you for a while

Caught a Lite Sneeze

Lyrics, Music, and Commentary by Tori Amos

“The gates opening–whether you think of the gates that lead to Hades. This period of composing for me, with the harpsichord and the piano, timelines crossed. If you think about it, its about crawling inside the bloodline…the bloodline of the piano…that leads to the harpsichord and back. So, the information of mother to daughter and daughter to mother, what they’ve been struggling with for centuries trying to find their own feminine power but getting all mixed up and steeling fire from the men. So this record was very much about crossing over into, um, different consciousness. Whether you call it death, death of a soul, death of a portion of you that has had to wake up to the truth of certain things that were torn up.”

“So this is almost a sort of dream and yet it is a reality at the same time and I think that is what is so scary to her. Mike Lipscomb, the director, um, seemed to have quite a handle on symbology and he wanted to play this out within a dream color. So, naturally, her perceptions of what she thought was going on, well, they are crumbling all around her. I think that happens to most people when you are ripping the mask off of your face.”

“Trying to bring this to the visual world was quite a challenge. Um, when you talk about steeling fire, that was something Boys for Pele, which this album…um, thats what I was exploring. To access the shadow side, the dark prince. Not Satan, so all Christians, you know hold on to your jantanas (?). You can’t get those mixed up, or you don’t really know your archetypes very well. But, you know, the resentment that I had for the men that could channel and tap into this archetype of the dark prince, dissipated when I realized, for me, that the dark prince was pushing a white cashmere Chanel little number, uh, was a woman, and drove an ice cream truck.”

“Believe it or not, I was on green screen most of the time. I seem to live my life on green screen. Um, but this was an extremely physical shoot. I was rolling around on the ground, getting dragged behind chairs. There were moments, obviously, when I had to be suspended and flying and moving around. But it was a mixture of the tangible world that Tori was in and the world she was trying to come to terms with. This was the opposite of Jupiter in that Tori is, um, trying to come into the earth plane from her land of, um, misperceptions.”

~ Tori on “Caught a Lite Sneeze” (Fade to Red DVD)