you for a while

Winter

Lyrics, Music, and Commentary by Tori Amos

“I still have that piano. That little blue piano. My mom and dad have it. Um, Cindy and I wanted to make it sort of Part 2 to Silent All These Years…so it was a variation on the same theme.”

“Casting the children was really good fun. Cindy had a little boy at the time…um, he’s a big boy now. I think it really inspired her to bring little critters in who had, um, you know the charm and the cheekiness that Buster had. I don’t know if they went to the same school. But working with them was, I think, important ‘cuz it helped me to be able to move from woman to young girl, which I needed to do in this video. Obviously this story is about a girl and her father.”

“So, I must say I remember coming out in, um, you know a collared sweater because Karen Binns, the stylist, thought well yeah…child, woman, girl, it all works in a sweater. And Cindy said, “What in the world is she in?” And, um, Karen said, “Well I love the material.” And Cindy said, “Well do something to it, Karen.” And she said, “Girl, I’m gonna push knit in a way you ain’t never seen knit pushed.” And Cindy, I think, was thrilled by Karen’s ability. Karen Binns, um, is one of my closest friends and she is the stylist who I’ve been with since the beginning. Cindy introduced us. Cindy also brought in the make-up artist, Leslie Chilkes, with whom I’ve worked more than with anybody else in the world. She is also a very close friend. ”

“And I think there was a real, um, a bonding with the women on this, being able to kind of, um, open up about the relationship they had with somebody whether it was their real father, or somebody they kind of looked to to hold that space, or what they wished their father had been.”

“I remember Cindy really needing me to kind of cross a line back in time of the disappointment you faced growing up and to be able to sing about that in this last bit of the video. I filmed this in the end. Sometimes you film your close ups in the beginning, because you look better, let’s face it. But Cindy didn’t want me to look better. She wanted me to be able to get to that place. It took me being with the children and remembering…and there were a lot of tears, I’ll be honest. So that by the time we reached this bit Leslie had to redo my makeup and after some hugs we filmed this last verse.”

~ Tori Amos on Winter (from Fade to Red)