QUOTES >>

I: How did you two meet, and what led up to you two collaborating on a single?

BT: Tori and I have a lot of mutual friends, and everybody has been like, "you two get on my nerves" and "you two have to hook up" because we remind the mutual friends of each other. Finally, we were introduced by those mutual friends, and it was freaky for me. It was like meeting my lost soul sister. We have so much in common, it's frightening. She and I both moved to L.A. when we were 18 for five years, nobody paid attention to us, she went to England, I did the exact same thing, and signed with the same record label, the only person who would listen to us. Both of our moms are from Chattanooga, Tennessee. We both have tornado fetishes, on and on. She went to my rival high school in Maryland, she's from here -- it's just bugged out! I visualize music, she visualizes music. Anyway, we met, and we did remixes to "Talula" and "Putting the Damage On" and she was like, "Brian, these pieces of music mean so much to me, I want to sing on one of your songs." She was like, "I love the last song on your album ['Divinity']." And I went through a whole thing with her about "Divinity" and that it was originally named "The Yoga of Divine Action," which was a writing by Deepak Chopra -- I explained to her the essence of this writing, and she totally connected with it, and also, too, we were both in this period of entrapment, in need of self liberation, if you know what I mean? We both were feeling trapped and needed a catalyst for transcendence, just a vehicle to get out of ourselves, and talking about this writing of Deepak's and talking about how we were feeling, is what inspired the lyrics to "Blue Skies." Whenever I listen to it, it's like this little girl, it's like somebody in their own kind of personal hell wishing for their personal nirvana.

I: When she was recording the lyrics over "Divinity" was it intended as being a vocal version of that particular song?

BT: No, it wasn't like Tori saying, "I wanna sing over this, and let me see what I can come up with," and I was like, "I'll take the music out and we'll make something new out of it." That is a cool way of doing things. There's all sorts of different ways of doing things when making music. Like for this one song I did for the new record, we went over to the lake across the street from my house and all the frogs and bullfrogs had a tonal area, something that makes you unconsciously sane in that key. My friend Shane and I went over there and we started with our guitars, and we're playing acoustic guitar and we wrote a whole song, but we didn't realize we wrote it in F-sharp because of the frogs, and we came back and listened to it, and we were like, "something's missing," and then I said, "I got it!" And I went into the closet and grabbed my microphone and portable DAT, and went back to the lake to record the frogs and put it in the track -- just different ways of making music. Doing "Blue Skies," I was like, "give her something that's pre-existing, let her vibe on it, and have her get out what we had talked about, and then me come in and put my feeling in again." Had I written the music for the song before she sung the lyrics, I would have never written the same thing, but she wouldn't have written the same thing either if the two of us just sat down in a room.

I: How did she go about writing the lyrics?

BT: Tori put the CD on, and sang for 15 minutes over an unreleased version of "Divinity" at a soundcheck for a show, and sent me the DAT without ever even listening to it. There was a note attached that said, "Brian, listen to this," and I took it and took literally every phrase and every breath and cut it into pieces to make a song out of it. She sang the words "blue" and "sky" next to each other one time in the whole thing, and I cut, glued, pasted, and made this thing that ebbed and flowed like a song.

I: Was the end product anything that Tori had imagined it would be?

BT: I think it was absolutely nothing that she'd expected. In fact, when I sent her the DAT, she called me immediately and was like, "Did I sing this shit?" Then she hung up and called back five minutes later saying, "This shit is bad-ass!" She was tripping out, because [her voice] was so edited up. That's what I'm talking about -- that was a dope-ass performance, but taking technology and manipulating it like clay.
-- BT; DJ Times, Feb, 1997

"I did a dance track with Brian Transeau, "Blue Skies". We grew up in Maryland at the same time. We went to rival high schools but we didn't know each other."
-- Tori; Q Magazine, July 1997

"What Tori and I did, I think, is different, because it mixes indie esthetics with electronic musical aspects. Tori and I have a really unusual connection in that way because we know what the dirt smells like."
-- BT; "Transmissions" Radio Show, WHFS Washington D.C

"What I did for the Talula single was scat, recording over the original vocals. I was in Holland to do tele with my guys, specifically with Marcel, and Rob. Mark was working on setting things up for the tour. The Dutch just came to hang. This all actually started in London. BT and I were having dinner and he was telling me about these people who chase tornados and all this stuff about the Internet, which I don't understand. Why would someone go on there just to make up lies about me? I don't get it, it sounds like a sport, I mean feed the Christians to the lions, or like, gladiators where one of them has to die, it's nuts. All I know is BT was telling me about a page, a web, or something, where everyone talks about chasing tornados. Real people who jump in their Jeeps, cars, or on bicycles, and start racing toward these tornados with video cameras. I just started singing, 'He's chasing tornados, I'm just waiting calmly, he's chasing her'. We were with a guy named Spence from Perfecto Records too. BT said, 'What the hell was that?,' and I said, it's the new opening line for the Talula Tornado mix. We both looked down at our plates, BT looked at me and said, 'screw the spaghetti, lets record.' So we smuggle a bottle of wine out of the restaurant, rush to a black cab, and go studio hunting. We show up at EastWest. I knock on the door and we say, 'It's us,' and the security guard asks 'Is it OK' and I say, 'Of course it's fucking OK,' he was nice to us then. So we are working off the label's phone trying to find a studio. We're not having any luck, then Spence remembers a friend that has an old studio in his house, near Ladbrooke Grove. So we call him, race down in another cab, it's one or two in the morning by then. I do a scratch vocal so I can remember it, and take it with me. It sounded like shit but it wasn't supposed to sound like anything, it was only reference. I knew I was going to have to do it again, but I was leaving the country the next day to go to Spain. Anyway, when I got to Holland, I tried to record it again but I only had seven minutes and it still sounded like shit. So I said, 'Come on Marcel, I've gotta go back in the studio, make it work, I have to do it right.' So I went to Germany, then back to Holland for another TV show. After dinner that night, ten or eleven o'clock, Marcel and I went to a studio about 40 minutes out of Amsterdam, and sang the Tornado mix over Talula. I didn't even have the CD, I had to borrow a copy of Pele from someone, and sang to it. The DAT was about 15 or 20 minutes of me just scatting over the album track. I rushed that to BT in London, and so he's using it for the 20 minute dance mix. Just adding to it what I made up, and the part about chasing tornados."
-- Tori; Upside Down #7

"It's funny because I didn't even know about... I was just doing the Tornado mix because I was eating linguini one night when BT, who is a great dance remixer -- and when I say 'dance,' it's British, so it's very different from the American concept of the dance world. And although they have that, too, Brian reminds me a lot of Brian Eno -- BT, his name is Brian. And so, he and I just hooked up and he was going to do this remix. I was eating linguini with him -- with a fantastic bottle of Chardonnay and we were in London, and he said to me, 'Do you realize what the Internet can do?' And I said, 'Well, a little bit. I know there's information about anything.' He said, 'No. Do you understand that there are pages where people chase tornados.' I said, 'No?' He said, 'Yes, people literally do this.' The real -- not the Hollywood version. And I said, 'Come on, Brian, you're not serious.' And he said, 'I am.' And I put down my linguini and started singing to him at the table 'He's chasing tornados -- I'm just waiting calmly -- Chasing...' And he said, 'What is that?' And I said, 'I don't know.' He said, 'Well, let's do it.' I said, 'It must go in Talula. So we ran to a studio that night at two o'clock in the morning with our bottle of Chardonnay and recorded it... [The song had] absolutely nothing [to do with the movie, Twister]. And they heard about it through Brian. They were calling him about...you know, 'cause he's a hot remixer. 'Have you heard anything? Anything we should know about?' He goes, 'Well, Tori did this thing that you might be into.' And then they listened to it and called us up. So we had no idea this movie was happening."
-- Tori; KPNT, 105.7 The Point St Louis, June 12, 1996