Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (28 page)

ANN:
Before she can gather perceptions onstage, Amos must create a framework. She does so through an unusual approach to compiling her set lists. Most pop musicians rely on repetition to please a crowd hungry for familiar hits, and to make their own night's work less complicated. Contrary to the myth of ecstatic release, an arena rock show now is much more likely to feel like a Broadway show, slickly plotted and perfectly rehearsed. In Amos's view, this common approach serves neither the artist nor the audience. Her fans, who of en follow her tours, would grow bored; worse yet, so would she. And the great resource of her voluminous songbook would grow musty with disuse.

Varying her selections each night over the years, Amos has slowly developed a way of creating a story through set construction. The songs she selects (aided by Chelsea Laird, who sits by her side with a large black pen each night, modifying the list) speak to one another, falling into an imagistic narrative reflecting the particular time and place of each performance.

Where am I … ?

“You're in Chicago, lady,” answers a voice in front of me in a coffee shop line, as Chels jumps back into line after answering her cell. It's nine a.m.

I try to find a corner table. Okay. Where am I? I close my eyes and start
scanning my memory banks, the memory banks that hold the lockboxes that hold the keys to the place called Chicago's memory banks. I've played here many times … First at a place called Shuba's in 1992. Yes, I remember. I can see that girl / woman / banshee playing for her life at the piano. Playing before the two Marys knew they had to marry within my Being for me to tap into the Feminine without my circuits being blown to bits. These two would have to integrate inside my Being for me to one day be able to play the hebe-jesus into the piano, shake those insurmountable mounds (don't I wish) above and below my navel line, have a sensual whisper with Husband before the buses leave, and be feeding a slightly-later-than-midnight bottle to my two-year-old.

“Hey, they didn't have your usual, so I got you this instead,” Chels says with a devilish grin.

“I'm desperate. I'm sure it's heaven.”

Chelsea's weapon is open and she's ready to type.

This is our ritual. Every day.

Okay so
where am I?
This is the core question we must weave into our net before we cast it out into the information pool. Before the set list can be written, there are things I want to know.

“So, Chels, let's get a rundown of what's on at any kind of museum in or around the city—a rundown on any other event or events occurring here this month, from the mundane to the strange. Let's get a synopsis of the week from the
Tribune
online, the last twenty-four hours from the BBC (since we have the previous twenty-four from the day before and so on and so forth …) and a National Read in the last twenty-four. The past and the present are the threads that together will give us the clues to what our Chicago tapestry should be.”

With a trustee Americano at her side, Chels will ride like Brunhilde as Valkyrie on her laptop to Valhalla in Asgard and back to Chicago by sound check.

Chels reminds me that we already have a history of this area precon-tact (pre-European contact).

“So let's pull that up, and a bullet-point history of Chicago.”

“Do you want an update from the Smoking Gun?”

“Oh, yeah, the more the merrier. We've got two shows here, right?”

“Yep, today and tomorrow. Are we focusing only on today's set list?” (I see that hopeful Chelsea we-are-so-up-against-it-girl-Friday look in her eyes …)

“Both. They go in tandem.”

“Thought so.” And off she goes.

Every night the set list is based on the things that cross our path, and we work with a palette. You're given what you're given. Cities have different essences, colors, smells. Letters come across to us that we read or don't read. The time of year matters; maybe we're near a holiday like Easter, and that means certain songs are appropriate. What's on the news figures in. Sometimes what happens is sad, you know—Tash fell down and scraped her knee and called for Mommy and I didn't know what to say. And she said, “Make it go away” and I couldn't, and I glanced at the television and was reminded that there's a war going on. Narratives arise in moments like that. We consider using everything, and some things we discard.

There are also musical considerations, of course. I know how the key of each song connects with the next; I chart out the rhythms in my mind. We also have to keep stations—there's the Wurlitzer station and the piano station, and the Rhodes, and I have to balance the time at each one. I also need to provide time for Matt and Jon to adjust to each song, you know, reach for a tambourine or quickly tune down. It has to move—I do not like lag. The last thing I want is for the show to turn into, you know, “The Best of Ricki Lake and Tori” with the audience between songs.

That approach has no flow. I want each performance to be like a sonic film.

Some consistency is important from show to show, because people just want to hear certain songs, but it's also crucial that we don't seem as if we're repeating ourselves out of thoughtlessness. Many artists work toward one show; they do their homework and spend weeks on their set, like a seminar. But I have a big catalog and don't see the value in doing the same thing every night. I mean, what is this? Like, our seventieth show? Or eightieth, since November. Each night I have to be somewhat different. What worked six weeks ago in Radio City won't necessarily work for Santa Barbara, which won't necessarily work two shows later in Albuquerque. We're different people now, here in the moment, at every show.

The only thing that started being consistent was that we would have the metaphorical fire at the beginning every night. The Apache woman calls all of us to ceremony with “wampum prayer.” That's not Scarlet singing. They're different women. She's calling me and the musicians and everybody to the fire. We're burning the sage; it's very much a place for us to kind of shed, I think. Shed the outer world, our habits, the rational. And to walk into the world of metaphor and symbol and story.

There are certain nights when Tori lets the audience know what's behind the construction of the set list. On the
Scarlet
tour, she dedicated one set to Lori Piestewa, the first woman to die in combat in the Iraq conflict, who was a member of the Hopi tribe. Tori mentioned that during the show. The show was in Boise, Idaho. Other times the theme is not obvious at all. It can start with one line extrapolated from one song that on this night relates to a certain subject. On a different night when there's a different thread running through the set list, that same line could have a totally different meaning.

The biggest challenge is that she has such an arsenal of songs, and I don't know what she's going to play on any given night. I have to keep it fresh no matter what she chooses. With most artists, it's the same set over and over. You create your theatrical piece and it goes from beginning to end. But with Tori—the Austin show on the
Scarlet
tour is a perfect example. The entire first half of the show, she played all amber and red songs. One of my friends who was there was poking me—he's like, “Don't you ever use blue? Don't you ever use green?” “Yeah,” I said, “that's what I use for all the songs that are in the pool that we're not playing tonight!”

Sometimes I play a song a lot and I just need a break from it. Especially when we've been on a long tour, certain ones pop up a lot. Sure, we'll do the better-known songs, but it might also be a B-side that recurs. “Take to the Sky” was very much a part of the
Scarlet
tour. Especially with that nod to Carole King, when I break from the original song and put in a bit of “I Feel the Earth Move.” But for that tour, I would change it to, “I feel my earth move under my feet” instead of
the
earth. I was going back to one of the major themes of the album, that relationship to the land, getting people to realize that this is something they must claim. I wanted to communicate the idea that your relationship to your nation, and to the earth, is very personal. When we toured in the summer, I wanted to be outside as much as I could be. I wanted to get people back to the land, to their relationship with the land, with music that's working with the land. And Carole King's song, just like the outdoor settings, would also take people back to an innocent sensuality—kissing on the lawn on summer nights. I'd been there.

We were also doing “Sweet Dreams” a lot, because I wrote that during the first Gulf War, when we were in very similar circumstances. I wrote
it in 1990 about another George Bush and another Middle Eastern war, and more than a decade later people were requesting it again. It became relevant, a commentary of the time.

I was performing at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., of all places, when the Afghan war was announced. I remember that the whole city was in a vise, in the iron grip of a choice that was bringing up all kinds of emotions in people. The backstage was filled with union members— they had pulled Andy Solomon aside and asked him if I would play “Raining Blood” (my cover of a Slayer song) that night because a few of them had boys that were heading out and they didn't know if they would see them again. A lot of them felt as if this one was the beginning of the end of days, whatever that means to people. I was about ready to take the stage in a couple hours, a few blocks from the White House, having to hold a space for a crowd with mixed emotions. Anger. Grieving. Retribution. Reticence. All these being the components of the evening, to name a few. I've played many shows, and this one was one for which I had to remember my training from Poppa. How to make the music like a stream of clear water for people to come drink. Then have their thirst eased by that drink of music and harmony and words in a discordant world on a discordant day, whatever their political beliefs were. I did play “Raining Blood” that night for all the fathers and mothers who were going to have to let their flesh and blood go. To have their flesh and blood exposed.

After the
Strange Little Girls
tour in 2001 and the Afghanistan War, after having the medicine woman come backstage, she spoke to me about how as Americans we have a true mother. That mother is “she who we call America.” This medicine woman said to me, an hour before showtime, “Do you feel that the soul of our land is in the right hands?” I was saddened and quiet. Then she said to me, “Would you turn over your physical mother to those who are in control of she who we call America?” I said,
“Well, of course not.” She looked at me with piercing eyes, despite her humble appearance. “Then how can you turn over your spiritual mother so that they have made Miss America Misrepresented so that she has been pimped out for the gain of those who can gain from her?” She changed the tone of her voice. Without moving she rose up like a pillar and seemed to speak for all the ancestors from ages past. “We, the caretakers of she who you call America, are giving you a key to the healing of this land. A generation must rise. That generation can be from two to one hundred and two. But this generation of which I speak must form a bond. They have an opportunity to have an intimate relationship with the soul of this land. The European Americans, the African Americans, the Latin Americans, the Asian Americans, and the Middle Eastern Americans must now become caretakers of their Spiritual Mother, or they will be takers of their Spiritual Mother. Caretakers or Takers—you're either one or the other. If the masses keep taking and not caretaking, then your grandchildren will have very little to nurture them. The songs will be coming to you and others who have heard the beating of our drums—you will need to listen. You must find your own relationship with your true Spiritual Mother. Your loyalty should not be to anyone who claims power over the land at any given time, whose intentions can change on a whim, depending if they've been seduced by power and what it brings. You must see the signs, even in yourself, dear one.”