Tori Amos: "This Is My War!"

To propel one of 2007's most fiercely political albums into the upper echelons of the global charts is no mean feat. To do so some 15 years into your career, in a fickle climate in which many of your peers have been written off with the shelf life of a Ginsters pasty, is another phenomenon entirely. Never one to shy away from a battle, Tori Amos tells Dave Kerr why motherhood spurred her American Doll Posse into action
Feature by Dave Kerr.
Published 08 October 2007

"I made this record because I was so infuriated with what happened in the last American election. I wanted to address the question of where the women were - or where weren't they? - and why. But I knew that picking up the 'tomahawk' again I needed to think of my three year old; I'm looking on this work as a mum. [My daughter] Tash is not an accessory. Some parents aren't really involved in the rearing of their children; they might be celebrities who are always off and their kids are never with them. Well, we take Tash on the road everywhere we go and have tutors and the whole bit. When she was three, when I made The Beekeeper, I was in a place of dealing with a little girl. Now she's six and it's a whole different ballgame.

"I had to make sure that she could be protected; not just call George Bush a cocksucker at a London show: Mommy's not the Dixie Chicks. Dealing with a three year old, I knew that I had to write a work that would somehow penetrate and permeate the next generation.

"Now, this [American Doll Posse] is my war - as a minister's daughter – on the right-wing Christians. My father looked at me and said, 'You're not gonna put this out about George Bush, are you?' And I said, 'Yeah I am, dad, because it needs to be said.'

"I think the Christian right-wing media's behind certain stereotypes of women: you have the career women or the tarts and they're all at 'war' against each other. It's incredibly myopic. People aren't looking at who the culprit really is; they're not looking at the administration and the civil liberties that are being quietly taken away. People are more interested in all those silly people who wear no knickers on the red carpet. So I thought, 'If this is how you wanna play, if you need female archetypes, then I can get you Aphrodite and Athena. If you need high heels and sex, there's no problem with that.' So that was the beginning of 'Right then, let's put out a girl band that says something.'

"You've got to ask, 'What is the way to combat this Christian right wing that has put this administration in power?' The only way is to fight ideology with ideology. You have to find ways to slip through the radar and get to the masses so that they start asking questions. I don't believe in telling somebody who to vote for, but I think you can light fires in people to say 'wait a minute'. These are dangerous times. But as an artist I just kept seeing Natasha coming to me in 20 years and saying, 'Mum, where were you? Did you just go unconscious for a while? Did you even think about the world you were leaving me and my friends or were you so selfish'... and that plagues me. If I hadn't been a mother then I probably wouldn't have recorded this album. But I had to be a mother pushed."

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