Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (44 page)

ANN:
Archetypes survive because they are both consistent and adaptable. The goddesses who continue to inspire us, even those who have survived the civilizations from which they arose, are no strangers to change: their legends, their outward appearance, even their names, have evolved to serve the needs of whatever communities call upon them. Corn Mother speaks of respect for the land that bears us; Saraswati honors the flow of creativity; Sekhmet stands for the fierce inevitability of fate. In other circumstances these deities had other names: Ceres, Minerva, Kali. But the qualities of the soul each represents remain consistent.

In Asia, one goddess thrives whose spirit is adaptability itself, as it manifests in the act of extending kindness to others. However you spell her name, Quan Yin, the beloved avatar of compassion, remains the spirit of refuge, the comforter of sorrows whose name means “the one who contemplates the supplicating sound of the world.” Quan Yin is called Kannon in Japan, the Green Tara in Tibet, QuanAm in Vietnam, and Kanin in Bali. She manifests as a male as well: as Avalokitesvara, the keeper of the mystical Lotus, and as Guan Yin, the guardian of the sea. She has been pictured as a thousand-limbed, thousand-eyed dancer and a white-robed queen who rides a celestial dragon upon the streams of life. Consistency in multiplicity is Quan Yin's essence, for compassion must manifest uniquely to suit whoever seeks it, though the gift of peace it brings is ultimately the same.

As above, so below: it is the human mission to become an eye within the storm, to remain grounded while responding to life's sometimes baffling variety. Artists, who cultivate openness in service of a vision that encompasses the world, must become particularly adept at this balancing act. Yet the mundane world of material survival—not to mention the ego—can sometimes mire an artist in a rut. The tempo of success can change again overtime; it takes wisdom to move along with it.

At midlife, Tori Amos understands that she cannot rule life's tidal shifts, only navigate them. She is a rider of the waves, her sense of the future defined by an undiminished faith in music's power. Like Quan Yin, she learns from listening, and finds her power in leading those who listen to her back to the answers within themselves.

One deep purpose of music is to present a holistic version of what has been broken. There is a tradition of this that goes back thousands of years. Writers and artists have gone deep, deep inside; some have been killed because of this work, because it is perceived by many as a threatening act. There has been a deep belief that the masses are controlled because they have been separated from themselves at the core. They have been separated from the voice in their own soul. This is how you control another person, and this control gets perpetuated by those who don't even know they're passing this behavior on to their children. And at some point in my life, I really believed this was a war artists waged, a battle between people separated from their wholeness and those who saw that the only way forward was to eliminate the curse, the hierarchy, and redefine power.

I've felt music's integrating effect throughout my own life. Music more than anything else is what keeps me on the planet. I don't know if in another life I would be given music. So I'm going to create with it as much as I can. It is the only universal language that's tangible. Love is a universal language, but that's a much more abstract concept than being able to communicate with anyone in the world because the two of you can dance to a rhythm that we all innately understand without having to say a word. Music is more than a privilege; without it, I really don't know how I would cope. It's one reason I haven't gone off the rails.

As I've grown older, I have realized what a debt I owe to creativity. I
can't say it enough: this force is not something that I own, or generate by myself, and as I've learned to embrace its profundity, I have been able to let it guide me into new phases.

The Native American way of thinking says you have to move on the medicine wheel. Too many people, especially women, are trying to stay in a place that they can't sustain physically and emotionally and spiritually. Thinking in terms of the Four Directions—the south, realm of innocence; the west, seat of power; the north, territory of hard-earned experience, and the east, frontier of enlightenment—you cannot remain within a direction that has blown you out. The west has said, “That's all now.” And you have to move to the north. You're approaching middle age.

I heard this message from certain wise people whom I met when I was thirty-five. They would say, “You have to see that middle age means midlife.” I was saying, “No, no, no, I've only had a few records out,” but these guides were being realistic. If I make it to seventy, which is a few years shy of the average life expectancy of an American woman today, then I'd hit my midlife at that point.

We're in a business and a culture that doesn't accept such changes for women. We're still supposed to be wearing our little midriff tops and staying perpetually twenty-five. Some of the men in my field have made the transition to midlife quite elegantly. Neil Young, for example, or Bruce Springsteen. But for those artists, it's always been about the content. So I shifted perspective in my musical career, too; I said, “Okay, let's go back to my content. Let's go back to the power of the pen.”

There were other inspirations I could tap into for this transition, coming more from the world of visual art. Georgia O'Keeffe made it as an old lady. Dorothea Tanning is in her nineties and still painting and writing poetry. I found some examples in the jazz world—Ella Fitzgerald performed into her seventies, despite health problems; Rosemary Clooney
made a comeback in her late sixties. Myself at thirty-five, I felt that though the business is so much about the image, there is still a place for the songwriters singing the songs and not just handing them over to the next ingenue.

A lot of younger women have said to me, “Looking at your generation is the scariest thing in the world. What we have to look forward to is very bleak if our so-called role models aren't happy with who they are and wish they were more like us.” They want somebody to turn around and say, “Middle age is a great place to be; you will
want
to arrive at this place.” The songs that have been coming to me lately, with their varied points of view, have been helping me to see how many different aspects of the self there are and that there is so much to work with, for each of us, at every stage.

I'm beginning to see myself less and less as the one going out with the ships and sailing the seven seas. I did that. Okay. I've breastfed pigs. Then there came a time when I had to realize that it's now for other women to traverse that particular territory. I think I'm in a place where I'm trying to realize again what my role is. And it's not sitting there half-naked with a guitar between my legs. When others try to tell you what your role should be, and you can't pull it off, it's a problem. After all, you've got to wake up with yourself in the morning.

The Native sages who came to see me gave me another message, which came true. It's a conversation about business. The message was, in the tribe, women realized certain benefits as they aged. They were then included in discussions they couldn't join when they were younger. The Western, capitalist worldview doesn't recognize the usefulness of women's experience. Imagine if we treated men the same way—we'd lose so many of our poets and visionaries. Popular music is so focused on the outer being that it's hard for everyone to survive and stay in the game. And if you think about it, the
women who have lasted are the ones who've kept themselves looking a certain way—Cher, Tina Turner, Madonna. However they did it, they maintained their looks. But it's interesting to note none of those three women is a composer. They might play at it, but they're not writers like Neil Young or other rock males. The women who are great composers, like Joni Mitchell, but who maybe haven't tailored their image to the modern consumer, aren't out on the “circuit” as much. So for female composers about ready to turn forty, the industry is not banging down your door. Yes, if you're an icon you will be able to play Merriweather Post, but you may not be sitting alongside Dave Matthews on the playlists at radio. Herein lies the challenge: to be able to traverse pop culture's addiction to imaging, all the while infusing your pencil not with lead but with estrogen.

A lot of leading men are just happening at forty. By that age, they know how to be clever, they know how to listen, they supposedly have experienced life. They might not be as cute as younger guys, but they're often sexier and almost always more powerful. In rock, it's somewhat different, even for men. We are drawn to the young king. I think it's messianic. And it's also obviously sexual. Americans, especially, still aren't comfortable with adult sexuality. It's like, your mommy and daddy have sex—no, no, no, no. There's a general denial, even though some people may leak it, even mommies at playgroup.

What I've experienced in Europe is that there's a place for mature sexuality; there really, really is, and there has been historically. And it isn't necessarily trashy. There's dignity and elegance to sexuality, because it's part of your life. And because there's a place for it, sex is not just everywhere, randomly emerging, as it does in our popular culture now, which is what many parents are so afraid of.

Becoming a parent has helped me see the proper place of things in my own life. When you're a mommy you have the opportunity to get very
clear. I can deal with the music business now and not lose too much energy over its obnoxious aspects, because I know where my priorities are. What matters, in terms of work, are the songs. That doesn't mean I'm not willing to do the other work that's necessary. But when difficult situations come up, now I can see that there's an inner working to it all. There was a time when I believed that making records was separate from life, and I began to hear from other people that it wasn't. Wiser people than I advised me that no, it's part of your life. That's why you need to have a studio close to where you live, really trust your collaborators, and integrate and balance all the elements.

Mark's father gave me some wisdom before he died, and I remember it most days. He said, “If I could be any age [he was in his midseventies at the time] I would want to be forty.” I said, “Tell me why.” I was really surprised. I wasn't forty yet; I think I was thirty-five. He said, “That was when I was old enough to know the what and the how of it all, and still young enough to do it.”

Some people feel they've lost something as they get older. For me, I feel like I've gained a thing I was desperately looking for. I'm not saying there aren't days when I look in the mirror and say, “Jesus Christ, I look old.” But there's a quality within me now that I was hungry for, starving for, looking for, in my midtwenties, and I didn't find it. I found it later, outside the music industry, when I started choosing my friends wisely. I made a choice not to stay in L.A.; I made a choice to leave London. And I knew that my relationships would develop with the people who should be part of my life, even if they lived six thousand miles away, not just those I ran across as I pushed my career. Friendships are based on being tested. Being backstage when the champagne is flowing because you have your hands on a huge success is not really the time when a friendship is tested.

The miscarriages—I wouldn't wish them on an enemy, but they really
brought me to a place of bitterness and loss. And instead of wallowing in that, at a certain point I could begin to take the gall out of it. Nearly everyone is faced with some kind of health problem at some point, and when you are, that sense of immortality goes, that arrogance. Maybe there was a time when I thought I was immortal; I think a lot of people do. But certain physical struggles have come to me, and the best thing about them is that I have so much more compassion for what people go through physically, and for their losses. I'm beginning to accept that the body goes through changes. Lots of changes. Sometimes when I'm onstage in the middle of a show I feel better than I've ever felt in my life. When I turned forty I was doing a show and I thought to myself, “Why didn't anyone tell me how great you could feel at forty?” Then of course there are those days when I'm just trying to put one foot in front of the other.