Girl

"The beginnings were composed on an old upright piano in Virginia. It's horribly out of tune, which is one of the things I love about it. The chorus was written but that's about it- I threw it down on tape and forgot about it- months later I was cleaning the house (truly a happening) and was throwing tapes away. Eric intercepted this one out of a pile, I was chopping onions in the kitchen, he brought it in and said 'listen'- I did."

Silent All These Years

"The bumble bee piano tinkle came first. This one evolved slowly but it stayed an obsession until it was finished. I entered boxer occupation- part of me not wanting to hear what 'I' was saying, the other part fighting off 'The Dirty Brain.' I finally distracted THE BRAIN DRAIN with the task of filing chocolate cake recipes."

Precious Things

"Heavily into the sandman comics, by now the nights were late candles all over the house dripping where they would. Wax is a bit more fun to play with than bubble gum. The doors were open by now- I couldn't resist but there's always air suction."

Winter

"Summoned to the piano this Russian music box round played me over and over and over 'til I was wrapped in a blanket with the memory of cinnamon apples on my tongue and boys that didn't- 'We' went back to where I felt no time- it was all happening again, presently."

"Without question my favorite time of the year. Strange for a girl who is always cold. There is something that draws me though, whether it's to catch me watching Torville and Dean walking down a road so bundled up I look like the Yetti or taste testing Day's mulled wine, I've found myself out, I'm a winter girl."

Happy Phantom

"When the songs began showing up, I wrote their names on separate envelopes and made a faerie ring in the middle of the house. I'd go sit in the middle of the ring to focus on a song's direction. All of the songs seemed to work toward the completeness of the other- they decided we needed to hang out with death for a while."

(*At the end of this song- at 3:10, if you listen closely, you will hear Tori say "Oops..." which was overlooked the final cut.)

China

"The fifths in the bass represent the beginning of an ancient ceremony- This ceremony took me to China- took me to the kitchen table where most wars get nurtured- I've always felt China and secrets are good friends. This was the first song written on Little Earthquakes."

"So Cindy called me up and said, 'I know what he's building you.' I said, 'Cin, who's building me what.' 'Your lover in the video,' she said. As I remember, we started to dive into the idea that creative couples make 'things' that can Rip each other and their images of themselves- separate and together, separate and together which make them separate together.

”Build walls separately, build walls together. Egos are delicate things, unfortunately walls are not misperceptions running fast so fast it helps set the stones in place. China was shot in North Corwall. Strangely enough where we recorded Choirgirl five and a half years later. As in Spark you are seeing real water in Winter's glory in England. My 'love' in the video built me two things which the sea took with her- an honest to god Rock piano and an upside down china teacup in the form of a skirt."

Leather

"A hole opens, sometimes, that I fall through- a bit like the Madhatter- I guess where memories coughing in loose molecules come and chase me around for a while. I felt like I had lived 20 different lifetimes from birth through death during the writing of this song. When I looked up from the piano and at the clock, thinking I was hours late for someone, it had only been 8 minutes."

Mother

"Mother came on a bit like dream sleep. It was early morning when I made my way to the piano. I knew that 'they' were trying to show me something- a memory of 'the fall', not the one we've been taught, but the other side of the story which hid the belief of certain ancient mythologies. I began to remember, where I believe, we came from."

Tear In Your Hand

"Emotionally all these songs come from experiences that trigger them. I haven't chosen to talk much about that side of the song-writing- the seed for all these songs. On the technical side I heard the music as a steady motion no change really from verse and chorus only the bridge that leads straight back like a loop to the same toll booth where you threw in some change to go around only to end up surrounded by the place you left. The only difference is by taking the loop ride- you can see the place you left exactly as it is; some sadness a whole lotta corn field and a puddle."

Me And A Gun

"Me And A Gun is based on a personal experience. I wouldn't talk about it for seven years. I saw 'Thelma and Louise' and it's like a door opened- and I began to open that door and for myself from being a victim in my head. You can carry that for the rest of your life really- and I've smashed that."

Little Earthquakes

"My eye twitches sometimes. I was surrounded by the thoughts I smashed they decided I would be a good dinner- I decided I wanted 3 bridges in this song."

Under The Pink

Pretty Good Year

"Mountain biking became a major event in my life for a week. The mud was so thick on the tires- we got there just in time to feel the mountain thaw, the sound when these two merged was something like 'thclpleekooh'- I said on an intake of breath with no lips moving and no throat usage, I like this word and I liked the idea of the eternal footman saying 'asta' on a mountain bike."

"...Like Pretty Good Year, for example. I got a letter from a guy named Greg in England. This one got to me -- it missed getting to me for, like, three months. But it just got passed around to different people, and finally somebody just -- I was walking through the record label in between the tour up in England, and somebody put it in my bag. They just said, 'You know what, Tori? This has been sitting around here. Just take it.' And I took this letter, and I opened my bag two days later, and I read it. It was a picture of him he had drawn himself. It was a pencil drawing. Greg has kind of scrawny hair and glasses, and he's very skinny and he held this great big flower. Greg is 23, lives in the north of England, and his life is over, in his mind. The tragedy of that for me, just seeing that over and over again, got to me so much that I wrote 'Pretty Good Year'. You don't really know what my role is. Am I Lucy, or am I that eight bars of grunge that comes out near the end where I express, and then nothing, everything else is Greg's story? I found that kind of really fun. The emotion is coming from somebody else's story. And yet it touched me so much that I could sing it."

(*This song, as Tori says, is part two of Ode To The Banana King (Part One), as Lucy (Tori) continues from and into Pretty Good Year) *Note! I have believed that Part Two of Ode to The Banana King is Cornflake Girl. I’m really not sure which of us is right!

"Casting 'Greg' for 'Pretty Good Year' was vital because the song was inspired by a real boy named Greg- whom I have never met- not that I know of. I received a letter from this boy and it therefore became the seed for 'Pretty Good Year'. The boy that was cast in the video had the real name of Greg and we felt he carried a similar longing... The duality of the video for me is starkness in fantasy things are going well, clinically well or maybe transparently well that she senses what is about to come. Her breaking of the glass to follow him into his private Dreamworld is her way of confirming her instincts. Karen and I chuckled over the Ann Margaret reference, as always when things are on the precipice of blowing up- break in to a dance routine I say."

God

"Lemons and burnt oranges would come barreling down the skyway on the draw if the dark gray cats didn't open up and let those girls twirl in their fluffy new dresses."

Bells For Her

"Sometimes, but very often, I journey to this place of bells. I know I'm there when I see blue flood-lights and I have no hunger for anything, husks of wedding dresses, horse carts, silver liberty churches- any thing that I associate with bells remain unharvested until when I journey to this dimension of bells where I here them like they never tasted before."

(* All songs on this album were made using Bosendorfer pianos- Tori's favorite kind- except for Bells For Her.) "Bells For Her was recorded on an old upright(piano) that Phil and Eric demolished- or made better- I'm not sure."

Past The Mission

"Directions were always interesting... 'o.k. honey what you gotta do is you know the Wal-Mart? Well keep going- soon you'll see a road across from the chevron- take a left and follow that road till you see a bright turquoisey painted bird house- it's right after the creek at the bird house- it's not the first dirt road but the second- go on down past the mission and you wanna take a right and you can't miss it."

Baker Baker

"There's a stream that runs up in the rockies and it runs into a bigger stream and finally makes it's way to a river but never the ocean, and I was thinking about being whole again and that you don't have to make it to the ocean to be whole again- maybe you freeze and become a snow witch or maybe a sandwich and melt away and that's o.k. I think."

The Wrong Band

"Orchards are simple- a peach tree says 'some of me will be juicy and some of me will be dry. I'm not growing for you- I grow because that's what I do.'-you always hear some person complain about how dry their peach is and the peach says 'it's not our fault you have no understanding on the proper use for dry peaches."

The Waitress

"Condiments are my favorite thing, sometimes when I was lonely I'd line up all the condiments and pound them on the table and let them applaud me, adding confidence to my dishes before they got cooked."

Cornflake Girl

"History has recorded some pretty nasty things that have happened to people. I think we remember, I think it's in our cells and I think it can still hurt sometimes."

Icicle

"Sakura, sakura yayoi no sora wa miwatasu kagiri. I dreamed things were frozen in ice- songs and other dreams- and the ice can carry secret messages that warm a little girl's heart."

Cloud On My Tongue

"I crawled up in a flower when this one was being written. It was safe there and I wasn't ready to let this one in too deep- it was already to close."

Space Dog

"Flying over Chicago from New Mexico- I heard him- him who lives near 7 eleven. Fork in hand at a dead dinner table staring at the peas on his plate going 'come in lemon pie- do you read me? do you read me? beam me up- get me out of this place- I can't have their genes in me - come in lemon pie' -I read you buddy"

***This song was dedicated to a dog named Scrumpy***

"Scrumpy became our friend. We rescued him after a car crash and then he died from a disease 4 months later- he was our wizdog." (*I'd like to also add this, these are the background lyrics to the very end of Space Dog that people hardly notice, and I think the words are good and meaningful:

"So sure, those girls, now are in the Navy.
Those bombs, our friends, can't even hurt you now.
And hold, those tears, 'cause they're still on your side.
Don't hear, the dogs, barking.
Don't say, you know, we've gone Andromeda.
Stood with, those girls, before.
The hair, in pairs, it just got nasty weather.
And now, those girls, are gone.

Yes, Anastasia

"I hope I told your story correctly my friend. Too many codes- it was hard for me to decipher, but I believe Anastasia's story is everyone's in a way. She tried to tell me that and I blew her off."

Boys For Pélé

(* The Pélé of the album title, in case you were wondering after all, is the Hawaiian volcano goddess.)

"To Pélé, to those who have brought me to Pélé, to person (a very particular faerie) and all non particular faeries."

"It was a journey in me finding my own fire- my own flame- not through another person or through things or through the piano even, but just trying to find it as a person. I had to find fragments that sort of made up more of the whole. This record really took me to some of the hidden places in my heart as a woman. The programs that I have carried with me started to break down. The way I look at my life changed with this record."

"I think the last album, Boys for Pélé, was very much like that. That record was very much about trying to understand a serious break-up that I had with someone I had been with for a long time. I was trying to find parts and pieces of myself that I had never claimed. I'd been living through other people in my life, particularly the men in my life. So, it was a really tough record, very depressing, but in the end it gave me a lot of strength. It was a real tough journey-one of those where you think you're going to bite your own arm off. And you just hope somebody is there to put a muzzle in your mouth. But nobody put a muzzle in my mouth and I made Boys for Pélé..."

"There's beauty and wisdom in the darkness, and illumination. Pélé and Choirgirl were very much about that for me. Then it was time that I put my high heels on and ran into Venus- and had a good bottle of red wine."

"I went to Hawaii when I was at my lowest. (*When she split from her producer/boyfriend Eric Rosse before writing, recording and producing Boys For Pélé in a church in Ireland and a studio in New Orleans.) I was desperately trying to find passion."

"Let her explore and grow (*talking about Alanis Morissette). I did. What is this you're not allowed to explore? Look at me now. I'm breast-feeding pigs (*talking about the picture of her suckling a baby porker in the liner notes of Boys For Pélé.) It's the metaphor of embracing the hidden, the ugly, the shameful."

(*She considered pushing those 'boys' into the volcano as human sacrifices.) "I had five minutes of wanting to push them over the edge. I think if we're all honest... if anybody said they've never thought about just roasting their lover- they're a liar."

Caught A Lite Sneeze

(* Thanks to Jason Koenig for the following quote:)

"At first 'Caught A Lite Sneeze' was going to be filmed in Black and White so that the special effects could work, so it was a nice surprise when Mike the Director said he wanted to give it a go in color. A ghost. He kept feeling my character was my own ghost trapped between the worlds. Whether a part of me had gone so close to the edge that she went over the edge thereby resulting in a death of some kind...

I find it funny sometimes that although "Pélé" was really playing with emotional death, my character physically dies in 2 of the Pélé videos (Sneeze & Jupiter). Choirgirl on the other hand, which confronts physical death, has the most energetic- being physically present- from Super-girl in Spark, to Running Bride to Rave chick in Raspberry.

When I was studying all the videos with my friend Tam I tried to remember my impressions when we were filming. 'Sneeze' was physically demanding whereas 'Jackie' was the most emotionally challenging. I remember on the 'Sneeze' set, which was at a Studio somewhere in London, having conversations with Karen and Leslie about parts of 'one' dying when there is no resolve in a particular relationship. It really took until Choirgirl with the inception and then the loss of the Baby for me to nod spiritually to the two men of whom 'Sneeze' references.

Karen and Leslie knew I was searching through the whole video shoot demanding my heart to race across the planet and back into my body- a theme I come back to time and again as in 'calling for my soul at the corners of the world I know she's playing poker with the rest of the stragglers.' The chair scene here has become a mechanical dragon dragging parts of myself from other parts- it's a long way from the protective chair in 'Pretty Good Year.'"

From The Choirgirl Hotel

"There's beauty and wisdom in the darkness, and illumination. Pélé and Choirgirl were very much about that for me. Then it was time that I put my high heels on and ran into Venus- and had a good bottle of red wine."

"...After that, I think that this record (Choirgirl), as far as lyrics go, is not as abstract. Even though there's a lot of symbolism in it, there are moments when I turn around and I say something like, "she's convinced she could hold back a glacier/but she couldn't keep baby alive." Really clear. There are moments when it gets really clear and it goes back into symbolism again- "ballerinas that have fins that they'll never find." Which makes a lot of sense to me, because it's obviously a mermaid reference, but it's more than that. Maybe you'll be a mother and you'll never have that physical experience-like you'll never have the experience of being a mermaid. But even though you might not be a physical mother, it doesn't mean you can't have that kind of maternal love."

"I developed this record around rhythm," she says. "I wanted to use rhythm in a way that I hadn't used it before; I wanted to integrate the piano with it. The whole record had piano and vocal cut live with a drummer and a programmer. I didn't want to be isolated this time round " I've done the girl and the piano thing " I wanted to be a player with the other musicians, with guitar, bass and drums."

"I wasn't going to write this record as soon as I did." she says. But at the end of 1996 I was near the finish of a tour and I was pregnant. I had known from very early on " within a week " that I was pregnant. So I lived with the feeling and got attached to the soul that was coming in. And then at almost three months, I miscarried. It was a great shock to me, because I really thought I was out of the woods and I was really excited to be a mom."

"I went through a lot of different feelings after the miscarriage - you go through everything possible. You question what is fair, you get angry with the spirit for not wanting to come, you keep asking why. And then, as I was going through the anger and the sorrow and the why, the songs started to come. Before I was even aware, they were coming to me in droves. Looking back, that's the way it's always happened for me in my life. When things get really empty for me - empty in my outer life - in my inner life, the music world, the songs come across galaxies to find me."

(This event was the seed of the new album. The loss of her baby was what Tori calls "the egg of her music.") "People had a very hard time talking to me about what had happened, and I had a hard time talking about it. But the songs seemed to have such an easy time talking to me. And I began to feel the freedom of the music. Each song would show me a certain side of myself because of what I was going through. So a song like Cruel came to me out of my anger. She's Your Cocaine and iieee came out of a sense of loss and sacrifice. And other songs celebrated the fact that I found a new appreciation for life through this loss."

"There's a deep love on this record. This is not a victim's record. It deals with sadness but it's a passionate, record - for life, for the life force. And a respect for the miracle of life."

"This record got me through a real bad patch. But I can laugh with this record, and I can move my hips to this record, which is really good for me. It's very sensual- that's the rhythm."

"In the album art, there's a map. The choirgirl hotel, in my brain, is very near this map, and you can see in the right-hand corner, it says, "last stop before the CgH," which is the choirgirl hotel, of course. The choirgirl hotel is metaphorical. It's the idea that these girls, the song girls, live in this space and sometimes they let me come and visit and sometimes they don't. They're real persnickety. I feel like they're very independent. Whereas each record has it's own little story and family tree, this one was very much about... I swear to God, I could see some of these girls having margaritas together out by the pool, just saying hi to me as I walked by, you know? It's like, oh yeah, there's "Jackie's Strength," hanging out by the pool side (laughs). So I saw them as very independent, but I saw them as a singing group, and that's why I put them in a space that lives nowhere that I've ever been."

Spark

One last question. Who is the ice cream assassin?

"Who do you think that is?"

I have no idea

"Well, people have been praying to him for a very long time and more wars have been fought in his name. The big guy. Think about it."

"A parallel. Obviously. People have said to me that they've found this video disturbing. I guess facing death is just that. I didn't want a play by play on film of the literal meanings of Spark. So I would spend hours talking to James (Brown the Director) about circumstances out of your control and having to find this well in yourself that you didn't know you had. I've said before that Spark is about a girl having a really bad day.

Angels. I knew I wanted 'them' represented in some way. Someone had said to me after the miscarriage, 'Well, at least the angels were with you...'. 'No', I said. They went to a Rave and why not. When the Wolf is at your door there is no insurance, no distracting him, her, no angel can or has the power to break Universal law, not with this wolf or my door.

Water. The rhythm of the water in the Tropics where I wrote Choirgirl was the element that brought me strength to my woman, who was truly in No Man's land after losing the Baby. So James said to me that Water had to be the turning point the pivot where my character transforms. The ominous pulse of the video was no different than the feeling I had the day.

Spark is based on Death Lurking... People have asked me what happened to the girl in the Spark video. Well, the children of the corn as I call them or the angels, or as James fondly calls them- Village of the Damned, arrive in their buggy and Nicholas Cage & Meg Ryan do not come to mind and you figure maybe She's better off not getting, going, whatever-ing with them anyway and then they say, 'But what about him? HE's still out there'. And I say, 'Yes. I know'"

Jackie's Strength

(* Thanks to Sara & Rachel Long for the following information:)

And while it is true that she does say 'a Bouvier 'til her wedding day', the song is about Jackie Kennedy Onassis whose maiden name was indeed Bouvier, just so you know!

Pandora's Aquarium

"You know when you’ve cried and cried, and you really can’t cry anymore, so you’re very quiet? I started hearing the water. And ‘Pandora’, the last song on my record, came to me. She was sort of warning me that there are so many feelings under the rocks that I needed to turn into. She told me, ’You need to drive into this one, Tori, because you’re healing is in there. Once you go, it’s a whole new journey, but you’ve got to metaphorically leave this little dock and come with me to find out what’s really in this ocean of feelings.’ So I did. And that’s where I met these songs. I knew I wasn’t going to find a lot of answers from the philosophical camp, because it’s empty. What started comforting were these songs."

(*The album From The Chiorgirl Hotel had two other strongly possible names it could of been: Confessions Of A Chiorgirl and Songs Form The Chiorgirl Hotel (well, so I heard anyway, though don’t call her songs confessions 'cause she doesn’t want absolution.)

To Venus And Back

(*Themes on VB range from a troubling anthem about unavoidable father and daughter ties on "Bliss" to a whirlwind Los Angeles-based fantasy about the decade past in "Glory Of The 80s". The album title was derived from a conversation between Tori and her friends.)

"I was just writing and writing. I knew by the end of March that I had a new album's worth of material on my hands, but I was just going to use some of them for the B-sides album. But the band thought it would sound too random. Sonically, they're all living in a world together, and to take them out of that- how do you just hijack a planet from its own solar system? I realized it needed to be a new album and a live album. You have to know instinctively when a record has its time. I'm not talking about how much it sells. I'm talking about whether or not it resonates at that time. I've always felt that music and visual arts are a real reflection of what's going on in people's psyches at a certain time. For me, it was building a little bridge for myself, with the live album encompassing 10 years of material- because some of the live stuff was written in 1989- then to write a new work in '99, and kind of do some good seeding before we move on. I do think you take frequency with you. It's my little galactic record."

"I had originally thought we were tracking stuff for the B-Sides album, and all of these songs kept coming. The writing gods decided to stop by, and you try and be there when the muse decides she wants to hang out with you."

"No one event shaped this record, I sort of just let my observations take over. I realized that as a songwriter, you're not always going to have those moments where you're flying over Afghanistan and seeing fires and being told it's a war. You have to keep taking adventures and exposing yourself, but there are things in daily living that hide behind everybody's heart, and that's always fascinated me."

"I've never done a tour like this before -- with somebody. It was actually (Morissette's) idea. She had come to see me at Jones Beach (in Long Island, N.Y.), and we had a cup of tea and a giggle and got along really well. We share a lot of the same philosophies of putting on a show, which is important. I'm talking about the semantics of it, not just the music. Having all of these people on the road together is like a little town on the road, where you're all part of the same tribe. People do it differently, and it's difficult to pull it off with someone who doesn't hold the same priorities."

"I have no idea what people think about when they listen to my work. It's one of those things where if I was a fly, I probably wouldn't want to be in the room. I just put it out there, and people can think what they want."

"It's not like I don't have a team of musicians and engineers around me that I respect. (When one of them has a suggestion) I will literally change my shoes and let the artist leave the room. There's the one side who writes songs and spills her guts out. Then she leaves, and we have to make it good on the other side."

"I hope to get 11 or 12 songs on the (*live) album, but 'Waitress' is 9 and a half minutes long and 'Precious' is seven minutes long. We'll have to see which ones make the semifinals."

"It became quite exciting, because we had no idea we were cutting a new record. It just grabbed me by the throat- really. We ended up working around the clock and putting it together pretty quickly."

"I didn't know which B-sides to choose. It was getting too random. It started to become neither fish nor flesh, and that's not good for a mermaid."

"What I didn't get before I got married, is that marriage can come with trust, and lust can come out of trust. Of course that affects the new record, because I see passion differently. (But Venus is also the result of a very personal journey.) After the Plugged tour, I sort of walked into a fearce calm. I didn't need to be someone's daughter, wife or mother- even though I am a daughter and a wife, and motherhood kind of just slipped through time and space for me. The record is just about being a woman and waking up every day. Most songs didn't come until the title was in place. My friend Natalie looked at me at one point and said,
'You know you would go to Venus, or that you've been there.' If you're gonna approach the Venus realm, seduction lives there, obsession lives there, trust lives there, decadence lives there, control lives there."

"Looking back, I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else in the 80's than as a working musician in LA You just can't match that kind of decadence."

"It felt like a changing of the guard with this record, so it was nice to have the older children there to see the new ones (*children- as in her songs) down the gangplank, or over the bridge."

"I think once the title was in place, then really, the songs started to show up and say, 'Hi, we're from Venus, sit down.'"

Bliss

"Sometimes, when you express thoughts to people, you leave it open for somebody to tromp in there and start tearing it down. I sing, 'Father I killed my monkey,' to lead off the song, which explains that sometimes you even destroy your own- so they can't excavate it. When I was growing up, I started becoming very secretive about my thoughts and the sensory world I would go to, because there's a lot of mind control that goes on constantly, people wanting access: 'What are you thinking?' So sometimes I'd have my own defense going, which would be to look them straight in the eye and make them think I've killed my imagination. But it's like, I'll take control."

Juárez

"I read an article about several hundred woman in Juárez, New Mexico, who had been taken out to the desert and brutally raped and murdered. When they didn't come home, their brothers would go and look for them, and many times they'd find nothing. Sometimes they'd find a hair barrette or a sock or something they knew was their sister's. the authorities haven't really done anything about it... they get into this serial-killer theory. I mean, how much serial can one man indulge in? So as the song started to develop, I really began taking the voice of the desert, singing in that perspective."

"When people talk about this ('Juarez') track, they're comparing it to, I don't know, an 'electronica' track. But you're confusing your terms here, people. You're just confused, because it's a commentary on the real hardcore misogynistic stuff, done in a way that captures them with their pants down, literally, mutilating her."

Concertina

"Do you ever feel like you walk in a room, and you don't know why, but you're just so uncomfortable you're crawling out of your skin, even though nobody's touched you- physically? That's in 'Concertina,' when you feel like you haven't excavated enough of your different personalities that when one pops up, you're not sure where it came from, and you try to hack it out of yourself. It shocks you that you could have this kind of fault, or that other people could bring it out of you."

Glory Of The 80's

"Well, the harpsichord is very much in 'Glory of the 80's.' She's part of the bed; I cut it live, with the piano. You might not notice it, but she's there. I love that, because 'Glory of the 80's' could be the 1780s. I love some of the Minimoogs and those old sounds, and also the new sounds. What I have a hard time with is a lot of electronica. I don't like a lot of it, because it's real cheesy, (from) people who don't know keyboard sounds... not just the sounds, but the choice of the notes with the sound; that's so fundamental. It's not just the sound, but how you use the sound."

Suede

"There's this moment in 'Suede' where (the narrator's) being called 'evil' by this other person because of whatever she's done to them in their minds. But there's this side of obsession and passion where one party thinks the other party is doing something to them- and sometimes people aren't always looking at their part in something. In 'Suede' she knows what she's up to- she knows what she's been doing."

Lust

"'Lust' is trust. 'Suede' is the danger of not always the physical fornication of anything. It's the dangerous games that we play with mind control- the power of seduction, and how so many people put their hands up and say, 'I didn't do anything,' because they didn't fornicate."

Riot Poof

"That's what the song Riot Poof is about. It's like I'm the tooth fairy, the homo fairy and this is my present to all the homophobes. I'm leaving it under all their pillows... blossom riot poof."

"Riot Poof is for all those jocks out there who need to deal with their secret sexuality."

"With 'Riot Poof', there's cocoa butter on that golden ass. And that ass is chocolate. A lot of R&B has no ass right now. Some of it does, some of it doesn't. And there's a sterility to a lot of electronica. Sometimes you want something to be sterile; that's your point."

The 'Bee' Sides

"They (the B sides) have this whole underground thing, they have pamphlets out on them, they like being who they are. So when it was time to choose maybe six or seven songs plus a few new ones... it wasn't a really good concept of mine, it was one of my poopier ones."

A Case Of You

"Any time I would ever slip, I would put on Case Of You (by Joni Mitchell), and there is not a song that could move me about the way a woman loves a man the way that song does. I wish I had written that song. I'm living that song, I should have been able to have written it!"

Cooling

"So this little song, it's probably- she's one of my best friends of all the songs and she just didn't wanna be on any of the records. She was supposed to be on Pélé and then she told me to 'fuck off' and then she was supposed to be on Choirgirl, sort-of-kind-of and then she said 'you know- no.' And then she decided she'd like to be played live so I play her a lot."

Song For Eric

"This one song that I just...I love singing is Song for Eric and it's, um...it's a cappella, so my hands don't know what to do with themselves when I'm singing it, but um, I always think about this um,...you know when you have a memory of something, and you can't quite put your finger on what it is, but you just kind of feel it in your belly, and Song for Eric reminds me of a different time, something that isn't in this time, and I go there.”

Thoughts

"Girl was being recorded and I couldn't get a take. I was freaking out. Eric was in the booth playing air ball encouraging me to take a ten minute. Glued on the bench, I started this thing, coming from nowhere, singing nonsense into the mic. When I finished Eric said 'it's a take.' I said 'what?'- he had left the machine running."

Toodles Mr. Jim

(This comes up at the end of the song)

"That was 'Toodes Mr. Jim'. Mr. Jim died two weeks ago and he taught me how to pick cherries and I punched his daughter in the nose 'cause she was mean. Mr. Jim was good."

Upside Down

"Sticks, rocks, food- all sundry items came into the faerie doughnut including my feet over my head and a little blue girl."