If Tori Amos had her own TV show, it'd be Cooking With Tori. She'd share her recipes for huevos rancheros, homemade salsa, and her mom's fried chicken with lots of drippings. She'd reveal the secret ingredient in her spaghetti sauce (maple syrup--she wanted something with three layers of taste: savory, but with a tart little bite and a sweet aftertaste). Food holds a powerful attraction for Tori. She falls in love with chefs all the time, "even though they're 300 pounds and they're saying Bella! Bella! Bella!" At moments like that, she has to have a friend remind her: she's not in love with the man, just his marinara sauce. And if they got married, he wouldn't want to be always cooking for her, just as she wouldn't want to play piano for him first thing in the morning in her bunny slippers.
Tori is famous for a daffiness more politely called "eccentricity." When she writes songs, she sits down with her Bosendorfer piano and listens to what it tells her; she feels that her songs have always existed and she just heard them for the first time. Lately, the songs she hears have been about her experiences with men. Her new album, Boys for Pele, is not just about her romantic attachments, but all the men who are important to her, from her sound engineers to Jesus Christ. On vacation in Hawaii, Tori decided that she had spent too much time in her life looking to boys for passion. "I hit bottom with my male relationships," she confides. "I mean, I could not put one more fishing line in one more boy's pond." So she wrote songs about them, and offered them up to Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess. Originally she intended to push the boys into the volcano, but once she summoned up the image of them standing on the brink of molten lava, she decided to give them all marshmallows and a long stick and have a party. (Tori was never a fan of the soccer star Pelé, although she says, "Any gorgeous man with calves means something to me.")
Last year, Tori and Eric Rosse--her producer and boyfriend--ended their relationship of six years. Tori's careful to emphasize that Boys for Pele is not a song cycle lamenting the end of their relationship; nevertheless that melancholia colors the album. Asked what the best way to break up with somebody is, Tori grimaces. "Everybody knows there's no good way. Oh God, if there were a good way, I don't think I would have written this record." She blinks, staring off into space, holding her lips closed. "You remember sitting in that restaurant after it's over, meeting up again just because you have to, and you're crying at the table. You can't help it. He's sitting there, looking beautiful on every level--and yet you know not to reach across the table to touch his hand." She falls silent, playing a painful movie inside her head.
Tori was born Myra Ellen Amos, the daughter of a Methodist minister in North Carolina. She was a piano prodigy who was playing songs before she could speak complete sentences, so her parents enrolled her in Baltimore's prestigious Peabody Conservatory when she was five years old. Wanting to improvise and hating to sight-read, she left at age eleven. Soon after, she started performing at gay piano bars--with the reverend Dad as her chaperone. At age 21, she dyed her hair red, changed her name from Ellen to Tori, and headed to Hollywood. There, she fronted a heavy metal band in the Pat Benatar mode, Y Kant Tori Read: their self-titled album disappeared like Jimmy Hoffa. Shattered by this professional belly-flop, Tori rediscovered her first love, the piano. She recorded a dozen songs about her life and dreams alone with her keyboard, and at age 28, moved to London. She immersed herself in British history, exploring the battlefields of the War of the Roses, visiting the Tower of London and quizzing the Beefeaters.
Those solo piano songs became Little Earthquakes. Emptying out her diary--even the story of her being sexually assaulted on "Me and a Gun"--Tori made an intimate record that found a large audience. She followed up in 1992 with *Under the Pink*. She wasn't ready to talk about boys yet, so she dealt with the girls: sisters, best friends, rude waitresses. "Under the Pink is like an adolescent girl who's growing her breasts and needs to hide them," Tori says now. She's dealt with life for so long by casting herself as the antic elf that Tori's still not sure whether to call herself a woman or a girl. "I don't think one supercedes the other, but being thirty-two, it'd be quite helpful if the woman showed up." Her latest big step towards maturity: Tori's stopped dyeing her hair with Clairol Torrid's Touch Crimson and started going to a professional salon.
Where Little Earthquakes was emotionally and sonically naked, Under the Pink dressed up her music: jangling mandolins in "Cornflake Girl," bossa nova rhythms in "God." Boys for Pele strips it down again: Tori at the keyboard, singing longingly of broken hearts and boys in dresses. The emotional core of much of Tori's music is gently mournful, a hand reaching out that never quite brushes somebody else's fingertips. But Pele expands on that tone in every direction from the raw (the song about sucking off Congressmen) to the twee (the song where she talks to Mr. Zebra). Tori leavens her sorrows with periodic left turns into the hilariously surreal, such as when she wanders into the Eagles' "Take It Easy": "Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona/And I'm quite sure I'm in the wrong song." Tori's fans have responded to her music's unclothed emotion with utter devotion, and she tries to return the favor. She's lamented that her growing popularity means she can no longer speak with every member of the audience after a concert.
When Tori was singing with Y Kant Tori Read, she wore plenty of spandex and sequined bustiers purchased at L.A.'s Retail Slut boutique. "It was a good time to be a metal chick," she reminisces. Now all of those miniskirts and push-up bras are locked in a trunk at her parents' home in suburban Maryland. Today, in New York City on a break from the mixing of Boys for Pele, Tori is sporting what she calls her librarian look: a gray-and-brown sweater, blue jeans, and a pair of Hot Tuna sneakers. She grew up wearing Converses, although she now considers them a bit too trendy. But we're on a mission to upgrade Tori's footwear--we're heading for the shoe department at Barneys New York.
"Shoe shopping is a real art," Tori says, and skips up the escalators of the swank department store. On the fourth floor, she wanders among the shoes, almost running from one display to the next. Tori routinely wears three-inch heels when she heads out on the town; she takes taxis to get around, so she doesn't really need to be able to walk. She's happy to show off her legs, but in an elegant fashion: "I don't give free looks," she smiles. Tori wanders amidst the creations of her favorite shoe designer, Manolo Blahnik, holding up various pumps and sandals for me to admire. "When I'm in geometrically sound shoes, I feel like I'm part of the physics chatter. You feel like you're walking around in architecture." She wriggles out of her sneakers to try on nine or ten pairs, revealing that her toenails are painted bordeaux red. Ultimately Tori rejects glam options like a pair of lemon-gold high heels, reasoning that she needs more sedate shoes to mix in right now; she settles on four pairs of Manolo Blahnik flats. She heads over to hosiery ("socks and mittens are my friends," she says), leaving the shoe salesman to put the $1,700 charge on her American Express card.
When explaining themselves, most people like to take you from point A to point B. Tori's method is to stand on point B, waving her arms, saying, "Hey! Can you guess how I got here?" Her descriptions of her songs can be almost as tangled as the songs themselves. Witness her explication of the new "Muhammad My Friend": "There are many blood references all through this record. There's the sacred bride who wasn't honored. I think you know who I'm talking about: Mary Magdalene. The passionate woman who is the high priestess who chooses her love, she cannot be dropped just because she's become a whore in mythology. They just couldn't have a woman who could have the power of Jesus's cock and be sexual. So I'm having a cup of tea with Muhammad and saying that there are as many belief systems as there are people; to not acknowledge that means chaos, really. To make Jesus a woman, of course, is shape-shifting. So working with a Native American belief in shape-shifting, we are one. And the Holy Grail, which is underlying all that. Of course, I had to bring Gladys Knight into it. She's a bit of a goddess."
Since Tori's not afraid to share these diffuse ideas, she's gotten tagged as something of a flake. "If you speak of love, you're...." Tori stops, searching for the right term to belittle herself with. Finally she remembers one: "a new-age waif shivering in the forest." Tori's thought processes are authentic in that she *does* see the world at a perpendicular angle from the rest of us, but what seems like free association sometimes recurs verbatim with different journalists. During interviews, she likes to steer questions into long predigested chunks of Tori-thought, like a White House press secretary hell-bent on getting out the message of the day. After every interview, Tori hugs the journalist. This may be more manipulative than it's meant to appear, but it's also rather sweet.
"I use innocence in my demeanor like a Venus flytrap," Tori says, and she's absolutely right. Her carefully prim librarian clothes may be meant to reassure the world that she doesn't bite, but this is a woman who has Cleopatra fantasies and who sings about shaving off all her pubic hair. In concert, she famously humps her piano bench. She's taken generous helpings of shrooms through her life: "I'm definitely a hallucinogenic girl." In Little Earthquakes' "Leather," she sings "Hand me my leather," while in Boys for Pele's "Hey Jupiter," she sings "took my leather off the shelf." When I ask Tori whether those leathers are clothing or some other object, she declines to answer, blushing.
Tori spent too long at Barney's, trying on every hat in sight. Now she needs my help packing her bags if she's going to catch her plane to L.A. to finish mixing the record. In two days, she's made a mess of her hotel room that rivals the results of the Kobe earthquake. There's notebooks, empty bottles of Diet Pepsi, packages of Donna Karan petite nude hose, and a mountain of clothes and shoes between the bedroom and the bathroom. Heading into the bathroom with a fresh outfit, she makes meowing noises to herself behind the door as she changes, while I stuff her shoes into voluminous duffle bags.
When she emerges from the bathroom (Animaniacs t-shirt, blue zippered jumper), I sneeze loudly. Tori has a way of dealing with this situation--she points at me and cries, "Herr Sneezer!" Once I recover from the surprise, we discuss the physiological similarities between the sneeze and the orgasm. Tori smiles--she's just figured out what to do if she ends up pushing all the boys into the volcano. "Just in case I'm ever down on my luck," she says, "I'll get some black pepper."
Originally published in the March 1996 issue of Details. Copyright 1996 Gavin Edwards.