Tori Amos: The Enchanted Forest (Con't)

"Tori goes to levels of emotional rawness that most people don't like to go to, ever," says Ron Shapiro, executive vice president of Amos' label, Atlantic. "She wants to stir things up, but most people are not looking for that heavy a trip."

"The kids that come to Tori are the outcasts," says celebrity makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin, one of Amos' close friends. "She offers them solace and understands them on such a deep level." He pauses. "I know it sounds New Agey, but Tori loves to give and to heal. She's about feelings, and she's willing to share her path with people who are open to that." Not that only Web-crawling teens and twentysomethings can relate. The Doll Lady claims the Amos song "Silent All These Years" pulled her through a midlife crisis. "The most important thing I have learned from Tori," says 36-year-old Melissa Caldwell of the Tori-zine Really Deep Thoughts, "is that I have a voice. Even if no one else wants to hear it, I have to listen to it."

Tori Amos

Amos has resonance for guys, too, although they're often teased mercilessly for it. "If I had a dime for all the 'Tori Anus' jokes I've put up with over the years," says 17-year-old Alex Pearlman of New York City. Aucoin, 37, talks about Amos so zealously that "people think I'm brainwashed." For the most part, there's no such thing as a casual Tori fan. People either dismiss her music as pretentious and twee, or they cover their entire body in Tori tattoos. Really. Amos met one man inked in them from neck to feet. (She gave him a hug and gently suggested that he stop.)

It's no wonder misfits are drawn to her: Amos' early life is worthy of a three-part Behind the Music. Born Myra Ellen Amos to a Methodist preacher in North Carolina, she was a piano prodigy who enrolled in Baltimore's prestigious Peabody Conservatory at the age of five. At 11, Amos was kicked out for preferring Led Zeppelin to Chopin. At 13, she was playing Gershwin tunes in gay bars. At 17, she was a homecoming queen who dabbled in blasphemy. At 21, she was raped at gunpoint by a man who'd come to see her play in L.A. At 24, she was a washed-up rocker buried in bad reviews for the hair-metal fiasco Y Kant Tori Read. And at 27, she was living in London, recording the groundbreaking girl-and-her-piano opus Little Earthquakes.

On that record, and her stunning follow-up, Under the Pink (1994), Amos came off like the kind of deep, troubled, arty gal who furiously scribbles in her journal as she listens to Kate Bush. Her penchant for best-friend-only revelations about masturbating in church ("Icicle"), self-loathing ("Crucify"), and rape ("Me and a Gun") made listeners feel like privileged confidantes. When she founded the advocacy group RAINN (the Rape Abuse & Incest National Network), she showed a feminist can-do streak. But part of Amos' appeal is the way she balances the pensive with the wacky. She's a proponent of fairies, pagan gods, and loopy New Age philosophies, one who's currently reading a book that claims the ancient Sumerians were descended from an alien race. She once posed for a photo with a baby pig suckling at her breast.

"Tori's always been like that," says exGuns N' Roses drummer Matt Sorum, who's known Amos since her Y Kant Tori Read days. "I saw her after one show years ago, and she said to me, 'I knew you were in the audience, I felt you'-all that Tori-type shit," he says, laughing affectionately. "Tori was a star before she was a star, if you know what I mean."

But she is also the rare rock goddess to seriously question the traditional star/fan relationship, keeping the gulf between her and Tori-land as narrow as possible, whether it's responding to a note from a 13-year-old girl with a six-page letter and a stack of books or spending hours in online Web chats. Before every show, she reads ten preselected pieces of fan mail so she can feel closer to her audience. In fact, Amos won't even use the word fan because it "doesn't feel like you're part of the party" (it also makes her think of serial killers). She prefers "the People That Come to the Shows." "I relate to a lot of them," Amos says. "I get letters from kids who are just so exhausted from trying so hard that they don't even know what they're trying for anymore. They don't know where to find their essence-they're not getting anything from drugs or parties. And they realize where I go with my music."

Yet over the past few years, as she moved into her mid-30s, Amos has become far less able, far less willing to leave herself open. "I've really begun to value not spilling the beans on every playing field," she says. As her fame has increased, so has her deliberate remove from the world. "I'm quite a hermit," she says. "I don't go to parties, and I don't socialize much, even with people I know." She spends most of her time in her Cornwall farmhouse, working with her husband/engineer, Mark Hawley. She has learned, she says, to speak in "Chinese whispers": "Every word is loaded, so you find ways to avoid subjects altogether." This extends to her once-confessional lyrics, which have become abstract to the point of incomprehensibility. One of her New Age buddies might say she's building a bit of a "psychic wall."

"I do love playing for the People That Come to the Shows," Amos says earnestly, clasping her hands to her chest, "but it's very intense, and people are emanating all over the place. And there are also those who come to wound-I've seen people actually bite each other. So I have learned how to simultaneously protect myself and be the person onstage who loves to give. It's a paradox that lives within me that I'm just beginning to understand."

SIMULTANEOUSLY A FAN TOTEM, A BID FOR THE MASS MAINSTREAM SUCCESSS that has yet eluded her, and a further retrenchment in her enchanted forest, the double-CD to venus and back is the closest Amos has come to articulating that paradox. Tori-philes have been clamoring for a live album for years, and one venus disc features songs recorded during her 1998 "Plugged" tour, the first time she was backed with a full band. Amos and her crew sat down with hours of tape, rating renditions to come up with a line-up. "It got quite Wimbledon," Amos says, laughing. "Someone made the daft suggestion"-Amos favors British slang and speaks in the slightly clipped tones of that other Anglophile, Madonna-"to put some of the live tracks at the end of the new record. It's like, 'Why don't I just walk up to your painting and paint on it?'"

The other disc was to be a collection of B-sides and rarities, but it morphed into an entirely different project once Amos' friend Marcel Van Limbeek heard some new songs she had been fiddling with. Amos adores Van Limbeek, a Dutch physicist, nudist, and conspiracy theorist, and asked him for advice. "The nudist said to me, 'Sonically, this cannot live in the world of the B-sides,' " Amos says. "It will be separate thoughts." So instead she focused on all the fresh tunes that had "grabbed me by the throat."

Neither as precious as 1996's Boys for Pele, which was recorded in a church and ornamented with bells, bagpipes, and harpischords, nor as experimental as last year's From the Choirgirl Hotel, venus includes a few songs that rival "Cornflake Girl" in pure catchiness. "Tori is a very savvy businesswoman, and I think she feels that now is the time to aggressively make choices," Atlantic's Shapiro says. Some of those choices included coheadlining a tour with Alanis Morissette ("Why not get someone else's fans to pay attention to her?" Shapiro asks) and selling the atmospheric "Bliss" as a downloadable commercial single on the Web-a first for a major label. In another marketing twist, both "Bliss" and the spare, mournful "1,000 Oceans" single were released at the same time, to alternative radio and adult contemporary radio, respectively. "The goal is for Tori to cross over," Shapiro says, "and '1,000 Oceans' is as accessible as anything out there.

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