Rather than silence those voices outright, Amos thinks it's important to listen and respond. "Music is always a reflection of what's going on in the hearts and minds of the culture. So shutting them up isn't the answer. They're a gauge; they're showing you what's really happening in the psyche of a lot of people." Amos' interpretations use this music as a commentary on itself, and her strategy for doing so was developed organically. While she was nursing her one-year-old daughter, Tash, the first-time mom began to consider the similarities between being a song mother and a human mother, and then mulled over the idea of men as the mothers of their songs. "That was when I began to pick up the gauntlet: Words are like guns, they're powerful things. You take a man's word, you take his seed. So ... let's take his seed, let's plant it here [points to her heart], consummation. Let's go."
For this gifted arranger, the process of integrating and reinterpreting these "strange little girls" was familiar enough that she could have fun with it, yet foreign enough that she wasn't always sure who was in control. "When it's your own work and you're the mother of it, the DNA adds up and there's a certain genetic bond you have with your own song children," Amos explains. "These are the children of the men [who wrote them], and I went in with that respect. What I didn't really count on was discovering that if you build a bridge to travel into a sonic structure and you crawl inside, the fair exchange is that it can crawl back inside of you."
Some songs were difficult to get inside; others, like Eminem's "'97 Bonnie and Clyde," made sense right away. "[It] grabbed me by the hand and said, 'You need to hear this how I hear it.' " The track is a chilling tale in which a husband kills his wife and takes their daughter along on the ride to dump the body in a lake. For the recording, Amos sang from inside a box, psychologically aligning herself with the corpse. Backed by orchestration that would be at home in a Hitchcock movie, her icy whispers underscore the creepiness in lines like, "Where's Mama? She's taking a little nap in the trunk. What's that smell? Dada musta runned over a skunk."
Despite the obvious antipathy she feels for the message, if not the messenger himself, Amos grants that "Eminem wrote a powerful work. [But] I did not align with the character that he represents. There was one person who definitely wasn't dancing to this thing and that's the woman in the trunk."
It remains hazy how that character and the score of others who populate Strange Little Girls turned up at Amos' English country home — even to the artist who invited them. "I can't tell you the first woman that showed up," Amos says. "But I realized that there was a female presence — I don't know, is this the anima? Maybe. Are they pieces of me? Tiny bits, maybe. But yet they're not my own songs, so I went, 'Oh, I'm surrounded by all this testosterone, yet there's a female presence here.' That's when it became clear that the women had arrived."
