The Music and the Message

By Rebecca Ruiz, AlterNet. Posted September 19, 2005.

On a chilly fall evening, Tori Amos walks confidently onstage, her trademark red hair flowing as she greets screaming fans at the Chronicle Pavilion in Concord, California. In the final stretch of a nationwide tour to support her recent album The Beekeeper, she remarks how it's nice to be in a state where she can play what she pleases without being thrown out.

It's unclear whether Amos has ever been so blatantly censored, but the 42-year-old singer-songwriter has a history of raising controversial issues. This evening, which happens to be the fourth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, she delivers a moving cover of John Lennon's Imagine. Amos mentions that the audience should be worried when people propose banning the song from radio, which Clear Channel did after 9-11. She played it back then, too.

Tori Amos has spent the last 15 years of her career trying to sell music without selling out. The classically trained pianist turned pop confessionalist prefers to think of herself as in the business of ideas instead of in the business of making a lot of money.

"The music and the message is foremost for me," said Amos, who has sold 12 million records. "I want you to take away ideas. That is my mission, my life. Yes I'm in the music business also, and I have to play a serious game of chess."

That delicate balance has required Amos to fuse the roles of musician and businesswoman, a difficult feat in an industry where labels wield most of the power and women are often relegated to supporting acts. Still, Amos has created a career on her own terms and developed a strategy that could serve as a blueprint for singer songwriters who crave longevity and independence over flash-in-the-pan popularity.

"It's emotional blackmail to say if you're a good businesswoman and a musician, you're betraying your music," Amos said, defending singer-songwriters who are criticized for being perceived as too business savvy. A difficult lesson at the start of her career taught Amos that controlling the business aspect of her music was essential.

Y Kant Tori Read, Amos' first album, which debuted in 1988, was a disaster. Under pressure from Atlantic to become the trend du jour, Amos donned a leather bustier and a frightening glam rock hairstyle on the cover. The album bombed, selling only 7,000 copies. Amos viewed the out-of-body experience as a watershed moment.

During the recording of her second album, Little Earthquakes, Amos was a daily fixture at the label. "I was making sure that every decision fit with who I was and what the music was and I took responsibility, whereas I think I pulled the blinds over my eyes years before," Amos said. The album, a raw take on sex and religion, received critical acclaim and sold 2 million copies.

Nearing the age when the industry often tries to quietly escort its female artists to the stage door, Amos has already survived threats from Atlantic, her former label, to shelve her work until she was too old to play.

The dispute arose in 1998 when Amos confronted the label about the limited support of her work. She later discovered that her promotional concert tickets, normally used as an incentive to give an artist's songs more airtime, were used in exchange for promoting other label acts. The bitter altercation was another turning point for Amos.

"I had to look at the truth. If they're going to see you as a commodity, then you better look after the commodity. I had to understand how the game was working," said Amos. After fulfilling her contract she left Atlantic for Epic in 2001 and wrote A Sorta Fairytale, her most successful Billboard Adult Top 40 song to date.

Despite this success, and the recent unexpected resurgence of Carly Simon and Carole King, two founders of the female singer-songwriter genre, the holy grail of radio play for artists like Amos is more elusive now that the days of the Lilith Fair are over. With certain notable exceptions, artists of that era like Paula Cole, Natalie Merchant and Shawn Colvin have largely disappeared from mainstream music.

Rebecca Ruiz is a freelance writer based in the Bay Area.

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