On Under The Pink

"Under The Pink is a place, it's an internal place. It's the inner world, the inner life. You have to listen from your stomach. To me it's there. But you've got to be willing to put your moccasins on and walk down the road."

"Under The Pink was an impressionist painting."

"You get to write your diary once, and then you have to become somebody who can write about characters and other people. You have to learn your craft; you have to get your toolbox out."

"This album is a self-healing experience to me" [

"I had no choice, really. The songs just came. They seized me when I was going to a store. They said: 'Hey babe, it's time to talk about this or that subject'. Then I would go home and sit behind the piano and the idea began to take shape."

"Pink is a color with healing properties, representing the energy of love. Pink is, however, also the color that appears when we skin  ourselves... Everyone is pink under the skin and that is what I wanted to express. The world within is what is important to me..."

"There is a triangle on this record: the songs Bells for Her, Cornflake Girl, and The Waitress - a triad about women betraying women, that's a kind of theme here. We women have to deal with the patriarchy first, but then, what's the alternative? Do you need a woman to look after you? I'm here to apply for the job. But when you say patriarchy, you don't have to be a man to be part of the patriarchy. After I read Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker, about how mothers sold their daughters to the butchers; that kind of floored me. One always feels safer when there are good guys and bad ones. But there are no good guys out there. And it's not as if one sex can make it okay."

"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 dream world 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"

“Pretty Good Year is really part two of Ode To The Banana King. Ode To The Banana King is part one - as you see, Lucy reoccurs. That’s part two, Pretty Good Year. So I’ll probably write part three.”

“Whether it bums you out or not, the truth is, all this happened, as much as the first record did. But there are other characters involved a bit more. There are just other beings involved in this one. 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 - 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. I found this a reoccurrence in every country that I went. In that early 20 age, with so many of the guys - more than the girls, they were a bit more, ‘Ah, things are just beginning to happen.’ The guys, it was finished. The best parts of their life were done. 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 that I could sing it.”

“On Winter, the father sang to me, ‘When you gonna make up your mind/When you gonna love you as much as I do?’ and in Pretty Good Year on the new album, I sing to the boyfriend, ‘What’s it gonna take till my baby’s alright?’ There’s no self pity in the song and yet it’s a tragedy. It’s a tragedy because I can’t make him love himself. I can’t do it. No matter how much I beat it into him, I can’t do it for him. Funny how the tables have turned isn’t it?”

“In Pretty Good Year, I refuse to give pity. That was the main thing. Of course this was the worst year of his life; it’s a tragedy, this song. Yet it’s like the worst thing you can give somebody is support for their pity. Now the other thing in this song is it made me look at when a man doesn’t respect himself: how does that make me feel? Ok, we’re patient. Let’s be fair; we’re patient for two, maybe three weeks. And then what happens? We’re looking at the friend that’s walkin’ in the room with him. It’s ok for us to be, ‘oh, I’m laid off and I’m having a hard time and I am misunderstood and not given a chance,’ but we get embarrassed. I’ve studied this with women. If you’re an exception, then you get the gold star.”

“Who do you think Lucy is? I’m not telling you who Lucy is.”

“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 see the mountain thaw. The sound when these two merged was something like ‘thclulpleekooh’ 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.”

"I feel like, for whatever reason, this group of songs wanted to be together. Some songs people will say, how could you not have included this and that, and then you say, well I do have three strings, four strings songs on the record, and for instance, we included "Pretty Good Year" on the DVD because, again, for that moment in time when I was playing it that day, it was the last show, it was sound check... I only played it two other times on the whole tour. I mean like I'm talking about 150 shows, and for, again, that moment in time, Pretty Good Year was our way of saying goodbye to each other, the musicians, people I've loved, lived our lives together for many months, and in a year that's been filled with war, and we've had friends die - this year - and a boy came up to me and he was told he had terminal cancer and he said "Will you play Pretty Good Year for me?" And in that moment, um, she came. Her moulding when it came was not in good shape, so she was not going to make the record, but in the final hour, Pretty Good Year made the DVD, so those are the decisions that got made." (speaking in 2003)

"God was definitely high drama. I chose Melodie, confidant, and confident She had a wealth of religious perceptions. Rituals became the key word as well as dangerous -- the different ways people worship. What is sacred to one person would be insulting to another which is why so many people have been tortured and tortured others over "My God's Bigger than your God.". The realism of God juxtaposed with the 'fantasy gone wrong' happening across town of Cornflake kept me aren't and Leslie constantly having to Refocus ourselves. I learned specifically 2 things on the God. Shoot 1 - rats shit but they don't fart. 2 - never handle snakes after cavorting with 150 rats without sterilizing yourself in Clorox first. Obviously there's always a p.s. to this -- not everyone will see the art form in us pairing the junkie with the Hasidic wrapping ritual ."

"Why be afraid of these cuddly, soft, adorable things? For a minute, I thought they were communicating with me."

“Now my idea of God is not the energy I’m confronting. I’m confronting the institution of God that we’ve been taught through Christianity, the one that kind of rules the planet as far as the media goes. I’m saying, ‘Buddy, you need to sit down, and you need a babe, and I’m not busy this week. There’s just some stuff we’ve got to go over here.’ It’s been very empowering. Instead of this, ‘I’m not worthy.’ That’s just a bit too big for me.”

“I had weekly tea-parties with God, ‘cause that power is the spirit of creativity to me. In the song I direct myself toward the God of the institutionalized religions, the God we have been taught about, for Whom we feel sinful and submissive. It was liberating for me to direct myself so directly toward Him. He’s very lonely, I guess. In what I call the God-energy-power, there’s a lot from the Bible. He brings love and healing, but also destruction. He’s partly built out of the projection of men and women. The patriarchate, the witch-hunting, the firestacks follow from it. In the name of God a lot of wrong has been done. The woman has been robbed of her own experience of lust I have explained it to you like I never did before.”

“God is, ‘Hey buddy, I think you need a babe. Sit down. And I just happen to be around.’ The whole concept of God that our institutions have taught us, whatever it is, it’s not just Christianity but the whole rigmarole, to me isn’t what it truly is. I don’t know what it truly is. But I don’t believe that what we’ve been taught is what it is. Most of us don’t - that’s not true. A few of us don’t. But when you’re 10 years old and being taught a belief system, you don’t have the wherewithal to go, ‘Well, when they’re putting this dried, stale cracker in my mouth, and telling me it’s all going to be OK, it’ll be OK if I put my little warm hand down on my little warm spot. That’ll make it a bit OK.’ That’s where Icicle comes in. But with God, I think that the energy force of creation feels really pissed off that this usurper that humankind has created is misusing that force, you know? I think it’s really pissed off.”

“The notion of a male force as God is definitely not how I see things. Because that male force is the Christian God who says, ‘we are Christians and we love our neighbours as ourselves as long as they believe in God. If you do, we won’t rape your women, slaughter your children or cut your nuts off - which was basically the culture of Christianity, with a male figure as its God-head. That’s why I sing, ‘God sometimes you just don’t come through/ Do you need a woman to look after you.’ The God-force must be feminized, perceived more as a God-Goddess. Jesus, his mother, ‘his church’ all must be redefined. Especially a figure like Mary Magdalene...”

“There was actually a part of me that felt really yummy going: ‘OK Babe, You’re in a bit of trouble. Things aren’t going well. Put Your feet up. I’ll make You a cup of tea ‘cause You need some advice. I’m not busy this week so You’re in luck’. There has been a shift in the way I see myself. Instead of ‘poor little human’, it’s more like: ‘OK, I’m human and maybe You are immortal, but I know stuff ‘cause I’m here, so I do have a perspective that I value. That’s really a wonderful place, I think. Humans haven’t been taught that they should value their perspective. It’s always been so much bowing and scraping to the mythological deity. And I’m kind of feeling like He needs a babe. I’m definitely going after the patriarchy in that song. I’m going after the male presence that’s dominated religion and calling forth the goddess to do that. It’s a goddess thing to do.”

“I went after the patriarchy and God this time: I figured we went after the son, let’s go after the father. That whole song is about calling forth a Goddess, that’s what it is all about. So I really do feel that we pull that energy forth on the record. It was very liberating for me to write God. To be able to say, ‘hang on a minute, buddy. Sit down here. You got to be held accountable.’ Now this isn’t my concept of what the great creator is. This is the concept of God, the institutional religion, whether it’s Judaism, Christianity, Islam... and many other branches and offshoots, it’s definitely been our heavenly father he ain’t lactating! Some women have said to me ‘I can’t believe you’ve made God a woman’ and it’s like, ‘Ok genius, leave the room, think for five minutes, go over your history, come back in the room and you tell me who has been the pope for the past few years. You tell me who’s been ruling institutional religion: males, patriarchy and a male God. The female Goddess who has been our role model has been the Virgin Mary, a sexless being. Now even though the Virgin Mary had kids later on, nobody wanted to talk about that when I was growing up, nobody wanted to talk about the Magdalene. Nobody wanted to talk about Mary’s true role. And people don’t really think about how that affected an entire planet, to have the most populated religion worshipping a sexless being!”

“Some of the songs, like God, I’m just so in the middle of, that I’m not really the director. When I wrote that I was having a complete conversation with the concept of what God is. Not necessarily what I think God truly is, but what the institution, whether it be educational or what have you, has made of God. To me, it’s the root of all problems, that song right there. For me, one of the most important things I’ve ever done. You can call it my prayer if you want.”

“I think that God - that was a number one hit in America on alternative radio - got a lot of the fundamentalist Christians pissed off. So, that’s a good thing, I think, because that means you’re stirring the pot up. I like stirring the pot up a bit.”

“Singing God was really empowering, the primitive, the seduction. Seducing God a bit was wonderful. He’s great, he had a good time. He’s smiling! I mean look, it’s about communicating with a force that you’ve been so controlled by, and saying I need to deal with this force.”

“Give not thy strength unto women, nor thy ways to that which destroyeth kings.” -Proverbs 31:3. Well, I’m going to tell you something cute about my dad. I called him from the studio and I said, ‘Look, I need a quote from the Bible that shows the raw deal women got.’ I call him back, and I’m in England ‘cause we’re mixing, and I just needed this quote and my father says ‘Would you like to hear my quotes?’ He gives me two pages of quotes form the Song Of Solomon which says, ‘Thy globes are like ripe sweet berries; thy navel is like a cup which poureth spring water.’ It just goes on forever and I say, ‘Dad, no, this is not representative of what I’m talking about.’ He says, ‘Yeah, but these are beautiful quotes.’ And it was very interesting to me how my father, bless his cotton socks, just can’t acknowledge the way that the Church has treated not just women, but people in other cultures - it’s hard for him as a minister to see the other side of Christianity and what it’s done in the name of God.”

“There’s a division of power, male and female power, and there’s a division within my own being. There’s been a dishonouring of us with each other, and us with ourselves, and women against women, and men against men, and women against men... and that’s how the song God got written. The institutional God who’s been ruling the universe, in the books, has to be held accountable. I want to have a cup of tea with him and just have a little chat. I feel like the song is a releasing, a sharing. It’s honest and loving. And it’s sensuous. It’s the goddess coming forth and saying, ‘Come here, baby. I think you’ve had a bit of a rough job, and I don’t mind helping out now.’ Which I think is really cute.”

“That moment is a moment, that song as you hear it was written as it was recorded. I’d been feeling something in my belly all day, and I told Eric, ‘I’m feeling something.’ He goes, ‘Like, when? Do you need to set the mikes up now or what?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, but later. I’ve got to eat first.’ It was around four o’clock, and he said, ‘Are you feeling something yet?’ I said, ‘Not quite yet.’ He goes, ‘Well, like, feel it now, because I’ve been waiting for six hours and I need to record this.’ And I said, ‘Uh.’ He just said, ‘Just go in to the piano. Just go in.’ So I went in, and I was listening to the sonics of the detuned acoustic. All of a sudden, this thing has started that was and it came in that moment. Words, music, everything. And for one second, my head went out of it and had to come back in. It was during the instrumental part where I was going, ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’ And when it was over, it was like, ‘Did you get that?’ And he goes, ‘I got it.’ He pushed Record. It’s like, thank you for pushing Record.”

“We are no more than walking plasma, just stuff. That song Bells for Her is one of the most emotional moments on the record, because it handles the end of a friendship. You go through the life force and see how your friend walks out and you can’t stop the things happening because of that, no matter what you try to do. Who tries to resist the life force gets sucked in. When you’re confronted with a painful experience, a shocking deed of betrayal, you must be able to ventilate those feelings of anger and violence somewhere, but there are certain borders. You can’t wound someone and just walk away.”

“Eric Rosse, who produced the record, had wanted to really work with the piano more than samplers. He completely annihilated this upright and made this beautiful creation out of it. They spent two days detuning and muting it, doing all this stuff to the strings.”

“The main thing about Bells for Her is that there’s no resolve, and that’s what that whole song was saying. ‘Can’t stop what’s coming, can’t stop what is on its way.’ All I can do is respond truthfully, and the concept that we’ll always be friends, or we can always work it out, I would have bet you that I could have worked anything out with this person. I would have bet my hand I could have worked anything out. I’d be missing a hand right now. It’d be the one-armed Tori tour. I couldn’t have foreseen this. And I think, how many people, in marriages or families, and they’re going, ‘Wait a minute, I’m a rational being. This is a rational being, so we think.’ Of course, I’m a little - I’m partial, but I would have thought, yes, we could work it out. And when it got to the end ‘blankettes,’ and the spelling changed, and when I was writing it down, I did it ‘blankettes’ as in - well, what it means to me is just blank women, chicks. Yet they were making mudpies and creating and it’s void now. And if you talk to people that know her, they think she’s a together, great babe. And if you talk to people that know me, I’m a together, great babe. And yet just couldn’t do it. So there is a triangle on this record of the betrayal of women. It’s not just that relationship. It’s many other things in other tunes.

“Bells for Her is the loss of a friend. From Cornflake to The Waitress to Bells, Bells is the loss of - and it’s kind of backwards. I do the last thing first, and then the first last. But Bells is the spirit speaking, not the ego speaking, but the part of me that still loves a friend that for whatever reason you can’t make a resolve. You just can’t do it. The big lesson in this whole year is that there isn’t a resolve for many things.”

“Whenever they would seemingly instinctively attack men, or whatever, I’d have to say, I don’t automatically feel that way. I’m trying to rise above such feelings. Hatred for men, en masse, is as poisonous a feeling as shame. And Bells for Her is the scream of ‘no’ before you cut the chord and let them go. The song Yes, Anastasia also has lot of that stuff in it.”

"Probably my favourite here. I take Vanessa William's advice, saving the best 'til last. We filmed in Arcos, Spain we were there 4 Days. 2 days full shooting, 1 day in, 1 day out. My Mother flew in for this one and you can just imagine your mother surrounded by all these older Spanish sweethearts. Working with Jake Scott was fascinating from my point of view because although he was a young director it was so in his blood it was untrue. Karen and Leslie found the casting of the Priest enough for a gossip. Yes he was gorgeous as was everyone -- the young girls one of the girls mother's - the wee one - helped us put the whole thing together. 4 Days of my life I will never forget. It changed my thinking about food, about passion, about the commitment to art, to love unfortunately not to learning to spill."

“With Past the Mission there’s hope. ‘Past the mission I smell the roses,’ and Trent sings on it. I wanted him to sing on it because of his energy. I love his work. Past the Mission wanted him to sing on it.”

“We love Elton. Past the Mission has - yeah, I can see that. George Porter Jr. from the Meters played on the whole record, and there’s a lot of him on that, as much as Carlo Nuccio from the bottom end. I did the piano vocal first, but they played the track, which gave it that - especially in the verses, that New Orleans kind of church meets Otis Redding meets, and they had a lot to do with bringing that out of the piece itself. Trent, obviously, it’s nothing like he does in his work, which I found an interesting choice, because it wasn’t for him to sing on something that was his, why do that? Past the Mission is a love story. It’s kind of a strange one in that it’s me again, still trying to find pieces that I’ve left other places. It kind of breaks my heart when I hear him sing with me, ‘I once knew a hot girl.’ Where is she now? She can come back again. It’s that same thing, where in Pretty Good Year and Past the Mission and Space Dog, where everything is reclaimable.”

“Of course I believe they were together. Of course I believe they were a couple and that she understood things. She represents the Goddess, the female, the feminine, the joining, the equality. ‘Some things only she knows.’ And until we acknowledge that there are some things only she knows; and there’s some things only he knows, too; and until we have mutual respect, there’s that prison tower, and there’s that mission and the hot girl got lost somewhere in between.”

“Some things only She knows. There is a power that the feminine energy holds that hasn’t been claimed, especially in religious mythology. Past The Mission is claiming that, I guess.”

“There is also this huge underlying Holy Blood, Holy Grail theme in this song. What the Holy Grail was, the Blood Royal, was Mary Magdalene coming on a boat to the Mediterranean south of France carrying Jesus’ baby - the King of the Jews.”

“I think there’s also a bit of the Mary Magdalene/Jesus relationship in Past the Mission, because I was reading Holy Blood, Holy Grail at the time. It has a lot of thoughts. It’s a very long book about a historical viewpoint on everything, with the Cathars and all that happened in the Pyrenees, and the Merovingian dynasty and the whole nine yards. It’s an interesting read. It opened my mind up a bit. More than anything, it was the sexual relations, even if it’s just with yourself, surrounding the oppression of the church, and that’s where Past the Mission again - it’s really freeing to me, that song. I’ve always kind of - there’s no resolve, either.”

“Past the Mission refers to a personal experience with sexual violence, which I had a song about on Little Earthquakes also. So, the remark ‘I once knew a hot girl’ is painful. Where’s she gone? On this record there are songs about the healing from that experience, like Baker Baker (‘Make me whole again’), Past the Mission, Yes, Anastasia. The idea is to rescue myself from the role of a victim. That I have a choice left. Though I can’t change what has happened, I can choose how to react. And I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being bitter and locked up. That’s also the thought behind the phrase ‘past the mission/I smell the roses’”

“The trouble in the churches is what I sing about in Past The Mission. But there’s also a lot of hope in that song because ‘Past the mission I smell the roses.’ There is a denouncement, I think, in this whole earth life. I’m not going to say - although I think R.E.M.’s right that it is the end of the world as we know it - that I think it’s really showing itself as that. But ‘Past the mission I once knew a hot girl...’ Where is she? Where did she bury herself? Again, it’s trying to find the pieces of myself that I have numbed over the years. And there is life past the mission.”

“Past the Mission is about a girl who refuses to be a victim anymore. But she has to face a lot of thought patterns to do that.”

“Directions were always interesting... ‘ok 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.”

I wanted to keep the centre while I experimented with different sounds. I mean, that was the whole idea. What arrangements can the piano hold? And through the whole process, we learned the piano can pretty much take anything. It’s just this choice, like in that bridge of Past the Mission, I’m playing a Vox organ around the piano, and Eric had styrofoam being pushed on the bottom end of the strings of the piano to create that strange bassoon sound. So there was a bit of prepared piano experimenting that we really didn’t take as far as we really wanted to because we were short on time.”

“Baker Baker is kind of tragic in a way, because - I’ve had to look at how I treated men, and on this record, I think with Baker Baker, to deal with a man that truly loved me, but that I wasn’t emotionally available for. You know how women always say men aren’t emotionally available. Well, a lot of women aren’t emotionally available. It’s like, if you’re vulnerable, we say, ‘Look, we need you to be sensitive.’ So you become sensitive, and yet we go, ‘You’ve got no fuckin’ backbone,’ and we kick you in the face and run off with a ski trainer.”

“In Baker Baker, not blaming... that’s where gaining my power is coming from, being able to say I am the one who has not been able to be intimate, I’m the one who pushed him away.”

“I took from the rape that man’s hatred of women, so much so that I couldn’t access parts of myself. It’s as though a computer chip has been put in, to cut out contact with your core self, your central energy source. And that hatred ran so deep that I just numbed myself to survive. Even sexually, after the rape, I became the vampire, I drank but would not let the men drink. And I had to be a hooker to have sex. Having felt I let myself, and all women, down because of my total vulnerability the night I was raped. I then had to continually tell myself I was in complete control, so I had to feel like I was getting paid. Even in Baker Baker, on this album, it says I’m the one who was endlessly unavailable, to Eric, even when having sex. And now the only way I’m getting out of all this is with him. The only way back now having taken so much hatred from one man is to accept so much love from another. But it’s a long, slow process.”

Baker Baker acknowledges that “I was the one that wasn’t emotionally available. We’re always blaming the guys, saying, ‘You’re not sensitive enough; why can’t you just be more understanding?’ And then when they are more sensitive, we kick ‘em in the face and go for the hockey player. It’s like ‘Dominate me, just dominate me. Not long - I’ll time you - just a little!’”

“...Sex is only safe for men... The Wrong Band, that’s what it’s about. The Wrong Band, with Heidi and Ginger and me, we’re all professionals in The Wrong Band. My character, although I say she, who’s really written about a woman that I knew that had to leave for Japan. She left to be protected, because she was involved with somebody in the house years ago. This was years ago. She got in too deep. She just knew too much, and she was really afraid they that they were going to kill her, they were going to ser her up and kill her. She went to Japan to be protected by another powerful man, but she didn’t have too many choices at that point, and he was powerful enough to hide her in Japan. I never heard from her again. I don’t know what happened. And I knew her for three years. You just get in too deep, and when the Heidi Fleiss thing came out - whatever you do to open your mouth or cause it or whatever it is, it’s just kind of a shame that, again, it’s that control of the Patriarchy. That goes back to God again.”

“In The Wrong Band, the hooker’s saying ‘I have a voice here that’s worth believing. I got in over my head.’”

“I and so many Christian women were taught to despise Mary Magdalene, because she was a prostitute. Because of that we had great problems coming to terms with the prostitute in ourselves, which again, is something the Church teaches us to deny, and something in the song, The Wrong Band, is about when I sing, ‘Ginger is always sincere, just not to one man.’”

“The Waitress is the next step in Cornflake. I don’t have them in order. It doesn’t work like that. The Waitress is how I can’t control my violence, and in this one situation, we’re both equals, we’re both waitresses in this song. I don’t go into the details of why. Why isn’t the issue. The issue is that I thought I was a peacemaker, and this violence has totally taken control of every belief system that I have. It’s a very scary thing, especially after you talk about anti-violence.”

“The consciousness is divided. You’re either looking at who you are, or you’re not. Yeah. The Waitress, the rage, the betrayal. The whole ‘you are not a woman, you are a lizard with a stolen pussy. You have no right to be a woman.’ Then it’s ‘Tori, what right do you have to judge her?’ Then it sums it up: ‘but I believe in peace, bitch.’ I mean that’s really it. It’s hanging onto your beliefs but one hand’s on the neck and you’re going ‘three to five, three to five, I don’t know, broomstick up the butt every day, I don’t think I can do this...’ get out of the room quick, she’s not worth it. It’s not your job. Why can’t you just see that she doesn’t get it? And when they are in a position, some of these women, to hurt other woman... it just... you want to rip their heads off.”

“It’s just to feel the feeling of rage, because I’ve been on the victim side before. It was just shocking for me to have to deal with that part of myself. First, of course, you acknowledge it, and then you go, if I don’t control it, I could end up in jail with a broomstick up my ass for the next 30 years. That’s no fun. I could, like, go to Italy and have good fettuccini. That would be a drag, and I’m sure there are people out there that just snap that one millimetre more. I mean, what is it that keeps us - there’s something obviously in us that keeps us from taking that step.”

“So there are a lot of shades of grey in my life now. I try to weigh off the different points of view these days. For example, I try to look differently to violence. That’s an important subject to me now. I felt so violent the last few years. Still I portray myself in “The waitress” like a bird of peace. That’s significant.”

“Everybody understands basic emotions: feeling like a coward, wanting to kill some cunt and having no remorse about it. It’s like, “No, I don’t feel guilty about this. What I feel bad about is that I don’t feel bad about this.” That’s what I have to look at. I try and crawl into my unconscious, and it’s not that different from what’s inside any of us. All of us have a bit of the vampire and a bit of the nightingale.”

“I was mad. I wanted to throw her up against the wall. She did something - one day I’ll tell you-that made me want to kill her. My reaction was a bit extreme. I was ranting and raving. I’ve had this feeling about being a peacemaker why can’t we sit down and talk about it: and here I am throwing this bitch against the wall, having no problem with annihilating her cell by cell. But the issue, I know, was in my head and she was calling it up in me.”

“Condiments are my favourite 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.”

"At one point, engineer Paul McKenna said to me, "You know, Tori, this record's missing something." I said "Oh, Ok." And within 48 hours, I had this horrible argument with a waitress. She was the devil. She was Satan. She was a meanie. She became the embodiment of a few women in my life that I was it out with, and "The Waitress" got written. And Paul said, "The record's complete.""

"A cornflake girl is wonderbread whereas a raisin girl is whole wheat bread."

"I would like to think I'm a raisin girl, because in my mind they're more open minded. Cornflake girls are totally self centred, don't care about anything or anybody."

“There are many layers of jazz influence in Cornflake Girl. But while I was writing it, I refused to go back and listen to those influences because it had to evolve itself.”

“Originally, Steve Caton, who played mandolins and guitars on the record, came up with this little line on the mandolin, and that was the ‘Ding ding-a ding ding’ with the strumming to it. Everybody really liked that. And even in the mix studio, I was screaming at the top of my lungs that it had to be a whistle. I want the cowboys coming over the hill. Eric was laughing his head off, and the mixer, Kevin Killen, said to me, ‘This whistle is naff, Tori.’ And I said, ‘Well, guess what, Kevin. When you make your own song, you can put your own mandolin on it. This is a whistle. Fucking put it in. Put the sample in.’ So I got my whistle, and I’m happy as a clam to this day.”

“So Cornflake, Bells, and Waitress are a triangle together. Part of this record is dealing with the betrayal of women, between women. These three, Cornflake is, I’ve been reading Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker. It went in depth of just women betraying women, and how the mothers really sold their daughters to the butchers, and had their genitalia removed, et cetera. A lot of memory came to me. Just social memory, not necessarily personal memory - collective memory of how women have turned on each other. And the concept of a sisterhood is not real. I think that hurts me more than most concepts, because the idea that - we’ve been, women have had obviously very little to say in their lives, and it’s been a difficult road. See, I believe in past lives, so I’ve been a man making it hard on women also. Just if we look at it from objective viewpoints, just the history of woman has been very lonely, and when you think that we should support each other, understand each other, that makes sense to me. You would think.”

“After I read Possessing the Secret Of Joy by Alice Walker, about how mothers sold their daughters to the butchers, that kind of floored me. One always feels safer when there are good guys and bad ones. But there are no good guys out there. And its not as if one sex can make it okay. Now with Cornflake Girl, the idea was that I always had this sisterhood and it was just blown to bits. I was betrayed by someone, a girlfriend, who gave me a pretty shitty deal. Her opinion was - I’m a shit - it depends on whose table it is that you’re having arsenic at. I think the disappointment of being betrayed by a woman is way heavier than being betrayed by a man. We expect it from you guys. It hurts, but I’m not shocked.”

“There’s the Cornflake Girls and the Raisin Girls, and they represent two different ways of thinking: narrow-mindedness and open-mindedness. It’s about the disillusionment that comes from the realization that someone has gone from one way of thinking to another. It’s also about this idea that women are the good guys and men the bad guys, which just isn’t true all the time.”

"The American version of Cornflake Girl happened after Karen and I were 'Running our Mouths.  Atlantic America thought the Black & White version was too abstract.  I'm not Really sure what the black and white version is about I think a kind of "Dorothy in Hell searching for a Pacific Rim Chef" --A Journey to the centre of the universe with a rope tied around my furry galoshes.  At any rate the black and white was a 2 day shoot -- as was the God video which was happening the same week across town.  Because Europe and America were going for 2 different singles it was a pretty busy week for this person.  The American version was also shot in L.A. about 2 months later when the Americans finally decided they were going with Cornflake as the British decided on Pretty Good Year which was shot in a studio in London.  The American Cornflake was choreographed by Bunty a choice of Karen's -- She also plays one of the women in the back of the truck (the girl in red con- fronting the evil Uma Thurman looking control Bully) Nancy Bennet and I had a blast doing this with Karen as always styling and conceptualising with us.  I can't lay claim to a lot if this but I do take credit for the lipstick weaponry and cooking the cowboy -- all in all a low pressure day."

“In Cornflake, you think, no, this is not really happening - you bet your life it is. It’s a betrayal of women against women, which I really wanted to go into.”

“It’s been - again, it’s the victims become the abusers, it’s that whole - which is explored in Waitress, too, where I become the one who wants to slice this person’s head off. But the thing is, it’s been, it’s so disappointing for me when I feel betrayed by another woman. So Cornflake Girl is that disappointment. ‘This is not really happening, you bet your life it is. Never was a cornflake girl, thought that was a good solution.’ Cornflake being white bread, closed. ‘Hanging with the raisin girls,’ you know, whole wheat, multicultural, open, a little more going on. ‘She’s gone to the other side, giving us a yo heave ho. Things are getting kind of gross.’ I think that’s clear. ‘And I go at sleepytime, this is not really happening. You bet your life it is.’

The second verse, it just supports the whole thing. ‘Rabbit, where’d you put the keys, girl?’ Rabbit, in certain Indian traditions, it represents fear. ‘Rabbit, where’d you put the keys, girl? And the man with the golden gun thinks he knows so much.’ Well, those are my God references again. ‘All the sweateaze are gone, gone to the other side, with my encyclopedia. They musta paid her a nice price. She’s putting on her string bean love.’ Anorexic. They just put it on. If you go to their side and take up their case, then you’re a strong, independent woman. Well, you know, I’m tired of strong, independent woman equals. And there’s a list. Instead of - well, hang on a minute, the most interesting word here is vulnerability, that’s getting left out, because it’s associated with weakness. You don’t dress a certain way to be a strong independent woman. It’s fascist, and it’s the same - they’re no different. They’re the other extreme. I don’t feel a part of any kind of sisterhood.”

“Again, it’s not about good guys or bad guys. It’s not about this team or that team, although on Cornflake Girl there are the cornflake girls and the raisin girls. And you know I’m a raisin 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.”

“In Icicle I try to regain the innocence of my childhood.”

“I am a minister’s daughter, for heaven’s sake! So, of course, I can see why some would regard sexual fantasies about Jesus Christ as unacceptable. But that’s part of what I’m saying in Icicle, when I tell of how I used to masturbate at home as a teenager, while my father and his fellow theologians were downstairs discussing the Divine Light. I was exploring the ‘divine light’ within myself. And anyone who sees that as ‘blasphemous’ can go to hell! Like I said to you before, that’s how women are paralysed, disconnected from their own power by religion. Talk about patriarchal power structures. For centuries the Church has slammed a crucifix between a woman’s legs and even masturbation obviously is a way of dislodging that cross, of self-empowerment. And how dare anybody say that my honouring my woman-ness in that way, my relationship with my own body and my opening to this energy between my legs is a ‘sin against God’ is ‘blasphemous.’ That was my act of defiance, of asserting myself against the oppressive force of religion which has always made women deny their sexuality. The concept is that Jesus Christ, through the Father, Son and Holy Spirit experienced life - the human form. Well, what I find quite inexplicable is that he could suckle at a woman’s breast yet not soil his dinky by having sex! How’s he supposed to experience life at the level of his dick, for Christ’s sake! That’s the Church’s core denial of sexuality, right there, alongside the idea that Mary could give birth without ‘doing it’. It’s absurd. So when I say I want to ‘do it’ with Jesus Christ it’s not just that I want to sexualise Jesus, bring him down to our level, I want to breathe the earth into his lungs. He came from Heaven and we, as women, come from the earth. So it’s the idea of soil beneath the fingers, the notion of, ‘If this blood is sacred, then drink it’. That’s what it’s all about.”

“In Icicle I try to win back the innocence of my childhood. That girl that masturbates to survive, the vulnerable, innocent flower, has always done good things for us. She’s had to fence off certain parts of herself to get ahead. Now it’s time to light the candle and melt those parts. Who dares to open him- or herself can also forgive themselves for not having stood up for themselves enough.”

“When you’re 10 years old and being taught a belief system, you don’t have the wherewithal to go, ‘Well, when they’re putting this dried, stale cracker in my mouth, and telling me it’s all going to be OK, it’ll be OK if I put my little warm hand down on my little warm spot. That’ll make it a bit OK.’ That’s where Icicle comes in.”

“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.”

“There’s a wonderful acceptance in Cloud On My Tongue, an acceptance of being in circles and circles again. That’s its whirlpool vat. It all leads to that.”

“Cloud On My Tongue, dealing with Eve... dealing with feeling inferior, that somebody else has something that you want.”

“I travel a lot around the world, and I went to all sorts of places, and I ran into different people. Borneo had something that I didn’t have. It was a very free, hot, jungley place, and the people that, or a person that came from there, had something that I didn’t have that I desperately wanted, which was no rigidity. When I say, ‘Leave the wood outside, what, all the girls here are freezing cold, leave me with your Borneo.’ Or don’t leave me with your Borneo, because I’ve had it before, and that’s why I need the wood, because it just - you can go now, you’re already in there, whether it’s pregnant or whether it’s just infused. You don’t even have to hang around and watch me disintegrate, because you’ve already done your job. You’ve already accomplished what you wanted, which was another scalp on your belt, and you did it. That’s not one of my favourite men songs.”

“My only problem was, I said ‘You can go now’ after he was already in there. I mean, it had done - it was already planted, so whatever it was, that’s where I think Cloud balances out Baker Baker a bit, because it’s the Shadow side. She’s not ignorant. She knows exactly what’s happening.”

“In Cloud On My Tongue, I put all my power in this other person. I think that they have something that I don’t have. Well, of course we all have things the other person doesn’t have as far as abilities. But we ALL have emotion that’s capable of being complete for each one of us. But you can’t be complete for me. We know this in the head, but to really apply it is another thing. Because when you feel inferior, you feel inferior. Sometimes I feel inferior to men who have this raw wolf energy. I just got to this recently. It doesn’t mean that I still don’t, like, snake around and leak all over the place when I’m around one of them. I kinda go, ‘Oh, God, here it is again. What am I gonna do?’ What’s happening is that I cut that part out of myself a LONG time ago. Because I judged it to be bad, and I was afraid of it. I was afraid I wouldn’t be respected if I got in touch with that. I’m not talking strictly about sex. That’s like a form of generating that energy, but just because you’re having sex doesn’t mean you’re generating that energy. Do you see what I mean? But there are other ways of trying to get to it. Like music. Creativity tries to get you to that expression. That kundalini energy. I do it when I’m playing but I’ve really had a hard time bringing it into my life. I sit there sometimes like all the knobs have all been turned off. And I’ll see something with the knob turned on and I go, ‘How did they do that?’”

“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 too close.”

"Under The Pink represents a lot of different emotions, it is kind of like a door. So whether Cloud On My Tongue is about acceptance, acceptance that I haven't thought I could get in touch with a certain primitive energy, because I've cut that off from myself with a lot of my experiences, from my Christian upbringing...to the Me And A Gun experience, I've cut that off. I've taken on a lot of shame, of passion, and of sexuality."

"When I wrote Cloud on my Tongue, I was having a hard day because I put all my power in this other person. Sometimes I feel inferior to men who have this raw wolf energy. The concept of free expression in your life. I have it in my work but not in my life. So when I meet these people who have it, I want to get close to them because I try and suck their energy, that's what I do."

"...don't leave me with your Borneo, because I've had it before, and that's why I need the wood, because it just -- you can go now, you're already in there, whether it's pregnant or whether it's just infused. You don't even have to hang around and watch me disintegrate, because you've already done your job. You've already accomplished what you wanted, which was another scalp on your belt, and you did it. That's not one of my more favorite men songs."

"I think she went into the wrong state. She went into Borneo. Wrong continent."

“Space Dog: we’ve worshiped everything else, why not him?”

“I can see how Space Dog is tricky... But Space Dog’s a mushroom trip.”

“Yes, that song is dedicated to Patti Smith and when I sing ‘Where’s Neil when you need him’ I’m talking about Neil Gaiman, the author of The Sandman strip, one of our greatest writers. I also talked about him on Little Earthquakes. Of Patti Smith I especially admired her energy, her life-power. Jimmy Page helped me through my time at the conservatory by showing me there was also something else.”

“Talking about Dog Star and the information that has come through some of the medicine people about Orion and the wars that have happened there.”

“In Space Dog when I make the reference to Neil Gaiman and Patti Smith, or when I say deck the halls, this is going into the past where I had visions of how I thought things would turn out. Always coming back to you the people that haunt you. ‘It’s you again, it’s you again’ or ‘Is she still pissin’ in a river, heard she’d moved into a trailer park’ meaning didn’t carry the torch as far as she could. The song is about giving your power to someone else - passing the torch.” 

“As far as Space Dog goes, it was a drawing on a mud wall in New Mexico. It was a shape, and it really was, if I could take a picture and show it to you sometime, the whole record was recorded in mud, mud walls, adobe and wood ceilings, wood floors, because Eric really loved the sound, which is why it sounds like it has that warm womb thing. Well, in one of the rooms, there was this - it’s Space Dog. A feather on his head, and it’s this sharp nose. It just really is. That’s how so many of these songs came, in this Under the Pink world. If you rip all your skin off, we’re all pink, and it’s about what’s underneath that. That’s how I see it, anyway. Space Dog would come and visit me, just as my alternative deity, so to speak. The idea that everybody puts their faith in, I don’t know, this yogi or this channel or this god or this saint or this whatever, well, Space Dog was like, hey, it’s my deity.

"I was flying over Chicago. Before I got into the city, I was flying over, and I just felt this scene happening by this 7-11 I could see way in the distance. It was a very cold night. It was in March, and I was going in for a signing at Rose Records. I was flying in, and I felt this young boy, 13, 14 years old, with his family. He’s eating peas. His family is like, some of those people that show up on Oprah Winfrey sometimes, that you just go, My God, if I had to go home with them, I would contemplate, like, eating Pledge. And I just felt his presence. I felt him just opening himself up to another possibility, because his world was just so closed. The best thing he had near him was the 7-11 goddess. I was just watching from the - I was in the window seat, and I was just watching, like, way down. I felt Space Dog. I’ve been talking to him, and I felt Space Dog going, ‘Lemon pie. Coming through, lemon pie.’ It was very Agent 99. I kind of felt like Agent 99 going, ‘Oh, Max.’ And this young man responded. There is something out there.

"The idea, again, with Pretty Good Year, there are a lot of triads in this whole record, and Pretty Good Year and Space Dog kind of kiss each other, where - let me focus my thought. In the bridge, ‘Deck the halls,’ going back again, to, again, not having resolve. ‘I’m young again. Somewhere, someone must know the ending. Where’s Neil when you need him?’ You know, that’s all in that. ‘Is she still pissing in the river now?’ Patti Smith. ‘Heard she’d gone, moved into a trailer park.’ Concept being, somebody that had all of these beliefs, and then just numbed themselves.

"And Space Dog’s philosophy is, well, together, when I’m hanging out with him, it’s, ‘So sure we were on something. Your feet are finally on the ground, he said.’ That’s Space Dog’s philosophy. And in the counter-vocal in the end goes, again, the betrayal stuff, mostly girls, and yet, if I’m in the present, and I’m on something, which is on the earth, on the ground, then I have total opportunity to decide what my reaction will be. I can’t decide anything else, but I can decide if I’m going to let something totally take over my life, which it did in The Waitress. But by Space Dog, I’m going, I do have a choice. It’s part of the growth.”

“I hope I told your story correctly, my friend. So many codes, it was hard 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.”

“Poppy is the little girl who was in Silent All These Years.”

“It’s a journey. Anastasia Romanov... it’s not like I’ve read loads of books on her. I was aware of the family and that’s about it. So I’m in Virginia, and I had crabs I keep saying that! I had crab sickness, I had eaten bad crabs in Maryland! But I couldn’t cancel the show. I was at sound check, and needless to say, when you are very, very ill, it is easier to communicate with your source... you are fragile and vulnerable. Well, her presence came. Now I have only heard of her in history, I’ve got no point to make. She comes and goes ‘you’ve got to write my tune.’ I go, ‘ohhh, now’s not really a good time.’ She says, ‘no, you’ve got to understand something from this, there’s something here that you’ve got to come to terms with.’ And that night came ‘We’ll see how brave you are,’ and that was really about the whole record. That came just about before everything. And whenever I sing that chorus, ‘we’ll see how brave you are,’ it means so many different things to me. It’s part of my self, my spirit self saying to the rest of myself, ‘if you really want a challenge, just deal with yourself.’ The funny thing is that Anna Anderson, who claimed to be Anastasia, died very close to where I was playing, an hour or so from there in the 80s. The feeling I got that Anna Anderson was Anastasia Romanov. She always tried to prove it and a lot of people believed her and some people didn’t want to believe her, because of what that would have meant. And again, it’s really working through being a victim. ‘Counting the tears from ten thousand men, and gathered them all, but my feel are slipping.’ You can’t blame the men anymore; there’s always you. It comes back to us; it comes back to me.”

“So Cornflake Girl, The Waitress and Bells for Her add an underlying theme to the record... even with ‘girls, what have we done to ourselves’ in Anastasia: ‘thought she’d deserved no less than she’d give, well happy birthday, her blood’s on my hands.’ You’re not the cause of this person’s unhappiness. And yet you seem to be the one standing there getting dumped on.”

“That’s my big epic. A lot of Debussy influence on the first half, and the Russian composers on the second half. I was real excited working with Phil Shenal, who arranged the strings. We’d had quite a famous arranger arranging and Eric and I erased it all after we had some margaritas. No, we purposely did, it was shit. “

“I was feeling so sick that I wanted to be put out of my misery. And then I get this presence. It’s like a light, a bluish-greyish light . . . The message was, ‘You need to learn something out of writing my story.’”