you for a while

Spark

Music, Lyrics, and Commentary by Tori Amos

“This was shot in Darthmore, which is in southern England, around end of March…so it was pretty cold. The outfit, um well sometimes you know, that outfits, well it can get kind of crazy. Sometimes it comes out of some weirdo conversation I’m having with Karen and she thought well, we want something kind of luminescent so that in this very dark tale, with this, well, disturbing story occurring that we wanted Tori to have a luminescence about her…that through it all there was a sense of, not um, choirgirl, but this was from the Choirgirl Hotel album, and so we wanted her to kind of be protected in this shroud.”

“I was really into Twin Peaks the first season when it came out. So I like the idea of a complicated story where something has happened to her and yet she’s not totally defeated. No, she’s not having lunch by a warm fire…but I like the idea of her having to pull herself out of the depths…um, finding her spark.”

When Skeeter was written on the tree…um, it was was a fond name that we called the little person before I miscarried. So, in a way, I think when James Brown, the director, wanted to know what Spark was about, well Spark is about a loss really. So we created this allegory and, um. Of course when Tori gets into the water its sort of like the Sea of Galilee and her baptism again. There is usually a reference to otherworldly things, whether its the mermaid world or the angelic world, there is mythology in a lot of what I do.”

“Um, I think being mindful that most of it was really trying for me. You are out of control when you are blindfolded. I thought that it was a reference to how a lot of us feel when we are going through a very dark patch.”

“Um, you know, Tori runs into the children of the corn that are in the car. And the scary thing about all of if is that she thinks for a moment that she’s escaped this kidnapper who wants to kill her, whether those are the voices in her head or a real kidnapper. And she thinks, oh wow, okay, here I’m going to get some help. And a lot of times we don’t get the help we thought we were going to get…so she has to help herself.”

~ Tori Amos on Spark (from Fade to Red)