Led Zeppelin was a big influence on Amos, and her first album was actually as the lead singer of a pop/metal band called Y Kant Tori Read. That album disappeared into obscurity, and five years later Amos re-emerged with her current style. Her 1992 solo debut Little Earthquakes was released to critical acclaim and sold over a million copies. After several platinum albums with Atlantic Records, Amos moved to Epic Records for her latest release. I had the pleasure of speaking with Tori a couple of days before a concert here in Rapid City, South Dakota in April, 2003.
Chad Bowar: Describe your latest album, Scarlet's Walk.
Tori Amos: It's a sonic novel. It's a story about a woman who's crossing the country, asking questions, seeing what it is she truly believes in.
Is Scarlet all you, mostly you, or partly you?
My husband asks me that sometimes. Being that Scarlet had four lovers he wants to know. I don't really commit to this. It took me 15 years to cover the country, so I guess I've been writing this for a long, long time.
How did September 11th play into the equation for recording the album?
I was in New York that day, and I started touring soon after. I began to see people asking questions that they hadn't really asked before, and you're seeing it more now than you've seen in a long time. Who is our spiritual mother that we call America? What is our relationship to her, and is she in the right hands? Is she being protected? These are questions I started seeing from East Coast to West Coast, on whatever side of the politic you're on. People just saying I see my relationship with the country different since 9/11. I think that people began to feel that she was alive, more akin to the Native American belief that America is alive and a soul, and not an object that's controlled by any government. So the Native American way of thinking influenced the record quite a bit.
One of the songs on Scarlet's Walk, "Carbon", takes place at Wounded Knee, which is near here in South Dakota.
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