| We are walking down a country lane surrounded by hills so green it almost hurts to look at them. This is definitely a land for the faeries, whom Amos thanks on every album. Her connection to these and other mystical beings is often perceived as a reason not to take her totally seriously--cute New Age white-girl flower poet. But really the faerie thing is as much about an eerie chill that makes every hair on your body stand erect--or about brutal, bloody violence--as any Sky Dancer image. The original faerie tales were scary, sexy stories that helped children and adults work out their most primal fears. Faerie is as much bone and shards of glass and ice crystals sliding down the spine as it is pretty daisies and dolls (all imagery from Under the Pink; Amos understands this range). The queen of the faeries, Mab, had red hair and was buried in a tomb in Ireland, the country that Amos recorded much of Boys for Pele in. Thinking about those curls, that breathy or wailing voice, those sometimes crystalline, sometimes shattered, shattering melodies and lyrics, I find myself wondering if this is some kind of pilgrimage to an incarnation of the faerie queen herself. "I think that people who can't believe in |
faeries aren't worth knowing," she says when I bring myself to ask. "Neil [Gaiman, creator of the comic Sandman, featuring the Amos-based character Delirium] believes that faeries have gone beyond cool. They've transcended cool. I just think alternate realities make you a good writer. If your work is any more than one dimension, you believe in faeries. I'm sure I'll start thinking now about all the people I know who don't believe, that I quite like. We can still go have a pint. Not the Chardonnay, though." We pass some white horses in a field and I ask about another mythical creature that hasn't been taken seriously. "People make statements about "this unicorn s--t" and don't realize that "this unicorn s--t" was a secret code that millions of people wre killed for. The gangs could learn a few things." She's refering to pagan beliefs that survived through symbolism in tapestries and literature. "If you weren't toeing the Catholic line at the time, then you were a heretic. I'm trying to reconstruct some of these falsehoods...." Suddenly, she's had enough of theories and abstractions. Modern-day-Mab wants to go into the small nearby town to get the herbal pickup, quarana, for the crew: "Kind of a naughty faerie thing to do." |
