Original source of the interview: swide.com
She has sold millions of records, has inspired people all over the world and is regarded as a figure of female empowerment. This is what happened when Swide’s Ben Taylor shared a couch with the ethereal Tori Amos...
Tori Amos needs no introduction. She is the boundary breaking artist whose debut album, Little Earthquakes (1992), challenged the music industries attitudes to the piano and paved the way for the many female pianists who have followed. I met with Tori Amos to discuss her fight, female empowerment, who ’Annabelle’ is and the inner workings of her new LP ’Night of Hunters’, "a record that carries on the classical tradition of variation of theme: taking inspiration from classical forms to create a bold new work while paying tribute to the mastery of the original compositions."
Your career as we know it wasn’t simply born, it was a hard, long fight, and consequently you became a figure of female empowerment. How do you think female empowerment through music has changed over the years?
I think that there was a time in the 90s where there was a lot of exploration. Exploration of the mental self, the emotional self and the physical self and I think you were able to rip the skin off and investigate what you were really doing. Instead of writing songs about being hard done by , which you might have heard in the 60s and even though they might have been magical, there was more of a self exploration of what you’ve done to get yourself into this terrible situation and that was a real turning point. I think it was time to take that camera lens and really be fair, even harsh, about what you were doing with your own power and where the real abuses lay; Not just as in the late 60s, not having the same opportunities and complaining about that, now it was time in the 90s to look at the blood on our hands, in our own life. That was a real difference.
I think that now that (the 90s) is part of the pallet that women can pull from but I also think that there is a celebrity based culture that has become centre and I don’t think there is not as rich a poetry as what was happening 15years ago. There was a real wave of women investigating things, with the makeup off, really looking under the skin and I think sometimes now it is more about a sound bite and a catchy phrase. I think that there’s some really fun entertaining music but it would be nice if the great poets from the next generation would stand up, because we’re waiting. The men have stepped up, and I am not having a go at the women, I think some of them are making beautiful music and there poets in there.