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Background: Tori Amos has always been attuned to a higher ground, so it was fascinating to revisit this interview, which took place a little more than a year after 9/11. Like all of us, she was still trying to make sense of the attack and had captured her response in Scarlet’s Walk, released in 2002. Unfortunately, the lessons she shares here have gone unheeded by those in power and we seem to grow ever distant from the “story of the land.”

Tori Amos: America Trampled Under Foot

By Robert Cherry

“I don’t really know you. And I don’t know if you’re a cynic. But I’m about to say something, and I realize you can take it any way you want to,” begins Tori Amos, explaining the unusual collaborations that inspired her new album, Scarlet’s Walk.

Throughout her 14-year recording career, Tori Amos’ statements have arrived with disclaimers, but not from her. Usually they’re delivered by journalists who feel obligated to explain that she’s “kooky.” Perhaps because she’s been misinterpreted so many times, Amos now provides her own disclaimer in the form of a challenge.

“Some journalists who don’t know their mythology misrepresent what I’m about to say. So this is really a test of you,” she says.

It’s a challenge to journalists, as well as to those unfamiliar with the ivory-tickling chanteuse and her music. Before we take that test, some new information. Scarlet’s Walk is Amos’ best and most cohesive album since 1996’s equally epic Boys For Pele. It is, without question, her most ambitious to date.

Amos is renowned for her prodigious musical technique. She famously won a scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore at age 5, then infamously lost it at age 11 when she discovered Led Zeppelin. More crucially—and more rarely—she has a vision to communicate with that technique.

Her latest installment of that vision is an 18-track concept album about post-September 11 America, in which the ancient past and the slippery present clash for the country’s future. Like all of her work, Scarlet’s Walk is a deeply personal album, but it’s also her most outward-looking and even political.

On the surface, the songs track Scarlet’s cross-country road trip and feature some of Amos’ favorite recurring characters: porn stars, a female Jesus, Lotharios dressed as Mr. Right. A colorful map in the CD jacket helpfully traces the journey.

Beneath the surface, Amos constructs a multi-layered allegory about a woman’s spiritual and political awakening. In the lilting “Taxi Ride,” for instance, she sings, “This ‘we are one’ crap as you’re invading; this thing you call love—she smiles way too much.” It’s a long way from Alan Jackson. And, yes, Amos knows the difference between Iraq and Iran.

Amos worked once again with drumming ace Matt Chamberlain and bassist Jon Evans to create the moods evoked by the regions depicted in each song. She also called on some more powerful collaborators.

On songs such as the harrowing “I Can’t See New York”—written post-Sept. 11, and featuring lines like “I can’t find my way out of this hunting ground”—Amos also collaborates with the spirit of the land itself. Which is where the test begins.

“My grandfather trained me in Native American mythology,” she explains. “He believed that you have a relationship with the land. And as a storyteller in the oral tradition, you are co-creating with the land when you’re talking about events that occurred in a particular geographical place. When I’m in New York, I’m co-creating with the spirit of that city, the soul of that being who was wounded at that time.

“My grandfather believed the land could hear and was autonomous. And he was taught that by his grandmother, who escaped the Trail Of Tears [the forced migration/genocide of the Cherokee nation], and was kept alive by the land for nine months. So when you sing a song, there isn’t a hubris, like, ‘I have a message.’ I’m just the librarian—hopefully one with a cute shoe,” she says with a laugh.

Amos was in New York city during the terrorist attacks. That experience, along with a subsequent tour of the States behind the covers album Strange Little Girls, inspired the new disc. The well-shod librarian concluded that Americans are suffering, in part, from a disconnect with the land.

“A Native American woman came to see me on tour, and she said, ‘Now is the time that the people who own the land, and the people who hold the land—and they’re two very different things—must come together for the sake of her survival.

“‘The white brother came here and conquered. But you did not integrate the knowledge we’ve collected over thousands of years of living in this place. You go back to Europe and bring those stories here. But that’s not the story of this land.’

“There’s something missing,” concludes Amos. “We don’t have a link with our land.”

©2002 Robert Cherry, all rights reserved