Tori Amos - Hereinmyhead.com

This page is a collection of entries where Neil Gaiman mentions Tori in his online journal at neilgaiman.com.

got a question for ya..

Being that you're a good friend of Tori Amos.. and given the fact that your friendship with her is very well known among the public and the fans of Tori and you.. how often do you get asked about her? Do you ever get tired of people who interview you asking questions such as: "so, seen Tori lately? how's she doing? how's her daughter? you ARE her kid's godfather, aren't you? what's the word on the new album? you gonna write anything for it?" etc.?

Have you ever had to fight back the urge to lose your cool and yell "ENOUGH ABOUT TORI! Aren't we supposed to be talking about ME??"

Not at all. I get easily bored talking about me, after all, so I don't mind at all when people want to ask about Tori, any more than I mind if they want to ask about Terry Pratchett, or Dave McKean, or Yoshitaka Amano, or Kelly Link or... well, the list is long, and I never mind being asked about my friends. At a normal signing of three or four hundred people, there will be three or four extremely Tori fans in the line, and if there's a new album coming out they'll ask if I've heard it and if it's any good, and I'll tell them, and sometimes they just want to know if I really am the same Neil she sings about, or just if I've seen her recently, and I'm perfectly happy to answer. (Anyway, I figure one-in-a-hundred people are asking her the same questions about me in her meet-and-greet lines, just as they're asking Terry Pratchett if there'll ever be a sequel to Good Omens...)
-- Neil Gaiman, October 10, 2002 - 1:14 AM

I wrote a short story for Tori's tourbook today. It's called Pages from a Journal Found in a Shoebox Left in a Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Louisville, Kentucky. It's sort of about Scarlet's Walk (the album, the concept and the story) and it's sort of about a lot of other things, including the fragility of identity. It's just a little over a thousand words, but I think it works. I may even put it in the next short story collection.
-- Neil Gaiman, September 22, 2002 - 11:36 PM

It's madness on the writing front right now, lots of tiny things to do along with the big things, and none of them are moveable. Got to write an appreciation of Dave McKean for the World Fantasycon program book, for example, and it's time to write something for Tori's Scarlet's Walk tour program booklet. (I'm being sent the CD glued into a glued-together Walkman. When I pointed out that I already had a copy of an early version of the album on CD, and that I wasn't really likely to leak it to the web, I learned that Everybody was getting their CDs like this, which made me smile. I was also warned not to follow the lead of someone I will not identify here [ I shall disguise his identity, to save him embarrassment, and will only identify him by his initials -- MC -- and say that he is a percussionist of great coolness and excellence]. Anyway, this unnamed person apparently decided to try and open the sealed Walkman and remove the glued-up CD, and managed to cut his hand quite badly in the process. So I shall not do this. Nor shall I go to plan B, Boil the Walkman. I shall just press the play button, and be happy. I'm really looking forward to hearing the whole story in finished form, and trying to decide what kind of thing to write. Diary entries, maybe. Or a sort of American Gods thing. Or something else. Ah well, I'll talk to her and we'll figure it out.)
-- Neil Gaiman, September 11, 2002 - 7:52 PM

Spoke to Tori yesterday about the new album, and mentioned that I was ready to say something about it in the journal. She�s just finished putting the 60-piece strings on the album, is really excited and happy and up, and asked me please not to say anything publically until I�d heard something closer to what the finished CD is going to be like, with all the instrumentation on all the songs (as what I have on the skeletal CD she gave me is pretty much just piano, and some guitar, bass and drums). Also several songs on the version of the CD I�ve heard are in the process of moving to another place, and a couple of songs that were going to be in another place have moved onto the CD (including one song I loved when I heard it in Florida). I told her it would drive people waiting for news nuts (she said to give everyone her love, I forgot that bit), but I really do understand: she was one of the people I sent American Gods to in rough draft, a chapter at a time, while I was writing it, and I would have frozen and worried if anyone had started talking about it publically before the manuscript was at a point I was comfortable with, no matter how nice the things they were going to say. So I'll wait a few weeks until the somewhat more finished CD arrives....

I�ll say I�m thrilled and excited, though. And I�ll say that it�ll be a long time until October.
-- Neil Gaiman, June 18, 2002 - 12:35 AM

I assume that any Tori fans who want to know about the next album already know everything that's up on this article at Billboard.com.

(The quote from me actually came from a letter I wrote to Steve Erickson, who I thought would like it, which I'd copied to Tori's people, and when they saw that paragraph they asked if they could use it to explain what the album was. I said, of course.)

I'm really looking forward to hearing the finished CD with all the instrumentation on it. A few of the songs on there go back a way (I remember hearing an early version of "Gold dust" when I was out in Florida chatting about the album that would become Strange Little Girls) while most of them came about post-September 11th. They are all part of the tapestry, though.
-- Neil Gaiman, July 17, 2002 - 1:00 AM

Okay. Duncan is Tori�s personal chef. This is the drink he makes for her, and is posted with his permission. He says to make sure it�s not too hot when you drink it, and he adds that an ice-pack on the throat for about 20 minutes after coming off stage can reduce inflammation of the vocal chords.

Half a teaspoon of slippery elm
One dessertspoon of honey
two teaspoons of lemon juice
Add just a drop of water
and cream this to a paste.
Then add
6 thin slices of root ginger (or more, to taste)
3-4 thin slices of lemon cut into halves or quarters
Add boiling water, stir, let it sit, and let it cool a bit before drinking.
-- Neil Gaiman, March 10, 2002 - 10:44 AM

Finished the second draft of the whatever-it-is-I'm-doing-with-Avalon. Not quite ready to write the review of STRANGE LITTLE GIRLS I thought I'd write, having just got the whole thing, all 12 tracks in a final mixed version. Fascinating how the whole shape of the album changes with HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN on there; it's an eleven minute monster I want to hear a lot more times before I say anything sensible. But Raining Blood now works much better now, following it. (It was never happy following I don't Like Mondays.)
-- Neil Gaiman, August 11, 2001 - 2:53 AM

Surprised this morning to discover that what looks like more or less random paragraphs extracted from the first couple of the stories I'd written for Tori's STRANGE LITTLE GIRLS have started floating around the net, and suddenly got a real insight into how artists must feel, having worked themselves into an exhausted frenzy, gone without sleep and and racked up a bill of hundreds of thousands of dollars recording a new album, mixing it, getting it into a form they are proud of, only to have everyone's first exposure to it be a badly compressed 56K mp3 of a premixed version released to a couple of journalists...

If that's how the artist wants it released, fine. But if not, I dunno -- it's like a strange sort of race between curiosity and respect, and, knowing human nature, curiosity will always win, and always be disappointed.

Not, I should add, that I spent thousands of dollars or went without sleep to write the SLG stories. But I had always thought that people's first exposure to them would be as a sequence of 12, in the correct order, to be read or heard in combination with the photos they refer to, and in context of the songs.
-- Neil Gaiman, August 6, 2001 - 10:37 AM

Oh, one thing. Several people at the signing asked about the stories I wrote for Tori's STRANGE LITTLE GIRLS album. To clarify, they won't be on the CD -- I think the plan is to take a sentence from each one and put it by the relevant photo for the CD, then to run the whole story in the Tour Booklet. (one person asked me if the new album was really any good, as if I'd probably just been trying to get people's hopes up to help sell a dog of an album, which rather puzzled me. So, for the record, yes I really like the album. I think it's the best thing Tori's done in a while, and it's, in my opinion, her most personal album for years. I would be astonished if there wasn't at least one track on there that every dyed in the wool Tori fan loved immediately, and equally as surprised if there wasn't at least one track that they disliked equally as strongly -- it's that sort of record).
-- Neil Gaiman, July 22, 2001 - 9:40 PM

Tidying up some videos I ran into an old clip of Tori performing Silent All These Years on the Jonathan Ross show, circa 1991; Clive Barker and Anne Bobby were on the same tape. Everybody -- Tori, Jonathan, Clive and Anne, looked so young.

(There was a nice man at the Victoria signing, who said "I saw you on PRISONERS OF GRAVITY on TV ten years ago. And you don't look any older now. I guess you have a portrait in your attic, huh?"

"I do," I told him. "And the weird thing is, it looks this age too."

But the truth is, I pretty much look my age, I think.)

Anyway, I promised I'd donate something to one of the RAINN auctions -- I might donate that tape,although probably it's something that the Tori fans all have copies of and would yawn at. (How does one find out these things?)
-- Neil Gaiman, July 18, 2001 - 9:45 PM

...Left London on the Gatwick Express. Saw my family, or bits of it. Went back to London on the Gatwick Express. Did a strange but kind of fun thing with Tori, where we sat and were filmed talking in a hotel with galaxies in the lifts (er, elevators) and see-through glass bathrooms. Read the short stories for Strange Little Girls and then we talked about each story and each song and what it meant. I think they�ll edit it into something and put it out on the web in some form.
-- Neil Gaiman, July 16, 2001 - 7:14 PM

"(Jetlagged author tries to remember things he said, but he can only remember mentioning that the lyric version of New Age on Tori's "Strange Little Girls" CD is not as reported the one from the Velvet Underground's LOADED but actually the version from the Live 1969 LP, and I can only remember that because it's playing in the background as I type this.)"
-- Neil Gaiman, July 8, 2001 - 1:23 PM

I'm writing something for each of the girls. It'll probably be longer in the version in the tour booklet, at a guess.
-- Neil Gaiman, June 15, 2001 - 8:20 PM

Some days are instant Christmas. They put a smile on your face...

Today brought...

Tori's CD, Strange Little Girls. It's missing one track, but the other eleven are there. I knew what to expect this time, but my family are spellbound. It's just playing all the time in the background... as surprising and as wonderful the fifth time as it was the first...
-- Neil Gaiman, June 14, 2001 - 12:40 PM

(Fedex tomorrow will bring many cool things, including the new Tori Amos CD, for the booklet of which I have to find some words.)
-- Neil Gaiman, June 13, 2001 - 4:06 PM

Abbe -- I did a long interview this morning for a Tori fanzine, in which I worked very hard at not saying too much about the new album.

I spoke to herself yesterday, though, and things are coming together swimmingly. There'll be some writing I have to do, pretty soon -- I hope, before the tour, as the finished album, CD book and everything will be handed in at the beginning of July.
-- Neil Gaiman, June 1, 2001 - 1:18 AM

More on Strange Little Girls.

Sat up with Marcel, listening to the b-sides (all lovely, and in each case I could see why it wasn't an album track -- although one of them might be a single in its own right), and then he played me four or five of the album tracks again.

It got better. And I was blown away the first time.

I don't really want to say anything specific and tangible about this album, because it's not my place to talk about it -- it's Tori's and she'll talk about it when the time's right. And you'll hear it then,too.

But I will say that it feels in many ways like her first album as a grown-up -- as a mother, maybe; and that it's both her most accessible album (there's one track which made me think of nothing so much as a great lost track from Little Earthquakes) and also -- especially in the sequence of the last four or five songs, her most painful.

There are a couple of songs that are real singles. There's one song that will be a basement remix before you can say 'stains' . And there's one mammoth of a song that isn't yet finished, but even in the unfinished version it 's audacious and wild.

She does things with her voice I've not heard before. And the arrangements and musicianship are astonishing.

And, as I said before, it's not what you expect - *whatever* you expect.
-- Neil Gaiman, April 23, 2001 - 6:21 PM

Okay. I've heard the twelve tracks of STRANGE LITTLE GIRLS. I'll post something coherent later.

For now, let me just say that whatever you're expecting, it's not what you expect; whatever you're imagining, it's not what you imagine.

And I *knew* what to expect -- and it wasn't what I expected.

And yes, it's astonishing, and powerful, and scary, and cool. And if I'm good, maybe tonight I'll get to hear it again.

Neil

(And yes, if anyone wants to repost this anywhere, feel free -- I'd hate to see people arguing over paraphases of what I might have said.)
-- Neil Gaiman, April 23, 2001 - 1:19 PM

E-mail from my goddaughter's mum this morning with track listings for the new album. It's frustrating to know I have to wait until probably July when I'm in the UK to hear any of it.
-- Neil Gaiman, March 15, 2001 - 1:45 PM

Martha -- nope. Not a concept album -- there's no story there. It's more plotting as in... um... I don't really want to give anything away. Other than to say it will be very wonderful, amazingly cool, and very very very different, and you'll all find out what I'm talking about in September.
-- Neil Gaiman, December 19, 2000 - 7:50 PM

Have gone to see fairy goddaughter. Who is, I want you to know, the cutest thing. Well, not THE cutest thing. That was maddy. but she's up there. And she has a magnificently goofy smile.

Her mother and I are plotting the next album. Plot plot plot.
-- Neil Gaiman, December 18, 2000 - 9:30 PM