On From The Choirgirl Hotel

"The idea of a series of songs with the same basic sound didn't appeal to me. The woman in 'She's Your Cocaine,' which is about a reptile woman who has no fidelity to sisterhood, had to be distinct from the woman in 'Spark,' who's addicted to nicotine patches."

"...and the songs came from all corners. I'm calling this record From the Choirgirl Hotel because I felt like I didn't know if I was sending dispatches from it or if I'm part of their troupe and they let me sing alto with them sometimes. But the choirgirls were incredibly comforting to me."

"A parallel.  Obviously. people have said to me that they found the video disturbing.  I guess facing Death is just that.  I didn't want a play by play on film of the literal meaning of Spark.  So I would spend hours talking to James (Brown, the Director) about circumstances out of your control and having to find this will 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 at 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... "

"I don't know about making pop videos. I know about you know, making little films. That's what I try to do. What it was really about is this woman is in a situation and you find out later she was in the trunk of this car, and miraculously this car accident saves her life. To have your hands tied behind your back and be blindfolded to have that experience and really have to get from one end of Dartmoor to the other it was... you hear better, your instincts get better."

“Spark is about when I miscarried, in 1996. I was three months pregnant and very excited. All of a sudden I woke up one morning and started to feel bad. The songs started coming soon after. I was really angry at God. Going into a shopping mall and seeing some woman knock the head off her child, I’m going - ‘So this is fair?’ I don’t know where the spirit went, whether she picked another mummy, like, “OK, choose her, then! Hope you’re tone deaf!”

“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 you’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 played the percussion of Cruel in the shower on my excess fat. It sounded really good—it made me feel good when I’d have that next bag of potato chips. I’d say ‘Look, Cruel sounds great in the shower. You eat those chips, girl!’”

“When you start talking to people who have that kind of loss, somebody piping up, going, ‘Well, the angels were there for us during this time,’ well that’s beautiful. But people have to understand that they’re not there for everybody all the time. They get lost on the way. That’s why in Cruel when I say, ‘I don’t know why,’ I really don’t know why I can be cruel. I don’t know why the angels aren’t there for everybody, but they’re not.”

“There exists such a thing as boasting about misery. One sentence in ‘Cruel’ deals with that: ‘Dance with the Sufis celebrate your top ten in the charts of pain’. When I had a miscarriage, there were people who said: ‘Yes, but you only lost an unborn child. Our son was murdered!’ For some people things aren’t bad enough as it is. And some hang on to the fact that The Most Terrible Thing happened to them: they entered at #1 in the charts of pain. And then others are secretly jealous because they’re only at #6.”

"The bridge in 'Cruel' is like a Radio Afghanistan moment."

"When we were in the studio and Matt and Andy  were just groovin' with Cruel, I realized that the piano was just not working. It was just too many chiefs. I said, you know, I need to be a good Indian. Anyway, with Cruel, I took my hands off the piano and that's how we cut it."

"I think Cruel is my favorite. Whether anybody gets it or not, I demanded that it have its day in the sun. It's one of those ones that's really that underworld thing."

"Each song would show me a certain side of herself because of what I was going through. So a song like 'Cruel' came to me out of my anger."

“When I sleep I often have nightmares. Just like the one I’m describing in the song Black-Dove off my last album From the Choirgirl Hotel. I see a black dove. I see its face clearly. The dove is transparent. Like it is made of ice. I can see my hand through it. An auger goes through it and it is bleeding water. To get the same atmosphere musically I had to describe a scene of the movie Fargo to my musicians. A car is coming towards the camera from a long distance, very slowly. You know it will arrive in a moment. But you hope that this will never happen. My nightmares are so bad, that I mostly reject it when my friends want to take me to a cinema to watch a horror movie. Then I say, ‘No, thank you. I will dream in a few hours.’ Sometimes I feel like Hermann Hesses Steppenwolf ... The nightmares have agonized me since my childhood. I am the daughter of a Methodist preacher and as a child I was sexually abused by a friend of the family. I think the nightmares are telling me things about me I need to know. And I try to understand what they mean. Maybe so I can get to know something more about my soul.”

"I was very interested in trying different effects on all the instruments, including the vocals, to help develop the characters. I would say, 'Okay, imagine this girl as completely made of a frozen lake. I want you to imagine a drill, one of those long motherfuckers, coming right into her. The thing, though, is that she doesn't bleed blood. She's transparent and yet, she is in physical form. And I want to hear that in these eight bars.'"

"I will tell you this.  Kids and Pigs mixed together with their gorging of sweets and excited kiddie poo, vomit and literally piggy poo and cake pudding ickie oogie sugarie pukie all messed together sitting there rotting under the lights, take after take and you wonder why I carry an Oxygen machine -- card holder since 94.  Raspberry was one of the longer days of my life...  Karen pulled in these younger Directors: Barnabyand Scott.   I liked the idea their visual sense and their openness to Karen's mad visions.  She was inspired by an urban Alice In Wonderland feel if I recall the treatment correctly.   Kids with red wings -- red wigs little Toris she said.  This boy leading me into a world where Karen truly lives.  Every movie ever make Karen can give her version -- "A road ain't NO ONE EVER thought of pushing," a long by magical Day."

"I wrote it, for one of my girlfriends who just had a streak of men who really didn't get her. Sometimes I play the role of the man in my relationships with my female friends. I'm not talking physical, I'm talking on an emotional level. And so this is about being understanding. That if I were 6-foot-4 and had one less hole and a couple more round hairy things, there's no way that these men would be able to compete. Because I really think that they miss the beauty in the women that I find really attractive. They really miss it."

“OK, Now I don’t do hair-pie. Oh god, I hope my Dad doesn’t watch this, he can’t deal with this stuff, but I tell him he should cause one of these days one of the nieces or nephews are going to ‘come out’, but anyway, my husband and I are ‘Married’ but my friend Beene is, we are married. Now she has had some real bad relationships, there is this one, if I ever see him I’m gonna kick his ass and well. I’m gonna kick his ass right now. This is for Beene.”

“The animus in me is Raspberry Swirl. I’m in love with my women friends, but I just don’t eat pussy. But I’m still in love with them. If I had a different sensibility, then you know I think I could, you know, really fulfil someone down there, where a lot of men in their lives don’t. And eating pussy is a metaphor, too - it’s about crawling in their, being with their juices, really being with them.”

"Sometimes I fall into the videos like a Laven, a welcome escape from my real life character and the dynamics that surround "her".  Jackie was one of these times where I could put "Whatever" somewhere.  I would ride around in this taxi for hours as a pick-up truck with a camera on the back of it followed and followed and followed me as a truant bride.  The mythic references for brides are endless . . .  This video was tricky because it was close to the bone, having only been married for 2½ months.  Karen and I would talk about how "She" - the girl in Jackie, the bride in Jackie was a parallel on some plane.  Somewhere who had made different choices in her life.  A medicine woman told me once that alternate dimensions existed where a different you, a different me play out choices we could've made.  The girl in Jackie is an artist of some kind but "it ain't never gonna happen" to quote Miss Karen as she and I went back and forth over this alternate 2x2x2x reality.  We re-built my life, with the help of LL who was referenced in that book -- The Top 100 Psychics.  We knew what she ate.  I knew she drew with pastels.  I knew she was never going to make it to the church that day.  It's not that she didn't love him -- they'd been together since they were kids.  It's just about a promise she had make to herself a long time ago.  When James called me for the 17th time that day and said -- I've got it.  As you go through your old neighbourhood interspersed with present and past you finally run into young Tori.  We started to talk about casting and Karen convinced us with the help of Lesley of course that we could pull off young Tori.  Having to face my younger self was pretty wild -- her position being very clear -- "We had a vision.  You've become numb, we may never succeed but you never even tried."  So the answer is no, I don't know if "she" ever eventually marries her childhood love -- but she doesn't that day."

“Jackie’s Strength is really... I was asked to get married, right? And um I was quite nervous because I never thought I’d get married before. It just wasn’t something that I was gonna do. Even though I believe in monogamy, just having the church and state condone my union wasn’t important to me. And in fact, I really didn’t want that. So, when he asked me, it brought up, obviously, a lot of things. And I started going back in my little movie in my head, different moments of my life. And I remember my mother telling me that the day Kennedy died, John F. Kennedy, that she put me down, she had to lay me down because her heart started to slow down and she couldn’t breathe. And um, all she thought of was Jackie and the strength that it would take Jackie to lead the nation.. which she did. And I really knew that I was gonna need some kind of strength because I’m made up of like two personalities. There’s one side of me that could very easily have ended up at the 7-Eleven sitting outside drinking a Slurpee in my wedding dress and just missing the whole thing. And then there’s the other one that did make it to the church. So, this song is about the one that drank the Slurpee. She’s still out there somewhere.”

 “This wonderful boy had asked me to marry him, and of course I said yes, but I was shocked. You know, there was a part of me that had sworn that would never happen. You fantasize about what it would be like on that day, and then you fantasize about never having that day. Then you’re a vigilante and you will never have it. Then, all of a sudden, there it is, and you’re wondering, ‘Are we going to make it? Half of all marriages end in divorce. Is that us?’ That was all going on as I got lost on my wedding day.”

"There's a girl that had a fantasy about a wedding...I think when she was really young and then just ditched it. I mean, that wasn't gonna be her. And then she finds its her wedding day and she finds that she's getting lost. She's she doesn't know if she's ready to do that. And she looks back at her whole life, everything that ever happened to her to get her to that place. And she'd seen a picture of Jackie on her wedding day, and knows that she's not handling it quite so well. And that whole...the way that I really got inspired to write it is that I had a book of Jackie, and I turned to a picture of her in her wedding dress and then I turned the page and JFK was getting shot, its that famous picture of them in the car. and just one page...you know, your dealing with the birth of the bride and the death of her love, or the death of a union, and I was sort of dealing with...from the miscarriage to then being a bride myself, A bit backwards but anyway that's the way it was, the cyclical constant turning of the seasons and the life wheel, and it's so out of our hands sometimes, things that get put on our plate. There's a death or there's a birth or there's a love that walks in your life and your like, "oh, but I don't wanna fall in love right now, 'cause I'm already supposed to be in love with someone else" You know, it just doesn't get wrapped up in this neat little package and I started to be so, a new appreciation of the life force came out of losing the baby...I really began to see how fragile life is, and you and I don't know how long we're going to be here. I mean, I like to think I'm 80 years old and still rocking in my boots and you come and interview me and we have a margarita and we do it, but we don't know, and this record is really...It wasn't what I thought it was going to be but the rhythm made me really want to wake up every morning."

"The 1980s were not my mother's favourite fashion decade. She's very Jackie Kennedy, in a pillbox hat and a suit, whereas I was shopping at Retail Slut."

"The songs just grab me by the throat sometimes and say 'We're coming in.' I saw Jackie as a bride and I used to think I would never be a bride. I started to look at Jackie and how that woman held the country together after she watched her husband get cut down right in front of her."

"I mean my Mother was on the phone in tears because she, you know, grew up relating to Jackie Kennedy and, you know, put me down when JFK Sr. was killed. Laid me down as a baby and, you know, that's what Jackie's Strength was about."

"'Jackie's Strength' and 'Hotel' came to me as Siamese twins. The chorus of 'Jackie' was really the chorus of 'Hotel' so I had to pull them apart. 'Hotel' actually came with three choruses . It took a while to realize that 'Jackie' was a different song."

“iieee has a Native American influence and when you hear the rhythm and yet there’s a little of that New Mexican driving in an old dilapidated mustang and you’re just on your own and you just drive for days and days and you think you’re getting away with murder, and it’s just you. And I think that feeling. iieee is very much about dying and about sacrifice.”

“I had a bad pregnancy, lost the baby and started seeing this little boy, like age 7, Zuni or Pueblo Indian, with these great black bat wings. Now this sounds like a bad Dustin Hoffman virus movie, but I had these dreams. I’d go from town to town to play, but everyone was dead before I got there. Every town. I had this great ‘57 convertible with a matching dress and he would sit in the back with his wings out. This boy said that I had to build fires, which got me excited cause I’m an arsonist, and he would chant to me. He’d go E-E-E I-I-I E-E-E”

"She's Your Cocaine and iieee came out of a sense of loss and sacrifice."

“For She’s Your Cocaine I put on this tiny black body suit, jeans and high heels, got a margarita and walked outside for 30 minutes to drink Tequila in Cornwall, in the freezing November night. After a take I’ll get the guys a coffee and I’ll say, ‘The artist is on one today, isn’t she?’ They often agree.”

“You know, I think it is a reference to my rock chick days, but realized in a different way. There are three characters in that song - a he and a she and the girl singing it. I haven’t quite figured out if the girl singing is really pissed off that she isn’t special anymore, or if she is just horrified that she put this guy on a pedestal and he’s now he’s chosen this thing... this girl who wouldn’t even be let into a real girl’s party. This black hole of nebulae. I think your own sex can see your sex for what it is. You know the tricks of your own sex. Sometimes you can put your little play glasses on and not want to see them. But I know when another woman is flirting with one of my crew - it’s so obvious and yet they can’t see it. They say ‘oh she’s so pained’ or ‘she’s had all this stuff happen to her’. I know a girl like this - who uses her victimness to make people feel they can’t do enough for her, that nothing is ever enough. And you’re like an addict. You can’t spill enough blood, you can’t wrap your dick into seventeen different little shapes, y’know, like those balloons. ‘Here... look! Puppy! Ice cream truck!’ This song is my revenge.”

"She not being me, she being the one that he's obsessed about, and whatever we think of her is whatever we think of her - probably we think about her in Cruel. The woman in the song that the man is obsessed with could be amazing but equally she could just be a black hole."

“My heart goes out to where that song comes from. It’s very much about thinking you were loved for who you were, and realizing you weren’t, and realizing maybe you don’t love yourself. The line, ‘I guess you go too far/When pianos try to be guitars’ is just about never being enough. I felt that with my instrument sometimes, wanting to be Jimmy Page. You can only be you. A lot of times it’s never enough for people.”

“I met this guy, he’s no white knight, but I wrote this for him. I’m really not supposed to talk about him, see we made a deal; I married him.”

"Northern Lad is probably the loved woman in the group and she's gotta, she had to go to another country to get it yeah, yeah, I know northern lad, yeah."

"Since 1994, Mark has been the sound engineer on all my albums. when we first met in a rehearsal room in North London, I thought, "This is big. This is an upheaval in my life." He's a Northern lad, quite anarchic, and a little bit shaggy, you know. when he proposed to me, he said, "I'm definitely not marrying you for a Green Card. I can't live in that place," so I've had to be the one who relocated."

“I think as you’re getting married, all the loves, even 10-minute loves, are popping up. Hotel was really like feeling like an agent - a spy - in that he was the greatest guy at one time and they were giving me time behind enemy lines. Even though she knows they can’t be lovers because it’s a whole other life, she just can’t let him go.”

"I was definitely crashing at a certain point, I mean emotionally crashing. I had almost crashed and that's what I sing about in Hotel. It's a strange feeling to see you are crashing, and you know, that it is so, and you know nobody will appear and say: you don't have to crash now. you crash, and then you gotta crawl out of that one."

"I wrote a lot of it at the keyboard but also at the synth, too. I have a....What do I have?  I have a Kurzweil. The good thing is they maxed me out at Kurzweil with sounds, and then my friend came in and gave me a bunch of sounds - Mellotron sounds and stuff, 'tron viola, 'tron flute, 'tronny stuff like that. I started messing with them and in some cases writing things around some of them, like in 'Hotel.' So the keyboard was very present while I was writing. I wrote most everything before I walked into the studio."

“I had written this thing and I couldn’t get the first line. And I was in France with my friend Beenie. I go a lot of places with my friend Beenie. And um, we were with another friend of hers and her mother. Anyway, two of them are having an argument, right? So I decided champagne for everybody was a good idea. And that’s what you do in France. And it was like after lunch, so that’s good, that’s improvement. And um anyway they make very good champagne - we had Krug - and if, you know, if you ever have that experience just like even if you have to steal it it’s really worth the experience. So ok, I sent champagne around because everybody’s arguing and then Beenie comes to like update me on the fighting and who’s winning. And so I’m standing at the top of the stairs I’m in this shmoozy suite, I’m embarrassed to say it but I was. And so we’re standing at the top and she goes, you know, ‘Let’s go out to the deck and talk about this.’ So it’s one of those round staircases like they have in the Love Boat. And so I’m in these Prada platforms and I’m at the top of the stairs and I fall all the way down the stairs ‘cause I trip on my Prada shoes, serves me right. So I trip all the way down and I lie flat on my face and I swear to Christ I’m lying flat and my nose is like taped to the rug. And I said ‘oh Beenie, I need more champagne, this is so horrible.’ But I laid there and I said ‘oh my God Beenie, oh my god I have the first line.’”

“In Playboy Mommy, I’m much of a voluptuous, you know, but I’m allowed to do that because I’m a writer so its like, I make myself in that way. And I saw myself in a different way than I am with a thirteen year old daughter and a mother/daughter relationship just not being enough. I saw my mother, you know I saw how I felt when I was not ashamed, but that moment of why couldn’t you be the thing that I wanted you to be and I realized that I would probably have that in my heart”

“I saw her very much as a Magdalene figure. I saw her as someone who had become quite disreputable because of the means she used to survive. There was something in me that aligned with this disreputable woman that people have a hard time with. Sometimes you have to accomplish things in not-so-pretty ways. I saw strength in her. She can do things that those women accepted in the literary circles cannot do because she can swallow... This woman in Playboy Mommy, she’ll swallow. She’ll swallow a billion seeds to protect this little girl”

"I chose to include Playboy Mommy because, when I was listening to a lot of the old Multis, I had to be open to what I would find, not what I wanted to find, but what I would find. And yes, there were tapes that we put up, that, for whatever reason, did not weather the storm well. Maybe they weren't stored properly, um, maybe it wasn't recorded the way it should have been that day. There are a lot of maybes, but I had to pull back and make decisions based on a lot of things. Playboy Mommy I felt covered a point in this woman's life, a painful time. I think that was the most painful time of all for me in my whole life, was when I miscarried. I miscarried a few times, and this refers to that. The loss of knowing the soul that you feel you almost touched but you couldn't bring to life here on Earth, and yet there's something like a hymn, there's something almost um, I feel alive about Playboy Mommy, and when I heard it, I heard her spirit and her commitment to bringing this life to Earth, and it's joyous to me now. Maybe that's because I am a Mom, and I've... I sing it to Tash, and she sings it with me, and now, Playboy Mommy means something different because I've got to go play the piano." (speaking in 2003)

“I use a lot of symbology, so if you dive into the symbol world, you’ll have a better idea of what’s going on. You have to go into the myth of Persephone to really understand what I’m talking about: You have to know that the Lord of the Flies is another word for Hades, and that Hades captured Persephone. It’s the rape of Persephone; that is her myth. And she became queen of the underworld and couldn’t leave for half the year... But did she choose to stay by eating the pomegranate seed? Did she know the rules or did he trick her?”

“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 the 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 dive into this one, Tori, because your healing is 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 couldn’t chase after something that wasn’t going to manifest itself in the physical. I didn’t become a mother, although I owned life, I couldn’t go back to being that person I was before. And yet I knew that there was some primitive agony of women losing their children that I had to dive through. And believe it or not, Pandora took me by the hand and came first. It took me by the hand, drug me under, and all of a sudden, we were off.”

“Well all in all about, I started writing right after I miscarried, and I miscarried on December, 23 1996, which obviously, the angel was on the tree and the whole bit. So soon after that the songs started to come, thank God. And Pandora was the first one to come, not in her entirety, but she started to come. She came off the water. I was staying on the river, and the water was a large part of this record. I would spend hours on the water and seeing how the sea transformed itself, knowing that I had to transform myself from a woman who had lost a baby to a woman who was grieving, to a woman who had to find joy in life again. So the songs began, I guess you could say, early January and the album was finished in February of 1998, ready to be re-mastered.”

"And Pandora was the first one to come, not in her entirety, but she started to come. She came off the water. I was staying on the river, and the water was a large part of this record. I would spend hours on the water and seeing how the sea transformed itself, knowing that I had to transform myself from a woman who had lost a baby to a woman who was grieving, to a woman who had to find joy in life again."

"Pandora was the first song to really come after we had lost the baby, when I was just trying to find a reason to wake up in the morning."

"It was Christmas, and it was a really devastating time, but the songs started to come soon after that - I think the first one was 'Pandora'."