Interviewing Tori Amos is like playing with a toy sailboat.

Each question launches the boat out into a pond. But then it’s out of your hands.

Sometimes, the wind returns the boat quickly and you get to push it out again. Other times, the boat lingers out of your grasp — twisting in the wind — and you just have to wait patiently for its return.

Amos is set to sail into town Sunday for a sold-out show at the F.M. Kirby Center for the Performing Arts. She is touring in support of her “Boys for Pele” album.

For the uninitiated, Amos’s music is a mixture of classical piano and harpsichord with seemingly-incongruous lyrics about a friend’s suicide, rape and the Virgin Mary actually giving birth to a girl in Bethlehem.

At a recent Philadelphia press conference and subsequent phone interview, Amos spoke whimsically about religion, the nudist who mixes her monitors in the buff backstage, poppy seed cakes and light bulbs.

Most questions posed to Amos yield long, stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences that evoke the same inventive charm as her lyrics.

Throughout the press conference, Amos gestured incessantly with her hands — one of which bore an indecipherable magic marker note to herself. With each question, her eyes lit up, her body found a new contortion and her hands never stopped moving — as though she’s not used to speaking without accompanying herself on piano.

Amos — wearing a green blouse hanging out over her blue jeans, covered with a ratty inside-out sweater — explained what she experiences on stage.

“What happens is, really, I try and get out of the way a bit, so I can tap into a never-ending well of creativity,” she says, pausing — seeming to contemplate the next sentence fragment. “And a lot of times, I try to align myself with this wonderful force that all of us have access to. I don’t have the same experience as people watching and hearing. Everything’s motion, you’re just trying not to spit on the keys sometimes, it’s really basic.”

A Tori Amos concert is a dichotomy. In part, it has the air of a classical music concert, with its grand piano and harpsichord facing each other, with Amos spinning between the two. At a recent Philadelphia concert, total silence blanketed the crowd during each song. People were not even allowed to walk in the theater aisles during songs.

But Amos’ seemingly-proper concerts also have a dark side, with her sexual, religious-questioning lyrics echoing over the rapt crowd — many of whom wear her shirts emblazoned with “Recovering Christian” across the front.

In concert, Amos doesn’t use a set list. She just pauses, thinks, and starts playing the next song. She says her spare show in smaller venues, only augmented musically at times by an acoustic guitar, doesn’t hold her back.

“If I felt like I was limited, I wouldn’t do it. It gives you a lot of freedom,” she says, snaking her leg around and over the back of her chair. “It’s difficult enough in these theaters with this many people to stay focused … to really take a journey. With me alone at the piano, there has to be a level of intimacy or I don’t think we could go anywhere.

“And it’s hard to have that relationship when you’re this big,” she says, squinting her eyes and holding her index finger and thumb a small distance apart to approximate the size of the singer at larger shows.

Judging from Internet newsgroups, Amos has a cult-like following of people who put each of her lyrics under a magnifying glass. Many netizens continually refer to Amos as a “goddess,” an accolade also yelled several times during the Philly concert. Amos isn’t sure of the genesis of her goddess stature.

“The only thing I can come up with is all the God references that I make, so it’s kind of a joke,” she said. “And, of course, Pele is the volcano goddess of fire. So, I think they’re not just making a religious God reference, but also a Pagan reference which shows they’re religious instability or not, as the case may be.”

Amos, 32, the daughter of a minister with a doctorate in theology, said she read about and compared all religions.

“I would compare thoughts, ideas, facts… and what I began to see was that there is truth in every religion. There is truth there, but there are also many lies. And I was interested in uncovering the lies, the controls, the domination of the patriarchy, which women are involved in as well as men,” she says. “It is not about us becoming whole because then we wouldn’t need them. There would be no institution.

“Although, I will say that the little poppy seed cakes that get made by the little old ladies — that’s truth. That’s love. Yes, there is love there. There is no question that within the institution there are moments and pockets of truth, and there are also incredible pockets of control.”

A follow-up question about religious references in her lyrics yields a six-minute run-on sentence about power, the patriarchy, Mary Magdalene and the lack of women in the Bible.

Amos realizes her questioning of religion can sometimes be controversial.

“There’s always going to be feedback when you say something that’s against somebody’s belief system,” she says, “but … I’m putting light bulbs out there, that’s all I’m doing … and they either make you want to cogitate over them or not.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 22nd, 2003 at 11:33 pm and is filed under writings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.