Tori Amos’ advice to musicians in grad speech: ‘You need the imagination and the bollocks’
Tori Amos received the George Peabody Medal from the same conservatory which kicked her out as a child. Image: Facebook/@toriamos
Tori Amos’ commencement address at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore last May 22 provided graduates wisdom based on her failures.
During the ceremony, Amos was awarded the George Peabody Medal, the highest honor given by the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University to individuals who have made exceptional contributions to music in America.
A child prodigy, she studied classical piano at the conservatory, earning a scholarship when she was 5 and was kicked out when she was 11 because of her interest in rock and pop music, and her refusal to read sheet music.
Amos has eight Grammy Award nominations to her name and advocates for sexual violence survivors, having been raped when she was 21 which she echoed in the song “Me and a Gun”.
The singer-songwriter, whose body of work tackles themes of relationships, politics, sexuality, religion and feminism, imparted life lessons on being true to one’s self and one’s musical integrity.
The speech can be viewed in the video posted via YouTube by The Sideway Society.
‘You need the bollocks’
“I should get a medal for crashing and burning because I failed a lot,” she began. “I have hundreds of songs in the music graveyard and some of them should stay there forever.”
“I wanna talk to you about possibilities for you,” she said.
“I want you to think about Netflix. I want you to think about Amazon. I want you to think about Apple. And what are they doing? They’re making shows.”
“And have you heard some of those scores? Some of them suck,” she said to the audience’s laughter.
“Do you know why the scores are not very interesting on television?… Because they don’t have the imagination,” she explained.
“So budding composers, maybe you have not found your true north yet but it took me a while to find my true north as a writer.”
“And once I did, I thought, I need to be a producer. That’s a bit of a problem because as a writer I’m an introvert, I’m terrified. I write in the dark for a long, long period of time so sometimes it takes me years to write a song.”
“So I had to develop a skill set, which you all can do. This is an amazing time for you to experiment.”
“You have the skill set. Now you need the imagination. And you need the bollocks. Both balls. You need the stomach for this,” she advised.
“I just wish someone told me this about scenarios when things go wrong. Guys, things will go wrong. That’s OK,” she assured the graduates.
“But it’s how you handle it and if you put your head in the sand and just say ‘it’ll be fine’, OK that’s one of my crash and burn moments and I’ve had more than one.”
‘Success can be seductive’
As a producer, she learned the hard way to abide by her own rules and to stand her ground.
“So as a producer I got some advice and I developed with the muses. They taught me to put a protocol in place. So this is a sonic safety net. And as a producer think about this,” she said.
“If you guys are just hired guns, that’s kind of glamorous and sexy. You go in, you play, you play the notes, you take your paycheck. You don’t have responsibility,” she said. “But if you want the responsibility to see it through, then that’s a different skill set.”
She said breaking her own protocol would cost her not just money, but also risked her reputation in the music community.
On why she broke her rules, she said, “I was intimidated. Because sometimes, guys, you will be intimidated by people with a pedigree. And are famous. But their bar isn’t as high as yours, you have to remember that.”
“You need to think about who you serve. What is your intention as a musician? Because it is seductive. Success can be very seductive and that bar can slip.”
She recalled a time when a record company made her collaborate with an arranger, and the valuable lesson she learned from allowing others to take control over her music.
“I was told the rules would be, you don’t get to hear the arrangement until the string day, the orchestral day.”
“I was very nervous and I said—I was a young producer—‘that breaks my rules.’ The rules that the muses have set out if we’re collaborating. I broke my rule.”
When recording day came, she realized that the arrangements are not what she had in mind.
“Six hours later, it went from bad to worse. What happens now is I’ve blown my budget because I broke my rule. No, I did not approve the arrangements but by default I did.”
She said that if she went through with the recording, it could have ended her career. “You would look at me and say, ‘You’ve lost your mind!’ No, I lost my courage.”
Amos consulted a musician friend about the situation. “He said if you let this out, it’s over. You will have lost your mind and the respect of any musician.”
“And so I said get me a shot of tequila, lock this door and anybody who doesn’t have the stomach for this, leave before I lock it. I take full responsibility.”
“It wasn’t the orchestra’s fault. It was my fault. I had to stand my ground.”
‘Follow the code’
In the aftermath, Amos experienced a dose of sexism. “And the solution then was, ‘you know what, you’re difficult.’ Not pedantic. Men are pedantic when they’re producers. Women are difficult. So they said, ‘Why don’t we bring a professional man in to sort this out?”’
“And I said, ‘Not another goddamned man.’ I need musicians who will follow the code and arrangers who will collaborate. Not with their ego, but with their commitment to the muses to telling the story,” she asserted.
“This is the code that I have. If I cannot compose for you what you need, I need to step back and hand the baton to someone who can because that is the integrity of musicians that I am a part of.”
“Join me, and boy, the fun is just beginning.” JB
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