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If there's a way to use the piano without it being the center of attention, I'd like to do that. She doesn't feel shafted by that role."-Ticketmaster Website Interview

"I think there are alot of great female writers, but I don't think there are a lot of great female musicians."-Alternative Press Magazine, Jan 98

"I was accepted at Peabody when I was 5, and the whole idea was to get me to read. The problem with getting me to read was - it was so frustrating, because they started me on `Hot Cross Buns,' and I could play scores of musicals by then. So, when you can play, you know, Rogers and Hart, or Gershwin, by ear - maybe not perfect, but, you know, you get the gist of `Summertime' - then you're going, `Hang on a minute. From `Summertime' to `Hot Cross Buns' is a far cry.'"-NPR Interview



"I think that happiness is when you can let yourself feel every emotion you want at any time instead of being a lying little fuck."

"I'm not into this dieting thing. Chics, more to love. I've got all this cream cheese and they're bring up some poppy seed bagels. I'm going smilin' baby, I'm going smilin".-Q102 in Cincinnati Interview

"It has crossed my mind maybe that the public doesn't want my ultimate. But I can't censor or contrive. I think I'm lucky to have skated through under the guise of pop musician. I'm really a classical musician. If I get found out now, if the whistle is blown...maybe that's not such a bad thing."

"I felt like I had relationships with these dead icons (classical music composers) that, to me, would have been just hanging out in a house with loads of people, making music and probably having sex with most of 'em. Their music became a champagne social thing, when these guys were the Nirvana of their day."-LA Times Jan 30, 1994

"I had a strange incident with a girl when I was eight. It was a bit violent, a bit sexual. She was a little older than me. She held me down on the bathroom floor, made me take my clothes off and fell on top of me. There are women now in my life I love and am in love with, but it hasn't got physical. I experienced it at such a young age, when I wasn't ready. A boundary was crossed. And maybe I drew a boundary, consciously."

"I come to share, a personal, a real personal secret together, and it's reciprocal. I get a lot back from that audience. I'm very, very dependent on the crowd, very dependent."-Phoenix Club, Toronto 1992

"When they gave me this project, I felt really challenged. I tried to contribute something that I thought would add a different subtext to the scene and give Ethan Hawke's character a different angle."- on her song "Siren" which is featured on the Great Expectations soundtrack

"I like the freedom of being alone because there's an intimacy that I develop with the audience that I wouldn't otherwise. I mean, they could just as easily bond with the drummer. And the more distractions I give them, the easier it is for them to avoid what I'm talking about."-LA Times Jan 30, 1994

"I know every note I sing. Every night I know, was that note higher than last night? But that's not the important thing. It's the listener that concerns me. It's intake and out-take. If the listener doesn't like what is going on, it's partly their fault."

"The B-sides, some of them are my favorite, to be honest. They just...the songs didn't want to go on the album. They all have different places where they want to go, and, uh, it's strange. It's like, if you were to imagine writing a book. Chapter 7 is Chapter 7, and so it wouldn't fit in another book."-CFNY Toronto Interview, Oct 12, 1995

"My father suggested I take my songs and play them someplace. So I got a job at a local gay bar in Washington DC, playing for free. I used to play there when I was 13, wearing my sister's polyester pants and all made-up to look older. I was happy."-Mick St. Michael CD booklet

"I've heard a popular movie director scoff at the idea of the 'inner child'. This is nothing to scoff at. We are made of many different fragments. If these fragments aren't dealt with, we'll all end up in a looney bin."-British Press, 1996

"I wanna be burned....definitely burned, like the witches."-Atilla the Honey Interview

"There has to be a place where you allow yourself to go, "You know, that's how I really felt. There has to be a safe place where you allow yourself that freedom. So, I do it in music."-CFNY Toronto, Oct 12, 1995

"I don't prowl the night looking for boy blood like I was doing for a while." -120 Minutes, 1996

"I realized that what was most important to me was following my own path, and not the one laid down for me by others."

"Um, don't get me wrong because I love boys, it's just that sometimes we don't need you."

"What would we do without our assholes?" -in response to a rude audience member during a 1996 Kansas City, Missouri concert

"I think that they were kind of hoping that I would be Neneh Cherry if they just turned their backs...to put it mildly, they were very disappointed" - on her early struggles with Atlantic Records

"There are things that I refuse to deal with except through my music...because I don't trust humanity that much, and I don't know if I trust me that much. But I trust the songs."-Mick St. Michael CD Booklet

"You can never believe what you are up to when you're up to it, of course."

"Each song has a little soul, a little persona, it's own little birth certificate and favorite shoe shops."

"I've never felt anything that moves me as much as my piano. I'm an emotional player. I don't really like people. I prefer my piano to people. It's totally reliable and it's alive. I can hear what it's saying. For the most part, piano are female to me. Sometimes they're dykes, and they're always good fun."-Mick St. Michael CD Booklet



"Pretty is never beautiful."-Bay Area Musician, 3/11/97

"I want to bite people's butts when they hear my record, and I want people to want to bite other people's butts when they hear it."- on the then upcoming 1998 album, FTCH -Alternative Press, Jan 1998

"My voice came with age. I was no Shirley Temple. It took years and years to develop. Like you know some little kids have great voices at first but get worse later? Well, I was the opposite."

"Give the kids tools, so they can go build their own houses; not the blueprint of what the houses should be."

"I was a rebel for such a long time...to the point where I put on these sexual shows for the sake of shock value. I'm tired of being a rebel. Now I just want to be me."-Dallas Morning News, 6/14/96

"When I started watching my behavior and seeing how I would control people, and how they would control me, it was awareness. I want awareness more than anything, and part of awareness is being able to honor the part of you that's Lady Macbeth."

"So I'm in Virginia, and I had crabs...I keep saying that! I had crab sickness, I had eaten bad crabs in Maryland!"

"Well, women and music have been around for a couple hundred years now, but men have mainly dominated it. You'll have a few women popping out in art or literature, but being a female musician is tough."

It's hard not to notice a girl with two-foot hair and plastic snakeshin boots up to her thighs, unfortunately. That's what my band, Y Kant Tori Read, was all about. I left home at 21 and I was off to the races."-Mick St. Michael CD Booklet

"We all have creative gifts. My circuitry doesn't work for scientific things. I'm not helpful when somebody's sick or ill, but I can help with an emotional something. That's why I can't avoid the subject totally, because it is what it is. I'm very aware that there's such a world out there that exists as thoughts that you can tap into if you can...it's the only way I know how to talk. I mean, I don't use crystal suppositories every day...just on Tuesdays."

"I've played a lot of universities...they're real thinkers. They talk about stuff, they yell things out at the concert, and we have a little chat. They know that they're the future; I wanna play to them because they're the future." - -Westwood One Interview, 1996

"Being exposed to the gay community at 13 would change my views forever."

"I really respect anybody who stands by their truth."

"I wish we could go in a time capsule to a Sunday dinner at my home. You'd think these people are so warm, but boy do you disagree with them. When I was very little I got into trouble for wondering if Jesus had a thing going with Mary Magdalene."-Interview with Andy Darling

"Something comes up like bubbles to the surface, bringing up another part of ourselves that has been silent; that we were in the dark about. Lurking. Nightmares aren't my favorite thing. I want to feel safe, period. My soul wants to feel safe not terrorized."-Letter for RAINN

"My God, you guys, she's 21. Let her fit into tight pants. Let her explore and grow. I did. What is this you're not allowed to explore? Look at me now. I'm breast feeding pigs." -On Alanis Morisette -Toronto Sun, January 30, 1996

"What gives it to you? Does this rush, this being in love, meeting someone that has it? You want to be close, you want to be near them? No. You can feed off them for a while, but in the end, you're just a vampire."

"It's about draining you of your passion. Thats what religion is about; cutting off the physical from the spiritual."

"Once you get to know sad...she's got some sweet little dresses, you know?" -Spin, 1994

"Lucifer understands love better than anybody. You know he's done a mean tango with Greta Garbo a few times." --Keyboard November, 1994

"Do you know what it's like to be a girl and have blood running down your legs and think that you're dying, just because no one's told you that's what happens? It's horrible."

"A name holds an energy, like anything else. Look at 'Ruby Tuesday'. I think Talula is about rhythm and tone and sensuality. It ain't fucking Catherine. There's something in there about West Indian dance. And yet it's a very classic name too. Talula really just started to represent all women to me; women that let themselved dance for themselves."-Vox May, 1996

"I know I'm not like a picnic in the city on Sunday; but when you wake up one morning and you are making these gingerbread muffins for breakfast and you are dropping razor blades into them just to see how he reacts, you have to pull back and say, 'hang on a minute.' And that's really where the record (Boys For Pele) stems from. It's from being a woman alone and not being able to hide behind anyone else's personality."

"I strarted finding the people inside me; the prostitute that's really angry because I judged her so harshly, the self-righteous virgin who knows everything about sex and has never made love."

"I'm a road dog, I love being on the road."-Virgin Megastore Appearance

"I mean there have been times that I have had to go head to head with people, one of those shoot out kinda things. Definitely a high noon situation. Sometimes the relationship has just fallen apart because you have drawn your line. I am getting a bit better at that, drawing my line. I will go this far, but I cannot compromise what I really feel. You know how when you do something that goes against honoring yourself, it makes you feel sick in your stomach. You get heart burn. It's like if you had green chili, sausage, eggs, catsup, and Doritoes on white Wonder Bread. Yeah, it feels like that."

"I'm begining to accept and love the parts of me, of women that I was trained to hate all my life. Particualrlly the bad girl I can still be."

"I just want to play it like it is."

"Whether mankind or womankind has created what god has become, the point is it's a very strong force that has divided us within ourselves. I mean religion has divided the whole planet."

"We're taught which sides of our personalities are acceptable and which aren't. The magical side, the naive side, the side that believes in possibilities other than you grow up, take a job, form a place in society and then go to heaven, (except for mean old Hitler), no one wants to talk about that."

"Rape's not something where you just go, 'Well, get over it' or 'Believe in love and peace, my child, and it'll all be over.' Well, f*ck you, that isn't the answer. It's a great thought, OK, but you can go and stick crystals up your butt and get on with it. I'm all for love and peace, but that's not the side I work on. If somebody would talk about it, or worse, joke about it, I would be ready to kill. That's not healing. It was a very long time after that before I was with anyone again. And it has never been the same as it was before."

"If I saw someone destroying a piano, I'd fucking murder them! I wouldn't think twice!"

"I wish I had more of a sense of humor. I can be so hard on people. But I'm really into weeing. If somebody's being a jerk, I would like to go wee on their head. And then I do that, mentally."

"I wish I could get into those plastic snake pants again!" -On her "Y Kant Tori Read" days

"When you come to my shows, you think you're walking into this really yummy lunch, and little do you know you ARE lunch."

"Truly, I was a sweetheart when I was little, like the Honeysuckle Faery. Sweet-pea. But sweet-peas are not popular after second grade. Sweet-peas become nerds really fast."

"I don't think I'm singing to a bunch of ding-a-lings. If they show me differently, then I misread them."

"If your work is really linear, that's not much to talk about."

"I'm the thing that fundamentalist Christians cringe over."

"What sense does it make to load yourself with drugs so much that you are not noticing anything anymore?"

"I find that college students have been really open to what I'm talking about because its an open place to be on a campus. They're away from the real world, thats why it can be so magical. Every ear gets whispered in, its almost like a womb."

"If you're brought up with parents who are painters, you probably see everything in light and shade; I can smell a rat real quick when someone tries to tell me their way is the way. And see, I don't think my way is the way for everybody."

"I don't see myself as weird, I just see myself as honest."

"I always met men in my life as a musician, and there would be magic, adoration. But then it would wear off. All of us want to be adored, even for five minutes a day, and nothing these men gave me was ever enough."

"If it's yummy, I'm there. But if it's mushed up beetles, I don't think so!"

"I'm a tomato freak, but sometimes you have to get it in ketchup form for people to be able to open to tomatoes."

"The people on the internet know more about what I am doing than I do. Like, they will say that I am going to be in this mall on this day, and sure enough, I am there."-Dew Drop Inn Tour, June 17th, 1996

"The violence between women is unbelievable. Women try to make each other crawl so that their knees are bleeding."

"It's one thing to be a glitter girl, but it's another thing to be all woman."

"I was in love with this boy when I was five years old and I knew we could really make it work. I was trying to convince him and he took this hammer and hit me with it really hard."

"I'm like a lioness who kills her own prey and no one else has to kill for her. But if some other lioness comes to me and says: "I just got a good prey, do you want a piece?" I can say "of course" - and the other way around. It becomes difficult if another lioness comes along and envies me for that I can kill my own prey and she can't and therefore wants to harm me."-Rumba Magazine, March 13, 1998

"Almost every culture, every group, quote, unquote, has a way it wants to perceive things. And when I write songs, the Christians feel that because I'm not speaking the way they would like me to, that I don't believe in God, that I'm not part of the Christian formula. But being a minister's daughter, I know it very well."

"There are things that I would disagree with Jesus about - and I feel really good about that."

"History has recorded some pretty nasty things that have happened to people. I think we remember. I think it's in our cells and I think it can still hurt sometimes."

"I'm not a part of this buisness. I was playing music before people were peeing in their beds."

"I'm a nomad -- Tuscany, the West Country in England and two secret hideaways. I have to hide away. Sometimes, in some cities, crowds are so thick that I can't hear what the earth's saying and what's going on underneath all these buildings and concrete. It's hard to get close to the pulse of the earth. Sometimes it's exhilarating and sometimes it's depressing, [like a] nut case sitting next to you. I'm a nature girl, I don't like to be that far away from having birds sing, even if they're crapping all over me." - Talking about where she lives in a short article in the Atlanta Journal- Constitution on April 17, 1998.

"I always get stuck with my dad at Christmas. And it's like, I love my father, but Jesus Christ girls, you're 33, you wanna get laid, there's this hot guy, what are you doing? But then Dad goes, 'Oh, you've got to be here for Christmas...we're Christian.'"
-Dew Drop Inn Tour, November 3, 1996

"There was a way to play the classics, and if you deviated from a professor's interpretation, you wouldn't win the competiton."
-All These Years Biography

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