Tori sat down for an interview with LP33.tv during her visit to Austin, Texas where she performed at the South By Southwest Festival. The interview was broken into 4 parts, with one video a day being  posted on the home page of LP33.tv (Monday April 27th- Thursday April 30th)  culminating in the offer of a free download of “Maybe California”, a track off her yet to be released album Abnormally Attracted to Sin. 

(thanks go to Veronica  for transcribing these)

LP33 Interview Transcript, Part 1 of 4 – Monday, April 27th, 2009.

I do think these are really difficult times. Some people I know have completely had to change their lives and I think now, more than any other time, artists have to express this struggle.

[I'm Tori Amos and you are watching LP33.TV]

There is a song on the new record about one mother talking to another. One is about ready to jump off a cliff. We think younger women have a right to do that. That’s going to happen sometime in your life where it crosses your mind, quite possibly, but mothers — my god — if the mothers start jumping off the cliff, it’s chaos. But, don’t you think, in this time now, that mothers have been pushed to the limit beyond limit? When everything is falling to pieces and they don’t feel they can necessarily nurture ’cause they’re losing their jobs, they can’t put their kids into the schools they want, and, so, how do you find the way to look at these feelings and get through the chaos? Sometimes you feel completely powerless and there are songs on the new work that do that, and then there’s songs where you’re ready to take on a governor.

This is my tenth studio album and I think it’s my eighth solo production with my team. I certainly don’t work alone, my god, my engineers are right there beside me — Mark Hawley and Marcel van Limbeek, and they’re in the trenches with me. The musicians crawl in there with me. It’s not a commercial studio atmosphere. You have to really roll up your sleeves, make the wine by hand, pick the grapes — all that.

It’s a very, very different thinking space — a singer-songwriter — from production. The producer holds the power on a record. Artists come in and out as the producer sits there and takes what they’ve done and then builds this creature.

On Little Earthquakes, I handed over the production very much to those who were in the producer’s chair, and even though I was a co-producer on certain songs, Precious Things, etc., and I worked right alongside Eric Rosse — the other tracks… there wasn’t a situation where I could have that kind of power. Rolling up sleeves and being a part of that foundational work — it’s really exciting, but I didn’t have that skill in 1991. And, all these years, I think has been building that skill. And, so, this record is probably the most ambitious on the production front.

LP33 Interview Transcript, Part 2 of 4 – Tuesday, April 28th, 2009. 

The business of music, in the beginning, made me very, very tough.

[I'm Tori Amos and you're watching LP33.TV]

I don’t know. I didn’t have the sense of humour that I have now. Maybe that was my gift. Maybe that was the gift that was given to me, once you had passed through these tests, and the tests in the music industry are sort of like, I would say, heats of the Olympics. You may have one successful record, and then you think, I am here, and you don’t realize that that’s just the beginning of a potential career.

My mind goes back to times when I’ve been in great battle with different ideas. They’re not just people; they’re ideas about what the music business should be, and sometimes they forget about the power of music.

When you have advertisers that control certain media outlets, and if they have an agenda and they don’t like the message that an artist is giving, a message that says, “There are those who like to control the masses,” and you can become targeted. And once you realize that, that is a very different game you begin playing. When you have governments that are targeting you and when you’re torn, possibly, between them, and they can get to you in ways that we don’t need to speak about. But, the point is that arguing with a record company head is just baby stuff compared to what happens when you piss off a huge multi-national because they feel that women, for example, should be subservient. Here [in the head], not out here, not in the world, but here [in the head] and here [in the heart]. So, they create thoughts, ideas as bondage.

Look how many girls are choosing to be in relationships where they’re demeaned. The letters coming to RAINN and to us are endless of the cutting and the self-destruction. Nobody is doing it to them outwardly. There is not a hand that’s doing it, but you have to think about the ideas that get put out there, and you have to really fight that with yourself, inside yourself. And there are people in the arts, writers, that are putting ideas out there that challenge this. And, so, in your work you try and find things that give people keys to the secret sciences, the mysteries. It’s about thinking for yourself.

LB33 Interview Transcript, Part 3 of 4 – Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

I love music, more than anything. You do what you love and it was approved of by my father — he was a minister at the time.

[I'm Tori Amos and you are watching LP33.TV]

Being in a very devoted Christian household in the 60s, I think I needed another world that wasn’t controlled by others’ belief systems, and I had a place in music to discover what it was that I believed in.

I didn’t get exposed to great art until a lot later. It took me awhile for me to travel and to really see what was out there, and seeing how other cultures look at their surroundings. The rural parts of the world have art from nature and that art is its own if you’re open to seeing how the earth creates. And, so, they have that exposure that we, in the city, sometimes don’t open our eyes to.

I think now because you have the Internet, there are kids out there who might be stuck in a belief system or in a family that doesn’t allow you to just pick up and go to Moma or popover to London and go to the tape. And, so, and I don’t just mean from a financial side because we all know, if you want to get somewhere. I know, when I wanted to get somewhere, I found ways of getting there, and it didn’t stop me financially. I would save and find ways to get me to the place that was just a well, a well of ideas. And now you have the Internet, and you don’t have to leave the town you’re in if you are confined. And, so, I think that that is one of the most wonderful gifts that the Internet brings.

LP33 Interview Transcript, Part 4 of 4 – Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Each song has a visualette. They’re not music videos, really — they’re short films. I kind of see them like silent movies, with the music as the story.

[I'm Tori Amos and you are watching LP33.TV]

The director of the films is Christian Lamb. We’ve been working together on these films for — oh my goodness — over a year and a half. I met Christian because we were filming the live show and he jumped on the bus with us for three weeks and we gathered these montages of the crew, and the band, and everything that was going on. And, so, he would come to me and show me this montage that he had put together and he would put the music from the live show, and I would say, “Stop. No, no, cut that music off. Let me just watch it in silence.” And, I would look at it and I said, “No, this is a different story, and this music does not tell this story.” And, I would go off and write something. And, that was the beginning when I knew, oh my god, this is another, this is a whole other project coming. And, so, the writing happened in a couple of stages, and then he would come film to the music I would create, and I would create music to the films that he had created. So, it’s this collaboration that I have never experienced before with a filmmaker. 

I don’t sit around and think about my career over the last, I don’t know, eighteen years when I’m working on a project. When you bring it up to me, and I think about it, it’s something my mother told me once. She took my hand and she said, “Tori Ellen, do you see this woman standing next to you in the mirror?” And I said, “Well, of course, Mom. That’s the mother I love more than anything.” And she said, “I don’t recognize that woman. She’s a stranger to me becuase when I look in that mirror, there’s a young woman in high heels, running, and these ankles, now, are so swollen. And that’s a stranger at eighty years old looking back at me, and I don’t like it.” And, the passing of time in here [my heart]… sometimes I feel as if, sometimes that so much time hasn’t passed and so many records haven’t occured, but yet, the songs walk with me and they’ve changed me.