Piece by Piece

What girls do to each other is beyond description. No Chinese torture comes close.

A guitarist or a drummer can get a cold and still play; I get a cold and sound like a wet mitten trying to sing you a love song. Charming.

This is very simple in the world of chicks: some are hoochies, some are not, and some should never try to be. It's no different from the idea of sports. Now, I can go on my little rowing machine for four times a week, twenty-two minutes a time, and I can feel as if I flirt with the sporting world. Similar to the idea that a woman can put on something cuter for her man, for those moments, and flirt with garments that a hoochie woman might be pushing. But never for one moment should you get confused. My little rowing machine and I cannot consider ourselves athletes. Wearing the same garment does not a hoochie woman make. So if you are a true hoochie woman, may garments below the navel always be in your future. If you are not, then please don't throw away your cotton zippy jacket.

...Her entire life has been devoted to healing the deepest, most invasive unseeable scar that one can ever have.

We don't often see our own stories. Good artists are the ones that whisper our own stories back to us.

I'm an acquired taste. I'm anchovies. If I was potato chips I could go more places.

The Apocalypse is not something out there that will eradicate everything on planet Earth. That would be far too simple. The Apocalypse is in each and every one of us. It takes courage to fight the beast.

You want listeners to smell the lavender, to feel the point of those knitting needles in a handbag of the granny who happens to harbor a loyalty to Madame Defarge. You want the listener to know the wood's burning in the stove when they walk into the song with me. Music is about all of your senses, not just hearing.

From the ancient Inanna forcing herself to the underworld to visit her sister, Ereshkigal— passing through the seven gates of the underworld and then being hung on a hook, rotting— where she had to look at her sister, and her sister had to look at her. Both needed to see inside themselves, to see inside their own shadows. To come to terms with who they really were, not who they thought they were.

But I needed to access the Dark Prince in myself, instead of pulling in men who had access to it.

Every artist is born in a place, within a family, and though she may leave those sources far behind, they remain within her.

As soon as you stop being humbled by the creation process, Little One, it is so much bigger than you are. And when you think it is you and you are it, it will drown you or burn you alive.

For years I've gathered various books, sources. When I was little it might have been Tolkien, and so I would have just four books around me. I couldn't afford many books at the time, so I'd have what I had. Maybe I'd tear out ten or twenty pictures from magazines because I couldn't afford art books. I would check out library books and try to keep them as long as I could, but I couldn't jot my notes in them. For any particular song, I can't tell you the books that were on the floor, the photographs on the floor. I don't let anybody keep a record of that. Those are the secret ingredients.

There are times when I have had to make peace with the fact that I am at war.

Again, we go back to the power of words and how they can make you feel. They bring liberation or stagnation, they're chains. I began to see the structure of Tori—there's conservatory, and victory: you see that word in so many different other words—also anti-inflammatory but my favorite has to be Yakatori chicken. And I began to feel that the sound of this name was a window.

Tori is the woman in your neighborhood who stops by your garden, pauses, and gets you going for three hours on the topic of lilies that grow best in winter sun. Later, you'll walk by her pea patch and discover the most spectacular flower, not exactly what you planted, but something that shows the influence of the tips you shared.

Cindy came up with a glass world with a lone woman—Tori— having to navigate with bare feet. Karen came up with the idea of white. I dug it because if the woman missteps, then there is nowhere to hide all that blood on such a pretty white dress. I found that expression more in the vein of Artemis, if you're looking for an archetype. Artemis— the lone huntress, who finds other women to help her achieve what must be achieved as she tries to protect those creatures that she cares for.

There have been many other performers brought up by very religious parents, and then when they are able to own this essence and put it into their music, the sensual-sexual thing that they were not allowed to acknowledge and partake of in real life actually materializes in the music. If anybody knew you were consciously partaking of this sensual-sexual thing, you'd be ostracized. You would be thought of as sinful. Elvis went through something like this, if you think about it. Trace the roots of American popular culture, and the story is there.

Do you know who we are Mum?” And at that moment I just look into her blue planets for eyes, and she says, “We are Daughters of Song, Mama.” And at that I jump up with new life, pick her up, and say, “Now let's go play”_____

Then, as we ascend into the fifth and final act of the show, we can choose what we want to take back with us: a piece of our underworld self that, frankly, the cheating boyfriend may need to meet, or the boss that doesn't appreciate you, or the terrorizing Bitch at school—or maybe you're the terrorizing Bitch, maybe I am. Some fragments that took their masks off while we were on this underworld journey sometimes walk quietly with me. Only I know that after the show they will be staying with me as my figurative New Renter in my seafront condo, down the street from Pituitary Lane, behind Heart Terrace. Then again, some unmasked Beings that I see during a performance find me once I'm back in my dressing room and receive from me the “Okay you, thank you for the perspective and the vision, but in this century you can't just chop people's heads off and feed them to your cats, and I know these guys are bad guys, and thank you for the vision. So you can haunt me during the show again in Indy

I don't think that many performers necessarily want to see their audience empowered. I think a lot of performers, no different from priests, need the hierarchy. Modern, celebrity-driven entertainment turns the stage into an altar, and so many celebrities refuse to be removed from those altars once they manage to ascend. They will not be taken down— the Goddess is offended … As a storyteller in the old tradition, you held an important place at the circle. Your position was fluid, not necessarily permanent, but it demanded that you respected the others witnessing your performance as much as they respected you. All storytellers, all troubadours worth their salt knew their myths.

When I went on this trip I had a sexual/spiritual experience with a creature named Lucifer.

Music has an alchemical quality. And there's more than one voice on the piano. You have two hands. One can be playing a celestial melody while the other is doing quite the opposite. The joining of the profane and the sacred, or the passionate and the compassionate, happens right there on the keyboard.

I know now that my avatar all along has been closer to Lisa Simpson than anyone else.

Listen—when you're on the toilet, from the point of view of the toilet, you are not an icon taking a crap. You are a bottom taking a crap. If you can get that, you're going to be okay.

The songs don't spring whole into existence; they are built.

This is not your standard rock star's I-was-born-a-poor-genius self-deification, nor is it the opposite,

A time came later in my youth when I had to find the bridge between the aspects of playing music that constituted communication with myself, and performance. That's when I got a repertoire together, things that people would like. This is why I've done covers over the years.

That many southerners in our modern-day society, as rockets were beginning to go up to the moon, were still not over this particular wounding shows in some way the extent of this physical and spiritual bloodbath.

Festivals or radio shows can be the heavyweight championships of arrogantly detached clusterfucks.