"I talk in the book about thinking about playing 'Imagine.' But that wasn’t the right one."

"I needed to play something from a great songwriter that had an emotion that wasn’t about violence, but that also contained grief. Tom Waits has the line, 'So close your eyes, son, this won’t hurt a bit.'"

Said Tori Amos, asked about performing Tom Waits’s song “Time” when she was the first musical guest to play on David Letterman's show after the 9/11 attacks. She is quoted in "Tori Amos Believes the Muses Can Help//A conversation about music, politics, and what you learn about America from being on the road" (in The New Yorker).



Here are the lyrics to "Time." Consider the process of thinking twice about playing "Imagine" and coming up with "Time." That was back on September 18, 2001. Now, as celebrities ineptly return to "Imagine" for our coronavirus pain, it's worth reflecting on Tori Amos's alternative, "Time."

Here's her new memoir, "Resistance."

"'I felt this need to subversively convince people. I wanted to hook them more emotionally, with something they can relate to.' So she chose food. 'It is so integral to how we see ourselves and how we live every day.'"

Said the artist Allie Wist, who has created and photographed a dinner table with what you'll perhaps be eating after the global warming.

Click through to see "Flooded," a dinner spread of "burdock and dandelion root hummus with sunchoke chips; jellyfish salad; roasted hen of the woods mushroom; fried potatoes with chipotle vegan mayo; salted anchovies; and oysters with slippers."

The link goes to NPR, an American website, but I don't think Americans say "oysters with slippers." It might just be a way to say oysters on the half shell. I Googled "oysters with slippers" and got this Tori Amos song "Oysters" — which doesn't put oysters in slippers. She, the woman, has "ruby slippers," and she's "gonna turn oysters in the sand." On my own, I think of Lewis Carroll ("The Walrus and the Carpenter"):

But four young Oysters hurried up,
All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
Their shoes were clean and neat —
And this was odd, because, you know,
They hadn't any feet.

Leaving aside the well-shod, footless oysters, remember the Walrus and the Carpenter were — before they invited the oysters to take a walk — crying over the way the beach was covered in sand — "If this were only cleared away/They said, it would be grand!"



Stop your crying. The problem is solved, and not by the Walrus's proposed solution — "seven maids with seven mops," sweeping "for half a year." Global warming is coming to relocate the beach sand underwater, where it will be unseen seabed. And apparently you can still eat your oysters — along with your jellyfish salad and assorted horrible grungy little roots like burdock.

And here's something Leo Tolstoy wrote in his journal about a shoot of burdock he saw in a plowed field:

"Black from dust but still alive and red in the center... It makes me want to write. It asserts life to the end, and alone in the midst of the whole field, somehow or other had asserted it."

That was written in 1896, when, perhaps, artists still felt some urge to uplift and encourage us. Rather than wake us up for the purpose of telling us bad news.

"Tori Amos released her first solo album, Little Earthquakes, on January 6, 1992 — 25 years ago today."

My son John Althouse Cohen writes:

Although she's an American, the album was released only in the UK at first; the US version was delayed until late February. Apparently the thinking was that she might not be as appealing to Americans. The concern was unnecessary.

It's hard to express what a brilliant artist Tori Amos is. She does three things and is stellar at each one: songwriting (alternating between frankly confessional and slyly cryptic), singing (at its most mellifluous on this album but capable of being much more raw) and piano playing (classically trained but with pop and jazz sensibilities).

More — with videos — at the link.

"Women have sexualised themselves and made great art, which they may get flak for, but it's powerful."

"But if you sexualise yourself and you're not making art, you are just sexualising yourself. Everyone's embarrassed. It's not very good, is it? You're just pooping on yourself."

Said Tori Amos, somewhere into the answer to The Guardian's question "Do men age more easily?" and right after saying "I won't talk about Miley Cyrus at the VMAs."

It's an interesting chain of thought, no? Here's how I visualize the thoughts of Tori Amos, in 11 steps:

1. To ask "Do men age more easily?" is to ask whether aging is more difficult for women.

2. Miley Cyrus — who's very young, but used to be younger and who's trying to gain credibility as woman and not a kid anymore — showed some awful awkwardness with that sexy dressing and dancing.

3. Sexuality can work, since obviously I've used sexuality well in my artistic performances.

4. I'm not going to get sidetracked into talking about Miley like everybody else, the topic here should be me, and when I think of self-sexualizing, I want the subject to be me, and this interview is PR from my artistic work product.

5. The most graceful way to retrack onto me and my excellent use of sexuality is to speak in the abstract.

6. Women have sexualized themselves and made great art which they may get flak for, but it's powerful.

7. The key is to unleash the power of self-sexualizing only when you can arrive at great art, which is what I have done and Miley has failed at.

8. All these artists, including me, have a powerful effect on young girls, who want to be like us, and this is a problem that I have a responsibility to solve.

9. If your self-sexualizing doesn't produce art, then the product is you — your body out there in the real world.

10. The self-sexualized woman out there in the world — not on the stage within the trappings of art — is bad... is shit.

11. Oh, my dear fans, do not poop on yourselves!

"I felt that women betraying each other was something I was investigating at the time."

Said Tori Amos, explaining the origin of the song "Cornflake Girl":

The idea of that, and how quote-unquote friends can really hurt each other deeply, and the idea that the enemy is out there somewhere, but really, where we get hurt usually comes from people we are close to. So “Cornflake Girl” really was about two women, that one felt that the other had really betrayed her.

The inspiration came from Alice Walker’s book "The Temple Of My Familiar":

In the book, they talked about how young girls would be taken to a place for female circumcision, whether it was out in the desert of Africa or what have you, usually by somebody they trusted. A mother, a grandmother, somebody they loved, and of course the person that was doing this to them, taking them to the whatever you want to call it, the hacker or the mutilator, thought that they were doing the right thing, or else the girl wouldn’t be able to get married. They justify their betrayal, and that was really what prompted the idea of “Cornflake Girl.”

But wait, says Adam (at Throwing Things), what about that story about how "she beat out Sarah Jessica Parker to star in an ad for Kellogg's Just Right cereal?"



Just Right cereal... female genital mutilation... it's hard to imagine a greater disparity in sources for a song. And yet... everything goes into the mix, doesn't it? You read books about all sorts of drastic and dramatic occurrences and your own life ticks on with its miniature but important-to-you events, it all swirls around in your poet-brain, and out pop a song (and, over the years, out pop stories about whether the song came from).

This isn't journalism. It's art, and the only test is: it's a great song.

"It's a privilege to sit in the front row. I reserve those seats for people who appreciate music. Get the f--- out!"

Watch Tori Amos kick two girls out of her show. And they deserve it. I love the way the way they hunch over as they experience The Expulsion.

It's so:

Songs transformed with the sex of the singer.

What songs well-known as girl songs would take on intriguing meaning sung by a guy? Tori Amos comes up with a list of 20 songs, but I find her list uninspiring. Do you have any better ideas?

There's also the reverse: what boy songs could be transformed if sung by a female? The obvious actual example of this is Aretha Franklin singing Otis Redding's "Respect."

In Redding's reading, a brawny march powered by Booker T. and the MG's and the Memphis Horns, he called for equal favor with volcanic force. Franklin wasn't asking for anything. She sang from higher ground: a woman calling an end to the exhaustion and sacrifice of a raw deal with scorching sexual authority. In short, if you want some, you will earn it.

"For Otis, respect had the traditional connotation, the more abstract meaning of esteem," Franklin's producer, Jerry Wexler, said in his autobiography, Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music. "The fervor in Aretha's voice demanded that respect; and more respect also involved sexual attention of the highest order."

The trouble with a man singing that song is that it's a bit ugly: I make the money, so you owe me. It's the conventional arrangement. The lyrics are a bit awkward in the female re-sing. Why was Aretha giving this guy "all my money"? But we ignored that. It was the remnant of the Otis version. She sang through that and pulled out the better, female meaning through sheer force.

UPDATE: The classic example of a man singing a woman's song is Frank Sinatra singing Gershwin's "Someone to Watch Over Me." He's forced to sacrifice the most beautiful couplet -- "Although he may not be the man some/girls think of as handsome" -- but singing words that are an entirely conventional woman's dream, Sinatra lets us see a shocking, haunting vulnerability.

Celebrity corsets.

Check out the celebrity-designed corsets. (It's an auction to benefit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.) Not that I'm bidding, but may I recommend the Julianne Moore? And note the Eve Ensler. It's really Eve Ensler-y.

UPDATE: Chris emailed me that link, by the way, which he found at The Dent, a Tori Amos news site. Tori has a corset in the show. It's bee-themed.

ADDED: Chris adds: "The corset benefit is for an organization that Tori Amos runs. Also,the bee theme is a double reference that her fans would get--one of her best B-sides is called Honey."