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"I would hear a lot of people say, 'They're only words, what is everyone going on about?'... That's where I said I could pick up the gauntlet. I believe in freedom of speech, but you cannot separate yourself from your creation. We go back to the power of words, and words are like guns...Whether you choose the graciousness of Tom Waits or the brutality of 'Bonnie and Clyde,' they're equally powerful, and that's what drove me."
-- Tori, Los Angeles Times, July 1, 2001
"I've always found it fascinating how men say things and how women hear them," she said in a press release from Atlantic Records. "Words can wound and words can heal, and both are included on the album." When she first heard "97' Bonnie & Clyde," "the scariest thing was ... the realization that people are getting into the music and grooving along to a song about a man who is butchering his wife," Amos said. "So half the world is dancing to this, oblivious, with blood on their sneakers. But when you talk about killing your wife, you don't get to control whom she becomes friends with after she's dead. She had to have a voice."
-- Tori, VH1 News, July 03, 2001
"I think it's a very difficult time in America right now, [for] a heterosexual male," Amos says. "Face it, most of them want to be black, or they have to look over their shoulder at the woman that's going to take their job. It's driven me to do the project I'm about to do."
-- Tori, RollingStone.com, April 13, 2001
"One of the real premises for the record was how men say things and what women hear. To do that, I had to first be clear on what a man says." Amos set a second parameter for her selections: "Also, they had to reflect our time. There had to be some kind of resonance."
-- Tori, Ice Magazine, September 2001
"The intent wasn't just to take the opposite viewpoint," Amos explains. "But when I started crawling underneath the song-mothers' thoughts and into the shadows, then it started to become, 'Mmm, okay: This is how men say things and what a woman hears.' I realized that in order for me to really expand on that thought, and achieve it, I needed to get together a brain trust where we understand how men say things and what a man hears, as well."
-- Tori, Washington Post, October 5, 2001
"We as women have our books and our journals and our photographs to document our relationships. I found that a lot of men have CDs as their documentation of their lovers, of when they lost their jobs, things like that. And I started to think, 'Wow, this is their language,'" she says. "I did this project so women could crawl into the heads of men, and men could crawl into the heads of men, then back over that bridge into the skin of women, and hear how she heard what they said. I think that exchange is really quite vital for us to respect each other."
-- Tori, Vancouver Sun, November 8, 2001
She consulted a ''laboratory of men'' to come up with the songs. "Straight men, gay men, all sorts of men contributed ideas," says Amos. "It was tricky to assemble this material because a lot of the songs just didn't work. But the men were my control group. They brought the songs to me that meant something to them as men."
"This is such a dangerous project," Amos says. "It's not about your own work, where your DNA is in your songs and you are the mom. This is something I really had to approach differently. You have to acknowledge that these men are the song mothers. I'm not the mother here. But what I did find surprising was that with each male song, a different female character came intrinsically tied to it that had access to me."..."A woman said to me that this [album] is like my little archetypal United Nations. And maybe it is, because if you look at the different women, there are some that hold the Athena essence, some that hold the Aphrodite essence, some that hold the Demeter, some that hold the Persephone. It's all there."
-- Tori, The Boston Globe, September 16, 2001
"It's like when you're an architect looking at another architect's plan," she said, "and you see how people solve problems that you might not solve in that way. That fascinates me. It was the same with sonic structure, crawling inside these songs, finding their secrets and how chord structures would resolve themselves. In a way, without knowing it, it rubs off on you. It was a fascinating experience for me, getting to know other people's girls."
--Tori; MTV.com News, 09/23/02
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