On Strange Little Girls

"I was nursing Tash in Florida, and I was hearing a lot of male artists on alternative radio. And some of them really hated women. I thought about my daughter and what these guys were thinking about women. I wanted to build some kind of bridge, and I figured that was the only way to get into the heads of these men.

"The thing about nursing is, you do have enforced thinking time for hours and hours and hours a day. That's when I formulated the whole thing." In those hours I started to decide what I was going to do, and it did kind of surprise me what my choice was."

"I think it's a very difficult time in America right now for a heterosexual male. Face it, most of them want to be black, or they have to look over their shoulder at the woman that's going to take their job. It's driven me to do the project I'm about to do."

 "I wanted to go to some of the great poets of my generation, like Neil Young and Lou Reed, and crawl behind their eyes to see what they were thinking. I really felt like, as a songwriter, the only way to explore the power of the word was to use men's words. It fascinates me, the things men say and how women hear them. There are a lot of things being said by young guys that intrigued me."

"I dived into these songs because I wanted to find out something about the female characters in the. Instead I found out a lot about myself."

"It might have started when I was little. To make pocket money I would do weddings and funerals. I was 10-years-old or something. I liked the funerals better than the weddings because I didn't have to play, "We've Only Just Begun." I started cutting my teeth there and then I was playing in gay bars when I was 13. You get a very different exposure to music at 13, playing for other people to sing along with in a piano bar, having to follow people and their style and to crawl into the songs. You learn how other people hear songs which brings us to this record. It was not just what men say and how a woman hears them-that really intrigued me-but even more so, it was what men heard other men say. That was a part of the whole record-about men together. I've called a laboratory of men and I excavated them."

"Each of these songs became a myth of our time and whatever you think of these songs or these writers certain songs transcend us. Yeah, I have pictures in my head when I hear my songs "Winter" and "Professional Widow," but they are not going to be the same pictures that you see. My personal experience with a song is just my personal experience and a song goes beyond that. So, in this land of myth that you walk into in each song, it was a different male seed/vision, that I was taking to put into my garden. What I didn't realize, when I took their seed, is that I would also have to take a little egg back with me. That's the trade-off that happens in mythology. That's how the land of myth works. It's a sort of strange and mysterious world. These women were hitting me from all sides. They would just come in and take over."

"The character is really engulfed with passion and I think she's really worried about what the new age is going to be, and she's determined not to sit on the sidelines anymore as it develops. There's this igniting of passion on the whole record."

"She's a writer, "an observer. She'd doing research; she's documenting like an Encyclopaedia Britannica of life and experience. Her big line is, 'Well I'm doing research.'"

"You know I do have a, what would you say, a little survival kit as a woman, and sometimes I'm maybe more callous and cold hearted than an eleven month old but when I looked at my daughter I realized, know you she's going to grow up, and if you would have asked me in 1968 what I thought the new age was going to be when New Age by the Velvets came out, I would not have thought that we, with all the strides we were making then, and I remembered very well, I was five, I was at the Peabody conservatory and I remember this openness, free quality, not this anti-freedom movement that seems to be everywhere. So, yeah, it was a time where in 2001, my picture of the New Age in 1968 wouldn't have been this."

"She doesn't live for real, she's only doing research. Such a New Age type with a boring haircut and big glasses. Glasses are, for men, always a sign of vulnerability."

"...what a passionate piece of music..."

"It's just about passion. I love the idea that when this song came out (in 1970) it was part of a new freedom movement. Freedom from this yoke that had been around mankind, womankind - the Martin Luther Kings and Gloria Steinems of the world having cut holes in walls built up in suppression. Yet now we're in a place 30 years later ... (and) you're seeing hostility take hold again, this malice against women - women agreeing to be demeaned. Part of the call to do this project for me was that I couldn't understand that - is it a backlash against the alpha female? I'm still stalking that. But it's clear we've returned to an age in which men require power over someone - women, gays, whoever it is - to feel secure. So I said, 'OK, I'll walk into that new age with you, see what you see - and respond.'"

"It's the librarian. See, I've always had a fantasy librarian kind of secret life."

"I was attracted to the wife, who was faceless and nameless. Everyone's grooving to this tune, and nobody seemed to care about her."

"I didn't do it at all to please some journalists who'd like to condemn Eminem. The song impressed me as a phenomenon. I found it more frightening than the lyrics themselves that all over the world people dance to such words."

"It's a good example of how violence is tolerated in families. My father, a priest, just took part in a conference in which a UNO-report was presented and this report says that every minute a woman is abused. That's terrible. What I was interested in in the Eminem song was the figure of this abused woman. What kind of person was she? Who were her girlfriends? How did she feel?"

"I had to give a voice to that woman who is dying there. In the original we hear the man explain to his daughter what has happened. From my point of view we see the mother, hardly conscious, but just capable of passing on what she hears her husband say to her child so we go back to exactly the same moment. What got into her mind when she took my hand and showed it to me. How she heard that her daughter was pulled into his version of the story. How he made her an accomplice in the killing of her own mother. The mother realizes that her daughter will be torn up while she's growing up. She's asking herself what will be of her daughter. The daughter also has a spot on the album, she's the girl in Strange Little Girl. This is what became of her as a grown-up woman."

"When she spoke to me, the woman dying in the back of the car she took me by the hand and said, "You need to hear how I heard it." I brought in Phil Shenale, who has done string arrangements on most of my records, and I told him that I was going to speak this word-for-word how she heard it at the same moment that you hear his version. They happen at the same time in song's world. Once we started turning over the stones of Bonnie and Clyde, we followed the bloodline to Serge Gainsbourg's "Bonnie & Clyde." And that took us to, "this is a scary place to be and when you're the one with the 'ketchup' on your throat, it's a little different." This is how we heard it."

"In 'Bonnie and Clyde,' that was Eminem -- or one of the many people living inside him -- and he killed his wife. She has to have a voice. What intrigued me in the way he told the story was this rhythmic kind of justification. You have to have empathy for him. I did when I heard it, but I always chase what's on the other side of the camera."

"I would hear a lot of people say, 'They're only words, what is everyone going on about?' That's where I said I could pick up the gauntlet. I believe in freedom of speech, but you cannot separate yourself from your creation. We go back to the power of words, and words are like guns...Whether you choose the graciousness of Tom Waits or the brutality of 'Bonnie and Clyde,' they're equally powerful, and that's what drove me."

"When I first heard the song, the scariest thing to me was the realization that people are getting into the music and grooving along to a song about a man who is butchering his wife. So half the world is dancing to this, oblivious, with blood on their sneakers. But when you talk about killing your wife, you don't get to control whom she becomes friends with after she's dead. She had to have a voice."

"I have a real thing about when some of these rappers that talk about violence against women, and I'm talking about the ones that'll say, 'You know, look it's just a song,' and I'm going, 'Look if you're going to talk about raping a woman, have the balls to stand up there and go, 'Obviously I've got some kind of anger towards women.' I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe in, 'Don't be a fucking hypocrite.'"

"Eminem represents so much right now to a whole group of people. And he's a great poet. But when you kill your wife, you don't get to control whom she becomes friends with when she's dead." -

"Well, first let's go to entry point. Entry point is crucial. For the Stranglers' song this was brought, it was...the Stranglers were brought [up] by a few of the brain-trust of men. And what started to click for me was after I knew I was doing Bonnie and Clyde, which was soon on, because, that's something...when Eminem was brought up, she spoke to me, her character, in that myth, spoke to me, some of them in the first album really resonated with them, and some of them didn't want to get involved in that one at all. So I said, OK you guys go take a coffee break and I'll call you when we do Neil Young...So, that song, my interest became about that song because, you know, the reality of a woman being in a car staring death in the face is something that I personally resonate with. And we don't have to go any further into that. Eminem created a very powerful reflection of domestic violence. He made a choice as a writer, as all of them did, on the character that they would align with. What blew me away is that none of these men, the brain-trust, asked about her, not one of them. And it became an overtaking, hearing how she heard it. So this version, that you hear on this record, 'Strange Little Girls' - go back to the same time-frame, go back to the exact same time-frame, in the car, as he is telling their little girl what happened. And you cut to the cameras moving now on the woman in the back and how she is hearing, or hearing her filter. She is not dead yet in my version, she is almost dead. And you know, that is the tricky, tricky thing, when you kill your wife you better check her pulse before you're cashing in on that will, you better know she's caught - so she's hearing, this was a kicker for me when she showed me this, that her daughter is being made an accomplice. And will be divided forever between the two of them. Loving her father, loving her mother, like most kids do. She will grow up to be a strange little girl. Cut to the Stranglers Song. And that's our little girl grown up - end of story."

"I had to give a voice to that woman who is dying there. In the original we hear the man explain to his daughter what has happened. From my point of view we see the mother, hardly conscious, but just capable of passing on what she hears her husband say to her child. So we go back to exactly the same moment. What got into her mind when she took my hand and showed it to me. How she heard that her daughter was pulled into his version of the story. How he made her an accomplice in the killing of her own mother. The mother realizes that her daughter will be torn up while she's growing up. She's asking herself what will become of her daughter. The daughter also has a spot on the album, she's the girl in Strange little girl. This is what became of her as a grown-up woman."

"It is a very complicated commentary on domestic violence. I don't really need to give my opinion on that. What interests me, is that I got intrigued by the woman in the trunk of the car. Because no one ever asks about her. Not even my laboratory of men. Some men immediately took distance from this song, simply didn't want to have anything to do with it. But others were crazy about Eminem's music. A very intelligent man said he felt sorry for Eminem in '97 Bonnie and Clyde. He said: 'that bitch has done so much to him. It's logical that he has lost his way completely'. So I said: 'Alright, so you're obviously charmed by him. Eminem got you exactly where he wants you. While you know nothing about her'. Nobody in the laboratory of men asked himself who she really was. She had no name, she had no face and nobody cared about her. I was shocked: because this could be a woman that I had known."

"I don't know the rest of Eminem's work, but on its own I think you can do a song like '97 Bonnnie and Clyde, whether I think the lyrics are ethical, I leave out the discussion for now. My point is the following: if Oprah Winfrey calls you to explain what you mean by that text, don't come with: It's all fantasy. That's terribly weak. The same goes for his supposed homo hatred. He is entitled to showing he's not too fond of his gay fellow-man, that's the right to freedom of speech. But if that same group accuses him, based on that same right, you can't say: Yeah, but, I didn't mean it that way at all. If you then sit in a corner with your lawyer and your accountant, you show plain nasty behavior. Suppose I would sing a song where I constantly butcher black men, these black men will say: 'Well Tori, so you hate us'. If I just reply by saying 'No, it's just a fantasy', I expect people to rise and say 'Tori, that is so weak. You can't get away with this'."

"Do you know that it was very exciting for me to play the end result for the laboratory of men? Luckily, they thought the songs were very beautiful. But more important, they were listening carefully to what my strange little girls had to say. The man of the Eminem song said that he came to think of the woman differently. She was no bitch at all. Because she had such a sweet voice and it must be terrible for her to be in that trunk. To hear how her husband spoke about her to her daughter. When I heard him say that, I knew my mission was accomplished. At least one bridge had successfully been built."

"You know he wrote a really powerful song on domestic violence and the character he chose to align with wasn't who I was aligning with. And immediately when I heard it she just reached out of that trunk of the car and said you know there's another way to hear this."

"Yeah they built a space, a confining space, so that I couldn't move in it. And I just felt like it was really important. You know this one was a tricky one just because my desire was that our version would be happening almost exactly at the same time as he's telling his little girl the story. Because the whole point is that you're hearing her hear him tell her daughter lies and making the daughter an accomplice."

"This is the little girl whose father killed her mother in Eminem's song, all grown up, having to deal with the fact that she was an accomplice to the murder. She's a dichotomy of things because she's divided -- even when parents divorce, if they turn one child against one parent, you're dividing that child at the core"

"Men associated the song immediately to a woman who they felt attracted to. They thought Strange Little Girl was very sexy but if a woman sings it, that's totally not the point. In that case, it's about a girl in danger who has to choose whether she will protect herself or that she will be swallowed by the danger, whatever it may be. Strange Little Girl is a girl who I think of when it rains. The song is sad before sexually stimulating. My men's laboratory thought the same when they heard my version. The lyrics were the same, but the feeling is totally different because it's brought from a whole different perspective. I gave the girl a voice. That's how the idea began to, for each song, crawl into the skin of a different woman."

"I started to really see the influence that The Stranglers had on a lot of people. These were two British men, not jock-y kind of guys, not football hooligans. They're not really like that, and yet they thought that they were sexy songwriters. You know, "Girls on the beaches/Looking at the peaches," the whole thing. And I think they are, in a way. I was just drawn to them because... What a catalogue they've written."

"She's a showgirl, and I call her Isis. She might moonlight over in Vegas. She's the oldest of the showgirls there and has been around awhile. There's a mothering quality in her, she sees the other women who come through the door and get extorted. She sees who the puppeteers are, and she sees when they're lying there bleeding."

"I was very happy when somebody added Enjoy the silence to the list, it is a beautiful song about the danger of words. How they can make your world collapse sometimes. According to me the man in question asked for the song because he knew what I wanted to demonstrate with this album. The power of words and how they can get a different value if pronounced by the opposite sex. Do you know that is was very exciting for me to play the end result for the laboratory of men? Luckily, they thought the songs were very beautiful but more important, they were listening carefully to what my strange little girls had to say. The man of the Eminem song said that he became to think of the woman differently. She was no bitch at all because she had such a sweet voice and it must be terrible for her to be situated in that boot. To hear how her husband spoke about her to her daughter. When I heard him say that, I knew my mission was accomplished. At least one bridge had successfully been built."

"I went to some male friends and tried to find out which songs changed their lives. Often I was fascinated by the brutality - for example like in Enjoy The Silence by Depeche Mode - but sometimes also by the depth of mercy, the beauty."

"I tried many different women but couldn't put it into form, and then the guys started giving me information about John Lennon's shooting. In the wee hours of that morning, Mark David Chapman says he called a woman from an escort service and asked her to perform a service, in his words...to be silent. And that was my entry point because of 'Silent All These Years.' I had an understanding of silence, and that word resonated with me. And Depeche Mode's 'Enjoy the Silence' had already been brought to the table, so the thread goes back in the tapestry to that. Songs started to interconnect as I got to know them, not necessarily when I chose them."

"In the Depeche Mode song, I forgot to say ‘forgettable,’ so the line, ‘Words are meaningless and forgettable’ turned into ‘unforgettable’ because this is where I’ve been the last six months. They’re not forgettable."

"A think a little it of me got in the way of Enjoy the Silence, because I think I snuck out a little bit in that one just because that song expressed my feeling of motherhood in a way that no other song has for me. And it wasn’t written by a woman. But those are the pictures that I saw when I rediscovered this. And the person that brought it was not thinking of motherhood. It was a European guy who brought this one to the table, thinking of where he was when he heard it that year and partying at the time. But the ’80s, as you know, were quite a big party. They weren’t really violent times not like [these] times. It wasn’t about the whole 'Yo, bitch!' thing which is so tiresome, and [there] wasn’t the subjugation of women of gays. People wanted freedoms for other people, and to try and find some kind of magic, not some kind of domination and being dominated. Which was also driving the record, too. I mean, that had been clocked and observed and it was driving me also to try and figure out what was going on."

"It's ironic that this has been the ultimate slow dance for teenagers in love for years. The singer is really super cynical, and the lyrics show a superiority complex that doesn't know it's equal in pop music. He just has a hard on and looks down on the girl he sings about. I think that the men from 10CC where deeply on coke at the time, because this is real cocaine arrogance. Plus the arrogance from a pop-star that has hundreds of girls down at his feet and can say: 'Alright, you can give me a blowjob, but don't you dare thinking I care about you.' In my song it's different: 'You're not in love? Well, I'm not in love either, sucker!'

"She's a little fetish girl - she's into BDSM. It's all about power with her. And she's not really in love; she really isn't. She was at one time and she's having a different adventure in life. She will walk down many roads."

"...because I have traversed those areas of, oh, power as an aphrodisiac in those kinds of relationships. Role-playing and all that madness, which is part of life I guess. Part of growing up. But erotica to me is very different now. What is erotic to me? Well...feeling safe. Feeling respected. Feeling like a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny miniature earth."

"Yeah, but the damage is done! He says, 'So don't forget it.' He says, 'It's just a silly phase I'm going through.' It's manipulation. It's BDSM."

"I've traversed those areas in my own life and, God, it was devouring, on both sides. Power meant something different to me then. And I don't think it was safe. Because, say, I would take myself into places that could've been... offensive to my soul, taking a fantasy too far, where you think, 'This is dangerous, and I'm taking a hit here', meaning 'What have I opened up?', or, 'What am I playing out? What's in me that needs to be treated like this?'"

"Everyone knows the lyrics to I'm Not in Love. Well, with him I was playing precisely that game. My intentions were not at all honourable, but still we were just acquaintances."

"The song is that dark power dance. You're not in love? Well, neither am I. You want to play that one? Let's go. There will be a loser. Every five minutes. That might be fun for a while. Until it's not any more. Until the pounding and the scrapes begin to really hurt."

"I've been at war with the patriarchy for a long, long time and even the women that are in the patriarchy - it's not always the men. There a lot of men that I know really well, these are the Eagle Men, the men full of great thought and sages, that I'm lucky to be surrounded by. It wasn't being effective any more. It was for a time. We go back to Martin Luther and the 17th century as being nailed to the door of the church. There has to be a place. When I was seeing some of this Jesse Helms philosophy - a North Carolina politician whose in his late seventies now and who has been a real force in American politics. Some of his philosophy, either knowingly or unknowingly has been taken on board by some of these really groovy tattoo, pierced, sexy...erm...walking plasma. You have to sit back and say there is an anti freedom movement afoot that has become quite glamourised right now. And you end up with women who say 'Look, it's my freedom to give away if I want.' And you just have to say 'Wow, the inquisition's gotten very clever.' They don't need to torment anybody. You've got people over in Turkey or Afghanistan saying, 'Don't you dare take away my freedom to be defecated upon.' I look at the men around me saying 'What are you girls doing? Why?' You've got a whole contingent of men, particularly heterosexual men, and you have to ask what are these men doing hating women? Then what are you women doing wanting men that hate you to love you to see you? So there is always a question of Real Men and as women, how do we define that? What is a powerful man? We go after that in 'I'm Not In Love' by showing you this power game that she and he are at. It's a very involved little sexual dance, a tango happening. And it can be fun for a while. And then not. Because, what is power? You start to give away slices at a time, till you turn around and see that the pie has been cut up and you were part of the cutting. So what is our part in it? You and me in a relationship? What is my part in it? Not always them, them, them. So the idea that men can crawl over and into the skin of the women and see how they heard what the men said."

"The gal in I'm Not In Love is sort of investigating that power sexual tango, where maybe it's fun for a while but there's going to be a loser, just every time, there will be."

"Whereas a song like I'm Not in Love ... this was a real giggle-hour for the guys, because I'm Not in Love was, you know, slow dancing with the hand in the jean of the gal - or the young lad depending on which guy you're talking to! It turned into this whole walk down memory lane, and it started to really occur to me that there's arrogance, a hidden arrogance to that, so I chose to go into the shadow of this song. The version always exists, you can go listen to - you know some men really really treasured this song, but as a woman, being told, 'I'm not in love but - I have my girlfriend - but I feel this for you'. At a certain point you think, 'Okay, I'm not in love either. You want to play that one, you want to play it out, lets play it out.' It gets very dark ... if you really want to play that one out. Depending on what woman you're playing this out with." "The gal in I'm Not In Love is sort of investigating that power sexual tango, where maybe it's fun for a while but there's going to be a loser, just every time, there will be."

"Now, I could hold the S&M chick in 'I’m Not in Love,' whatever that says about me or doesn’t say about me."

"Before I became a mom, I might have thought different things overly sensual about a man. Now that I've become a mom, things that make me feel sensual as a woman and towards a man is, Is he safe? Is he a safe place where I could leave my daughter and turn my back? I didn't used to think about it like this. Before, sometimes it was this power-sexual-domination dance, which I explore a little bit in 'I'm Not in Love.'"

"She's a showgirl, much older than the other women. She wants to be a stage actress, but things haven't been going well for her. She hangs around with a lot of girls who do porn, and she doesn't judge them; she just wants to love them. Her mentors are some of the old screen legends--like Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. She lives in a fantasy world, in stories."

"She's one of my favourites, she's an enigma to me in so many ways. I have cups of coffee with her sometimes, and we have really good chats. But she's very hard to penetrate. She has these dreamy eyes; she loves to drive into the desert."

"Certain women walked after one listen straight through the door into my head, gave me their whole story and their voice. For others, I've had to wait longer. The woman on Rattlesnakes took so long that we almost had to drop the song but on a day I was sitting in the garden and I saw a branch with many curves. The shape reminded me of a rattlesnake and then, all of a sudden, she took possession of me. This mysterious girl, whom I still didn't understand, but wanted to be with from the beginning. I was curious about her lust for life, what moved her. I could live into the pain she felt because of her unborn child."

'I like her really much and of all the girls she probably has the most in common with myself but have you ever seen me wear a leather jacket with the Kiss-logo on it? She's become a friend, let's keep it to that."

"She's death. I think everybody gets to pick how they see death so to me she is the Grim Reaper and I saw her. Because time is ticking."

"I would hear a lot of people say, 'They're only words, what is everyone going on about?' That's where I said I could pick up the gauntlet. I believe in freedom of speech, but you cannot separate yourself from your creation. We go back to the power of words, and words are like guns...Whether you choose the graciousness of Tom Waits or the brutality of 'Bonnie and Clyde,' they're equally powerful, and that's what drove me."

"She said, 'When you listen to Time, I want you to hear me sing it.'"

"This one, who symbolises Death in Time. The Death is real; she doesn't need a mask or a pose, etiquette, tact or hypocrisy. All those things that make the communication between mortal people. Death and the passing of Time are almighty, so they can talk freely."

"People seem to be responding to that song. Tom Waits wrote it. It was first brought to me by a man who had lost his best friend. He said that this song is helping me feel closer to this person that I've lost and I said well, I never saw it that way before but I think I can. So that's how it sort of made its way into my life."

"As I started to get deeper and deeper into the project I started meeting these women. Are they the anima of the writers, I don't know. Are they the girls themselves personified? Not in all cases. Each woman has a very different relationship to her song. Some women are implied, some women are clearly there, written into the song by the male writer. And some, like in Time, Death, the essence if Death, who was a woman in white, just waltzed into the room. There was no way of me getting around this essence. Part of it might have been because the man who brought that song forth had just experienced the death of his best friend in the whole world. That was kind of a subtext of what was happening when I heard the song. And then the character appeared as Death herself."

"One of my favs off the record from Tom Waits. It's called Time."

"I didn't know that my relationship with the essence of Death was going to continue and develop. Neil and I have talked about how everyone's perception of her is different - she looks different to everyone. She came to me as this bright, beautiful being, almost angelic, as opposed to the image that we're conditioned to expect. I come from this heavy religious background, where Lucifer is portrayed as this dark and demonic thing. She came to me as this light - so bright, calm, very grounded and beautiful, you know? I loved that. No one has asked me this question before, so I'll talk more about it, if you don't mind. All these years, I've been on a search to find the essence of Death and build this relationship. Sometimes it's brought me to baby demons or to other things, types of demons. And as I learned more about her, whether it be through relationships, medicine men or women, the occult, literature, illness, we could go on, but any events that could show me a little more of that relationship with the darkness. By the darkness, I mean those things that are hidden from us, not evil or Lucifer is seen as demonic or satanic, but I don't associate Lucifer with Satanism. I don't associate Lucifer with being male necessarily, either. She can be a lovely light that shows people a little more of the hidden things and open them to things that they weren't aware of. There's that line, 'It's time that you love.' It was very different when Death said it than when I heard it from somewhere else. The real power, the most powerful aspect of Death is compassion."

"It's probably very difficult right now to find a heart of gold."

"Here are our twins. They're economic espionage gals - their saying is, 'It's not glamorous, it's just business.' They infiltrate corporations and access information and send it somewhere else. Good or bad, it depends what side you're on. They're not out protesting with a sign, they're playing chess with these corporate big boys. Its not about peaceful protest, its about being very effective, getting the job done."

"When I stripped it back, I saw that there was a sort of fury in the song, the "heart of gold" that any of us are looking for as we're rampaging the Earth of all of her resources-for bullion and all sorts of things. You have to pull back from that, and I found this song to be this desperate cry for something. These two banshees came to visit me-as if they were crying for the Earth and loading their water pistols, or like they've decided, "Okay, you haven't heard us, you haven't heard the cry of the Valkyrie, and it's war." And they became these economic espionage characters who chose to go to these establishments that didn't hear those Sirens' cry and say, "We're going to cut you off where it's really going to be quite painful for you, because you can't hear anything else. If you think you're going to destroy our mother, it's not going to happen."

"When I heard Heart Of Gold the first time I thought: this is pure hardcore!"

"Now the twins are good for me when I need protection, against swindlers or the wrong type of business relations. They know how to play the game with the big boys. Very hard to get those two out of balance."

"Gold, you understand? Gold! I am not an opponent to free economy, but we all know that it has its dark sides. Everybody can justify what they are doing but nobody sees the consequences it might have on our children. God bless Neil! I've heard that he loves my version."

"Heart of Gold, believe it or not, was a no-brainer, mainly because the stories the laboratory of men would tell around this song had my eyes rolling in the back of my head. They would say things like, 'This song is about looking for a woman who understands that I'm a player.' And I would say 'No. I don't think you have it right at all, you're not looking for a heart of gold, you're looking for a woman who's going to put up with your shit."

"Each song started to have its own kind of development. No different than kids as they’re growing up. Some kids grow up on a sailboat. Heart of Gold had that upbringing. When the guys brought that one to the table, in their reminiscing state it was like, 'You know, when I heard that song I thought about travelling the world and wouldn’t it be kind of great if my girlfriend could just really understand that I love her but I’ve got to travel the world, and if I meet up with someone else it’s nothing personal and maybe she could understand?' And it’s like, 'You want a woman who’ll put up with your bullshit. Looking for a heart of gold? Looking for a heart of Jell-o!' It was a certain point where one of them could understand, but a couple of the others just had this sort of little fantasy going about how great it would be if a man could just kind of just be the eternal prouerre. So there were a few things that were kind of working for me as Heart of Gold started to resonate. In this time that we’re living in it’s hard to find any kind of fantasy of a heart of gold. I think that sometimes it’s really kind of daunting when you go out there in the supermarkets and just have to run the gauntlet from the oranges to the limes without being killed or wanting to kill somebody. Just the lack of politeness in people. It’s just this fucking selfish kind of world that has no manners. I would just like for Miss Manners to make an appearance. And I’m a bit of an anarchist, but I just think, 'Anarchy with Miss Manners!' You know, there’s protocol in anarchy. You know, there just is. So 'Heart of Gold' sort of became a desperate, desperate sort of plea for my twins, my characters. And they kind of took on the persona of being in, would say, honorable righteous thieving against the white collar corporate world. And it’s not really my comment on Warner’s AOL because they’re all relatively the same, whether it’s that or Microsoft or whatever or whomever. But I think we all know that a lot of these companies think they’re above the law. So Heart of Gold became about my girls being able to go for the bouillon access, infiltrate, and trying to find the integrity and if they couldn’t find it they were going to break them where they could. And they’ve made peace with that. Would you want to hang out with them? I don’t really know you, but if you were having a war with say, Universal, you might want to know them."

"Sonically, it got dictated because in the tracking it was two lead vocals, which no other song had. That determined the characters."

"I adore Neil Young's music, and adore what he is as an essence. However, how this song affected a lot of guys in my group was pretty consistent. And I was going, 'No, a definition of a heart of gold is not a doormat, guys, somebody who is just going to take you back every time you hurt her because she loves you.' A heart of gold is somebody who's going to say, 'Love you. Go fuck yourself!'"

"Instead of you becoming the eternal pariah with this concept in your brain that it's okay to ask to wait around for you because she loves you while you just plant your seed from here to Japan, I'm your good female buddy friend who's gonna fucking tell you. I'm persnickety sometimes. And that should make you feel safe. You know that I've got your back. If the vikings are coming and raiding us -- and I don't mean the football team -- if you feel that blade hit the back of your neck, you know that I'm down. That, to me, is a heart of gold. That's a friend: ferocious."

"It was sung from the point of view of the cop who went to the school that day, because I couldn't hold the essence of this person who went and killed everybody. I had to be able to hold something in a structure of women, or I couldn't be in the chair for them. It was sung in a "childlike effect... I didn't believe that this was a bad seed so I wanted to create it in this sort of shattered playground world."

"The song was written after the high school murder in '97 in California where a young girl opened fire on her classmates. In my version of I Don't Like Mondays I crawl under the skin of the police officer who had to shoot the girl, that had opened fire. Out of self defence. She had a lot of difficulties with that, also because she, on that bloody Monday, was able to kill. At the time of the murder there was a lot of discussion about trading weapons in the USA. If kids can get a weapon so easily, who is responsible? It's easier to get a weapon than to get your driving license. Why don't we make it more difficult to get your hands on a weapon? I've always worried about these kind of things, but since Tash came into my life, I think the stupid American right to sell weapons‚ like it were a kilo of apples‚ is a straight threat. It got to me so much that I sang Happiness Is A Warm Gun from the same feeling. Audio fragments have been added from political discussions about the trading of weapons. That is a statement that I wanted to add myself. I want to make people aware of the mad society my daughter has to grow up in."

"And one of the brain trust of men called me up and said, after the shooting in San Diego that happened this year, 'You know you have to do I Don't Like Mondays'. And I said, 'You know fair point.' And as I was uh...That Bob Geldolf was commenting on years and years ago. And the fact that it, it's still going on, that its resonating still now, that and Happiness started to really kind of really become a couplet together. I was watching a lot of the commentary at the time after the shooting, and the thing that stuck me was: different people from the gun lobby or the NRA would say things to the effect of, or I'd read it on the net, that these are bad seeds that do these kinds of things. And it was almost like they were absolving themselves because we all know that the issue is accessibility. And with all my nieces and nephews, The Chip Is Going To Slip! It did with me. It's gooing to, so the last thing you want is they can pick up a 38 caliber gun. That's the last thing that you want.

"She went to school and she also had to shoot someone that day - she shot the kid that shot everybody. In our myth, she sings it from a place of having killed as opposed to the original, which was commentary."

"I didn't want to investigate the girl that had shot everybody that day, because I couldn't hold that essence. But I was drawn to the idea that those of us that are sanctioned to kill, it's a question. I don't think everybody's OK with it, even though they're allowed to do it. Especially in this situation, where it's a young kid who wasn't a bad seed."

"One of the last people Mark David Chapman called before he killed John Lennon was an escort service. And we don't know if they had sex or if they just talked, but he told her to 'be silent.' So this is sung through the eyes of that call girl."

"We hope that she'll (Yoko Ono) understand the spirit of it. I believe that she will. Lennon was a man who had seen an ad that said, 'Happiness is a warm gun' and he asked in interviews, 'Why is it warm? Because it's just been fired.', without knowing, when he said this, that one would be fired on him. Now, cut to the shooting incident in San Diego. I knew that Happiness was on the record. It's been circling me for a few years now, because yes, we have a gun culture. And, yes, we have a Second Amendment. As you and I know, when it's easier to get a gun than a driver's license, something is just intrinsically wrong. When the school shooting happened again, I heard comments like, 'Look, there are bad seeds out there and it's going to happen.' It just seemed like this absolving, this kind of washing of hands, like 'Hey it's not us,' meaning those on the gun side. And I have friends who are part of the whole gun movement. But you have to go, 'Why do we have to be so resistant to the fact that we have blood all over our hands? That kids are killing each other?' When do people turn around and say, 'Whatever we're doing is not working...'? On this record, the whole Second Amendment is talked about by my father on the single mainly because I figure if we're going to have the Bushes, Sr. and Jr., then I needed to have the Amos', Sr. and Jr. I thought that was fair."

"While we were investigating all sorts of events that circle Happiness is a Warm Gun, this song is tied to I Don't Like Mondays and the shooting that happened, again in San Diego this past year where the kids were being killed by a kid. That kind of brought up real questions that we all had towards the gun lobby, what they were saying about this shooting, things like bad seeds do this kind of thing and it was almost like they were absolving themselves of any responsibility, and we all know that the problem is accessibility, because the chip is gonna slip, and some of my nieces and nephews, who are sweethearts, the chip slips, as Bob Geldof says in his song. And if it does, do you want them grabbing for a 38 calibre gun? I'd rather them grab for a watermelon because that's what they can get their hands on! But that you can get a gun in some states easier than you can get a drivers license, that was terrifying. And my dad talks about the second amendment on this. He's the one people think is Charlton Heston sometimes, that is my father - Yeah. My dad does believe strongly in the second amendment, but with controls that aren't in place. And then we of course have George Bush senior and George W. also giving their views. My dad threatened me that I'd better not edit him, I said don't worry, I'm not going to edit you."

"We did some research and found that Lennon's killer hired a call girl and asked her to provide silent service."

"Well, if you go to a whore, you actually say: 'I admit that I am not able to meet a woman in an ordinary way. I am to lazy to invest time, energy and love in a woman, and I don't have any pride or self respect either'. But a lot of men pay a whore also for comfort and tenderness. A hole to fill and a shoulder to cry on. A typical case is the murderer of John Lennon. That man, Mark Chapman, ordered a call-girl the night before he shot Lennon. Later, she told the police he had asked her to be completely silent during the deed, 'like you sleep'. And 'sleep' of course stands for 'dead'. That's why I choose the call-girl disguise for the picture of 'Happiness Is A Warm Gun'."

"And this one is so sweet. If her customers want to shit on her, she speaks softly: 'No, we're not gonna do that, that is not my thing.' She is the prototype of the abused woman who approaches assholes in an understanding way."

"I mean Happiness is a Warm Gun is very much this Frank Zappa-inspired, nine-minute sort of a back-drop for the Second Amendment argument, a song written by a man who was later killed by a gun. It was just something that I thought needed to be talked about especially after the San Diego shooting happened earlier this spring."

"What a song, written by a man who had no idea he was going to be taken down by one."

"Look, my rebelliousness would not impress someone like you at all. I am both a daughter and a granddaughter of a priest and raised by the Christian church. Europeans don't understand what religion means in the States. Just like Americans don't understand the safety ... in the face of the queen on the Sex Pistols album. You can't hurt American people more than questioning their religious moral standards. It is my father who is speaking on Happiness Is A Warm Gun about his view on the 2nd Amendment. He said: don't change my words to prove you are right. And I said: I am not changing your words. I just have a different view from you. In this moment America is having a war against itself, you know. Violence is just like salt; we keep on throwing it into the wounds."

"That song has been circling me for a while - yes, since Columbine - but the gun question hasn't gone away for me before or after Sept. 11. Because there are a lot of people on my block that I wouldn't want having a gun! When I would hear people involved in the gun movement say, 'Look, there's going to be bad seeds,' they let us down by not addressing that access is the problem. Why can you get a gun easier than you can get a driver's license in some states, and why should that be OK without risking the Second Amendment? The laboratory of men brought me a wealth of information about this one. John Lennon saw this ad somewhere that said, 'Happiness is a warm gun,' and then he took it further, to his gun taking on all sorts of meanings and pictures, and tastes and smells, from drugs to sex, as we all know. But what drew me in was that this guy was murdered by one, and he had no idea. And that still hasn't been addressed, because it's the most powerful lobby in this country. And now we can justify that everybody needs one of these things. I'm not against guns. But I am against people pretending they're not what they are - no different than words."

"Because I had done 'Silent All These Years,' I had an entry point into that state of mind. And there's this guy who was tapping into this gun essence and manipulating it into the sexual and drug and religion realms, weaving them together, all the while having no idea that he would be killed by one. And that's where I walked in, saying, 'OK, let's take it to reality now.' But I had to know about this woman, to understand what she was doing there. I had to find the entry point."

"I was reading about what was going on in Afghanistan--the way women were being oppressed, the destruction of religious statues. And when I heard that song, I just imagined a huge juicy vagina coming out of the sky, raining blood over all those racist, misogynist fuckers."

"You wait around until you get tapped on the shoulder and you know that she's shown up, this character, this person who can carry the song and knows it, and truly your body feels different. For the Slayer track I walked back from the house to the barn - the studio's in a barn - and I felt that. It was like immediately, this French Resistance movement; when I heard 'slayer', I saw her, I knew who she was. I had a sense of her. And in a few days she arrived."

"She's a French Resistance women whose sister was killed. She went to the underground after the death of everyone she knew. She's calling on certain powers, no different than the ones Himmler and the Nazis were calling on, only they used the dark forces. Our French Resistance woman knows myths and is calling on power and working on alchemy"

"The text is really beautiful indeed, the words touched me deep. The Raining blood girl revealed herself to me from the moment that I heard the song. She said from the first line: 'Come with me Tori, I'll show you everything'. She took me to a warfield, pure horror. Still I felt safe with her, because of her braveness but not only the girl came to me. There was another image of a big, beautiful vagina in the air from which blood is raining. It's falling out of the air on certain countries which are so terribly violent against women like Afghanistan, where women can't even go on the street without a man, are not allowed to study and often get raped. And these horrors can not be lead in any way to religion. It's straight from the spirit of men."

"I still think Raining blood sounds more like Bartok than Radiohead. Justin Meldal Johnson, the bass player of Beck who played also on SLG, said to me: hey, the metal heads are not represented on your album and I think that is an offence I found that quite rightly. I started listening to metal records that had changed his live. He mentioned Slayer to me and what they meant to hem. I wanted to do something back for him. According to Justin the album Reign In Blood was most revolution air metal album ever. When I heard the song Raining Blood I knew it would give woman more power. The line that really got me was: Return to power draw near. Yes! That is exactly of our time. What is power? That's the big question in this whole album without mentioning it explicitly. And it gave me a good feeling. Especially when you consider what is happening to woman in some countries."

"She's an androgynous being, like a seahorse. Her essence is anima/animus combined, of the joining of two in one. It's a woman who has really integrated her animus. And this is what she projects to the world. Neil Gaiman is convinced she's a he, but I don't agree. I think she's androgynous."

"She embodies both the male and the female, makes true bridges between both sexes in her soul. Somebody with a lot of feeling for ethics."

"I'm saying is...Joe Jackson, he said it 'we think it's getting better but nobody's really sure' and there does seem to be, in the last couple of years, there' s been a weird sort of malice towards women and gay men from some of the heterosexual community."

"Like 'Real Men.' Once I had the music on tape I began to know who was singing it, what she was like. 'Real Men' was very much about articulating every word, a woman talking about where the real men are."

"I liked the idea of a woman's voice singing, 'We wonder where the real men are,' because that question keeps coming up: 'What is a powerful man?' I was surprised to find women who were turned on by the thought of being subservient, women who said, 'I think being dominated can be really sexy.' After hearing that, I just had to sit down and take an anti-inflammatory and start being a sonic archaeologist."

"I think it started with the idea of a place where men are the mothers. That's the original seed - I have to go back to the original, original seed before we get into the second layer. And the original one was a loving kind of compassionate place. A lot of the men in my life wanted to know what is it like to be able to hold another life inside your body. They didn't want to know what it would be like to be a father; they wanted to know what would it be like to be a mother. A man who could have that power. Which started to take me to the word power - and then we go to Joe Jackson, Real Men, how do you define a powerful man? That's really changed for me, because I used to be up to no good."

"So in the choosing the songs and where they sat on the record, of course, that's a story in its own. Order matters. At one time I thought I wanted to start the record off with Real Men, because I thought it would be clear what we were going for, but then it just felt like nothing could follow it, so it became our bookend, it was the end."