I like complex works. They just keep me on a more magical carpet ride. I’m into not leaving the planet, but really traveling. Music can do that if it’s done right. Some records do that for me. I love Queen, Freddie Mercury, these great performers, David Bowie when he was in his Ziggy period.

Music is my first language. Whether you like what I do or not, I know what it is that I’m trying to achieve with each work musically. When it comes to creativity I have a lot of will. It’s like the man would be going: “Come on Tori. Let’s take a drive and get to know each other”. Well, I get really shy, because I don’t have the 9-foot piano. And what if he gets to know me and decides he hates me?

There’s this jungle called ‘Women in Music,’ and the women that come before you they have their machetes and they clear a path. Joni Mitchell cleared a lot of brush away with her machete in the ’60s to make room for so many who have come after her.

If you make a record and it’s nice - and I’ve made those records before - they’re lovely and blah, blah, blah. But when you make a work that’s supposed to push people’s buttons and you do push people’s buttons, you can’t get nervous. That’s where being around a long time comes in, the experience comes in.

I once saw Jimi Hendrix on a television show and remembered my father, a minister, referring to that kind of music as “devil music”. I thought, right then, 20 years from now some minister is going to look at me playing the piano and say: “She plays like she’s got the devil in her.” I thought that was a good goal.

Well, I was a rock chick for years. About a year after that, I ran into the journalist who wrote this big “expose”.

I said: “Why couldn’t you give me the credit for putting those snake pants on of my own volition? What did you think the words on Little Earthquakes were about? I whored myself, and it horrified me. After that record, I threw out everything. My piano, even. I chucked it!”

But not because of the clothes. There’s nothing wrong with snakeskin trousers and hairspray. It was because the music wasn’t honest.

I’d see montages of our life on the road, and I’d shut off the music, realizing this music is not the underscoring for what I’m seeing at all…. I said, I wanna give people something that says my favorite thing: If it’s too loud, turn it up. I wanna give people creative worlds to walk into so that they are getting a sensory overload. You give people treasures, not ‘How can I cut all the costs?’

If you’re too intimidated by the music, then you’re useless to it, but if you have hubris, then you can’t hear how the ancient melodies want to be utilized, because you’re not listening, because it’s about you. Then it’s going to be defective. It’s a give-and-take all the time.

Yes, Anastasia doodle - from the Under the Pink sheet music book

The music always comes in my darkest hour, and the music is always so giving. I have this picture of an endless well somewhere, I don’t know where it is — in the star systems out there. And the more that you’re open to it the more that it keeps coming.

I am in the back of a taxi in my wedding dress, not able to quite go through with it. I pass the boy I’m supposed to marry at the church and I hide in the back of the cab like a wimp. But you can see I’m torn because my whole life is flashing in front of me. And I run into myself as a 13-year-old girl, which took a lot of hair and makeup. And that 13-year-old girl is reminding me that we had a dream. And the characters, the bride in the taxi, forgot. Even though I think she loves this boy, she didn’t follow her heart. You know, she never took that trip to Australia, she never took that art class, she never followed up on her dreams. And she just can’t get married and close the blinds. So it’s very emotional, this video, because she does love him, I believe that.

Q: If you could describe your musical universe with five words, what would they be?

Tori: The bose is nine feet.

If I think I’m going to sit down and write a song, it’s usually quite difficult, that’s where my discipline has to kick in. It’s very tricky, I usually have to go to my sonic pallet and get something that has already been “cooking” on the back burner and expand upon it. I can’t just take something out of thin air, well I can, but it will sound like I took nothing from thin air and it will sound pretty much like nothing. Just a derivative, that’s not what you want as a creative force.

I can hear music anywhere. I can hear music in the oddest of places it seems. When you think you should be inspired to write a song, sometimes you’re just not. Sometimes I think you have to take the information in and experience it. You have to drink it in. Not all moments walking in the woods are about anything but walking in the woods.

I couldn’t fly half of Holland over here. I’m sorry, that’s a big check to write, you know what I’m saying? … The reason I’m not doing it is because I couldn’t get a day rehearsal with an orchestra because of union rules and how much it would cost. I was going to do it, but I could only rehearse at soundcheck. And even the Dean at the Peabody told me, ‘Well, that’s music suicide.’ So I would be crying in the middle thinking people are watching us rehearse and we suck. I’d start running off—you’d see Tori Amos on YouTube running off from the Greek Theatre into the night, never to be seen again!