‘I don’t think we’ll ever be the same. We’re not going to go back’

Tori Amos on politics, grief and the pandemic

TEDDY JAMIESON

RIGHT now, Tori Amos says, the big thing is to resist despondency. “That is an illness,” she tells me near the end of our conversation. “That is cancerous. And it can spread through your whole being and you don’t even realise. You’re in a mental war and you don’t know how to get out of it, and you do have to have words with yourself.”

For the previous 40 minutes, the Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter, pianist, and composer has been talking about politics and failure and love and grief (she and I have both learned about that in the last year) and rage and singing in a gay bar as a teenager. But, again and again, we circle back to the moment we are living in, this time of the virus.

“You have to resist despondency,” Amos continues. “Throwing your hands up and saying, ‘See you on the other end of this Covid.’ No, we have to be present for it because the gold is here.

“But the pain is here, too, the loss of freedom. The loss of life. We’re grieving. You and I. We’re not only grieving somebody that we lost, we’re grieving a way of life.”

This afternoon Amos is in lockdown with family in Cornwall. “We’re a full house. I think my husband would love to be bored. When he hears people are alone and having a Buddhist retreat, I see envy across his face,” she says laughing.

It’s a good noise to hear. Before I speak to her, I’ve been reading her new book Resistance. The subtitle describes it as “a songwriter’s story of hope, change, and courage.” All of which is true, but it’s a book full of grief and anger, too. A book angry at toxic masculinity, angry at the politics of America, her home country, angry that it could become a country where children are kept in cages.

The grief? That’s for her mother and her best friend, who both died in 2019.

The anger and grief are, in their own way, the reason the book exists at all. In 2017, her editor suggested she should write a second book – she had already written Tori Amos: Piece by Piece – A Portrait, in collaboration with Ann Powers – one on “the aftermath of the 2016 election and what is the artist’s role in this time,” she explains.

Amos tried, submitting several chapters. But it was what she wrote in the wake of her mother Mary’s death that led to her editor calling to say she had finally found her voice. The bad news was that she would have to go back and rewrite the rest.

“So, to make the deadline, there were times I was writing 10,000 words a week,” Amos admits. “I had to galvanise to make the deadline. But that was OK after the Mary chapters. She helped me to find my way.”

Resistance is an impressionistic book full of snapshots of Amos’s life. It begins in Washington DC in the 1970s when Amos is a 13-year-old girl wandering up and down the strip looking for a bar that will let her play piano, accompanied by her father the Reverend Edison McKinley Amos (complete with dog collar).

Who was that 13-year-old girl, I ask her? “That young girl had grappled with being a failure at 11,” she says.

Amos had been a child prodigy, playing piano from the age of two and a half, winning a place at the prestigious Peabody Conservatory (part of Johns Hopkins University) in Baltimore. But at 11 she lost her place.

“My father was devastated, absolutely devastated. Because the trajectory had been that, by 13, I would be on the concert stage playing classical music. That was his dream.

“The downside of kids having so much hope being put on their small shoulders is when it doesn’t go to plan. And the disappointment is not small. Trying to deal with being a failure was not easy.”

Hence the trek around Washington bars to see if one of them would let her play.

“My father finally said, ‘I can’t let you waste away. This is not happening. I can’t accept this,’” Amos recalls.

“Nobody would give us a chance. And at a certain point I just wanted to go home. This was excruciatingly painful. Just the looks we would be given, because, at 13, you can observe. My father with his clerical collar on and me dressed up in my sister’s clothes and some heels and bad eyeshadow. The turquoise kind. Oh God, what a picture were we?

“And, finally, at the last door they said, ‘If she’s any good she can play for tips.’”

This was Mr Henry’s. A gay bar. “That was the beginning of my professional life, I guess. Dad took a lot of flak for that. My sister reminded me that the parishioners were not humoured by this at all. So, it really was a bold move.”

It was a place where Amos began to learn life lessons.

“Gay men know more about men than anybody,” she points out. “They really do. And they know the dark side of men and the secrets.”

My father had his clerical collar on and I was in heels and bad turquoise eyeshadow