Author: Tori Amos

Title: Resistance: A Songwriter’s Story of Hope, Change, and Courage

Year of publication: 2020

Page count: 272

Rating: ★★★

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I should preface this by saying that Tori Amos’ soul-stirring music has been a constant in my life for over half of it. I’ve seen her live in the double digits, all over the world, and forged wonderful friendships through her art. Me not enjoying this sophomore book-writing effort was never really an option, but I’m still surprised at how much I relished it. Each chapter in Resistance relates to a song in Tori’s catalogue, so I created a playlist (it would make one hell of a setlist—it has a nice flow, with some surprising transitions) to listen to as I read, and finished the book in a single sitting.

Tori has always subscribed to the feminist notion that the personal is political, and she highlights this time and time again in this memoir and political opinion piece hybrid. By weaving personal anecdotes into American political history, she shines a light on the wide societal shifts she’s lived through and experienced first-hand over her decade-spanning career. However, her main motivation for writing Resistance at this very specific point in time—she calls it “a moment of unprecedented crisis“—is to offer an honest glimpse of her journey as an artist, and her inspiration and creative process, because above all else, she believes that artists play a vital role in a society: Art calls out, holds those in power accountable, gives a voice to those who feel alone, and offers both resilience in the face of hardship, as well as healing.

The songs chosen cover every album in her back-catalogue (except Y Kant Tori Read, Strange Little Girls, and Midwinter Graces, which she however touches on in different ways), and serve as a framing device for her thoughts. Most of the time they are very clearly related to what she writes about, while sometimes they fit in in a more abstract, emotional, free-association kind of way—this can be something so slight as a particular turn of phrase, or a metaphor she went with in the preceding chapter. Some of the songs are presented within the original scope they were written in, while with others it’s clear that they have taken on a different meaning over the years; she’s always been very adamant about the fact that her song girls have a life of their own and are constantly changing and evolving.

“Sights and sounds pull me back down another year… I was here. I was here.”

Resistance opens with Gold Dust, a song which transports Tori back through the decades, and with its help she paints a vivid picture of playing piano bars and congressional parties in Washington D.C. during both Democratic and Republican administrations. The songs aren’t presented chronologically, and the book’s structure doesn’t follow any such order either; it’s all rather conversational, and she goes off on tangents, with skips ahead or back in time, following her own thread of thoughts. Sometimes these leaps work exceptionally well, and the songs act as useful bridges, while other times the sudden changes of subject matter might leave the reader a little confused as to how we got there. It bears some structural similarities to the first memoir Piece By Piece, in that the songs are woven into the book to give it direction, but it’s much more cohesive and coherent as a whole. The writing is very Tori; authentic, sharp, evocative, endearingly kooky in places, a little messy.

“I had yet to prove myself, to prove the piano was ready to carve a new place for herself in a snob-ridden pop culture playing for sinners—me being one—sweating out the demons with my left heel on the sustain pedal, singing for salvation, a sonic daughter of Jezebel with my right hip open to a southern church revival.”

From the D.C. piano bars, Tori takes us on a political journey through time, touching on the JFK assassination, Iran hostage crisis, Lewinsky scandal, 9/11, Anita Hill and the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements, the rising global trend of right-wing dictatorships and economic aristocracy, and the shared trauma of the Trump presidency. All of this she weaves into her artistic timeline, creating a blend of personal narrative and political observations from a songwriter’s point of view. We not only get to know Tori and her views better through this memoir, but also her loved ones, especially her mother Mary, whom she lost while Resistance was being written. Those final chapters unflinchingly open a window into Tori’s grief, and they feel out of place with the mostly political slant of the book—clearly unplanned, and worked in as the project was already ongoing—yet they are beautiful, poignant, and heart-wrenching.

If there’s one detractor to the way the book is structured, it’s that it starts out with having each song introduce the following chapter, but halfway through it flips around, and then reverts back to the original structure again towards the end. Those middle chapters are also the ones that feel most messy and rushed; the originally leaked working title had been “An Artistic Resistance: A Blueprint for Change in 20 Songs“, but there’s a dozen more in the final version. I strongly feel that the “Artistic” should’ve been kept, and overall, the book might’ve flowed better if it hadn’t been expanded, retaining only the most pertinent songs; I’m still a little baffled by some of the choices, especially while more obvious candidates weren’t included (Virginia, Broken Arrow, and Dark Side of the Sun are the most glaring omissions) over other songs where the connection seemed a bit forced. There were also some hard cuts and odd, sudden transitions; for instance, she goes from three chapters on 9/11 to one on Dr. Blasey Ford and one on female genital mutilation, before tying back to the 9/11 aftermath, which was quite the roller coaster. I would’ve moved some chapters around and arranged them differently (although that FGM chapter would feel out of place anywhere in the book!).

My complaints are minor though; this is a worthy, timely (albeit very US-centric) effort that will speak to different people in different ways; it’s something for the fans, but it has the potential of transcending that audience. Anyone who turns to music and art in general to find solace in difficult times will feel understood and comforted, and musicians in particular would find the advice and insight dispensed by someone who has been writing songs and spent as much time in the industry as she has especially valuable. Tori has a unique gift for quiet observation and distilling some of the most intangible emotions into a sonic form with a myriad of possible interpretations; it’s why her music touches so many people, and why her following, while not the largest, is certainly among the most loyal and devoted of any living artist. Resistance is active, powerful, and needed, now more than ever. Tori pleads with us to pull ourselves out of the “looking for a savior“-syndrome and do our part: We have to climb out of the belly of the beast ourselves, together, by striving to be the very best molecular machines we can be.

Note: I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.