Fairy-tale ending for Tori Amos

By JAMES MCNAIR

As you might expect, Tori Amos is sorted for real estate.

She owns a Georgian pad in County Cork, and a beach house near Miami.

Today, we are at her 19th-century cottage near Bude, in north Cornwall. The cottage overlooks Amos' studio complex, and her English recording-engineer husband, Mark Hawley, is here, too.

It is almost 12 years since the North Carolina-born singer and pianist released her debut album, Little Earthquakes. In 1994, she helped to establish the rape and incest charity Rainn and in 1997, Armand Van Helden's chart-topping remix of Professional Widow helped to reinvent her as a dance artist.

Last year her album Scarlet's Walk yielded A Sorta Fairytale, her biggest US hit. She has just released Tales of a Librarian, a best-of and bonuses collection she describes as her "sonic autobiography".

"My life with songs has been about chronicling time," Amos says. "I would write a piece of music so that six months later, when everybody had forgotten about, say, our glossing over of that embarrassing incident at church I could remember what happened."

Amos and Hawley have worked hard to ensure that Tales of a Librarian has life and spark. Featuring two new songs and reworkings of the rare B-sides Mary and Sweet Dreams, Amos also revisits classic tracks from her career. These new versions emphasise different aspects of the originals.

How had it felt, then, to listen again to her younger self singing songs such as Crucified and Me and a Gun?

"Mostly, I enjoyed revisiting the songs. But Me and a Gun (the track which documents Amos' real-life rape) was the one where I wanted Mark to deal with it. At the mastering stage, I lit a candle as I always do, and I heard her voice and she touched my heart. When I'd made my peace with it, I said, 'Okay, I'm gonna go now.' I've worked very hard to move on from that song so that I'm not a victim of it.

"With Crucified it was completely the reverse. I could enjoy being with the girl who sang that, enjoy hearing her as she took on the patriarchy. My approach now is different from how it was then. If you're angry at 40, it's not attractive. But being angry and writing a song like Crucified when you're 26 — well there's something sort of delicious about that."

The lyrics of Amos' song Angels take some deciphering. Amos explains the angels she sings of represent the votes "lost" in Florida during the last presidential election. "It's getting better by the day, but it's been a tough two years", she says. "I think about the war in Iraq, too, and the depressing fact that we're still in it.

"If you try to speak out, people say you're not supporting the country, but it's the Administration you're not supporting. Angels is partly about the 'lost' votes, and partly about a mass of people who could not see that they had the strength to stand up to everything that followed."

- INDEPENDENT