In the two decades since American singer/songwriter Tori Amos released her now seminal debut, Little Earthquakes, she has become one of the most important and innovative artists of her generation. She talks to Heidi Maier.

TWENTY years ago this year, US-born, UK-based Amos released one of the most potent, stirring and deeply personal debut records to ever have seen the light of day. To mark the occasion, she has delved into her back catalogue and chosen the 15 gems that appear, rearranged, reimagined and rerecorded, on the recently released Gold Dust.

Speaking from her home in Cornwall, England, Amos has recently returned from holidays in Florida. She says, laughingly, that she has sequestered herself downstairs, in her home studio, to do interviews while her husband, and longtime sound engineer, Mark Hawley readies their daughter for her imminent return to boarding school.

Lest it all sound too “tyrannical or Enid Blyton on crack,” Amos is at pains to point out that it was she who had to be convinced by 12-year-old Tash regarding the merits of attending the prestigious Sylvia Young Theatre School in London, as a boarder, and not the other way around.

“I like to joke at the moment that I have to let go of two things – a daughter and an album. But, really, Tash is passionate about this and what can you do? I could say no, but I’m not the sort of mother who wants to stifle her growth or restrict her interests, so I suck it up as best I can and accept that, yes, maybe I am losing her a little earlier than I’d like to be, but she’s doing something she loves and I am lucky enough to be in a position to give her that,” she says.

Gold Dust, a sweeping and extraordinarily epic reinterpretation of songs spanning Amos’ entire career, comes less than a year after the release of Night of Hunters, her first album for the revered German classical music label, Deutsche Grammaphon.

Tash, as well as Amos’ young niece, both sang on Night of Hunters, so Amos admits to seeing a certain synchronicity between discussing the release of Gold Dust as she prepares to send her beloved only child off to school.

For Amos, the process of choosing which songs would appear on the album and then working on reworking them to be performed with the famed Dutch Metropole Orchestra has been one she calls “absolutely alchemical and life-changing.”

The album is, she says, very much a variation on the theme of conversations and the exchanges and back-and-forth that have characterised different conversations at various points in her career: conversations with herself, with her collaborators, with her fans and with her producers and contemporaries.

“Some years ago, when the Metropole were doing a week of guest artists, I was asked to come along and play. During the rehearsals, the musicologist from Deutsche Grammaphon, Dr. Alexander Buhr, was there, and he saw something taking place that I, because I was inside of the bubble, wasn’t able to stand back and bear witness to,” Amos reveals.

“Alex saw what was really happening. He saw that a conversation was truly taking place, back-and-forth between me and the orchestra, and he said: ‘We need to record this properly and capture this conversation because, although sometimes it’s very, very subtle, I can truly see that you’re responding to them and, in turn, how they’re interpreting that.’”

Once Amos had decided which songs would appear on Gold Dust, arranger John Philip Shenale, whom Amos affectionately refers to as “Philly,” was enlisted to assist with the arrangements for the orchestra.

“When I was rehearsing it and rewriting it, what I did was rehearse to the mock-ups that Philly sent. He was working from original recordings sent to him by Mark. He would have sent him my piano and vocals from, say, ‘Cloud On My Tongue,’ from way back in 1993,” Amos elaborates.

“Philly would have to put his orchestral mock-up to that, send it back to me, and then I’d practice from that. I could turn down the piano and the vocal and play them with the arrangement, but them coming to play them with the orchestra, of course, was something completely unpredictable and amazing and extraordinarily magical.”

For Amos, that process, too, of rerecording the songs with the orchestra was something entirely revelatory and new.

“What you have to understand is that, previous to Night of Hunters, I worked alone. I mean, normally I sing without anybody listening but Mark. Since 1995, that’s how it’s been and, before then, it would be the producer of the project and so, at most, there’d be two people in there. For this, I was there! Oh yeah, I was so there, but I was in a different room, just so people know and understand,” she says.

“The orchestra works as an organism, as one creature. It’s in a huge room and we were at their studios in Holland, of course, in an enormous building. I was in a different room in the same building with the piano, and the microphones, and my voice. I was on camera for them and they were on camera for me. ”

Amos, who admits she had dreamed of recording her songs with an orchestra since first beginning to write the songs that would eventually come to comprise Little Earthquakes, the experience of performing with an orchestra while touring Night of Hunters was nothing if not simultaneously life-changing and educational.

“Live performance taught us all a lot of things, I think! Number one, it taught me that orchestras, unlike bands, do not jam if you need to breathe! We’d never played the program, back-to-back, without any breaks, until we were in front of thousands of people the first night of that tour and I realised, in front of them: ‘Oh my goodness, we need to be putting in jams and improvisations and instrumentals for orchestra to play while I catch my breath!’” Amos laughs.

“That’s what I’m used to doing and what, I think, you’ll find people who’ve seen me play live a few times will tell you – I take a few moments, I jam, I improvise, I catch my breath. I don’t always go out onstage knowing what will happen or what form it will take, but the band and I know one another well enough that we know, at some point, I’ll take my break and mix things up a bit while I’m catching my breath and getting myself together a little, you know?”

Amos who has longed referred to her songs as “girls” and spoken of them as though they’re actual entities, the process of deciding which songs would appear on Gold Dust was one she describes as “strange and complicated but also kind of wonderful, too.”

Still, even though she’s been playing professionally since she was a teenager, Amos is sanguine about “the new and unexpected lessons live shows teach you, as a performer and, really, I suppose, just as a person.”

“I mean, I’ve done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of shows, so you’d think I’d have thought about that, in the orchestral setting, before I went out there and played, but I didn’t. What a ding-bell, I know, but I didn’t. Nobody thought of it. You learn as you go and the orchestral arrangements, of course, weren’t done to my live performances, so that means it’s more contained and you don’t have, say, 20 bars of me improvising piano before, say, ‘Marianne,’” Amos says.

“I make up ditties live all the time and it becomes improvisational when you’re with a band. I’ve worked with my guys forever, we know one another, they’re improv players, it’s in our DNA. Orchestras don’t work that way. They play to the notes and the dots on the page. I know that, of course, but I didn’t, for whatever reason, in all the practicing I did, think about needing to catch my breath in front of thousands of people!”

Asked if it feels as though 20 years has passed since the release of Little Earthquakes, Amos is at once philosophical and humorous. Marrying a Brit and becoming a mother has, she says, “changed me, given me a much better sense of humour and opened me up in a way that, as an American, I don’t think I was before. I laugh a lot more now than I ever did before.”

“It doesn’t honestly seem to me as if ‘Silent All These Years’ or ‘Winter’ or ‘Precious Things’ are such an awfully long time ago. Yes, I remember what inspired them and the conversations that resulted from them, but they’re still very much alive to me. They’re not dead entities or entities that burn any less brightly to me now than they did back in 1991 or 1992. The girls are the same, they’re just wearing different outfits,” Amos admits.

“They like a bit of fashion, a bit of costume. You know how we, as women, don’t want to be in the same outfit always. This album was a bit like that. You can have a makeover but not necessarily look like a completely different person. Some of the girls didn’t want to change that much, they were happy in whatever they had around them, whatever instruments they were, you know, wrapped in, while others wanted some woodwinds, others wanted to dance with the strings.”

Gold Dust is out now on Deutsche Grammophon Records through Universal Music Australia.