Tori Amos Song Quotes & Sayings

For a song cycle to work, you have to feel these things when you hear them and you either have an emotional reaction to it or you don't. The plotline is something that gets woven together in the back-story. — Tori Amos

You really do kind of learn a lot about a person when you watch and listen to the songs that mean something to them. — Tori Amos

A guitarist or a drummer can get a cold and still play; I get a cold and sound like a wet mitten trying to sing you a love song. Charming. — Tori Amos

You want listeners to smell the lavender, to feel the point of those knitting needles in a handbag of the granny who happens to harbor a loyalty to Madame Defarge. You want the listener to know the wood's burning in the stove when they walk into the song with me. Music is about all of your senses, not just hearing. — Tori Amos

I think all the boys that write the screaming stuff would write the best love songs ... because they have the most to hide. The guys that are in the most pain are usually the ones with the biggest hearts. — Tori Amos

I've always seen the songs as having a consciousness. Since I was two-and-a-half they would come to me from nowhere. I never thought that I was conjuring them by myself, and I was always grateful they would come and visit ... They've always been very much alive. They don't have a physical body like we do but there seems to be an awareness. — Tori Amos

For many years, I shut down that place inside myself that needed to rage, cry, ask questions and basically just express herself. I made a conscious choice when I put (the song) 'Me and a Gun' on the record not to stay a victim anymore. — Tori Amos

Do you know who we are Mum?" And at that moment I just look into her blue planets for eyes, and she says, "We are Daughters of Song, Mama." And at that I jump up with new life, pick her up, and say, "Now let's go play"_ — Tori Amos

If you can surrender your protection devices, in order to track the potentially raw and perhaps elusive emotions that are the song's DNA, then that is creative vulnerability, which is ultimately hugely empowering. — Tori Amos

When I play live, it's a conversation that we're all having with the song, and the audience ... their response and relationship with the songs is as valid as my relationship with the songs. — Tori Amos

I have insanely dorky taste. Basically, if you're a woman, and you're under any kind of emotional duress, and you sing a song, I will listen to it forever. It's odd being a 37-year-old heterosexual male who owns nothing but Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos. But I'll go against that at first and play something boring like James Taylor. — Matthew Perry

There are things that I refuse to deal with except through my music ... because I don't trust humanity that much, and I don't know if I trust me that much. But I trust the songs. — Tori Amos

I was fascinated to think about a place where men could be the mothers and I thought of my own song-writing and I decided to have a relationship with their daughters. — Tori Amos

Tori Amos had a major influence on how I craft words in a song. Until I heard 'Little Earthquakes' all my lyrics used really obvious analogies like rain for tears. — Hal Sparks

For years I've gathered various books, sources. When I was little it might have been Tolkien, and so I would have just four books around me. I couldn't afford many books at the time, so I'd have what I had. Maybe I'd tear out ten or twenty pictures from magazines because I couldn't afford art books. I would check out library books and try to keep them as long as I could, but I couldn't jot my notes in them. For any particular song, I can't tell you the books that were on the floor, the photographs on the floor. I don't let anybody keep a record of that. Those are the secret ingredients. — Tori Amos

Standin' on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and I'm quite sure I'm in the wrong song. — Tori Amos

Operation Peter Pan spanned from 1960-62 whereby over 14,000 children were sent away from their families in Cuba, some never to reunite again. Pan Am flights took the children to Miami FL, 'Never-Never Land', and the children became known as the 'Peter Pans.' I wrote this song for my daughter, and it is sung for all the daughters and mothers, fathers and brothers who felt this pain of separation all because of governments and their politics. — Tori Amos

I like involved projects. I'm driven by the idea of characters and the song-cycle form is similar to a musical. — Tori Amos