This was aired on Music Choice. Music Choice is kind of like a radio station that gets broadcast into your tv by a satellite dish.

Jo Mayder : So what artist, who just released a new album, has been described as making love to her piano in concert? The one of a kind Tori Amos. Usually seated between two and playing them both simultaneously, her new album From the Choirgirl Hotel has just been released and it our featured album this month. Tori called her first album a diary, the second like an impressionist painting, the third like crossing the river Styx and changing her relationships with men for good. Her fourth, written after the loss of a child through miscarriage, is like a hotel. The songs are the girls staying there, independant of each other, but having fun hanging out. Describing the sound of the album as sonic geometry, and recorded in a converted barn in Cornwall, England ten miles fromt he ocean, I asked Tori how the songs translate in her own mind, into musical pictures.

Tori : Music is obviously a therapy, and you can't touch it, but in the mixing I'm very much about, it has to become visual. It has to translate on that level, now obviously it will translate to you differently then it will to me, but I fell if I'm seeing a picture, you'll see your own picture. At least it'll go into that realm.

Jo Mayder : Here's one that Rolling Stone described as the hardest working bar band on Saturn.

(They play the album version of She's Your Cocaine)

Jo Mayder : That's She's Your Cocaine from the new Tori Amos album, From the Choirgirl Hotel. Dark and moody, the cover art of the new album conjures up images or Tori lying in chalk marks in a pulp fiction novel from the 50's, a sharp contrast to her second album, 94's Under the Pink, where Tori, all in white, appears open and angellic. Let's go back to that time, with Cornflake Girl

(They play the album version of Cornflake Girl)

Jo Mayder : That's Cornflake Girl, from Tori's second album Under the Pink. Tori's commented, "This record got me through a real bad patch, but I can laugh with this record, and I can move my hips to this record which is really good for me. It's very sensual, that's the rythym."

Tori : iieee has a Native American influence when you hear the rythym, and yet there's a little of that New Mexican, driving in an old dilapitated mustang. And you're just on your own, and you drive for days and days and days and you think your at the end of the earth, and it's just you. iieee is very much about about dying, and sacrifices.

(They play the album version of iieee)

Jo Mayder : That was iieee from the new Tori Amos album From the Choirgirl Hotel, more from it coming up, but first, here she is in a rare appearance. This is from Encomium the Led Zeppelin tribute released in 95. A music critic once described Tori as the coloratura (???) of Robert Plant's fan club. Here she is with one of her major musical influences on Down By the Seaside.

(They play Down By the Seaside again) Can you tell they are trying to promote the new Plant/Page album for next month?

Jo Mayder : That was Tori Amos and Robert Plant from Encomium the Led Zeppelin tribute. We'll leave you with a song from Tori's new album, the haunting Playboy Mommy.

(They play the album version of Playboy Mommy)

Tori : It felt like all these songs were different beings. I just saw some of them in room 13, and some of them answering the phones. It became very much like a traveling group of, oh I don't know, wonton women I guess. They're a bit of a group. Some are altos and some wear leather, some are sopranos, and the only meat. Some don't like men, and some just adore men. Some aren't interested in anything but reading, they become very much like entities.
The difference in this record is I had such an amazing time playing live with the players. All my other records, for the most part, I would do the piano first, and the other instruments would have to fit in around her. It was a very self-involved way of doing things, but this time I surrendered a lot more than before...

Written by Jo Mayder, Copyright Digital Cable Radio Associates