Let the Lava Flow Not all of Tori Amos' fans have been able to follow her progression from earthquakes to volcanoes, but the sizzling songstress doesn't pay any mind.

by Alan Sculley

Ever since her eye-opening 1991 debut, "Little Earthquakes", Tori Amos has stood out as a maverick in a pop music world that is all too prone to simple, proven formulas. Usually aided only by her solo piano accompaniment, exploring melodies and arrangements that are not bound by standard time signatures or verse-chorus structure, and writing lyrics that can be cryptic yet probe deeply, Amos has established herself as a truly original artist.

So it's no surprise that Amos says if listeners want to understand her new CD, "Boys for Pele", they may need to abandon the conventional ways in which they approach a record.

"It's a metaphorical work, so if you use your head, you're kind of in trouble," Amos says. "You have to really go from your senses. It's what things represent more than what a word means. It's association. And if you go through that way, then you're responding from your instincts and tastes and smells, that whole kind of response, instead of analytically. It's a heart record. If you use your brain, you won't get it.

"It doesn't matter that you're going to see different faces than I am. I'm not trying to get you to see who I'm talking about. It's about an emotion. I do hope they feel the emotion or I haven't done my job."

For many of her fans, "Boys for Pele" is Amos' most challenging work to date. Although it sounded startingly original when first released, "Little Earthquakes" now seems rather conventional by Amos' standards. It had plenty of straight-forward lyrics - particularly on "Me and A Gun", her chilling first-person tale of rape, and "Silent All These Years", her story of repressed identity - and its songs were musically accessible and radio friendly.

By the time of her second solo outing, the 1994 CD, "Under the Pink", Amos' lyrics had grown more impressionistic and her music more adventurous, as the songs ranged from the percussive tones "God" to the gentle solo piano sounds of "Bells For Her".

On "Boys for Pele", Amos pushes herself - and her listener - to further extremes. As her comments about the sense-based content indicate, her lyrics have grown more cryptic than ever. The CD does have a general theme: it describes a woman's struggle to stop living through the energy of outside forces, be they lovers, friends, or work. The problem (for some) is that Amos has created a work so open-ended that many of the songs could mean starkly different things to different people.

Amos cuts a diverse and daring musical path through the 18 tracks on "Boys for Pele". Many of the songs lack the immediate pop appeal of older tunes like "God", "Cornflake Girl", or "Crucify", and instead veer sharply around the sonic map. There are quiet, contemplative tunes like "Marianne", whimsical moments like "Mr. Zebra", and stormy, emotional eruptions like "Professional Widow" and "Blood Roses". More than a few critics have found "Boys for Pele" to be too extreme, and have criticized the CD for a lack of musical focus and for lyrics that at times seem unfathomable.

But, regardless of how others hear it, Amos' candid comments about her music and "Boys for Pele" leave no doubt the CD has deep personal meaning for her and required a substancial emotional investment to create. The project, Amos says, had its genesis during a particularly difficult point in her life. At the time, a number of personal relationships had undergone change. Most notably, she had broken up with Eric Rosse, her long-time boyfriend and producer of "Little Earthquakes" and "Under the Pink". Amos had also been touring extensively behind "Under the Pink", and had reached a point where she found herself drained of emotion and identity - and desperately in need of escape and rebirth.

"Pele is a volcano goddess in Hawaii, and I fled to Hawaii in the middle of the "Under the Pink" tour for five days when I was at my lowest, and I couldn't feel any fire within myself. I couldn't feel anything," Amos says. "I came to the north shore in Hawaii, and a friend of mine - we'll call her a medicine woman, a very wise woman - was there. And I felt after the San Francisco, or around those dates, I couldn't feel a sense of when I wasn't behind that piano or with a man in my life. I couldn't find out who the woman was. Some of you may ask me, 'Why did you go to the men in your life?' and the truth is I felt they had an energy force, to a flame, that I couldn't find. When I went to the north shore and I just spent time walking up and down that beach with this medicine woman, I just began to feel the presence of Pele all over the island, even though I know she's not on that island. I just felt this deep little flame start to happen.

"If I could have one one-billionth of what I felt from that energy, the volcano that permeates that whole space there in Hawaii, I was like: I won't need anything. I won't need to go a party and be liked. I won't need people to understand. I won't need anything. So Pele really got me in touch with repressed anger that I needed to loose, got me in touch with the resentment that I had had and the deep place in the heart where I was really, really sad, because I couldn't be playmates with certain boys that I had wanted to be playmates with because we just didn't want the same things, although there was a lot of love."

Perhaps she just needed to hang out for a while in the company of a South Seas island volcano goddess to realize it, but Amos now understands that her artistic progression has really been a search for her true self. "Well, you know there are no victims, that's where I sit now," she says. "The journey from "Little Earthquakes" through "Pink" to "Pele" has been really a claiming of womanhood. And I kind of see these records as a trilogy.

"They work together. And this final record was about me embracing my womanhood. I call it the boy record, which means it's the womanhood record because it was really through the men in my life, what they didn't give me in some cases, which forced me to give it to myself. And they couldn't give it to me, just like I couldn't give it to them. I couldn't give them their fire, and they couldn't give me mine...I was dying. I don't care how many sold-out concerts I had. I was dying.

"You know, being somebody else's opinion, most of you creatures out there haven't been exposed, I don't think, to people making comments on your work on a big scale. What can happen when that happens to a few of you, whether you're writers or musicians or etcetera, you can start to become these opinions. And everybody has an opinion, guys. People will love you, people will hate you, people will say you're not worthy to even make music. People will say you're the most amazing thing there ever was. And in truth, you just have to throw it all out and just know where you stand with yourself, know when you don't have it, know when you do.

"The final step was acceptance, accepting that when I need to rage I need to rage, and when I need to weep I need to weep, and when I need to put on that giggle, and just giggle until I can't stop, no censorship."

Many of her devotees think the essence of Ms. Amos is that of a "girl who thinks really deep thoughts" (to borrow one of her lyrics), and the singer plays up that image in interviews. She speaks in a whisper, as if her ideas are too intense for passersby to hear. She punctuates her sentences with deep breaths and sighs (sort of like her singing style), and she answers no question without first mulling it over.

Asked about the misconceptions she thinks people have about her, she pauses for 20 seconds while cooking up a response. "People think I don't have a sense of humor at all, that I don't know how to have a laugh over a margarita," she says finally.

"But they're just not feeling what I'm saying. My humor is like a butter knife, not a butcher knife. My humor is there--it's just not very obvious."

On The Streets, January 29, 1996.

"Funny that - but true. Not that those men don't have places of their own womenhood but that is something that is theirs and not mine to go taste." She rolls 'taste' off the tip of her tongue. "I have my own and needed ways to find it and I had no idea how to do it. So until I cut off from the boy zone I wasn't going to the girl zone."

The neverending life search for our feminine and/or masculine side/s. " Yeah, and it seems so much through other people instead of kind of like reflecting things to each other. That was never enough, it was like 'Oooh, you've got something I want' and instead of 'Well, Tori, everybody can explore anything they want emotionally or intellectually or spiritually or physically', it's like 'no', I thought I had to get it, use it, shall I say, through them."

"The mountain and sacrifice allusion is partially true in that it was going to be my own little marshmallow roast but I decided I didn't want to roast them anymore in the end, that I didn't want the karma. " And she chimes a cascading peal of infectious laughter."

"Okay, look it is a bit sharp-edged. Yes, there is a little bit of .... you know I have to get a little of my ... (deliberate pause) digs in there. But for the most part the ideas are the gift the men in my life brought me was what they gave or, in some cases, didn't give, thank God, because they couldn't. Nobody can give another person their own soul, their own worth."

"These songs are about the realisation that you and the person you're with are talking different languages. They're about recognising than an extreme kind of viciousness if being played out even as you exchange honeysuckle. They're about the hidden things that go on in a women's heart - the things that are expressed and the things that have to remain hidden. They're about the breaking down of the patriarchy within relationships and the idea of women claiming their own power."

So then are you "this little masochist" who's "ready to confess" in "Hey Jupiter"? Silence. Long silence. Bigger than a pause silence. "Tuesdays and Thurdays are my masochist days." More rich and vibrant peals. " Now I beg of you no exclamination marks anywhere. Those exclamation points are just urgh."

And that is how words were scripted into this conversation the fact that music is her first language and without it she "can't find my way around the barn," how it has become the "tone and rhythm of 80 per cent of the story" and the music in the rhythm of 80 per sent of the story" and the music taste of the songs. "The words are calling it minestrone but it's the garlic, it's the kidney beans, it's all that stuff that is nurturing the minestrone."

Quite a potpourri, really. Condiments, then. The ink is obvious, just "I am so into them right now, it's getting dangerous," her lips smack "I was pocketing Heinz ketchup and mayonnaise sachets on the flight here and my manager was going, 'Tori, this is embarrassing, we're in first class' and I'm like. 'I know but when we get off and if we go somewhere that has french fries and they don't have mayonnaise I'm going to be wrecked."

She blames her crew for this obsession and nearly oozes all the way to Sydney at the mention of a Mexican cafe (Cafe Mejico in Potts Point) where the Mexican chef, rightly miffed at the lack of the real Mexican thing, has come up with a guacamole so right, so individual, so spiced yet palate perfect it begs addition. "Oh God, can I go like worship," she swallows in anticipation of her mooted August tour.

Meanwhile, Tori Amos, begs your ear for just a second: don't buy the copy of her 1988 rock album Y Kant Tori Read currently hanging proudly on the wall of an inner city record shop with a $350 collector's price tag on it. Her hips were so much smaller then, and definitely wouldn't fit into the snake pants now.

And that's a bit of womenhood, too.