"resistance" by Tori Amos (Hodder & Stoughton, 2020)

I've read "Will You Take Me As I Am" by Michelle Mercer, about Joni Mitchell, and Janis Ian's autobiography, so I thought I'd better catch up with Tori Amos though I knew something of her life already. There are lyrics from songs that allude to political/society events - hostages in America's Iran embassy (I'd forgotten that a rescue mission flopped); 9/11 (she was in New York on the day). Analogies from the political to the personal abound. A politician avoids arrest because people in power return favours. She's told that in the record business favours have to be paid for.

When she was 13 her father said "you are drowning in your own self-destructive sea of mediocrity" (she'd been a piano prodigy who'd been chucked out of music college). In his dog collar he took her to clubs, seeing if any of them wanted a Happy Hour pianist. One of them accepted her. She and her dad didn't know why all the clients were male, and that the clients thought her father's clothes were a kinky costume. Later her father would tell his congregation that it was the safest club a young girl could play in.

She toured between 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. She's always adjusted set lists for concerts, taking requests beforehand, finalising as late as 7pm, sometimes changing her mind during the concert. She felt that "Every audience was a cross-section of people with many different skills, insights, and access to information. As an artist on tour at this particular time in history, I was in a unique position to get a sense of what was going on in different cities, in different countries" (p.102)

She takes seriously the idea of Muses, and of melodies reaching out to find her. Her husband doesn't believe it. She does research for songs. In 2016 she realised that "one of the core tenets of my art ... would be the exploration of the force "possession"". She considers her relationship with Muses a merging more than possession, but they're related concepts.

• The song "Girl" had me putting up dreamcatchers around the house to salvage pieces of myself that I myself had gaslighted (p.39)
• "Girl" ... told the story of being a girl that someone was trying to oppress, then she expanded her persona to a country, America, that authoritarians were trying to possess (p.48)
• "Ophelia" ... is a warning. A warning to be vigilant in a culture of predator worship but also to see through those who make excuses for a predator's behaviour and who help them continue abusing (p.88)
• How women behave toward each other within the global culture of patriarchy is the discussion that the song "Cornflake Girl" wanted to take part in (p.92). She'd been using the phrase "Cornflake Girls" with a friend as private code to mean "serial saboteurs of women". Ah.
• Pilgrimage is a practice I have been applying as long as I can remember in order to jumpstart creativity ... Pilgrimage is about breaking a pattern. Breaking patterns gets me to think in a different way ... The key is to balance the tension of calm documentation and the anxiety of the unknown. Yes, of course, this can also be the romanticism of the unknown ... Some writers create havoc in their own lives in order to bring this tension" (p.140-142)