Free Tori Amos: Piece by Piece by Tori Amos, Ann Powers

“what it is)—the curfews and the disagreements over whom I should date and how I should behave all got to be too much. He and I get along much better now, but at that time it was really overbearing, and I knew that I had to become a woman.
    ANN:
Corn Mother's story brings to light the importance of honoring your origins, but it also makes room for humans to seize their own destiny. The earth goddess's grandsons create civilization with the hunt, and though they no longer live in an Eden, they inhabit the real world. An artist must also go beyond her origins to fully realize her vision. For Amos, this moment of separation began when she named herself.

     
    The Sumerian goddess Inanna
CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:
     
    People called me Ellen, my middle name, during most of the years of my apprenticeship. I was fifteen when I realized I needed my own name, but for a while I didn't know what it was. I went through tons of names, even Sammy Jay; there were a lot of different ideas floating through—I don't know if you can actually call them ideas, more like brain farts. Finally, when I was seventeen, somebody just walked in one night and revealed it to me. It wasn't someone close to me—just a guy my friend Linda McBride dated for a couple of weeks. They came into one of the lounges where I played, just to have a drink, and when she introduced him to me, he said, “You're a Tori.”
    And I just kind of went,
I think you re right.
Soon after that, a friend of mine who worked in the Reagan administration came to the piano bar. I told him my new name, and he said, “You can't be a Tory. I mean, it's like calling yourself a Republican, only British.” And I said, “I don't care. I just don't care.” I knew the spelling wouldn't be like that anyway.
    When I consider why I took that name for myself, I realize that maybe I was trying to create another potential. Myra was my given name; the root of Myra is, of course, Mary. And I understand that I carry that. It was important to my father that all the women in his life, my sister and my mother and I, had forms of Mary. He was devoted to the mother Mary. There's a respect there, for Jesus’ mother. The Magdalene, however, they didn't even call her Mary—she wasn't a consideration.
    So in our family there was Mary Ellen, my mother, Marie Allen, my sister, and I was Myra Ellen. So I really felt I could not create my own destiny—it's almost as if I was given cement and told to build a cabin. I knew that certain controls were in place that I couldn't break. I could not break through the opinions of who Myra Ellen was and what was expected of her.
    Again, we go back to the power of words and how they can make you feel. They bring liberation or stagnation, they're chains. I began to see the structure of Tori—there's conserva
tory
, and
victory:
you see that word in so many different other words—also anti-inflammatory but my favorite has to be Yakatori chicken. And I began to feel that the sound of this name was a window. Although I can't fly, it gave me access to go to certain subjects, to get into secret ideologies. To travel, which I've been doing ever since.

SONG CANVAS: “Mother Revolution”
There were two Jamaican nurses taking care of me. They were both deeply religious women. They believed in God and followed the Bible word for word. I would speak to them of the Great Mother; I would tell them that they reminded me of the depth of love that I felt from the Great Mother. When I would sit by the sea, so as to let the rushing of the winds and the salt clear the way—cleansing the thoughts that were pulling me down, I would reach for the hands of these two women. All three of us believed that there were forces that could pull you down. Pull you away from your center. They called it Satan. I didn't choose to disagree with that terminology. Satan means different things to different people, and a lot of people see it as an outside force working to recruit people into