...about Mother Nature, Spirits, Faeries, garden(s), plants, flowers and pets...

  "Yeah, I believe in Fairies and that they exist... 
I mean, they talk to me. Our world is just as real as theirs, do you know what I mean?"
[June 1992, 'Keyboards', Germany]
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  "I believe in life force... 
and that we can all tap into it. It’s there for anybody and everybody. We’re all a part of it."
[February 1996, 'KSCA' Radio Station, US]
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  "Let me tell you something about the Faeries...
You go to Ireland. You go someplace like County Cork, where the guys are maybe twice as big as you. And you diss the Faeries... You won't have a face left. Because the thing is, those people understand. If you have a modicum of intelligence, you'd understand that the faeries were a civilization that they believe was exterminated... So it's, that's just a term they've put to it, but it was a race of people. It was a people - the Tuatha de Danaan."
[February 1996, 'KROQ' Radio Station, US]
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  "I think that people who can’t believe in Faeries aren’t worth knowing. Neil [Gaiman] believes that Faeries have gone beyond cool. They’ve transcended cool. I just think alternate realities make you a good writer. If your work is any more than one dimension, you believe in Faeries. I’m sure I’ll start thinking now about all the people I know who don’t believe, that I quite like. We can still go have a pint. Not the Chardonnay, though."
[March 1996, 'Spin', US]
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  "It goes back to studying mythology and really getting fascinated with a race of people who were driven underground. They were called Faeries in later lore, but they’ve become this whole caricature. This is difficult to explain to people, when all they can think about is Tinkerbell."
[July 1996, 'The Georgia Strait', US]
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  "With Poppa, there was Spirit in all things...
You have a relationship with the Spirit World or you have nothing."
[August 1998, 'Details', US]
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  "I was in a mood that day...
We were supposed to be cutting something else, and it wasn't coming together. Matt [Matt Chamberlain] was running around, but the band hadn't shown up yet -- meaning Caton [Steve Caton] and Jon [Jon Evans] hadn't come. And I just had this thing about my garden. I got a list from my gardener about everything that was in my garden that was still alive." [on song: 'Dãtura']
[1999, Unknown]
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  "...I'm talking about the times when lines have been crossed by men. Men can be dangerous, like in the song Dãtura about how sometimes they can bring you gold and sometimes they can be the bearer of poison. The plant Dãtura is a hallucinogen and it's like men. If you get the right amount you'll walk into the garden and become a woman, but if too much seeps in in the wrong way and at the wrong time - it'll kill you."
[1999, Unknown]
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  "There's something about this place," Tori Amos whispers...
"Driving out here in the jeep with an ice-cream cone I didn't run into any ghosts, but it is mystical. There are so many land secrets. The trees know things..."
...
We're in Cornwall, up the coast from King Arthur's old 'hood--these days Tori's--sitting on a cliff and staring at the sea which the wind's doing its darndest to blow us into.
...
"You know that story about the Grinch who stole Christmas?" Tori asks. "How his heart grew 70 times seven larger that day? When people come down from London, it feels like that here. And when I'm in a town in the America South, and you're humming Deliverance because you just know that Uncle Billy is doing something strange with little Tommy, you think of this place--and you breathe a little easier knowing you can get back to it."
[October 1999, 'Mojo', UK]
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  I: The song Dãtura that I was having a listen to - I've been reading up on it. Now apparently you have a herb garden with a list that you run off in the song Dãtura as well.
T: Had.
I: You had? What's happened?
T: You know that Hurricane Irene?
I: Oh yes, did hear about it.
T: Oh, she kicked my butt. My gardener, I had this emergency message from my gardener, like I get this message in Berlin. "Your gardener's calling from the tropics - they say it's tragic." So I'm going to have to go down there and figure it out. But I've lost everything in the garden except the Datura. (laughs) Which is a hallucinogen, that's good because then it'll help us get everything back together again.
I: Fantastic. So do you put together herbal remedies? Do you concoct natural remedies for things? Like oh, example, we've got a lot of people who are studying at the moment - they're cramming, they're stressing. Anything for concentration? Or for creativity? (pause) Do you mess about with your herbs at all?
T: Uh, no. I have other people to do that. Because it's kind of tricky stuff. Because honestly, like with Dãtura, if you do it wrong - people have died doing it. So if you get it wrong you could become brain damaged.
I: Mm. I read that...
T: Some people around me think that I'm brain damaged but I don't want to take it further. You know?
[November 1999, 'Triple J Radio', US]
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  "Dãtura is this plant...
that if you put too many leaves in to steep --even though it does have altered-state potential in a big way, like bella donna-- if you don't steep it correctly, I hope you like to fly..."
[November 1999, 'Pulse Magazine', US]
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  "There’s this wonderful humility that... 
happens when you deal with the power of Mother Nature,” she says. “I think women can be very much like that. Lionesses are very much like that—they’re just sitting there sunning, very calm and then some ridiculous tourist comes and wants to take a picture. Then all they find is his camera.”
[December 1999, 'Courier Mail', Australia]
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  Tori's Tip on visiting the 'Niagra Falls'... 
 
[2002-2003, 'Scarlet's Web']
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  My first pet...
"I had some fish, and I loved them. Once, me and my friend transported the fish in the back of his car, and they fell onto the car floor. We got them back in the little bowl, and they survived for a while after that, so that was a big moment. But they didn't survive my apartment."
[October 2002, 'Boyz', UK]
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  "Playing live gives me energy in itself...
There's a frequency that music offers if you're able to tap into it and it really is like an elixir that I haven't experienced in any other form."
 ...
"Putting that aside, I have a disciplined regimen and found what works for me with eating and how to prepare myself mentally. There is a spiritual side to a daily like that can really support you, even if it's a quiet moment you take to take in say how beautiful the day is and the gifts that Mother Nature gives us. It's about recognizing the creative force that is around us and that's inspiring to me because we're all a part of this in a small way."
 ...
"To be a part of such creativity is a gift. That doesn't mean that I don't have bad moments every day because I do. I have to have chats with myself every day about something that has really pissed me off. But it's about not letting that take over my day."
[July 2003, 'MSN chat']
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  "Tori Amos heard the story of the Corn Mother from her grandfather [Poppa, who she had an immense close relationship with. She wrote 'Frog on my toe' for him, a tribute when he died.] as a girl, during summers spent with him in North Carolina. The love of the earth was ingrained in her, along with an awareness that her own talents were a blessing she could not take for granted. Her Cherokee blood is one element in the complex weave of influences that greated Amos as she grew toward the moment when she could begin, respectfully, to create herself."
[An Powers, February 2005, 'Piece by Piece']
...
"Nanny and Poppa each had a full-blooded Cherokee grandparent who was on the Eastern Cherokee tribal rolls. They were spiritually drawn to the old ways and chose to stay on their native ground. From the Smokies of east Tennessee to east of the Blue Rdge Mountains in North Carolina, they settled on old Cherokee ancestral land. They understood that this ancestral land was their sacred spiritual source, just as the Lakota will say the Black Hills are theirs. This is where I spent all my summers as a child."
...
"Nanny grew the garden... It was tiny, but it enticed me because of the begonias and the honeysuckle."
...
"Poppa wouldn't give up on me...
- 'Focus on that tree, little 'un,' he would say. We're talking around 1967, when I was four.
° 'Come on, Poppa, I'm hungry'. 'You almost have it. You can get this. Feel her strength. Let her tell you her story. Now sit still and let her play you like you play that piano.'
As I got older Poppa would push me.
° 'Can you hear the ancestors, little 'un? They are not happy today.'
- 'No, Poppa, I can't really hear them.'
° 'Then ya just aren't listenin', are ya? Now don't you roll those eyes at me. Yer gonna needs to know this one day.'
- 'Know what?'
° 'How to tap into a place's power spot.' He would bend down with his hand, touching that sandy Carolina soil.
- 'What are you talking about?'
° 'Hum. Ya gotta hear the hum.' He looked straight at me as if I were being told the most important piece of information ever.
- 'The hum?'
° 'Yes, the hum of the Great Mother. Let this sink in. Every inch of this land has been walked on by somebody's ancestors. That means there are events, conversations, killins', singins', dancin'--Lord Almighty--squabblin', you name it. It has happened. So ya decides first what ya needs to tap into. Find the way in. Ya must hear the tone. Follow it and yer probably at a vortex.'
- 'You believe this, Poppa?'
° 'I know this, Shug: the white man don't know.'
- 'Careful, Poppa, Dad's white.'
° 'Hmm. He's Irish-Scottish. That ain't white. They been fightin' the white man who takes the land--takes the land till the Grim Reaper comes up and taps the white man on hte shoulder and says, 'No weaslin' outta this one, yer time has come.' It used to tickle your old Poppa to see a white man turn white as a ghost.'
- 'Ok, in English.'
° 'Most people nowadays, Shug, don't see. Don't feel. Don't hear anythin' that science can't prove. A hundred years ago people said a man would never fly.'
- 'But he couldn't.'
° 'Yes, granddaughter. Yes, he could. He just hadn't figured out how The Eagle Dancers knew man could fly. It was only this dimension that the mechanics hadn't been worked out.'
- 'So now we know how to fly.'
° 'Only the physical, granddaughter, not the spiritual. Back to your studies, and find me a vortex before lunch.'
- 'Does my hungry tum-tum count?'
° 'Nope.'"
...
'We'd take walks every day, and he would communicate the way he saw the world, which was that there was life in all things, that there was a kind of knowing in all things. Like anyone, according to Poppa, I'd have to retune my own receiving information system, in my own being, to be able to hear the unique harmonics--thereby understanding the language of the Spirit World. What I do know is that he knew this language. I can not tell you I quite understand how he did, but I watched with amazement as he would communicate with nature, and he seemed to understand it--he seemed to bask in his relationship with it. I did not have this ability and somehow I knew I never would, but at age four I began to feel something else. I began to feel the music inhabiting me.'
[February 2005, 'Piece by Piece']
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  "When I lived alone...
and didn’t have to answer to anybody, I had a really different life. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy that life. I did. But [marriage and motherhood] is a different experience. Having a child means that it can’t be about you all the time. But finding a balance is key-not losing your self-respect [by being] trampled on as a mother or a wife, and retaining your personhood within [those roles]. Look at Mother Nature. The seas can be calm and yet she can become a tidal wave. That’s been my greatest teacher-the earth herself. Watching how she can hold the extremes in both hands and bring them into balance. Now, some women relate more to [other] aspects. You need the nurturers, [but you also] need the warriors. You need the ones who can say, “I can give an assessment about this without being swayed by my emotions in this moment.” Like my sister, she’s an internist. Sometimes she has to make pretty serious decisions and she has to keep her emotions out of it. You need all different kinds of women to make the matriarchy."
[March/April 2005, 'Bust', US]
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  "One of the reasons I wanted...
Damien Rice to sing on The Power Of Orange Knickers and the reason I chose orange for terrorists, not because of Guantanemo Bay, but also William of Orange, and this is the idea of invasion. When people are invading, they usually think they're helping. And being brought up by my grandfather from the Eastern Cherokee nation, the English, German, Irish, French, Spanish, European who invaded thought that they were doing the Indians a service. We were savages and they could not honour our spiritual beliefs. Now there is a tidal wave in America happening underneath that, and people are turning more now to the Native American ways."
 ...
"They're definitely searching for a connection to the land. With all the crisis' that have happened with Mother Nature, she is speaking loudly, 'you must hear me.' The Mother Revolution is already occurring and that's why in The Beekeeper, I was really trying to target some of the dark ominous intentions that are at work in America."
[May 2005, 'X-Press Online', Australia]
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  "We look at Mother Nature...
as our teacher, all kinds of devouring essences exist, but I really believe it's how you utilise parts of your being in your life."
[May 2005, 'X-Press Online', Australia]
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  Coils of cayenne-red hair whip across Tori Amos's face... 
"The gales here are fierce, dramatic - like theater pieces," she says, her voice almost lost in the Cornish wind. "Mother Nature steers this ship." Amos throws an oversize anorak over jeans and a sweater and squelches determinedly in gum boots across the muddy back garden to join her husband, Mark Hawley, a sound engineer with surfer hair who's wearing beach shorts despite the weather. He slips an arm around her shoulders, and they gaze at a rain-lashed building site, the latest redevelopment project on their rural property. Amos grins broadly. "Isn't it cool?" she says.
 ...
Cornwall allows her to "live anonymously." And there's a certain poetic logic behind Amos's making it her home: Her songs play with a whimsical romanticism that suits a land soaked in mysticism. "The Cornish have that stuff imprinted in them," she says. "Ask for directions and they may say, 'Turn left, past the fairy ring.' But they don't shake crystals at you." More important, this place allows Amos to bring up Natashya in an environment where she's "more aware of the realities of nature. Tash knows that the grocery store is dependent on what grows in a field. There's an invisible cord between the people and the land, as the American Indians have, " she says.
 ...
Amos's Cherokee heritage through her maternal grandparents is a big influence, even here, far from the U.S. Amos concedes that at times she misses her home country. "Especially the casual familiarity, the attitude of 'If it's not right, let's fix it.' On this side of the Atlantic you run up against reasons why you can't do it. But sometimes discernment is a good thing. That's why it's good to have two points of view." The climate is another sticking point. "I miss the warmth of Florida," she says. "We had an exotic garden...before the hurricane."
[May 2005, 'In Style', UK]
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  "I believe...
...in never approaching things halfheartedly.
...in eating good food. Life is too short not to!
...Mother Nature can be our greatest teacher.
...that stepping into a good high-heeled shoe opens a world of possibilities."
[June 2005, 'Glamour Magazine', US]
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  "I think on [the title track] "The Beekeeper"... 
it was addressed, because the song itself speaks about loss. I was drawn to the idea that in the bee colony, the drones are the ones that go first. I thought that it was nature's parallel for the loss of this man before his time. It was originally written about my mother -- she was critical, and she flat-lined and came back. That's the last time I saw my brother. But after his accident, I finished [the album] with an ode to him. "Toast," the final song on the record, I wrote on the plane coming back from the funeral."
[March 2006, 'Rolling Stone', US]
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