Tori Amos Interview

I've always said to my male friends, if you're going to do your wife in, you better be careful the friends she makes when she's dead. I was just drawn to the woman dying in the trunk as her daughter is sitting in the car while the girl's father is telling his side of the story while the mother's body is in the trunk. So my perspective is she's not quite dead yet, and the final thing that this woman hears is her ex-husband, father of her child, telling her daughter this, knowing that her daughter will become a strange little girl one day. And her daughter is being drawn into the horrible crime, this murder. So I thought it was really important that people heard the mother's side of it. Fair is fair.

You started playing piano at a very young age. When did you decide you wanted to pursue music as a career?

I was doing funerals and weddings when I was 8 or 9. I was cheaper than the organist, so my dad could cut me a deal. I realized funerals and weddings were intriguing, but I needed to stretch. I've playing clubs since I was 13 or 14 in Washington, DC where lobbyists and Congressmen would come in and have their cocktails and I played piano bar for them, their requests. I think being exposed to that political side of things maybe influenced my work, because I was intrigued on what went on, how it worked. As a piano player you just there and listen for six hours and people say things that they probably shouldn't be saying, and eventually part of these people have become characters in my stories. When I moved out to L.A., in some ways it was child's play compared to what goes on in Washington. It's a lot more glitzy, but it's definitely not as conniving. L.A.'s much easier to see what people are up to.

You're going to be here in concert Wednesday night. What should a fan expect to see at a Tori Amos concert?

We love playing live, and every night it's a different story. I don't write the setlist until about an hour before I go on, depending on what's occurring in the world. The songs change their meaning depending on which song occurs

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