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.

Curious Wine: Tori Amos II

Riding a train through America I’m seeing a side of the country it prefers to keep hidden: it’s truly the world on the wrong side of the tracks, a world of tumbledown tarpaper shacks, abandoned cars and boarded-up buildings. Now—as I type this—I’m somewhere in North Texas, riding the train through a swamp, watching an eagle circle and the play of light through the dusty leaves. I’m listening to Tori going to Venus and back.

“Suede,” she sings, music swirling around her voice like eddies in the current of the swamp-river. “Anybody knows you can conjure anything by the dark of the moon.” It’s a song like black chocolate and woodsmoke, shimmering and remote. “Suede,” she sings.

It’s too hot outside, but winter is becoming imaginable once more. Summer is rotting in a haze like a neglected peach. The album plays over and over.

Remembering the first time I heard these songs, in early summer: I had spent the day in Dartmoor, visiting friends (Terri’s Pre-Raphaelite cottage, with its magic kitchen and elegant messages written in gold on every wall; wandering the Frouds’ house, made even more otherworldly by the fact that they weren’t actually there, just Brian’s paintings and Wendy’s elfish dolls smiling and leering at you from every corner of their concertina-maze of a world). I had fetched up in Martian Studios at the end of the day like a stray puppy in need of a home.

Outside the train window now: a wall of red earth strewn with a hundred glass bottles; a seat ripped from a school bus alone under a tree; pines and willows and a vast tangle of wild honeysuckle.

“What red wine is this?” I asked Tori, that night, when the world was quiet and dark.

“I’ll send you a bottle,” she said. It was a marvelous wine, gentle and wise.