Tori Amos Song Quotes

Hair is gray and the firers are burning. So many dreams on the shelf. You say I wanted you to be proud of me. I always wanted that myself.

A guitarist or a drummer can get a cold and still play; I get a cold and sound like a wet mitten trying to sing you a love song. Charming.

You want listeners to smell the lavender, to feel the point of those knitting needles in a handbag of the granny who happens to harbor a loyalty to Madame Defarge. You want the listener to know the wood's burning in the stove when they walk into the song with me. Music is about all of your senses, not just hearing.

For years I've gathered various books, sources. When I was little it might have been Tolkien, and so I would have just four books around me. I couldn't afford many books at the time, so I'd have what I had. Maybe I'd tear out ten or twenty pictures from magazines because I couldn't afford art books. I would check out library books and try to keep them as long as I could, but I couldn't jot my notes in them. For any particular song, I can't tell you the books that were on the floor, the photographs on the floor. I don't let anybody keep a record of that. Those are the secret ingredients.

Do you know who we are Mum?” And at that moment I just look into her blue planets for eyes, and she says, “We are Daughters of Song, Mama.” And at that I jump up with new life, pick her up, and say, “Now let's go play”_____

As a songwriter, I'm gathering clues and possibilities all the time, whether I see a piano that day or not. I've tried to explain to people how I collect these dispatches, because I think anybody can do what I'm talking about. Once I do plug in, I might get only one line and two bar phrases of the melody. I always have elements of songs around that may never ever get recorded. As far back as Little Earthquakes, I began to realize that I needed to have a library of notes, phrases, words, things that might prove useful at any given time. Within a few months' time I'll gather hundreds of those fragments. Half won't be used. And then the craft comes in, the part that is about painting a world. You want listeners to smell the lavender, to feel the point of those knitting needles in a handbag of the granny who happens to harbor a loyalty to Madame Defarge. You want the listener to know the wood's burning in the stove when they walk into the song with me. Music is about all of your senses, not just hearing.

The songs don't spring whole into existence; they are built.

I think of the structure of any particular song as a house. The bathroom is the bathroom, and you have to understand the shape of the bathroom and its needs. The kitchen's the kitchen. Sometimes you want the chorus to be the kitchen in a song. Sometimes you want the chorus to be the shower, very cleansing. Sometimes it's the bedroom. Or sometimes the chorus is that shower, but instead it's about being naked and soap and it's sexy—or it's not sexy at all, but an eradication of someone or something. It could even be akin to “I've gotta wash that God right outta my hair,” depending on what sticky archetypes have been prodding through the night. The point is, even in terms of the emotion expressed, the shape matters before the story does. Without the structure, there's nowhere for the story to live.

THERE IS ANOTHER WAY through and past the delusion of “barren.” People who are addicted to power can live on the same street or attend the same school as us or even play on the world stage. They can weaponize the thought of being creatively barren in order to debilitate the artist. They target artists specifically because they know that artists have the ability to reach the public in ways no one else can. They know this. And what they do not want is to be called out or held to account or revealed to be the manipulator they are and that they are a person aroused by the possibility of absolute power. That is a naked truth. And they do not want it exposed in pictures or songs or poems or articles or books or film or through dance. So when the propaganda spreads about “writer’s block” or “an artistically barren portion of time,” especially when it comes to women, this poisonous propaganda gets magnified. And then it can drown out reason and become a probable eventuality. Although it is merely a projection, unfortunately it can become an imposed self-fulfilling prophecy.