Tori's torrid search for self

SILENCE That was the response of most people after the Atlantic Records playback of Boys For Pete, the latest album from Tori Amos. "The only ones who got what it was about were the head of the classical department and an S&M woman," she says, smiling, and immediately bringing into focus both the divine multi textural musicality of her song cycle and the sado masochistic nature of many of its lyrics. Equally revealing was the response of the record company executive who told her "This album is going to unnerve people." But then the latter is so true of so much that Tori Amos sings, and speaks about, that there are, no doubt, many people who believe the woman herself should be confined to silence.

Tellingly, this was the very subject she addressed in her first hit single, Silent All These Years, a song which has since become an anthem for an age in which more and more women are wrenching from patriarchal power structures, such as pop music, the right to express themselves as they see fit. Likewise, in relation to religion. Indeed, an understanding of the tension between religion and sexuality, in particular, is central to any appreciation of Tori's work.

This, after all, is the woman whose legendary song, Icicle, deals with a youthful clash between masturbation and religious belief. This is the woman who claims such acts "of defiance, of asserting myself against the oppressive force of religion which has always made women deny their sexuality". Similar tendencies made her decide to record certain tracks for the new album in a church, in Delgany, Co Wicklow, near where she now lives.

"This whole album is about reclaiming the woman in me, as opposed to the girl, which is more what songs like Icicle were about," she elaborates.

"What spurred it on was that I started to see how hidden things were in my relationships with men, which also reminded me of all the layers that are part of life in the South. Like me being told at 10, I know you love that nigger down the road, then going in to dinner and being seduced by the smell of sweet potatoes, and not seeing the horror underneath it all. I wanted to get back to the horror. Segregation also generates much of what I do, because my mother was part Cherokee and married into Scots, Irish, English and German, which is another part of what I'm trying to reconcile within myself. And then there was a woman's place in religion, which made it fine to be intelligent, but not passionate. Being a minister's daughter, I felt all that acutely, which is partly why I recorded such passionate songs in a church."

This period of reappraisal also was propelled into higher gear as a result of the break up of Tori's long time relationship with Eric Rosse.

"I didn't have to really look at this until separated from my soul mate and tried to fill that space with other men, quickly at one point becoming a vampire," she says, echoing her previously stated belief that women should be free to explore the "bad girl" and the prostitute within themselves, though this, too, was part of her own potential which had been oppressed by her "relationship with God, the father" and with her own family who rejected such women as "purely evil".

"But what I didn't understand, then, is that the Magdalen is truly the blueprint for woman and that blueprint was not passed down," Tori now asserts.

"I see Mary Magdalen as the High Priestess, the sacred bride of Christ But this was robbed from women. And as I was crawling on my knees in Oklahoma, during the Under The Pink tour, I was crying out what is this emptiness inside my being? What is that something men have access to, and I don't? Not just patriarchal power.

I was negotiating multi million dollar deals, so it wasn't about being powerless, at that level.

It was that I lacked a sense of completeness in my soul.

"Then I met these ancients not just native Americans who train people to go into their unconscious. And while I did that, for a year, I was writing these songs and discovering the energy of the Magdalen, T. S. Eliot's wife, the Catherine the Greats, and Anne Boleyn. That's why Boleyn shows up on this record. But women like her, who were sexually active, did not gain the respect given to her daughter, the Virgin Queen. Likewise Mary Magdalen, as opposed to the Virgin Mary, the Divine Mother. As I started to understand the depth of this lie, and how there was no reflection of whole woman anywhere, I started to claim that reflection in my own being, and each song on this record became a fragment that had been perverted, as in Professional Widow."

Similarly, in terms of tracks like Muhammed My Friend, in which Tori "feminises all God forces" and Father Lucifer, which was fired by her need to walk with "she that is Lucifer," she explains.

"I've pulled in a lot of men who wanna be Lucifer as in prince of their own shadows, rather than just evil so I had to make contact with that spiritual archetype, through music. And I did. That's when I also met the Professional Widow, and the Marianne of one of the following songs, who may, or may not have killed herself. That's how I got these songs.

But how much of what Tori rationalises here is also an extension of her feeling that what was "robbed" from her, specifically, was a sense of her own "womanness" as a result of the rape she experienced at 22, and wrote about in the song Me And A Gun (This song later won her a Visionary Award from the Washington D.C. Rape Crisis Centre.) Certainly, nowhere in her work is the link between sex and religion captured as forcefully as when she says, in that song `I sang Holy Holy' as he buttoned down his pants/ Me and a gun and a man on my back". Speaking about this experience during a previous interview, Tori explained "It was a knife, not a gun. And I was singing hymns because he told me to. I sang hymns to stay alive. Yet I really do feel as though I was psychologically mutilated that night and that now I'm trying to put the pieces back together again." How much further down this particular path has Tori Amos progressed in the last two years?

"I've realised that the question of `what is a woman?' has been around much longer than my rape experience" she responds. "And part of my healing is an understanding of how to pull those fragments together."

But is Tori sexually healed? Has she risen above her post rape tendency to equate instinctively sex with violence, which also led to her being unable to consummate lovemaking with Eric Rosse?

"Well, some wonderful things have happened," she smiles. "Yet I also feel I had to hit rock bottom, to feel incapable of ever having intimacy with a man again, without getting physically sick. On that tour, though I'd feel passion white playing music, I'd then walk off stage and not be able to tap into that with Eric, who was one of the most beautiful men you could meet, inside and out. I had too much armour on. But I finally broke out of that, after he left and I threw myself into situations where I was not respected. My soul was urinated on, defecated on, believe me. And the rage came out, in the first song I wrote for this album, Blood Roses, as in where I say, I've shaved every place where you've been which means I know I've thrown away those graces. I crawled, I grieved for the lost woman. But that was my fire walk, my rite of passage. That's what this album is really all about.

"And I finally made the journey back to man, by making the journey back to woman, which is what I was helped to do by the ancients. And as I started to claim my worth as a woman, not from the reflection of myself in the eyes of men, but from within myself, I began to open up again. Now I'm on another plane. I know diversity creates wholeness and I have a right to feel every emotion that exists, which is not a truth that was previously passed down to me."

Tori claims she and Rosse finally parted because "we couldn't grow any further together, and didn't know why" and that this sense of "still loving Eric, but letting go" very much informs the song, Hey Jupiter. But is it true that she is now involved in a new relationship?

"Yes," she says, smiling. "But it's based on different things, in that I'm not looking to him for my womanhood, though sex is part of it. How that happened was a very slow process. But, at one point, I just looked up, tears were running down my face and I said, `I can do this'. And he just held me. It was a sacred moment. Yet it wasn't the act of being able to be sexual with a man that made me feel complete as a woman, that was something that happened after I travelled to the core. And what I felt, about the change is there in songs like Jupiter. Putting The Damage On and Not The Red Baron, which is pivotal, because it helped me to have compassion for the men in my life. Indeed, part of me is still in love with the men who brought me to my fire. That doesn't mean I wanted to take the boys to the edge of a volcano and push them in Though that thought did cross my mind"

Yes, Tori agrees that many of these "boys" probably had the same thought about her, though she rejects "completely" the suggestion that she cannibalised their lives to serve this album. Its seemingly threatening cover on which she poses holding a gun with "a dead cock and a snake coiled around my feet" is merely her "again showing I've reconciled myself to certain aspects of my past". And if this most "intimate" collection of songs is finally greeted by mass silence, will Tori Amos take this as a rejection of her most personal sell?

"Probably," she muses. " But if that happens, I'll still celebrate in silence. Because, although Boys For Pete may not be commercial, it is the only album I could have made at this point in my life."