supposed to be, and they were conjoined with their instruments. You could not divide them. And you couldn't invade them, either, unlike the way the Church and its ideas had invaded my consciousness.
I still didn't give up the Church. You have to remember, my father was my manager after I left the conservatory. I was playing in gay bars, but he was steering my career. I'm still going to services every Sunday at age twenty-one. I felt at the time, I think, that I could overcome thecontradictions. I had never believed that degradation was the path of the Magdalene. I didn't care what the interpreters of the Bible said. And the more I researched it, the more I discovered what was right. At the same time, I was looking for what Robert Plant was tapping into. This sensuality without the subservience. But really, in my life, I was still experiencing the division between the sacred and the profane. I was not experiencing the transformation of the profane into the sacred. Not yet.
Finally, a month or so after my twenty-first birthday, I moved to L.A. Partly, I was trying to get away from my father's control. At a certain point, the curfews he was imposing, the protectiveness, it was just overbearing—considering I worked six nights a week, bringing home my own bacon. At the time we were having too many disagreements. Whom he wanted me to date and whom I wanted to date … it was just all falling apart then. And I knew that I had to become a woman.
In L.A., ironically enough, I lived behind the Methodist church on Highland and Franklin. But I started running around with all sorts of people and getting exposed to all sorts of ways of thinking. This period was a huge turning point for me because I decided what I was going after, even if I didn't know how to go after it yet. I was around other people who'd come from kind of the same place I had, escaping their upbringing, so everybody was always searching. I was exposed to other cultures and began to see how different people worshiped and how different people looked at the joining of two people. Yet I was still having personal relationships in which I had to take on a role. And this lasted for a long time. Until I was broken down enough on such a level that something in me rose up to the powers that be and just said, “No. I don't need you to see me as an honorable woman, or as an object of desire; I don't need to pay respect to your Gods.”
During those years in Hollywood, what worked was the rock chick type or the folk poet. So much of the music business is about men desiring you.
I mean, there weren't a lot of ugly women getting signed. Maybe in some way I decided,
This is what the industry seems to want, and everything that I'm doing isn't working.
When I would turn in the tapes of me at the piano to various producers or A&R men, the responses would be, “This is not happening. Nobody wants this. The piano girl thing is dead.” To you who are reading this right now, that statement, “The piano girl thing is dead,” seems ridiculous in light of what is occurring right now in music. And it was a ridiculous, unfounded assertion. But it was implemented by the Record Company Cheeses, and it did its damage.
It took a while to recover and reintegrate. By the time I finally got to make
Little Earthquakes
, I made a conscious decision not to be objectified here. My material had to be about the content, not the powder-puff compact. They couldn't come between me and my piano. So in a way, no matter what people wrote about how I was onstage at the time, I think I desexualized myself. I was trying to find out who this person was who played the piano. There was a return to the girl I had been at five, who had her own beliefs when she stood up to her grandmother. When she stood up to the patriarchy of the Christian Church. At this time in my life there was a reclaiming of a person. A person whom I had locked out of the proceedings at a certain point.
I wrote a song during the recording
I still didn't give up the Church. You have to remember, my father was my manager after I left the conservatory. I was playing in gay bars, but he was steering my career. I'm still going to services every Sunday at age twenty-one. I felt at the time, I think, that I could overcome thecontradictions. I had never believed that degradation was the path of the Magdalene. I didn't care what the interpreters of the Bible said. And the more I researched it, the more I discovered what was right. At the same time, I was looking for what Robert Plant was tapping into. This sensuality without the subservience. But really, in my life, I was still experiencing the division between the sacred and the profane. I was not experiencing the transformation of the profane into the sacred. Not yet.
Finally, a month or so after my twenty-first birthday, I moved to L.A. Partly, I was trying to get away from my father's control. At a certain point, the curfews he was imposing, the protectiveness, it was just overbearing—considering I worked six nights a week, bringing home my own bacon. At the time we were having too many disagreements. Whom he wanted me to date and whom I wanted to date … it was just all falling apart then. And I knew that I had to become a woman.
In L.A., ironically enough, I lived behind the Methodist church on Highland and Franklin. But I started running around with all sorts of people and getting exposed to all sorts of ways of thinking. This period was a huge turning point for me because I decided what I was going after, even if I didn't know how to go after it yet. I was around other people who'd come from kind of the same place I had, escaping their upbringing, so everybody was always searching. I was exposed to other cultures and began to see how different people worshiped and how different people looked at the joining of two people. Yet I was still having personal relationships in which I had to take on a role. And this lasted for a long time. Until I was broken down enough on such a level that something in me rose up to the powers that be and just said, “No. I don't need you to see me as an honorable woman, or as an object of desire; I don't need to pay respect to your Gods.”
During those years in Hollywood, what worked was the rock chick type or the folk poet. So much of the music business is about men desiring you.
I mean, there weren't a lot of ugly women getting signed. Maybe in some way I decided,
This is what the industry seems to want, and everything that I'm doing isn't working.
When I would turn in the tapes of me at the piano to various producers or A&R men, the responses would be, “This is not happening. Nobody wants this. The piano girl thing is dead.” To you who are reading this right now, that statement, “The piano girl thing is dead,” seems ridiculous in light of what is occurring right now in music. And it was a ridiculous, unfounded assertion. But it was implemented by the Record Company Cheeses, and it did its damage.
It took a while to recover and reintegrate. By the time I finally got to make
Little Earthquakes
, I made a conscious decision not to be objectified here. My material had to be about the content, not the powder-puff compact. They couldn't come between me and my piano. So in a way, no matter what people wrote about how I was onstage at the time, I think I desexualized myself. I was trying to find out who this person was who played the piano. There was a return to the girl I had been at five, who had her own beliefs when she stood up to her grandmother. When she stood up to the patriarchy of the Christian Church. At this time in my life there was a reclaiming of a person. A person whom I had locked out of the proceedings at a certain point.
I wrote a song during the recording
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