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Tori Amos Shares The Beekeeper's Backstory

by Tina Whelski

The breezy, sensual songs of Tori Amos’ ninth, and latest album, The Beekeeper (Epic) ride the drift of an impending storm with honey sweet vocals and a storyline that looks at mending the historical rift that divides a woman’s sexual and spiritual self. In writing the music Amos draws from both her own emotional impulses and the rhythm of the world as she sees it at this moment. Days before her Summer of Sin solo tour began Amos offered a synopsis of The Beekeeper and shared her creative process, which she also chronicles in a new book Tori Amos: Piece by Piece, co-written with music journalist Ann Powers.

WOMANROCK: On The Beekeeper you continue to satiate your worldly curiosity and desire for self-discovery through song. How has your music evolved since Little Earthquakes (13 years ago) and do you feel you approach your instruments differently on The Beekeeper?

TORI AMOS: When I can listen to something a few years later, I’m able to be more objective. When I’m in the thick of it, I’m making choices based on what is right at the time and you have to trust your instincts and you have to be clear on your vision. For instance, I was listening to Choir Girl over the last couple of days because I’ve been learning a few songs for the tour and I hear that album really differently now than when it was occurring (laughs). I’m able to step back and you have a sense of detachment, which I think is really healthy—not when you’re trying to finish it though. If you’re too detached, you’re not passionate enough.

WOMANROCK: True. As we grow we often don’t notice differences in ourselves until we look back in retrospect.

AMOS: I like to use the word “changing” because at each time that an album is created, that reflex is where you are and just because some people are more drawn to a “fiery you” and some people are more drawn to an “intellectual you,” it doesn’t’ mean that they’re both not valid. They’re both valid—all of the albums are—but they come from a different place each time and I think that’s what’s essential. I don’t think any different than a visual artist; I don’t think you can say one installation is more important than another installation. I think that it might have had more impact on the masses at a time, but they’re all responding to the changes that are occurring and you couldn’t really super-impose one ten years later if you follow me. It sometimes works because of the time at which it comes out.

WOMANROCK: Lyrically you’ve commented that you write so that people can find themselves in your music, not you? You focus on that a lot in your new book too.

AMOS: In the book I call it giving people a “backstage pass’ into the creative process. When the songs come, sometimes they come in two-bar phrases and sometimes they come more complete. What I am always trying to do is to translate them in a way that people can develop their own relationships with the songs. If you ‘re too literal sometimes you anchor a song into space and time in a way that it doesn’t allow it to take flight. I try to work more with parables and prose as a songwriter than a style of lyric writing where there’s no room for interpretation. I’ve always been drawn to songs where word association and wordplay are part of what that artist does. Sylvia Plath was always very much like that and Anne Sexton. I was inspired by their work as poets. I’m trying to translate what I call “essences.” They don’t have arms or legs, but it’s more like light filaments. They don’t look like us when they’re complete. They look more like light structures. That’s really what it’s all about.

WOMANROCK: Giving people such license for imagination in your work, are you surprised sometimes when you hear how your songs are interpreted?

AMOS: I find it pretty intriguing because it’s not as if what it means to them is wrong. It’s not. That’s their perspective and the songs have always wanted people to have their own relationships with them and I have my own relationship with them, so I’m able to have my opinion.

WOMANROCK: I would think that’s an interesting turn when you’ve created something so personal and you put it out there to witness people cling to it with a different attachment.

AMOS: This is where you really have to let the songs go. You have to let them go and make their friendships and make their enemies with people. The songs are very capable of having their own lives (laughs). They’ve made it very clear to me. It is a paradox where on one hand you’re a co-creator with them and it feels as if there are pieces of my own mosaic of life within them that I really don’t have authority over. I have to allow them to go and be. The authority that I do have is how they’re presented and I try and work with them. A lot of times that has to do with what is going on globally, what is going on in our world at this time and that means the sound of it, the melody choices, and rhythmic choices. Sometimes it’s very much about chronicling time and the music is I would say a lot more involved than people give it credit. A lot of times people talk about the lyrics because it’s more tangible but the curds are very much in the music.

WOMANROCK: Applying your process specifically to The Beekeeper, combined with the sense of “urgency” you felt for this album, could you discuss bringing it all together.

AMOS: Because the right wing movement is not covert any more, but overt, I felt that it was essential to go after certain ideologies and teachings. One major one has been that a woman was responsible for getting us all chucked out of paradise. Therefore the garden allegory that The Beekeeper contained was core, no pun intended, but I felt that we needed to create gardens that represented different emotions that weren’t presided over by the patriarchy. Therefore on the album “Tori” goes to God’s mother, Sophia and asks her how to combat the violence and destructiveness of this time and Sophia basically says, “Tori, you must eat of the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge, unlike my son suggested.” So Tori eats of the fruit and each song is what she begins to have to look at in her own life. Some of her relationships are very loving and some of them are laced at the root with betrayal.

She begins to create this pantheon of songs once she begins to become conscious and that’s really at the root of The Beekeeper. The marriage of sexuality and spirituality is also very much part of what’s occurring here—a marriage within the being, not a marriage between male and female outside the being. The honeybee represented sacred sexuality in the ancient feminine mysteries and because Christianity has taken such a hold, as a minister’s daughter, I felt like we needed to go after this concept. I did a lot of research reading the Gnostic Gospels written by Elaine Pagels discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945. I also read the gospel of Mary Magdalene, which was discovered in the late 19^th century and I began to realize that there was another element to Christianity that was not included by some of the early fathers of the “proper” church. Women and their roles had been diminished and we had become subservient and subjugated in the new church. I was concerned because of some of the choices that were being made for leaders around the world—religious as well as political—that I felt were proponents for the ideology of the patriarchy opposed to the ideology of Jesus, which included women as equals.

If you read the Gnostic Gospels you discover that Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute, but a “prophet.” Maybe that was not “profitable” to the fathers who were creating the church, because how do you get power? Well the patriarchy’s view is you divide and conquer. The greatest way to divide and conquer is within the self, so when you divide sexuality and spirituality within a woman, she is completely and absolutely divided, therefore, The Beekeeper was very much about bringing these paradoxes together into the garden, into one being. The garden’s reflective of a woman’s body. That is the back-story.

Tina Whelski is Editor of Womanrock.com. She is also a columnist and feature writer for The Aquarian Weekly/East Coast Rocker www.theaquarian.com , Managing Editor of Starpolish.com www.starpolish.com , and contributes to The Hollywood Reporter www.hollywoodreporter.com , Modern Drummer www.moderndrummer.com . Music Connection www.musicconnection.com and Good Times magazine www.goodtimesmag.com . Additionally she consults for Fearless Music TV www.fearlessmusic.com .