NOTE

Bliss
"Sometimes, when you express thought to people, you leave it open for somebody to tromp in there and start tearing it down. I sing, 'Father I killed my monkey,' to lead off the song, which explains that sometimes you even destroy your own so they can't excavate it. When I was growing up, I started becoming very secretive about my thoughts and the sensory world I would go to, because there's a lot of mind control that goes on constantly, people wanting access: 'What are you thinking?' So sometimes I'd have my own defense going, which would be to look them straight in the eye and make them think I've killed my imagination. But it's like, I'll take control."

Juarez
"I read an article about several hundred women in Ju�rez, Mexico, who had been taken out to the desert and brutally raped and murdered. When they didn't come home, their brothers would go and look for them, and many times they'd find nothing. Sometimes they'd find a hair barrette or a sock or something they knew was their sister's. The authorities haven't really done anything about it...they get into this serial-killer theory. I mean, how much serial can one man indulge in? So as the song started to develop, I really began taking the voice of the desert, singing in that perspective."

Concertina
"Do you ever feel like you walk in a room, and you don't know why, but you're just so uncomfortable you're crawling out of your skin, even though nobody's touched you, physically? That's in 'Concertina,' when you feel like you haven't excavated enough of your different personalities that when one pops up, you're not sure where it came from, and you try to hack it out of yourself. It shocks you that you could have this kind of fault, or that other people could bring it out in you."

Glory Of The 80's
"Mainly the honesty of the decadence of that decade. There's the line /and then, just when it all seemed clear you go and disappear/. I knew a lot of great people in the eighties but at the time I didn't always understand them. Now, there's such a void in the art world, people with vision have physically passed on. It's also a stab at political correctness - you can't say this, you can't say that; now everybody has to be called a Spanish American, an African American and I mean, [getting worked up] Oh bloody, fucking hell!!! I understand the abuses that have happened and I absolutely think recompense should be paid, but you don't do it just on a surface level. Everybody thinks that the debt has been paid to the 'quote unquote' Indians who had their land taken away from them because we call them Native Americans. It's hard when everything is so eggshell, eggshell, eggshell. I do miss the eighties. It was great, knowing that friends were on one hand dialing a charity and on the other hand doing a line of blow -- but not lying about it, being honest. None of us are this light and dark fantasy. What's dark to you may be light to me and vice versa."

Lust
"Lust has a really strange effect on the piano and in the voice, so it feels like she's in a shape she can't get out of, but it's a shape that's able to bleed in to itself. Creating sounds like that--it's pretty intangible to try and talk about it."

Suede
"There's this moment in 'Suede' where [the narrator's] being called 'evil' by this other person because of whatever she's done to them in their minds. But there's this side of obsession and passion where one party thinks the other party is doing something to them--and sometimes people aren't always looking at their part in something. In 'Suede,' she knows what she's up to, she knows what she's been doing."

Riot Poof
"To me Riot Poof is about one part of my family that is the conqueror and the other part who where being conquered. They fought at both sides. And you have to find out who you are. Many people don't want to see that they're partly victim and partly the executioner. Every evening I get letters. Hundreds of letters. A great part of them are letters from young women (and men) who where sexually abused by adults they trusted. They hate themselves because they think they made the adults do this. They are all wearing a little victim sign. Like they belong like some elite group. They're drown in a lake called victimhood. Instead of saying: 'No! I have the pride of a lioness. I will hunt. I will escape from this all.' I found this place when I lost my baby. Then I understood the life force you can get from it. So I could go to Venus, to make passionate records there. I can't define my new record yet. I only see this picture in front of me, like it is filmed from a camera that is circling round the heart of Venus. So I can look at her in all her darkness."
[Tori; OOR Magazine, Sept. 18, 1999]

"This record talks a lot about the shadows and the shadow world," says Amos. "`Riot Poof' is for all the jocks out there who need to deal with their secret sexuality." [Tori; Tower Records' Pulse Magazine, NOV99]

"I'm surprised when I see, for instance, gay men being racist or women colluding with that patriarchal thing, when women are sexist against women. So men don't surprise me. Being a lioness, I know the teeth and claws of women. But, of course, women have always been blamed. We see it down the centuries - 'if she didn't have a wet pussy then we wouldn't have been with her'. Urgh! And they have a woody sitting at the fuckin' table but they see it as this sanctified, insatiable body part. And women aren't allowed that - if they do, they become bad. That's what the song Riot Poof is about. It's like I'm the tooth fairy, the homo fairy and this is my present to all the homophobes. I'm leaving it under all their pillows. [She pauses] Blossom riot poof."

"Well, that being a poof doesn't mean you're not a hunter, that you're not masculine, or a man. And also being feminine doesn't mean that you're not a hunter either. There are all these concepts around but now the paradoxes are starting to live."
[Tori; Attitude Magazine, Nov99]

"Yeah... Because I was brought up in such a Christian household it is about the father. It's a father God and a son saviour so when I say "The sun is warming / My man is moistening" in Riot Poof, which is really about a guy who finds his feminine after he burns everything to ground and decides maybe, head, face down to the earth, 'Maybe I need to think about this for ten seconds'."
[Tori; Much More Music's Speakeasy, Jan 2000]

[Julie]: So who wrote a song about you?
[Darren]: Because I was cooking for Tori Amos when I came out,she wrote a song about me. It was called Drama Queen which when translated into Dutch and back into English becomes Riot Poof, so that's what she called it.
[Darren Staats, Tori's chef during the 1998 Plugged Tour; Gay.com Interview, Early 2001]

Datura
"I was in a mood that day. . . . We were supposed to be cutting something else, and it wasn't coming together. Matt [Matt Chamberlain] was running around, but the band hadn't shown up yet -- meaning Caton [Steve Caton] and Jon [Jon Evans] hadn't come. And I just had this thing about my garden. I got a list from my gardener about everything that was in my garden that was still alive."

"...I'm talking about the times when lines have been crossed by men. Men can be dangerous, like in the song Datura about how sometimes they can bring you gold and sometimes they can be the bearer of poison. The plant Datura is a hallucinogen and it's like men. If you get the right amount you'll walk into the garden and become a woman, but if too much seeps in in the wrong way and at the wrong time - it'll kill you."

"'Datura' is this plant that if you put too many leaves in to steep--even though it does have altered-state potential in a big way, like bella donna--if you don't steep it correctly, I hope you like to fly . . ."
[Tori; Tower Records' Pulse Magazine, Nov99]