Hi, by the way.
I met her first on a tape, and then we spoke on the phone late at night, and then one night I went to see her play piano and sing.
It was a tiny Notting Hill brasserie, and Tori had already started when I got there. She saw me come in and smiled like the lighting of a beacon, played “Tear in Your Hand” to welcome me in. The room was almost empty, save for the owner, who was having his birthday meal in the middle of the room. Tori sang “Happy Birthday to You,” then a song she’d recently written called “Me and a Gun,” pure and dark and alone.
Later, we went off through Notting Hill and talked like old friends who are meeting for the very first time. On the empty subway platform she sang and danced and acted out the video she had made that day for “Silent All These Years”—one moment she was a Tori in a box, spinning around, the next a small girl dancing past a piano . . .
That was several years ago.
I know Tori a little better now than I did that night, but the wonderment she inspired then has not faded with time or with familiarity.
Tori doesn’t ever ring me. She sends me strange messages by other means, and I have to track her down in odd countries, negotiate my way through foreign switchboards. The last time she wanted to tell me that they served great pumpkin ice cream in the place across from the recording studio, a continent away.
She offered to save me some.
And she wanted to tell me she sings about me on Under the Pink. “What do you sing?” I asked.
“‘Where’s Neil when you need him?’” she said.
Tori is wise and witchy and wickedly innocent. What you see is what you get: a little delirium, a lot of delight. There’s fairy blood inside her,* and a sense of humor that shimmers and illuminates and turns the world upside down.
She sings like an angel and rocks like a red-haired demon.
She’s a small miracle. She’s my friend.
I don’t know where I am when you need me. I hope the pumpkin ice cream doesn’t melt before I find out . . .
I wrote this for the tour book for Tori Amos’s Under the Pink tour, in 1994.