THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

Some of the many faces and personalities Tori Amos puts forward on her new CD.

"God" and "Past The Mission" ( from Under The Pink ) , "Professional Widow" and "Hey Jupiter" ( from Boys For Pele ) , "Raspberry Swirl" and "Jackie's Strength" ( from From The Choirgirl Hotel ) and "Bliss" ( from To Venus And Back ) have become part of the contemporary musical landscape and vocabulary.

Amos has also become famous for her activism, including being a vocal supporter of RAINN ( Rape Abuse and Incest National Network ) . Her new album, Strange Little Girls ( Atlantic ) , is comprised of 12 songs written by men ( including Neil Young, Lloyd Cole, Tom Waits, John Lennon, Bob Geldof and Joe Jackson ) . Amos's activist's voice rings loud and clear throughout, particularly in defense of victims of sexual assault. Her riveting cover of Eminem's "97' Bonnie & Clyde" is both terrifying and fascinating, as she gives a voice to the voiceless. A longtime friend of the gay community, Amos's interpretation of Joe Jackson's "Real Men," shows that the wife and mother has not lost touch with us.

Gregg Shapiro: Doing cover songs is nothing new for you as many of your singles featured your versions of songs by Nirvana ( "Smells Like Teen Spirit" ) , Joni Mitchell ( "A Case Of You" ) , Jimi Hendrix ( "If 6 Was 9" ) , The Rolling Stones ( "Angie" ) and Led Zepplin ( "Thank You" ) , to name a few. Can you say something about covering other people's songs?

Tori Amos: It might have started when I was little ( with ) my dad. To make pocket money—I would do weddings and funerals. I was 10 or something. I liked the funerals better than the weddings because I didn't have to play, "We've Only Just Begun." I started cutting my teeth on them and I was playing in gay bars when I was 13 and you get a very different exposure to music at 13, when you're playing for other people to sing to it in a piano bar. Having to follow people and their style and to crawl into the songs—not even just how I heard them, but how other people heard them which brings us to this record. It was not just what men say and how a woman hears them. That really intrigued me. But even more so, it was what other men heard other men say—that was a part of the whole record about men together. I've called them a laboratory of men and started to excavate them. Then, I realized the premise would work—it could hold water.

GS: It definitely works. There seems to be a Stranglers revival occurring. Their song "Peaches" is on the Sexy Beast soundtrack and "Golden Brown" is on the Snatch soundtrack. Can you say something about why you chose to cover a song by The Stranglers?

TA: The person that brought the Stranglers to the table, there were two men, actually, and they brought different songs to the table. I started to really see the influence that they ( The Stranglers ) had on a lot of people. These were two British men. They're similar in that they're not jock-y kind of guys—they're not football hooligans, OK. You know, "Girls on the beaches/Looking at the peaches," the whole thing. They're not really like that, and yet they thought that they ( The Stranglers ) were sexy songwriters. I think they are, in a way. I don't know what their politics are. People say all sorts of things, but that isn't really my interest ( laughs ) . I was just drawn to them because ... what a catalog they've written.

GS: Yes, they've written some amazing songs. Your rendition of Neil Young's "Heart Of Gold" sounds more like Neil Young & Crazy Horse than the acoustic guitar and harmonica-playing Young in his own version. Please tell me about why you chose that particular arrangement for that song.

TA: When I stripped it back, I saw that there was a sort of fury that the song itself had in it. The "heart of gold" that any of us are looking for as we're rampaging the earth of all her resources, for bullion and all sorts of things, you have to pull back. I found this song to be this desperate cry for something. These two banshees came to visit me. Whether they were crying for the earth and loading their water pistols, or they've decided, "OK, you haven't heard us, you haven't heard the cry of the Valkyry, then it's war." They became these economic espionage characters who chose to go to the heart of some of these establishments that didn't hear the Sirens' cry and said, "OK, we're going to cut you off right there, where it's really going to be quite painful for you, because you can't hear anything else. If you think you're going to destroy our mother, it's not going to happen."

GS: Speaking of the Siren's cry. How do you think Yoko Ono would react to your version of "Happiness Is A Warm Gun"?

TA: We hope that she'll understand the spirit, and I believe that she will, that it was done in. This is a man ( Lennon ) who had seen an ad that said, "Happiness is a warm gun" and said in interviews, ( the brain trust of men brought to my attention this information ) , "Why is it warm?"—because it's just been fired—without knowing, when he said this, that one would be fired on him. So, cut to the shooting incident in San Diego [ in March or April ] , and I knew that "Happiness..." was on the record. It's been circling me for a few years now. Yes, we have a gun culture. Yes, we have a second amendment. As you and I know, if it's easier to get a gun than a driver's license, something is just intrinsically wrong. When the school shooting happened again, I heard comments like, "Look, there are bad seeds out there and it's going to happen." It just seemed like this absolving, this kind of washing of hands—"Hey it's not us"—on the gun side. I have friends who are part of the whole gun movement. You have to go, "Why do we have to be so resistant to the fact that we have blood all over our hands—the kids are killing each other." When do people turn around and say, "Whatever we're doing is not working." So, the whole second amendment which is talked about by my father, mainly because I figure if were going to have the Bushes, Sr. and Jr., then I needed to have the Amoses, Sr. and Jr. I thought that was fair.

GS: That's your father speaking on the CD?

TA: ( Speaking ) of the second amendment. That's the Reverend Doctor Edison Amos ( laughs ) .

GS: Is that the first time that he's ever appeared on any of your CDs.

TA: Yes. And he threatened me that I couldn't edit him to prove my point. I said, "I don't need to edit any of you to prove my point ( laughs ) ."

GS: Really. His point is made just by him speaking.

TA: Yes.

GS: While we're on the subject of violence, the strings on your cover of Eminem's "97' Bonnie & Clyde" give it this heart-pounding scary movie quality. Can you please say something about how you approached that song?

TA: When she spoke to me—the woman dying in the back of the car—and took me by the hand and said, "You need to hear how I heard it." I brought the brain trust together, and this was more the sonic end of the brain trust.

Phil Shenale, who has done string arrangements on most my records, I brought him in and I told him that I was going to speak this, word by word how she heard it at the same moment that you hear his version. They happen at the same time in song world. Once we started turning over the stones of Bonnie & Clyde, we followed the bloodline to Serge Gainsbourg's "Bonnie & Clyde"—you always have to find entry points—which took us to the place of, "this is a scary place to be and when you're the one with the ketchup on your throat, it's a little different when you're the one." This is how we heard it.

GS: You have both a large female and a large queer following, two segments of the population that have taken a verbal beating at the hands of Eminem. What would you say to them about Eminem?

TA: First of all, I don't think there's any kind of transmutation when you attack their person directly; I don't see the strength in that. But, I think that as an activist, as we both know, you go to the poison to get the antidote and there's power in that and there's healing in that. When you take a man's words, you take his seed. So, it depends on what kind of alchemy you want to do. I choose to do the kind that hopefully shakes things up and brings some awareness and brought the woman a voice. To me, what I found in my research, with anybody that heard this song—nobody asked about her. Nobody wanted to know about her. Whether people hated his character or aligned with his character, nobody brought her up. I just kind of stood back there and I said, "There's something intrinsically wrong here." Even people who can't stand what his character is—and some, of course, found him charming—neither ( of these groups ) heard her. I said, "OK, she needs to be humanized, because she could be our sister."

GS: You gave her a voice.

TA: She could be you or me. I've been in a car against my will. I felt like the way to phoenix out of the ashes was to reclaim that piece of you that people hijack.

GS: That's very powerful. There are these amazing images of you, photographed by Thomas Schenk, as 13 different women, all of whom are connected to the songs. Can you please explain that concept?

TA: In the beginning, I didn't realize that when you walk into myth-land—because with each song, it became a myth of our time—so, whatever you think of these song or these writers, and even with my own work, certain songs transcend us. Yeah, I have pictures in my head when I hear "Winter" and I have pictures in my head when I hear "Professional Widow," but they are not going to be the same pictures that you see. My personal experience with a song is just my personal experience. But a song goes beyond that. That's what's really important for people, when you're analyzing stuff, to remember.

So, in this land of myth that you walk into, of each song, yes, it was a different male seed/vision, that I was taking to put into my garden. What I didn't realize, when I took their seed, is that I would also have to take a little egg back with me ( laughs ) . That's the tradeoff that happens in mythology. When you eat the pomegranate seed, you have to go visit Hades for six months, again. The question we always have to ask ourselves is, "But did she eat the seeds intentionally?" "Did she think Hades was kind of cute?" You have to ask yourself these questions because that's how the land of myth works. It's a sort of strange and mysterious world. They were hitting me from all sides these women ( characters ) . They would just come in and take over.

GS: Was being each of these different women a bit like being a drag queen?

TA: Oh, wow, I never thought of it like that, but it's a very good thought, isn't it? Especially when I did "Real Men" ( laughs ) .

GS: I'm really glad that you mentioned that, because Joe Jackson's "Real Men" is the perfect song to close the album, because it sums up almost everything in the song—would you agree?

TA: That's how I felt. At one point, it was starting the record, but then it was like, "No, that's not how the record should start. There's nothing that can follow it." It became the heart of the record, really. "Don't call me a faggot/Not unless you are a friend," is the obvious one for your readers. That song has always been such a mantra for tolerance. What really struck me was the line, "You can wear the uniform/And I can play along." I kind of cocked my head on that one. I giggle. "If there's war between the sexes/there'll be no people left."

GS: That's one of Joe Jackson's best lines.

TA: "Kill all the blacks/kill all the reds/"If there's war between the sexes/there'll be no people left." This was happening when that Chinese debacle with the American plane was going on. I don't know how much coverage it got here, but in Europe it was getting so much coverage at the time. Our world teeters sometimes on "Is it going to be safe."

GS: Well, it's a very fitting finale to the record. Did you have the opportunity to have contact with any of the songwriters while you were recording the album?

TA: To be honest with you, to take on a project like this, you can't. You have to choose, are you having a relationship with the daughters or the mothers? I had to stay true to my relationship with the daughters. My songs are my song-girls. I'm their mother. Some of them, I don't know where they are in the world. Sometimes, you just go, Where is "Leather" tonight? I have no idea what havoc she's creating. I know she's meeting people and she's making friends, and I'm not going to know them all.

GS: This a great opportunity to ask you—now that you've done an album entirely comprised of cover tunes, how do you feel about other people covering your songs?

TA: The greatest compliment that you can have as a songwriter—even if somebody holds your feet to the fire or if they take a different position in the song or expose your hand on it—to be threatened by it would reflect where I am as a person. Somebody might cover one of my songs that shows a side where you might look at my character and see that my character isn't likable in this one and theirs is. I welcome anyone who could find something in my work. It means that you're a part of something that's bigger than you.

GS: It's truly an honor to have somebody think enough of your work to make it their own, as well.

TA: Yeah, even if they don't think a lot of you. With some of these artists ( songwriters on Strange Little Girls ) , I might not have a whole lot to say to some of them. Some of them feel like they need to have power over another person, or they think women or gays need to be subjugated. Whoever they are—we don't know exactly who all these people are out there. People are entitled to their beliefs, but it doesn't mean that you have to have a lot to exchange with each other. I did pick powerful wordsmiths. I did set out to prove that words are like guns. I set out to prove that words can wound and words can heal. I had heard a few men out there say, "What's everybody going on about? It's only words." As a songwriter—we have to stand by our work. So, I went to the men's words themselves, to prove to them how powerful their words are.

GS: You have succeeded. I understand that you are going to be embarking on a tour in support of the Strange Little Girls album. But now, you have an additional family member. How do you see balancing motherhood and touring?

TA: Well, right now she's jet-lagging and she won't eat her dinner. I'm a crap cook. We'll have Duncan ( our chef ) on the road ( with us ) . But, what a way to wake up in the day, turn around if you get a spare second, there's just nothing more magical than somebody going "Guh."