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"As a performer, I work as a mirror. So whatever you're
giving me, I give it back to you tenfold, because that's how mirrors can
work. When all this love is coming to you, and all this projection is coming
to you, and all this stuff is coming to you, what an audience really is
doing is they want to give to themselves. Performers do have this power. They
can keep what you're giving them and not give it back. It's how you think. You
can stop the wheel. You have to keep the wheel going, which is intake,
outtake."
"Being a minister's daughter means you get really good
poppy-seed cake at Christmastime, and you get really wonderful dresses and
things made by these really nice little old ladies. And you also get an
incredible amount of confusion. But when you're 14 years old, and you don't
know what your beliefs are, you're taking on everybody's beliefs around you
and you're making them yours. And I'm not about the institutionalized
Church. At all."
"[starting to sing "Little Earthquakes"] Good year for
hunters- Hang on! This is... this is rattling my piano, hang on. [guy comes
out to fix it] That's okay, how's everybody doing? [cute little smile] This
is how it really works you know we spend hours before you show up
figuring this stuff out. [to the guy] That's great. I'm glad he came out
because his hair looks really great with this light on it. I was telling him
earlier he needs to walk around with this blue light. [guy starts to leave] Isn't
that happening, see, isn't that good?! Okay. Guess what the first song is?!
Guess?!"
"Adolescence is that time when I think, it can be- it's
the cruelest place on Earth. It can really be heartless."
"Before I walk out on stage, I set my parameters for the
room. It's kind of like a witch with her brew. I decide what I'm bringing
to the party that night. And I bring different things with me in every city
that I play. But I try and tune myself to the audience out there. And again
it's smelling what's cooking in the kitchen. It always comes back to [sniff]
a little garlic [sniff] she's got pudding in the oven [sniff]. And then,
once you know what that's all about, then you go, [cute face] 'We're gonna
bring a little of this tonight.'"
"We all get intimidated by showing ourselves, for whatever
reason, we think, If I really show who I am, and someone goes [pfftt] then
it's gonna crush me. Well, it's not gonna crush me. It doesn't crush you if
somebody does that- somebody will do that. Many times. And once you accept
that that's not why you're doing it, you're doing it because that's your
form of expression."
"I don't play for races or religions, you know, I'm into
faeries."
"I've never felt anything that moves me as much as my piano. I'm an
emotional player. I don't really like people. I prefer my piano to
people. It's totally reliable and it's alive. I can hear what it's
saying. For the most part, pianos are female to me. Sometimes they're
dykes, and they're always good fun." - Tori, CD Booklet
When asked about Boys for Pele, which was
apparently a week or so away from being released the day of these
interviews, particularly the half-joking question, "Is it a soccer
player reference?" (which was funny when it was asked on the first
interview, but got kind of old after the second or third or forth):
"Um, well it depends what kind of mood you're in really. She's
actually the volcano goddess; she's been around a little longer
than he has. But, um, yeah, this record's about stealing fire,
stealing fire from the men in my life, which I've done, um, I can't
be ashamed to say, so, uh, it's kind of, it's, it's a passionate
little record."
When the interviewer mentioned "hiding it well,
Sister Ernestine" and asked how a girl raised Methodist would know
about nuns, Tori said: "I know about anything Christian, honey. They
baptised me for 13 bloody years, they held my head way down, baby."
[Morning, Tori, how are you?] "I'm pretty good."
[Pretty good?] "Yes." [Where are you right now?] "I'm in New York
City, I just flew in from London pretty late last night." [So, you're
pretty jet-lagged.] "Yeah, but I got all these bagels coming, I'm
very excited, I got blueberry, I've got poppy-seed, I've got onion
bagels, I just {kind of stumbling over her words in excitement} all
this cream cheese and butter. [What, no salmon?] No salmon, honey,
I want it hot and sweet. I mean, I'm not interested in this dieting
scene. It's, forget it. Chicks, the more to love, that's all. I'm
having butter. [Butter's the kiss of death.] Mmm... [That'll clog your
heart up.] Mmmmmm... But I'm goin' smilin', baby, I'm goin' smilin'."
Um, well, I got my vampire's license as I wrote
[Boys for Pele], just because I think, um, when you start
seeing, you know, the hooks that you throw in to the people that
you say you love, and, uh, it got pretty volatile at certain
points. And I think the whole reference to Pele is the boys, the
men that brought me to my fire, what they give me, or what they
didn't give me in many cases in truth, um, forced me to have to
find my own, and that's what it's about."
"But I do know that for me this record is partly
my shadow, it's the descent, the descent of woman, trying to
remember those fragments, those sides to us. You know, Mary Magdalene
was not one of our, um, blueprints that we could follow, and I
really went back to that bloodline... We're not talking about
virgins here, we're talking about becoming a woman, honoring
woman, the passion, the compassion, and the power and the wisdom
of that."
When asked if she rode horses when she was young,
because of the song "Horses," and, I guess, the song "Winter," Tori
said: "I got thrown." [metaphorically, or actually?] "Well, you
know, this record is pretty much a metaphor, so, it's, it's um,
written in novel form, from beginning to end, it's a story, it's
a story of this descent of woman."
Just, you know, with some of the pictures on the
new record when it's coming out, cuz again, it's like a novel, the
music as well as the booklet- um, Little Earthquakes was
more diary-form, Pink was more like an impressionist
painting, and this is like a story- and, uh, so, some of the pictures,
just have a sense of humor, okay?"
Talking about then-upcoming single "Caught A Lite
Sneeze," ["Caught a Lite Sneeze, that's kind of an interesting
name for a song] "Yes, especially if he was a lite sneeze and not
the flu, if you know what I mean, girls. [Oooh... Ooohh.. So
you're lookin' for the flu?] Well, guys would like to think they're
the flu, wouldn't they, but sometimes they're just, hachoo."
"[Men, particularly in the British press] come
in asking me why I'm so agressive and why I hate them, and, and,
what they don't understand with this record is that it's about
incredible passion and incredible desire and incredible need and
then, love. It's all gotta be in there if you're being fair about
it."
"At 11 it seemed to me that my life was over." Tori
about being kicked out of Peabody.
"I want to be a legend." Tori at age 17 to the
Washington Post.
"I take that stage and that piano a demon girls
come out."
"The girl and her piano are dead." Tori wrote
a really disturbing letter home after her rape.
"I don't need my hair sprayed out ten inches
and my bra showing through."
"Almost every journalist in this town has used
my bathroom." Tori is very newsworthy!
"She was a music writer's dream." - Tom Hibbert,
a high profile British music writer.
"[Tori is] "Joni Mitchell on crack." - "Comedian"
Lenny Henry.
"To me the songs already exist. I'm just an
interpreter for them."
"[Trent Reznor's] life is dedicated to being
an innovative and experimental musician."
"There are only ten ideas... What makes the
difference is how you spice them."
"The way I play is a bit torturous but... it's
the only way I know how to play." Tori!! "Torturous?" Come on,
get real! :-)
"At 30 I feel ready to have a child, although
I don't intend to stop my career." - good news (twice!) from Tori.
"Robert Plant did it for me. I was ten years
old and I wanted to give him my virginity." - Tori
"There's such a lot of guilt to work through.
I'm not totally free yet."
"...Umm...my dad and I had a lot of arguments about things...He wanted me
to...uhm...be a virgin until I like got married. Well....I'm *still* not
married, folks...*snicker*...this is *my* prayer... Every finger in the
room..." (she sings "Crucify")
"I used to teach Sunday school. I had the biggest class...I had like 70
kids. But that was because I wore red leather pants to church."
"I mean a lot of the big heavy metal violent guys were all nerds. Kurt
Cobain could've told you. He was a nerd."
"I do like to talk about things that nobody wants to hear at the dinner
table."
"Don't think about wanting to punch him because he humiliated you in front
of all these grown-ups. You think it's wrong to feel that way because he's
my father, or he's my teacher, or... he's God, who has humiliated me as a
woman, in a sense. Because I've been less than. I haven't been able to be
the Pope. I've been able to be the Virgin Mary and Margaret Thatcher, and
both are kinda sexless."
Talking about the first concert she went to (Elton John)
"She was 15 and I was 11. We were very mature for our age though; we had a
little lump of hash in our back pockets. We snuck ourselves down to the
front, we pushed our way through, and when he threw his water, it fell on
me, and I felt like I'd been baptised by the piano king. Obviously, it
hasn't hurt me. "
"To me happiness, true happiness is when you can really dance
with sad."
Go back zu Hause (home)
FROM THE LITTLE EARTHQUAKES VIDEO
"Monsters are the best, most wonderful. Monsters are,
um.... you know.... It's like, you've got to fight for your right to have
a monster."
FROM THE GREAT INTERVIEW CD AND BOOKLET
From the CD
"There are things that I refuse to deal with except through my music...
because I don't trust humanity that much, and I don't know if I trust me that
much. But I trust the songs." - Tori, CD BookletFrom the booklet
"That was my role when I was nine--a freak
child."SENT TO ME FROM A FRIEND
Since I didn't find these quotes on my own (they were emailed to me), I don't know the exact context, but they are cool just the same!!
"I do sound like the Little Mermaid on acid." - Tori in Newsweek 1996 (I know, there are many more than one Newsweeks from 1996, but a friend emailed me this quote, and that is all he gave me to work with. :-))
Did ya like it?! You should have!! :-) Either way, if you haven't emailed me yet, now would be a good time! Tell me what you thought!
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