Dishing Strange Little Girls with Tori Amos

There are two extreme examples of what can happen when a woman covers a man's song. Depending on how she chooses to approach the song, the outcome seems to be either vitality or death. One extreme is Patti Smith, who pressed "Gloria" into her own prayer book, but essentially kept the song as is: a manchild's cry about his sweet young thing. "And I'm gonna tell the world I just made her mine." The "him"s didn't become "her"s just 'cause she was a Patti from Jersey. Greasy male yearning was claimed by the greasy gal, and suddenly it was okay for the rock bitches to be just as bent as the boys.

The other extreme is Karen Carpenter, the Ophelia of AM, cowering in curlers upstairs and eating out of a dog bowl while Patti was making like Sinatra. Karen took the Beatles' "Ticket to Ride" and switched all the genders to suit her femininity (and keep the Carpenters safe for AOR, presumably). When she demurs that "the boy that's drivin' me mad is goin' away," her change-up is almost imperceptible. But when she sings a good-time guy line like "I think I'm gonna be sad," it's terrifying coming from her gifted, empty mouth. Don't do it, Karen! Don't be sad! The Carpenters made the big money as one of the most popular recording acts of the 70s, but something tells me Karen's heart and soul died a long time before her body did.

I ask you: Which one goes on, widowed, grizzled and still unable to sing worth a damn, but sourly wearing the mantle of warrior priestess? And which one starved to death, angel-voiced, and became an American joke?

I want to insert Tori Amos and Strange Little Girls, her new album of covers (all of the songs were written by men), into this spectrum. But Tori won't go for it. A creamy girly girl with a taste for catharsis and a hotline to the music of the spheres, beatific of visage, riddled with song, a proud survivor of horrors that would make lesser women reach for the toilet seat (see "Me and A Gun," her dry-eyed a cappella rendering of a rape, from 1991's Little Earthquakes), Tori's Strange Little Girls neither take back the night nor do they lay down and die. "I don't think [Strange Little Girls] exists between either of your poles," she tells me during a phone call from a tour stop in Detroit. "I tried to create a pantheon that would hold many archetypes of women."

This is Tori's irritating, gently evasive way of saying she is not the performer of the songs. It might be her hands on the keys and her delicate voice full frontal, but a different facet of womanhood performs each track. The album art features Tori made up and fabulously bewigged as androgyne (for Joe Jackson's faggot opus "Real Men"), metal mallchick (for Lloyd Cole and the Commotions' "Rattlesnakes") and as a satiny sylph for her beauteous version of Tom Waits' "Time," in which she plays the role of Madame Death, the kindly Jane Black who leads the rum bums out of the rain ("so close your eyes/This won't hurt a bit...it's time").

I doubt Strange Little Girls will earn Tori any new fans, but if rock classicists hear her cover of Neil Young's "Heart of Gold," exploded out into a harpy dirge, she'll definitely get some more enemies. "Well, let 'em cry," she says breezily. "You're not looking for a heart of gold. You're looking for a doormat. Fuck. That." Tori claims that the archetypes who perform this song are twin girls, "and they're their own hearts of gold for each other."

"It's interesting that you cut out the line 'and I'm gettin' old,'" I add.

"Oh, it's in there," she warns.

Ditto with her bawling take on the Beatles' "Happiness Is a Warm Gun," which Tori eviscerates, covering it with snippets from a radio broadcast about Lennon's death. She overleaps the overdone heroin subtext and goes straight for the Second Amendment. To my dismay, the vocal chimes in on the "Mother Superior" lyric and gnaws its way out from there. It's just about the only song on the album where my classicist hackles are raised and I wanted her to take a more literal read of the original. "The song was written by a man who didn't know he was going to be killed by a gun," she says. "In some states it's easier to get a gun than it is to get a driver's license."

10cc's "I'm Not in Love" putters along to an electro-heartbeat. Tori sings cautiously, starkly: "it's just a silly phase I'm going through." It's very obvious here that a girl is singing a guy's song. I tell her that 10cc took its name from the amount of semen that's ejaculated by the average male.

"Oh, that's funny. I just picked it because it was a song that guys slowdanced with other girls to while their girlfriends were at home. Well, you know what? I'm not in love, either! It's a dangerous tango."

"I can't believe that at this phase of our evolution as a species we're still on this gender thing, Tori. It seems pretty...dated."

"Well, I was thinking that two years ago, when this brushfire philosophy of male rage reared itself in the West. Grunge male rage wasn't directed with malice and rage toward bitches and faggots."

Hence the cover of Eminem's "'97 Bonnie and Clyde," which peabrains have already called "shocking" but I'll just call plain old cinema. Tori sings it from the point of view of the cardiganed mommy, trying to make do, who is now slit-throated and dead in daddy's trunk. She's trying to console her frightened daughter. It's the Hitchcocky arrangement, the really tense strings interspersed with Tori's weak, tender voice that propel the song. "I did it without changing a single one of [Eminem's] words," she says. "Some men had empathy for the father in the song. But no one ever asks about her. And she was the only one who wasn't dancing."

What is arguably Strange Little Girls' best track is Tori's absolutely sinister cover of Slayer's "Raining Blood." As synth chopper blades fart and slowly fade overhead, Tori lays into her Bosendorfer from the scorched ground. If you never believed that Slayer, despite the hair and insane bpms, was a group of really pious guys who fear the shit out of God, you'll believe it once you hear Tori's rendition. When Slayer's Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King wrote "Awaiting the hour of reprisal/Your time slips away" and describe what's coming out of "a lacerated sky," they were talking destruction on a grand scale, the end of mankind, the day when everyone in the dirt pops up and salutes a dour Judge. But when Tori wrangles it, it's about clitorectomies. Well, that's what she says.

"When a woman sings it, I hear one woman dying. A wise woman. A witch." I try.

Tori doesn't say anything.

"I hear...menses?"

"Yes. Yes." Tori says quietly. "We're gonna crawl into this huge vagina in the sky."

Dear, sweet menstrual mommy Tori, with her bouquet of personal vendettas and her feminist art that is still jammed in the 70s, back when artist Judy Chicago made a photolithograph of herself from the waist down pulling out a bloody tampon, and a series of drawings that equated rejection with "having your flower split open." This sounds like ur-Tori logic. She's been grooming her own version of this rosy rage since she started playing covers in the piano bars?what Tori fanatic can forget her line in "Precious Things," from Little Earthquakes: "he said you're really an ugly girl/But I like the way you play/And I died/But I thanked him." And when she sings this, tremulously, full of stoppered hatred, the ugly girls in the audience wail like they're being penetrated for the first time.

And now she's back on the cover circuit. Sort of. She's not playing for tips no more, and Tori isn't ugly to anyone. She has legions of ugly fans, and she hugs them wholeheartedly, one by one, at in-store appearances. As a preadolescent, she "started at funerals and weddings," she remembers. "I was cheaper than the organist." By the time she was 13, she was a pro on the piano bar circuit.

"I bet in the piano bars you couldn't have busted out with 'Raining Blood.'"

"No, but there was a lot of room to move in piano bars. A lot of the waiters were gay. I was playing in DC and Tip O'Neill, who was speaker of the House at the time, would sit next to me on the bench and ask for 'Bye Bye Blackbird.'"

"You need to know the premise of all of this," she continues. "I'm a new mommy. There's some things you only tell your mother. I respected the songs and their male fathers. And then there's some things you never tell your mothers. That's why I needed my Laboratory of Men to?

"Your what?"

"My group of male researchers, or control group," she explains patiently. For all her ethereal silliness, all her worlds within worlds, her songs as babies, Tori sounds very Lady Professor at the end of the day. She makes a point of speaking slowly and lucidly, like she's used to being misunderstood.

"I had to know what men listen to after they make love. It's never what I think."