The singer-songwriter’s music is defined by her ethereal womanhood, which is unrelenting in its quest for harmony and a wider, greater understanding.
So when Amos isn’t spending time with husband Mark Hawley and daughter Natashya Lorien Hawley on tour, she’s thumbing through her well-traveled copy of Elaine Pagels’ “The Gnostic Gospels” or shopping for her daughter’s birthday party at a nondescript mall in Cleveland, both expressions of her womanhood.
“You caught me being a mom today,” Amos said by phone earlier this week. “I’m shopping for my daughter’s fifth-birthday party, which is tonight at the Cleveland show. It’s a ‘Star Wars’ costume party, and of course she’s Princess Padme.”
Amos, who plays Red Rocks on Monday, quickly wrapped things up at the mall and steered the interview toward more serious, introspective ground.
“People always say to me, ‘When you get back to your real life,’ and I’m like, ‘Wait, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’ (Being on tour) is my real life. My real life unfortunately isn’t a 9-5 job. My job is travel, and our home is where the next hotel is, just like troubadours in the old tradition. Having a child has made me much better at conserving energy and learning how to do this without getting wrecked and caught up in it.”
Life for Amos, who turned 42 last week, is all about the journey – the people you meet and the places you stay. It’s what helps her create new music, including this year’s excellent “The Beekeeper,” which is a record, she has said, that was dictated to her.
“I’ve been trying to take the advice of the medicine women who would come to see me over the years at the shows, and they would say that you need to move at the medicine wheel into the powerful woman’s place of acceptance of who you are,” Amos said. “And it might not be who you thought you wanted to be, or how you wanted people to see you as.
“It’s taken a lot of work for me to see that there are so many divisions in women who I meet across the world because of the projections they take on from their religion to their families to what is a sexy woman or what is a spiritual woman. You try these ideas on like clothes, but some of them aren’t fitting certain women so well. It’s because we don’t have any mythology, and so we don’t have anything to latch ourselves onto.”
Judging from her own experiences – and from letters she has received over the past 15 years – Amos believes the relationship between a woman’s sensuality and sexuality is one of the most difficult to manage “because there isn’t a blueprint for it.”
“It’s tough, especially now that the right-wing side of Christianity is not covert but overt and very much in control of what you hear on the radio and what gets put up in the stores. They’re the censors.”
She speaks easily on the topic because it’s loosely the subject of “The Beekeeper.” Amos’ religious upbringing is also a part of everything she does – which makes for epic clashes between her own philosophies and those of the her Methodist preacher father and the church in which she was raised.
“I felt that I had to bring these two segregated parts of woman into a marriage,” Amos said, “marrying the Marys, the Magdalene and the Mother Mary, Mary sexuality and Mary sensuality. I’m always arguing with my father, who I do adore and love, who still believes Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. … (Others have said) Magdalene was not a prostitute but a prophet, and it was not profitable for the church to have her in that position.”
The union of sexuality and sensuality is one Amos has struggled with, but motherhood and music have helped her. Another battle she fought early in her career dealt with the industry’s star-making machine.
“When we were doing the ‘Under the Pink’ tour, that’s when it all exploded,” she said. “Most second records are bombs, but mine did better than the first, and when it came out, the machine clicked into overdrive – and suddenly you become a commodity. Fame is a very dangerous lover, and unless you face it and understand it and come to terms with it, it will take you down .”
Amos has always guarded her privacy. Her lyrics are intensely personal, but most of the time they’re shrouded in arty metaphor using mythical archetypes as stand-ins for those involved in her own life.
In her husband, Mark Hawley, who was and is a sound engineer for Amos on tour, she has found someone who values his privacy even more tenaciously.
“He protects our private life seriously and shuns the spotlight,” she said, speaking of their home in the small village of Cornwall, England. “He’s British, and he’s very not involved in the celebrity side of things.”
Amos noted that Cornwall is a private place and “not open to outsiders. And I am an outsider, but because Mark went there as a child every year he has a real sense of place.”
As for her, all she needs is “to be near a piano and where there’s love, where my heart is.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
Tori Amos
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