On Tales Of A Librarian

"I'm referring to it more as a 'best-of' because I think to have a 'Greatest Hits' you need like ten Top Ten hits. This is more of a chronicle of what we know of Tori from 1990 to 2003. So it's from her perspective of the last many years, having travelled around the world and going through her own personal stuff. And the songs do that. Maybe it's the closest thing to an autobiography of this woman's life that there's ever been."

"It includes things like 'Precious Things' and of course 'Silent All These Years,' 'Cornflake Girl,' 'Spark,' songs that people might be familiar with on one level. And then there are quite a lot of songs that I felt gave you more story and a bit of sizzle with variations musically. It had to represent a whole musical spectrum because that's very much a part of the story. It's not just the ballads. It's not just what you heard on the radio."

""Angels" is a song that I wrote this summer, after touring America yet again and seeing were we are as a country, at our cross-roads. I've been moved by people's visions, all over the world, touring... touring in Europe and seeing where as Americans, we have to look at our own shadows and Angels is really a song that talks about what's really going on, their trapping Angels by the Potomac, and maybe because I grew up there, working, playing piano bar for those congressmen, for all those years, I felt like there was something that I've seen, and there's something that has to be said at this time."

"It's a commentary on now. The world after what we've been through the last two years and the state of play."

"My take on this time."

"So, um, this little song is something that after touring the country for all of last year, it seems like forever, but um this song kind of came to me just sort of as um a chronicaling of this time that we're in and she came and tapped me on the shoulder and she's on Tales"

"The line about the man that better watch his back could be about anyone in America who think they won't be involved. I guess you could say that the Angels represent the missing votes during the last presidential election. People still found it difficult to understand that they were unable to undo the result. It's getting better by the day, but it's been a tough two years. I think about the war in Iraq, too, and the depressing fact that we're still in it, people warned us for this situation, but if you try and speak out in America, people say you're not supporting the country, but it's the administration you're not supporting. It's funny, because Christians talk about people being possessed, but they're attempting to possess the voice of the land. So Angels is partly about the 'lost' votes, and partly about a mass of people who could not see that they had the strength to stand up to everything that followed. And what is an Angel? according to my opinion it's someone who are able to stand above something."

""Snow Cherries from France" took a long time to write, yes, about 7 years maybe.  I finally finished it this summer. And it's not that it was just finished as far as a song goes, but I couldn't seem to find the point of view to sing it. I went back and forth, depending on if I was mad at my husband or not, I mean, it kept changing. But then finally I found a place with it, that I began to understand what it was saying to me, and in the recording I changed some of the quotes that he had said originally, no, she says. And because of that, it all began to make sense. So her position in it changed from when I started to write it, and she's a little more involved. She's a little more up to shenanigans than I thought she originally was, and that's why it worked."

"There is a song I wrote for Choirgirl that didn't come out and I didn't record it. It's one of my favourites called Snow Cherries From France. And I haven't recorded it yet and I wrote it for this record. So we'll see."

"Hmm yes it's about love. I usually don't tell what my lyrics are about. But it's one of those songs where the woman knows that the man will leave, but she chooses to be with him anyway."

"I started writing this song in 1996 to '97. It's been a long time coming. I think it finally came together because I changed the narrator's point of view ever so slightly. That is, that she knew on some level that he was going to leave her. The previous angle was that she didn't think he would go. She came into it a lot more naive the first go 'round. And finally, once I kind of cracked who this woman was--how she thought, and how she felt--it came together. That is, that deep down, she knew he was a wanderer. And she took the risk anyway."