Tori Amos - Hereinmyhead.com

trapped in purgatory
a lifeless object, alive
awaiting reprisal
and death..
i said, she said..
death will be their acquisition

the sky is turning red
return to power draws near
fall onto me
onto her
fall onto me
the sky's crimson tears

abolish the rules
abolish the rules
made of stone

pierced from below
souls of my treacherous past
betrayed by many
now ornaments dripping above

awaiting the hour of reprisal, mmmm
your time slips away

raining blood
raining blood

from a lacerated sky
bleeding its horror
creating my structure
now i shall
reign in blood

n/a

Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.

She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny French woman with white hair, with a daughter and a grand-daughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy.

Or that's a lie. Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull.

Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months' pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.

There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow.

There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughter's wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones.

-- written by Neil Gaiman

"You wait around until you get tapped on the shoulder and you know that she's shown up, this character, this person who can carry the song and knows it, and truly your body feels different. For the Slayer track I walked back from the house to the barn -- the studio's in a barn -- and I felt that. It was like immediately, this French Resistance movement [person]; when I heard 'Slayer', I saw her, I knew who she was. I had a sense of her. And in a few days she arrived."

"She's a French Resistance women whose sister was killed. She went to the underground after the death of everyone she knew. Shes calling on certain powers, no different than the ones Himmler and the Nazis were calling on, only they used the dark forces. Our French Resistance woman knows myths and is calling on power and working on alchemy."
-- Tori; Alternative Press, Oct 2001

"Beck's bass player [Justin Meldal-Johnsen] suggested I do a cover of Slayer's Raining Blood...I was reading about what was going on in Afghanistan--the way women were being oppressed, the destruction of religious statues. And when I heard that song, I just imagined a huge juicy vagina coming out of the sky, raining blood over all those racist, misogynist fuckers."
-- Tori; Spin Magazine, Oct 2001

Last year's covers album, Strange Little Girls, led to some interesting conversations. "I'm open about some of them. Slayer sent T-shirts; that was fun. But some of the messages and conversations were very personal. Yoko Ono had to approve Happiness Is A Warm Gun, and she was absolutely divine. Neil Young had to hear Heart of Gold, because I changed the lyrics. But I didn't change a word of Eminem's ['97 Bonnie and Clyde]. Eminem and I have the same lawyer, which is handy."
-- Tori; Blender Magazine, Nov 2002