Tori Songs

#1.

« Then we go on to  C A U G H T  A  L I T E  S N E E Z E  and she’s still vampiring, she needs that boy blood. You can say you are beautiful, you are enough                             - but when are you going to claim it? You are on the hunt.

It’s really about a relationship. And she’s kinda given herself away, so she’s trying to get pieces back in any way she can. I mean, whoever works at that point, Inanna or whoever. And if it works calling her in the church, to evoke a little ass, then you go for it.

#2.

« There’s a lot of symbolism in it, there are moments when I turn around and I say something like:          "she’s convinced she could hold back a glacier           but she couldn’t keep baby alive" 

Really clear. There are moments when it gets really clear and it goes back into symbolism again:           “ballerinas that have fins that you’ll never find“ 

Which makes a lot of sense to me, because it’s obviously a mermaid reference, but it’s more than that. 

#3.

« P R E C I O U S  T H I N G S  is a song that came to me when I was living behind a church. 

I was about 24 years old. I had a roommate that listened to really raucous music and it started to take me into flashbacks of my grandmother. And she used to put me in a corner and she would read me something, I think from Leviticus, I can’t remember. But she was convinced that I was gonna give my soul to God and my body to a man that I would marry.                                     But at five years old I knew that we were enemies. 

So, in my mind I was always trying to find ways to get away from this Creature. I thought of things and my mother thought I was a demon for thinking them but I think she would smile out of the corner of her mouth because I think she felt the same way.  

#4.

«  I wish she had been on Pele, cause I think it would have been kinda cool for a volcano to say:                “This is cooling faster than I can”

I usually try not to define my lyrics too much. I think it’s really important that people find it in their own way. 

      But when I wrote  C O O L I N G  I had been in Hawaii, and I was really on a sensory level with pineapples – the smell of them – they had an effect on me while I was there. 

#5.

« Some of you know that we like really good wine. So, I wasn’t quite sure if um, the things I was seeing was from that, or if they were really happening. And it was a strange time, I had a bad pregnancy and I lost the baby. And I started having this vision of this little Pueblo boy everywhere I went. And we knew it wasn’t a little boy, so… I really didn’t know who he was. And the wine really wasn’t that good, you know what I mean? So um, I would close my eyes when he would appear and I would follow him and he would say things like:          “Come, rabbit, come on.”  And I would go. And we had this 1959 convertible and he was a Zuni boy, Zuni or Pueblo boy. And he would sit in the back with his arms like that [spread out] and we would drive for hours and hours and hours. And I would sit there and we didn’t know where we were going, but when we would get there, nobody would be alive. 

#6.

« I think that there is a place where she realizes that people come in and out of your life, sometimes for one day, sometimes for longer, and all of them make you what you are. 

                      You can’t separate these people out of you. They form who you are, even the ones that you kind of say, ‘Well, you know, I don’t know if I wanna be formed by them anymore’…                              But you are in some way. You are. That’s why maybe you don’t have to look at them so harshly because they have affected you. 

#7.

#8.

« The whole thing about  S I R E N  was I was asked to do this music to this film, Great Expectations. And when I saw the rough cut of the movie it was a bit of a different thing than it ended up to be. But point is, the scene that they asked me to do, um, when I first saw it, I felt like those guys were on a boat fishing. And they had had this grunge music there               - being a manly kind of thing and I’m like, screw that, that’s ridiculous. If you’re gonna do a manly thing on the water, go Polynesian, 800 years ago. Go into the sirens and do it correctly. I mean the Miller time and all the baited worms all this stuff from the great tackle shop          - blow that. 

Go and find the sirens, make your sacrifice, cut off a toe, do what you’re supposed to. Be good guys. 

#9

« B EA U T Y  Q U E E N  and  H O R S E S  came in one take. It was all done as you hear it, live with the pedal of the Leslie. Recording this was really challenging for the engineers because the Leslie cabinet was out in the graveyard of the church. 

        When you hear B EA U T Y  Q U E E N you are hearing this girl in that moment: she’s standing in that bathroom, watching those girls put on that lipstick. I don’t want us to be talking to her 15 minutes later about what she realized in that bathroom. I want her to go back to that moment in the bathroom: It’s white. It’s that funny fluorescent light. It’s that tile, with the green crud in between. It’s those old toilets with the beautiful handles. You can hear the sound of the water dripping. 

                          Time doesn’t exist in that moment.

       This is not a confident girl. You are not at acceptance level. 

You are in her brain, getting triggered. The little windshield wipers are going, and you’re starting to see it from the other side.

#10.

« S I L E N T  A L L  T H E S E  Y E A R S was foundational. I started writing it for Al Stewart (the melody, not the lyrics) because he'd asked me to write something. I allowed myself to find my voice for somebody else, but not for myself.

Then Eric Rosse made me ask myself the question: How could I give a song like that away? So, as I started to claim it as my own, I was able to write the words around it.                                                       This song became my mantra.  It was a talisman which brings me back to the tale, and to the mermaid mythology.

#11.

« F A T H E R  L U C I F E R  is really about going to have a cup of tea with Lucifer, which I had to do. 

Now, when I say Lucifer, I'm talking about the feelings that we hide from ourselves, not something that's twisted and evil, like during the Inquisition when they used Christianity to torture people.                                                                         That's Satanism. 

I had to go in this record when I was trying to find parts of myself that I had not let scream and dance and have a tear. I went to go visit Lucifer to get my talisman, which means my little magic key that took me to the places that I hadn't let myself go. That's really about having a little tango, a little dance, with Lucifer. 

#12.

#13.

I was leeching off the men in my life. Don’t get me wrong, they were leeching off me, but I didn’t like who I was.

My dad and I were walking out in the old farm, my grandmother’s farm. She really wasn’t a nice person. My dad is like James Dean or Billy Graham. There’s no real difference there. I was telling him how bad I felt because of the first album being so bad and Dad said to me,

#14.

« In  P R E T T Y  G O O D  Y E A R  I refuse to give pity. That was the main thing. Of course this was the worst year of Greg's 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? Okay, 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 when it's a man. 

#15.

« The songs started coming.

B L O O D R O S E S was the first, and it was that feeling of ripping open your vein and going “this blood has sold millions of records. This blood can do many things.”

#16.

« 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 pissing 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…

#17.

« I was in love with this boy when I was five years old and I knew we could really make it work. I was trying to convince him and he took this hammer and hit me with it really hard and, you’re going to really hate me for this, but I was so stupid, I tried to get my dad, the minister, to invite them over because I wanted to see him and conquer his heart.

I was going to give him bubble-gum and then he’d let me into his treehouse to play with his toy machine-guns.

I just wanted to be with him so bad.