| Garbage – Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!) Lyrics | 22 years ago |
| This song was written for and inspired by the book "Sarah" written by JT Leroy. Sarah is the story of the prodigal son recast in the carnivalesque world of the highway truck stop and its environs. The narrator, an androgynous twelve year old boy, idolizes his mother Sarah, a "lot lizard," or truckstop whore. He leaves the safety of the lot - a perversely idyllic kingdom ruled by Glading Grateful ETC., a benevolent pimp who sent one of his boys to chef's school to cook gourmet meals at the truckstop diner - on a quest to become as famous as his mother. Adopting her name and sex, "Sarah" stumbles into dangerous and fantastic worlds pocketed away in the West Virginian wilds. He hitches a ride to the famous luck restoring Jackalope, is mistaken for a saint and must prove himself by walking on water. When he is captured by LeLoup, Glad's violent rival, "Sarah's" life is all but over. Will he perish at the hands of LeLoup, or will "Sarah" find his way home? | |
| Tori Amos – Twinkle Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"Yet the record isn't finished until Twinkle; it just wasn't finished until that song. That level of the flame, feeding the flame, because after all the stars, the fire, I had to go into that place of becoming that instead of trying to find it again." |
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| Tori Amos – She's Your Cocaine Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"There are three characters in "She's Your Cocaine" - a he and a she and the girl singing it. I haven't quite figured out if the girl singing is really pissed off that she isn't special anymore, or if she is just horrified that she put this guy on a pedestal and he's now he's chosen this thing... this girl who wouldn't even be let into a real girl's party. This... black hole of nebulai. [INT]: That isn't very sisterly of you. [Tori]: I think your own sex can see your sex for what it is. You know the tricks of your own sex. Sometimes you can put your little play glasses on and not want to see them. But I know when another woman is flirting with one of my crew - it's so obvious and yet they can't see it. They say 'oh she's so pained' or 'she's had all this stuff happen to her'. I know a girl like this - who uses her victimness to make people feel they can't do enough for her, that nothing is ever enough. And you're like an addict. You can't spill enough blood, you can't wrap your dick into seventeen different little shapes, y'know, like those balloons. 'Here... look! Puppy! Ice cream truck!' This song is my revenge. [Tori; Attitude Magazine (UK), May98] |
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| Tori Amos – Riot Poof Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"To me Riot Poof is about one part of my family that is the conqueror and the other part who where being conquered. They fought at both sides. And you have to find out who you are. Many people don't want to see that they're partly victim and partly the executioner. Every evening I get letters. Hundreds of letters. A great part of them are letters from young women (and men) who where sexually abused by adults they trusted. They hate themselves because they think they made the adults do this. They are all wearing a little victim sign. Like they belong like some elite group. They're drown in a lake called victimhood. Instead of saying: 'No! I have the pride of a lioness. I will hunt. I will escape from this all.' I found this place when I lost my baby. Then I understood the life force you can get from it. So I could go to Venus, to make passionate records there. I can't define my new record yet. I only see this picture in front of me, like it is filmed from a camera that is circling round the heart of Venus. So I can look at her in all her darkness." [Tori; OOR Magazine, Sept. 18, 1999] "This record talks a lot about the shadows and the shadow world," says Amos. "`Riot Poof' is for all the jocks out there who need to deal with their secret sexuality." [Tori; Tower Records' Pulse Magazine, NOV99] "I'm surprised when I see, for instance, gay men being racist or women colluding with that patriarchal thing, when women are sexist against women. So men don't surprise me. Being a lioness, I know the teeth and claws of women. But, of course, women have always been blamed. We see it down the centuries - 'if she didn't have a wet pussy then we wouldn't have been with her'. Urgh! And they have a woody sitting at the fuckin' table but they see it as this sanctified, insatiable body part. And women aren't allowed that - if they do, they become bad. That's what the song Riot Poof is about. It's like I'm the tooth fairy, the homo fairy and this is my present to all the homophobes. I'm leaving it under all their pillows. [She pauses] Blossom riot poof." "Well, that being a poof doesn't mean you're not a hunter, that you're not masculine, or a man. And also being feminine doesn't mean that you're not a hunter either. There are all these concepts around but now the paradoxes are starting to live." [Tori; Attitude Magazine, Nov99] "Yeah... Because I was brought up in such a Christian household it is about the father. It's a father God and a son saviour so when I say "The sun is warming / My man is moistening" in Riot Poof, which is really about a guy who finds his feminine after he burns everything to ground and decides maybe, head, face down to the earth, 'Maybe I need to think about this for ten seconds'." [Tori; Much More Music's Speakeasy, Jan 2000] [Julie]: So who wrote a song about you? [Darren]: Because I was cooking for Tori Amos when I came out,she wrote a song about me. It was called Drama Queen which when translated into Dutch and back into English becomes Riot Poof, so that's what she called it. [Darren Staats, Tori's chef during the 1998 Plugged Tour; Gay.com Interview, Early 2001] |
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| Tori Amos – Putting The Damage On Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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Damage speaks for itself. The song, being herself damaged, it's trying to teach myself about graciousness, and I have such a hard time with that. I have a very hard time. Damage was so essential for me to sing, it's one of the most difficult ones for me. I can look and have love and feelings for some of these people but... " [B Side, 05/96] |
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| Tori Amos – Purple People Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"So I was uh, we were in Cornwall and we were hangin out, a bunch of us. And um, the great thing is that we always had a saying 'it's 6 o'clock in the world somewhere and that means you can have a drink. You know, when you think its too early to drink, we don't drink that much. That depends on who we are comparing ourselves to. But we have a European way we look at thinks, its not like we never kind of go to work...i can't play the piano if i'm doing anything cause i can't find it for one thing...and then once i'm sitting on the stool i still can't find it..so um. There was a time when we would decide it was 6 o'clock and it was like 9:30 in the morning. And um, one time we were having this moment and my friend Tam was telling me a story about a girl named Besty Brown who used to torture her and come up to her [Tori giggles] ..that's the thing she used to come up to me and go 'Hi I'm Betsy Brown, do you do judo? i do judo!'. And I went into the studio and things kinda happened." [Tori; End Sessions - KNDD 107.7, Seattle, WA on 9.11.98] |
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| Tori Amos – Professional Widow Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"[Professional] Widow is my hunger for the energy I felt some of the men in my life possessed: the ability to be king. I wasn't content just being a muse. I was the creative force. I was in relationships with different men where if they could honour that, they couldn't honour the woman, and if they could honour the woman, they couldn't honor the creative force..." "As I got to know Widow, I began to really adore her candor. She was so cut off from so many other parts of being, but here she is, deliciously convincing him to kill himself so she doesn't have to leave fingerprints on his body. She'll make sure he showers before this all begins. She's ready to extract what she wants from him, the current won't be what she wants until he's dead. Whatever his addiction is, she's convincing him that mother mary will supply it." "'Give me peace, love and a hard cock': because you can't have one without the other. For her to really say, 'are you gay?/are you blue?' that same person has had to say 'give me peace, love, and a hard cock,' because if I hear Peace and Love one more time! That is so full of shit!" |
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| Tori Amos – Pretty Good Year Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"Whether it bums you out or not, the truth is, all this happened, as much as the first record did. But there are other characters involved a bit more. There are just other beings involved in this one. Like Pretty Good Year, for example, I got a letter from a guy named Greg in England. This one got to me - it missed getting to me for, like, three months. But it just got passed around to different people, and finally somebody just - I was walking through the record label in between the tour up in England, and somebody put it in my bag. They just said, "You know what, Tori? This has been sitting around here. Just take it." And I took this letter, and I opened my bag two days later, and I read it. It was a picture of - he had drawn himself. It was a pencil drawing. Greg has kind of scrawny hair and glasses, and he's very skinny and he held this great big flower. Greg is 23, lives in the north of England, and his life is over, in his mind. I found this a reoccurrence in every country that I went. In that early 20 age, with so many of the guys - more than the girls, they were a bit more, 'Ah, things are just beginning to happen.' The guys, it was finished. The best parts of their life were done. The tragedy of that for me, just seeing that over and over again, got to me so much that I wrote Pretty Good Year. You don't really know what my role is. Am I Lucy, or am I that eight bars of grunge that comes out near the end where I express, and then nothing, everything else is Greg's story? I found that kind of really fun. The emotion is coming from somebody else's story. And yet it touched me so that I could sing it." "...in New Mexico, where I went to write, and record, this album, was that at one point I was spraying Pledge polish in a cupboard and I inhaled it and I got a lung infection which meant I couldn't speak, or sing, for three weeks. And I really thought my voice was damaged forever and had to do voice lessons on the phone, with this voice teacher to try and get the natural corisone back on the cords. I was thinking 'what if I never sing again?' Then I'd say 'if I can't sing what's the point in being alive, is this person worth anything at all?' And there were moments where the only answer to that question was 'no'. Then i'd give in to the self-pity that comes out in the song PGY, and in the lyric 'They say you were something in those formative years'. [Tori Amos, Hot Press, 02/32/94] "mountain biking became a major event in my life for a week, the mud was so thick on the tires we got there just in time to feel the mountain thaw, the sound when these two merged was something like 'thclulpleekooh' i said on an intake of breath with no lips moving and no throat usage, i like this word and i liked the idea of the eternal footman saying 'asta' on a mountain bike" [Tori Amos, Under The Pink Songbook] |
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| Tori Amos – Playboy Mommy Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"Playboy Mommy dealt with my feelings of rejection - 'wasn't I enough to be your mother, didn't you want me? Well, don't come, then. Go choose some little right-wing Christian for your mother.' It's a human response." ""I was pregnant," she softly states. "I got pregnant on tour, it was a surprise, but I was deeply thrilled about it. I was almost three months pregnant... Christmas '96... and I miscarried. And it was very difficult. The sorrow was just really deep. I know some people who've gone through it and they move on quickly. Everybody responds differently to a loss. I got quite attached to the spirit of this being....It was a girl. That's why on Playboy Mommy, I sing, 'Don't judge me so harsh, little girl.' I had so many responses to it before I could get to the place where I am now. You see people hit their kids in stores and you just go, What force of judgment gives these people these little lives? I have a lot of questions right now. I know it's a free-will planet. Things happen. But you know that saying, Bad things don't happen to good people? That's a painful lie, and it hits you on such a core-level. I know now that I have an appreciation for the miracle of life that I didn't have, but I don't believe in the saying that it all happens for the best... it's just not appropriate." "This woman in Playboy Mommy, she'll swallow. She'll swallow a billion seeds to protect this little girl." |
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| Tori Amos – Pandora's Aquarium Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"You know when you've cried and cried, and you really can't cry anymore, so you're very quiet? I started hearing the water, and "Pandora" - the last song on the record - came to me. She was sort of warning me that there are so many feelings under the rocks that I needed to turn into. She told me, 'You need to dive into this one, Tori, because your healing is in there. Once you go, it's a whole new journey, but you've got to metaphorically leave this little dock and come with me to find out what's really in this ocean of feelings.' So i did. And that's where I met these songs." |
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| Tori Amos – Ode To The Banana King Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"Pretty Good Year is really part two of Ode to the Banana King. Ode to the Banana King is part one - as you see, Lucy reoccurs. That's part two, Pretty Good Year. So I'll probably write part three." [Tori; Beat Magazine, July 14, 1994] |
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| Tori Amos – Not The Red Baron Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"Then of course in the record we move into a whole other moment. Not the Red Baron is the moment of compassion for all the men on the record. It's where I could see their planes crashing, I could see that they have a side too. And if their planes would crash I stared to gain compassion for their side of it." [B Side, 05/96] |
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| Tori Amos – Northern Lad Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"My heart goes out to where that song comes from. It's very much about thinking you were loved for who you were, and realizing you weren't and realizing maybe you don't love yourself. The line, 'I guess you go too far/when pianos try to be guitars' is just about never being enough. I felt that with my instrument sometimes, wanting to be Jimmy Page. You can only be you. A lot of times it's never enough for people." |
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| Tori Amos – Mr. Zebra Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"In Mr. Zebra we pick up Ratatouille Strychnine, who we love because she's our little double agent who can poison people and get us out of trouble when they're hurting us! But she's tired, she's tired of the poisoning." [B Side, 05/96] "Lyrics to me, when they become references so that Mr Zebra can be who you want it to be, although you know that there are certain clear words - Strychnine, sometimes she's a friend of mine. And you get a sense of the characters, of who they are. And I'm sure the person, women that you know that are Ratitouille Strychnine, and we can kinda love those women, but you have faces that are different from the faces that I see when I sing about um, that cute little babe that's poisoning the muffins in the kitchen. But we love her, too. And that was important in this record. This is really the hidden sides of the feminine, the ones that get a little wicked, and the reasons that they're wicked. That's what is being said also in the story, the reasons, 'cause they haven't been recognized, that they kinda have to mutiny for me to listen to them so that we can get to the heart, and that's really the core of the record." |
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| Tori Amos – Merman Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"It's inspired by a man with integrity, such deep integrity that I married him. It's about having someone heal your whole life. I'm talking about the times when lines have been crossed by men. Men can be dangerous, like in the song Datura about how sometimes they can bring you gold and sometimes they can be the bearer of poison. The plant Datura is a hallucinogen and it's like men. If you get the right amount you'll walk into the garden and become a woman, but if too much seeps in in the wrong way and at the wrong time -- it'll kill you. So yeah, Merman is that. When I was touring last year and Matthew Shepard got murdered I was dedicating it to him. A lot of guys were asking me to sing it for him and it just kinda took a life on of its own." [Tori; Attitude Magazine (UK), Nov99] |
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| Tori Amos – Marianne Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"Marianne Curtis is a girl I went to school with in junior high. She was the kind of person everyone adored, she was just magical. I had written a song about her years ago which I used to play in the bars sometimes. It never went any further than being performed, I didn't record it. Since then I have always wanted to have Marianne in a song. She died from a drug overdose when she was 15. It is not known, but I don't believe it was suicide. I think she took the wrong things together. She is very special to me, and comes to visit in my songs sometimes." |
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| Tori Amos – Lust Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"Lust has a really strange effect on the piano and in the voice, so it feels like she's in a shape she can't get out of, but it's a shape that's able to bleed in to itself. Creating sounds like that--it's pretty intangible to try and talk about it." |
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| Tori Amos – Little Amsterdam Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"Go further into the place of the South, the place of the hidden, with Little Amsterdam, which is all metaphorical, about wanting to kill people, being angry at people that you feel have done something... the whole domination thing, the whole hierarchy, patriarchy... and her way to fight back and they are blaming her but it wasn't her bullet but she still believes it would have been fine if..." She makes a soft gunshot noise. "They lost him". [B Side, 05/96] |
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| Tori Amos – Liquid Diamonds Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"I don't know of anybody who's gonna be fulfilled if they get hit by a bus. You have to surrender to that eternal need to be fulfilled. That's very much what Liquid Diamonds was for me." |
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| Tori Amos – Juarez Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"I read an article about several hundred women in Juárez, Mexico, who had been taken out to the desert and brutally raped and murdered. When they didn't come home, their brothers would go and look for them, and many times they'd find nothing. Sometimes they'd find a hair barrette or a sock or something they knew was their sister's. The authorities haven't really done anything about it...they get into this serial-killer theory. I mean, how much serial can one man indulge in? So as the song started to develop, I really began taking the voice of the desert, singing in that perspective." [Tori Amos; A.P. Magazine, Oct99] |
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| Tori Amos – Jackie's Strength Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"Inspired by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. "I saw Jackie as a bride - and I used to think I would never be a bride. I started to look to Jackie and how that woman held the country together after she watched her husband get cut down right in front of her." "This wonderful boy had asked me to marry him, and of course I said yes, but I was shocked. You know, there was a part of me that had sworn that would never happen. You fantasize about what it would be like on that day, and then you fantasize about never having that day. Then you're a vigilante and you will never have it. The, all of a sudden, there it is, and you're wondering, 'are we going to make it? half of all marriages end in divorce. is that us?' That was all going on as I got lost on my wedding day." |
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| Tori Amos – Icicle Lyrics | 22 years ago |
| "In Icicle I try to win back the innocence of my childhood. That girl that masturbates to survive, the vulnerable, innocent flower, has always done good things for us. She's had to fence off certain parts of herself to get ahead. Now it's time to light the candle and melt those parts. Who dares to open him- or herself can also forgive themselves for not having stood up for themselves enough." | |
| Tori Amos – Hotel Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"I think as you're getting married, all the loves, even 10-minute loves are popping up. Hotel was really like feeling like an agent - a spy - in that he was the greatest guy at one time and they were giving me time behind enemy lines. Even though she knows they can't be lovers because it's a whole other life, she just can't let him go." |
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| Tori Amos – Hey Jupiter Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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Hey Jupiter is about the pain of separation that Amos says is very much about a real man. "I was at my lowest. I was at a hotel in Phoenix, and I realized that for once there wasn't a man I could turn to." "well, i was really in a bind because, um, i was doing some bad things. i was in a love triangle with these, uhh.., i don't know if they were real men now...i'm not...i'm confused about the whole thing! let's see , i was lying in bed...um, strange things happened to you on tour. like strange englishman start sitting at the end of your bed, apparitions of dead guys . and they start singing songs to you. and this guy was definitely dead, and he was definitely singing to me. um, so i'm confused about the copyright laws. i'm not sure if i need to call his ex-wife and give him part of the song or not. but, why should i do that! she's rich...she's not nice. and so, anyway, i kept the copyright, the guys forgot who i was, and the song's mine." [answer to question of the circumstances surrounding the writing of Hey Jupiter, VH1 Storytellers] "When we hit Muhammad you realize we've just taken a bend in the road. The first half of the record is about her descent in to the horror; she's got to find another way of looking at herself. On Hey Jupiter, she knows the way she has looked at relationships with men and put them on a pedestal is over. There's a sense of incredible loss because I knew that I would never be able to see the same way again. It's freeing, and [yet] there's a sense of grieving with that." |
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| Tori Amos – Glory Of The 80's Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"Mainly the honesty of the decadence of that decade. There's the line /and then, just when it all seemed clear you go and disappear/. I knew a lot of great people in the eighties but at the time I didn't always understand them. Now, there's such a void in the art world, people with vision have physically passed on. It's also a stab at political correctness - you can't say this, you can't say that; now everybody has to be called a Spanish American, an African American and I mean, [getting worked up] Oh bloody, fucking hell!!! I understand the abuses that have happened and I absolutely think recompense should be paid, but you don't do it just on a surface level. Everybody thinks that the debt has been paid to the 'quote unquote' Indians who had their land taken away from them because we call them Native Americans. It's hard when everything is so eggshell, eggshell, eggshell. I do miss the eighties. It was great, knowing that friends were on one hand dialing a charity and on the other hand doing a line of blow -- but not lying about it, being honest. None of us are this light and dark fantasy. What's dark to you may be light to me and vice versa." |
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| Tori Amos – Father Lucifer Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"So, um, when I came home I guess it was at Thanksgiving because I remember a bird and forks going down at the table, when my father said to me, 'Tori Ellen, I can't believe you wrote this song about me.' And I said, 'I write everything about you, what are you surprised about?' And he said, 'No, but I'm really hurt about this one.' And I said, 'Well which one is it?" And he said, "well, you called me Satan." And I said, "No! I was taking drugs with a South American shaman and I really did visit the Devil and I had a journey." And he went, 'Oh, Praise Jesus!'" [VH1 Storytellers] "Father Lucifer is really about going to have a cup of tea with Lucifer, which I had to do. Now, when I say Lucifer, I'm talking about the feelings that we hide from ourselves [not something that's twisted and evil, like during the Inquisition when they used Christianity to torture people. That's Satanism.] I had to go in this record when I was trying to find parts of myself that I had not let scream and dance and have a tear. I went to go visit Lucifer to get my talisman, which means my little magic key that took me to the places that I hadn't let myself go. That's really about having a little tango, a little dance, with Lucifer. The idea that Dark is not a scary thing if you go in there understanding there is a purity in Darkness. There's also a lot of distortion in Darkness. It's a choice where you want to go, and I wanted to get to the truth, not to the drama and to keeping me from the truth." |
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| Tori Amos – Cloud On My Tongue Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"..there's a wonderful acceptance in Cloud On My Tongue, an acceptance of being in circles and circles again. That's its whirlpool vat. It all leads to that. --I travel a lot around the world, and I went to all sorts of places, and I ran in to different people. Borneo had something that I didn't have. It was a very free, hot, jungly place, and the people that, or a person that came from there, had something that I didn't have that I desperately wanted, which was this no rigidity. When I say Leave the wood outside, what, all the girls here are freezing cold, leave me with your Borneo...Or don't leave me with your Borneo, because I've had it before, and that's why I need the wood, because it just -- you can go now, you're already in there, whether it's pregnant or whether it's just infused. You don't even have to hang around and watch me disintegrate, because you've already done your job. You've already accomplished what you wanted, which was another scalp on your belt, and you did it. That's not one of my more favorite men songs." [Tori Amos, The Baltimore Sun, 1994] |
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| Tori Amos – China Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"The fifths in the bass represent the beginning of an ancient ceremony. This ceremony took me to China, took me to the kitchen table where most wars get nurtured. I've always felt China and secrets are good friends. This song was the first written on Little Earthquakes." |
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| Tori Amos – Blood Roses Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"You know, when she says, I think you're a queer, well, I think you're a queer and I've shaved every place where you've been, boy, God knows I know I've thrown away those graces... it's very clear that the war has begun. You've just walked into the record and the war has begun. The blades are out. And she's become a piece of meat in her mind, she's willing to cut out her voice, she's willing to cut out the flute from the throat of the loon, at least when you cry now he can't even hear you. It doesn't matter who the people are, you know, and if you resonate with letting yourself go that far to be needed or to keep something going, well, do you need another pound of flesh? What do you need, what more do you want? And that's the point when I say, 'he likes killing you after you're dead.' So from the beginning of the record on it's really obvious that you're walking into not what is going on on top of the table, the conversation with the rose at the dinner of the couple, but what's really going on in the couple. Sometimes the man changes, but it's her story. It's her, who she pulls in to work this out with, and the men that defecate, the men who can't be enough, the men who aren't ready to embrace themselves so no matter how much you like them you can't go there because ... ...they're not yet whole.." "'Let go and love,' fuck that shit! My heart is scarred. I have a tear running down the middle of it and I'm not ready to say, 'Let go and love.'" "So many girls will come to me with tears in their eyes and scratches all over their wrists from self-mutilation, and I'll say, 'I actually do understand the obsession to be difficult.' I mean, I was in absolute horror that I allowed myself to be raped. Blood Roses is the on-the-knees version of that, the ripped-open veins and the blood dripping, going 'Why is it my fault now?'" |
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| Tori Amos – Bells For Her Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"...the main thing about Bells for Her is that there is no resolve, and that's what that whole song was saying. Can't stop what's coming, can't stop what is on its way. All I can do is respond truthfully, and the concept that we'll always be friends, or we can always work it out, I would have bet you that I could have worked anything out with this person. I would have bet my hand I could have worked anything out. I'd be missing a hand right now. It'd be the one-armed Tori tour. I couldn't have foreseen this. And I think, how many people, in marriages or families, and they're going, 'Wait a minute. I'm a rational being. This is a rational being, so we think.' Of course, I'm a little -- I'm partial, but I would have thought, yes, we could work it out. And when it got to in the end 'blankettes,' and the spelling changed, and when I was writing it down, I did it 'blankettes' as in -- well, what it means to me is just blank women, chicks. Yet they were making mudpies and creating and it's void now. And if you talk to people that know her, they think she's a together, great babe. And if you talk to people that know me, I'm a together, great babe. And yet we just couldn't do it. So there is a triangle on this record of the betrayal of women. It's not just that relationship. It's many other things in the other tunes. But Bells is the spirit speaking, not the ego speaking, but the part of me that still loves a friend that for whatever reason you can't make a resolve. You just can't do it. The big lesson in this whole year has been that there isn't a resolve for many things. Life isn't about, well, if I just get to this mountain peak, it's over. There are like 5,000 peaks in the distance." [Tori Amos, The Baltimore Sun, '94] |
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| Tori Amos – Sugar Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"So, I had to get this song together in about 2 hours. And this boy really pissed me off, because I had a crush on him, right...and he'd been making tea for me for nine months. And so, the whole thing is...he would sit there and ask me... Now if you're making tea for a girl, right, for 9 months don't you think, guys. I mean help me out here. Your noodle, it can hold a lot of information, right? But don't you think, you can remember how many sugars a girl takes in her tea after 9 months!" [Tori Amos, US Hey Jupiter single, intro to song] |
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| Tori Amos – Suede Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"There's this moment in 'Suede' where [the narrator's] being called 'evil' by this other person because of whatever she's done to them in their minds. But there's this side of obsession and passion where one party thinks the other party is doing something to them--and sometimes people aren't always looking at their part in something. In 'Suede,' she knows what she's up to, she knows what she's been doing." [Tori Amos; A.P. Magazine, Oct99] |
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| Tori Amos – Spark Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"Spark is about when I miscarried, in 1996. I was three months pregnant and very excited. All of a sudden I woke up one morning and started to feel bad. The songs started coming soon after. I was really angry at God. Going into a shopping mall and seeing some woman knock the head off her child, I'm going - 'So this is fair?' I don't know where the spirit went, whether she picked another mummy, like, "OK, choose her, then! Hope you're tone deaf!" Q: One last question. Who is the ice cream assassin? Tori: "Who do you think that is? Q: I have no idea Tori: "Well, people have been praying to him for a very long time and more wars have been fought in his name. The big guy. Think about it." |
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| Tori Amos – Talula Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"And it keeps moving into the dance of Talula, and her desperately trying to dance, desperately trying to figure out the whole idea of loss: it must be worth loosing if it's worth something. So if I feel like I am loosing something, at lease I valued something enough to loose it in the first place... it's going back into that train of thought. Talula is very much a riddle. The loss of Eric in my life was... it felt like half of me walked out the door. And Talula came as a nursery rhyme, my little dance that I would do when things were so sad. Because I started thinking 'but God, I have these feelings, which means...' we shared so many moments that I value, I really valued that, so what a gift that I can feel this loss, that I am not so numb, that I haven't cut myself off so much, and once I could feel the loss then I started to feel free. I want to dance and go 'yeah, I want to be with Talula. I want to be able to dance through the people that come in and go out of your life. I want to learn how to dance with the gifts when they come and the gifts when they need to take a different route." [B Side, 05/96] |
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| Tori Amos – The Waitress Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"The Waitress is how I can't control my violence, and in this one situation, we're both equals, we're both waitresses in this song. I don't go into the details of why. Why isn't the issue. The issue is that I thought I was a peacemaker, and this violence has totally taken control of every belief system that I have. It's a very scary thing, especially after you talk about anti-violence." [Tori Amos, The Baltimore Sun, '94] "Condiments are my favorite thing sometimes when I was lonely I'd line up all the condiments and pound them on the table and let them applaud me adding confidence to my dishes before they got cooked." [Tori Amos, Under The Pink Songbook] |
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| Tori Amos – Yes, Anastasia Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"It's a journey. Anastasia Romanov... it's not like I've read loads of books on her. I was aware of the family and that's about it. So I'm in Virginia, and I had crabs...I keep saying that! I had crab sickness, I had eaten bad crabs in Maryland! But I couldn't cancel the show. I was at soundcheck, and needless to say, when you are very, very ill, it is easier to communicate with your source... you are fragile and vulnerable. Well, her presence came. Now I have only heard of her in history, I've got no point to make. She comes and goes 'you've got to write my tune.' I 'go ohhh, now's not really a good time.' She says 'no, you've got to understand something from this, there's something here that you've got to come to terms with.' And that night came," as she softly sings the line "'We'll see how brave you are,' and that was really about the whole record. That came just about before everything. And whenever I sing that chorus, 'we'll see how brave you are,' it means so many different things to me. It's part of my self, my spirit self saying to the rest of myself, 'if you really want a challenge, just deal with yourself. The funny thing is that Anna Anderson, who claimed to be Anastasia, died very close to where I was playing, an hour or so from there in the 80s. The feeling I got that Anna Anderson was Anastasia Romanov. She always tried to prove it and a lot of people believed her and some people didn't want to believe her, because of what that would have meant. And again, it's really working through being a victim. 'Counting the tears from ten thousand men, and gathered them all, but my feel are slipping.' You can't blame the men anymore; there's always you. It comes back to us; it comes back to me." [Tori Amos, B Side, 04/94] "I hope I told your story correctly my friend so many codes it was hard for me to decipher but I believe Anastasia's story is everyone's in a way she tried to tell me that and I blew her off" [Tori Amos, Under The Pink Songbook] |
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| Tori Amos – Raspberry Swirl Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"The animus in me is raspberry swirl, I'm in love with my women friends, but I just don't eat pussy. But I'm in love with them. If I had a different sensibility, then you know I think I could, you know, really fulfill someone down there, where a lot of men in their lives don't. And eating pussy is a metaphor, too - it's about crawling in there, being with their juices, really being with them." |
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| Tori Amos – Horses Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"The record begins with the horses from Winter coming back to take me on this journey and we ride and go find the demons..." "It's as if the horses have come to take us back, to descend, to find the dark side. By dark I mean what's hidden, not necessarily satanic." [Tori Amos, Billboard, 1/13/96] |
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| Tori Amos – Datura Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"I was in a mood that day. . . . We were supposed to be cutting something else, and it wasn't coming together. Matt [Matt Chamberlain] was running around, but the band hadn't shown up yet -- meaning Caton [Steve Caton] and Jon [Jon Evans] hadn't come. And I just had this thing about my garden. I got a list from my gardener about everything that was in my garden that was still alive." "...I'm talking about the times when lines have been crossed by men. Men can be dangerous, like in the song Datura about how sometimes they can bring you gold and sometimes they can be the bearer of poison. The plant Datura is a hallucinogen and it's like men. If you get the right amount you'll walk into the garden and become a woman, but if too much seeps in in the wrong way and at the wrong time - it'll kill you." "'Datura' is this plant that if you put too many leaves in to steep--even though it does have altered-state potential in a big way, like bella donna--if you don't steep it correctly, I hope you like to fly . . ." [Tori; Tower Records' Pulse Magazine, Nov99] |
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| Tori Amos – Cruel Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"When you start talking to people who have that kind of loss, somebody piping up, going 'Well, the angels were there for us during this time.' Well, that's beautiful. But people have to understand that they're not there for everybody all the time. They get lost on the way. That's why in "Cruel", when I say, 'I don't know why' I really don't know why the angels aren't there for everybody, but they're not." |
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| Tori Amos – Concertina Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"Do you ever feel like you walk in a room, and you don't know why, but you're just so uncomfortable you're crawling out of your skin, even though nobody's touched you, physically? That's in 'Concertina,' when you feel like you haven't excavated enough of your different personalities that when one pops up, you're not sure where it came from, and you try to hack it out of yourself. It shocks you that you could have this kind of fault, or that other people could bring it out in you." [Tori Amos; A.P. Magazine, Oct99] |
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| Tori Amos – Caught A Lite Sneeze Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"Caught A Lite Sneeze is about wanting to do anything to keep a relationship going, knowing that it's over, knowing that it's slipping through the hands." "Honey, it means no fat, no butter. Lite" "He was a lite sneeze, and not the flu. Guys would like to think they're the flu, but sometimes they're just a 'h'achoo'" |
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| Tori Amos – Baker Baker Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"Baker Baker is kind of tragic in a way, because -- I've had to look at how I treated men, and on this record, I think with Baker Baker, to deal with a man that truly loved me, but that I wasn't emotionally available for. You know how women always say men aren't emotionally available. Well, a lot of women aren't emotionally available. It's like, if you're vulnerable, we say, 'Look, we need you to be sensitive.' So you become sensitive, and yet we go, 'You've got no f***in' backbone,' and we kick you in the face and run off with a ski trainer." [Tori Amos, The Baltimore Sun, '94] |
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| Tori Amos – Black-Dove (January) Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"When I sleep I often have nightmares. I can already hear your readers saying: 'I knew that. The way your songs sound you must really have horrible nightmares.' Just like the one I'm describing in the song Black-Dove on my last album From the Choirgirl Hotel. I see a black dove. I see its face clearly. The dove is transparent, like it is made of ice. I can see my hand through it. An auger goes through it and it is bleeding water. To get the same atmosphere musically I had to describe a scene of the movie Fargo to my musicians. A car is coming towards the camera from a long distance, very slowly. You know it will arrive in a moment. But you hope that this will never happen. My nightmares are so bad, that I mostly reject it when my friends want to take me to a cinema to watch a horror movie. Then I say: 'No, thank you. I will dream in a few hours.' Sometimes I feel like Hermann Hess' Steppenwolf... The nightmares agonized me since my childhood. I am the daughter of a Methodist preacher and as a child I was sexually abused by a friend of the family. I think that the nightmares are telling me things about me I need to know. And I try to understand what they mean. Maybe so I can get to know something more about my soul." [Die Zeit (German newspaper), November 11, 1999] |
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| Tori Amos – Bliss Lyrics | 22 years ago |
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"Sometimes, when you express thought to people, you leave it open for somebody to tromp in there and start tearing it down. I sing, 'Father I killed my monkey,' to lead off the song, which explains that sometimes you even destroy your own so they can't excavate it. When I was growing up, I started becoming very secretive about my thoughts and the sensory world I would go to, because there's a lot of mind control that goes on constantly, people wanting access: 'What are you thinking?' So sometimes I'd have my own defense going, which would be to look them straight in the eye and make them think I've killed my imagination. But it's like, I'll take control." [Tori Amos; A.P. Magazine, Oct99] |
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