for her is how, considering her busy schedule, does she find the time to chat with her fans before most shows? “When you say ‘find the time,’ that’s bullshit, because I’m pretty busy,” she says. “You make the time. You get your ass up and do it – it’s about priorities and desire to connect with people. I have a desire to connect because it changes the whole show and my understanding of who I’m playing for. I learn a lot and it keeps me really grounded and from getting involved in that whole celebrity thing, which I think is dangerous because then you’re not a good channel anymore."
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