ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 19, 1996 TAG: 9601190016
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: KIRA L. BILLIK ASSOCIATED PRESS
Singer Tori Amos is not one to sweep her demons under the rug. She fearlessly dealt with her rape on ``Me and a Gun'' and criticized the patriarchy of religion on ``God.''
But this time, the ``repressed parts'' of herself, as she calls them, wouldn't go away. She had to look them full in the face on her third album, the bleak 18-song ``Boys for Pele.''
``This work is a novel,'' Amos said in an interview. ``It's the story of the descent of a woman to gain her passion and gain her compassion and not hate the thing that taught her that.''
``The thing'' was her unsuccessful relationships with men.
``These relationships not having worked brought me to my own fire, forced me to it because I couldn't steal it from them anymore,'' she said. ``The thing that I was stealing I needed to find in myself.''
During the ``Under the Pink'' tour - ``God'' was a single off that LP - Amos said she was ``on her knees'' after separating from boyfriend Eric Rosse, who co-produced that record.
``There was no place to lean on; there was no place for somebody to make that ache go away. Then I had to say, `What is this ache?' And the ache was about not letting different sides of my woman to be free.
``Many sides of my musician were being developed but not my woman or my womanhood.''
She realized she had been ``trying to find this energy current in anything I could, whether it be the men in my life or fame or attention or whatever.''
So she began to read about Mary Magdalene; Amos calls her ``the blueprint for women which was never carried over and passed down.'' She sees Magdalene as representing woman as a passionate, compassionate being.
``Boys for Pele'' was recorded in a church in Ireland; that also ties in with the Magdalene theme.
``I went back to the church to claim the passionate part of my womanhood that I had been convinced by the church was wrong,'' she said. ``The idea of speaking my truth, no censorship, in a place that did not honor anyone's truth unless it was the church's truth ... was something that I was going after.''
Pele is the Hawaiian goddess of the volcano. The title's metaphor might refer to a sacrifice, but it's more than that, Amos said.
``As I began to get compassion near the end of the project,'' she said with a laugh, ``there was a flip side to that, which was the gift that those men have given me. In giving to me - or in some cases, not giving - that was the gift, for me to have to find my own fire, find my own passion.''
The record is sparse and distilled; some songs are just Amos and her Bosendorfer upright piano. Often, songs consist of a few repeated notes. When she wants to ``thrash,'' as she said, she brings in a harpsichord.
``That's the bloodline of the piano,'' she said. ``So as I was going back to the bloodline of woman with the Magdalene, I went back to the bloodline of the piano.
``Anything musically I did was to either show you freedom or show you confinement.''
The songs are a spiral staircase down into Amos' pain, rage and grief. ``Blood Roses,'' rooted in a harpsichord riff, is wrought with anger.
``It's about being used, being an object,'' she said. About ``men that weren't ready to fall in love who have no problem licking every inch of your body and trying to suck out your soul.''
``Putting the Damage On'' is the push and pull of temptation; Amos knows he hurt her, but finds he still looks pretty despite what he's done. ``In the Springtime of His Voodoo,'' with its sexy shuffling groove, is along the same line, but she's doing the tempting.
Amos sat on a black leather couch in the offices of Atlantic Records. She wore a short, gray knit dress, matching cabled tights and high suede wedgies in beige, black and gray - part of her extensive shoe collection.
Her hair was less aggressively flame than in the past; her blue eyes reflected the gray of her dress. At first, she sat straight, arms folded. As she became more comfortable, she slouched, she curled in a fetal position - she even turned upside down so her head was where her feet had been and splayed her legs out against the wall.
``I'm stretching my back because it's killing me,'' she said with a giggle.
She'll glance sideways at you sometimes; other times, she'll look you straight in the eye, raising her brows if a comment strikes her fancy. She laces her speech with long pauses as she searches for the right words.
And she speaks in metaphor just as she writes songs. One in particular seems to summarize the album.
``The male-female dynamic is like a garden,'' she said with a slow smile. ``It's like a garden with so many plants, some that haven't even been registered as a proper plant. But that doesn't mean it isn't a proper plant and it isn't growing in your garden.
``I found some girls that were growing in my garden and that's what this record became.''
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ``Anything musically I did was to either show youby CNBfreedom or show you confinement,'' says Tori Amos.