When you’re in your 20s, there’s maybe a little room for you to not be at the top of your artistic game, if you look good on a magazine cover. When you’re not on the cover of the magazines anymore, then you realize that the work has to be great.
I remember driving to North Carolina when I was a little girl in a snowstorm to get down to my mom’s family in the Carolinas. There were chains on the car – it was the late sixties – and we were just singing in the car. Christmas carols.
There’s a richness to the old works if you look before the 1950s. The chord progressions and the language was more complicated, especially in the jazz and classical world.
There is an energy that you carry when you’re nurturing another life where you’re protecting first – and once you know that cub is out of the way of the hunter’s gun, you can be a little more daring.
The key things are about power and about growing up and realizing as you grow up that there are consequences for the choices you make, especially when you get seduced by power.
Take a different route to the coffee shop to see what you can see and hear. When we get in a routine, we can become zombie-like and shut down. It’s about discipline. You have to push yourself.
Some of the biggest advocates for feminism seem to believe that in order to feel powerful you have to make another woman subservient, and that is not what feminism is about at all.
I started playing the piano when I was about two and got a scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore when I was five. But I left when I was 11.
Not everybody wants to have the same career. I think what’s difficult is when you have two people that do something very, very similar and they both, say, want the limelight. That’s very tricky.
My husband doesn’t know what my songs are about – even when they’re about him. He’s very British in that way. He doesn’t ask, and he doesn’t want to be told.
My brother was a fantastic cheerleader for my development as a musician. He was almost 10 years older than me and would really push me to develop as a songwriter.
Musically, I always allow myself to jump off of cliffs. At least that’s what it feels like to me. Whether that’s what it actually sounds like might depend on what the listener brings to the songs.
I’m a mother, and that’s really important. Today, the mother and the musician can sit next to each other. Even when the musician is out there in full swing, the mother doesn’t get switched off.
I produce the records. I don’t hand over control to some really expensive producer who then talks to the record company and then tries to bend me to their will – for commercial purposes.
I think there’s a time as a writer when you want to see the best things in life, and you go out wherever you go with your dreams as a writer or a composer.
After a while, though, you realize that a whole slew of young singer-songwriter piano players are getting compared to you. That’s when you feel the passage of time is occurring.
When I was little, my mom tells me, I used to say things like, ‘Mom do you hear the string section? Do you hear the string section?’ And she would look at me and say, ‘No honey, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Tori’s my legal name. My niece and nephews, they all call me Aunt Ellen, because I went by my middle name years ago, before I turned 18.
Well, I have a lot of food references in my work.
Romance is important to me, and to have a romance with your husband takes a bit of doing. The key is to make sure your partner misses you. That means you have to take yourself away.