By IRIN CARMON

CONTRIBUTING WRITER

I was filing when it happened: Ears plugged with the Finnish teen pop sensation I had to write a blurb about that week; mind occupied with little other than filing Lil’ Kim’s press photo between Lil’ Bow Wow’s and Lil’ Troy’s. My editor at my summer internship at the Village Voice was on the phone nearby, his voice muffled by my Walkman warbles.

He cupped his hand over the phone. “Hey, Irin,” he called, “Do you want to talk to her?”

“Who?” I asked distractedly, pulling a headphone an inch off my ear.

“Tori Amos. They’re offering us interview time.” It dawned on me that he was on the phone with the publicist at Atlantic Records, whom I’d asked him to call. I needed an advance copy in order to review Tori Amos’ latest album.

Five years ago, I probably would have wept at the very thought of conversing with that goddess of the teenage girl’s pantheon.

“Sure,” I replied. “Why not?”

Young women (and even some men) of a certain cultural predilection might remember what it was like having fearless singers like Amos form the soundtrack of their adolescence.

“Once upon a decade, a girl had her pick of impassioned and inventive women who were safely subversive yet still spoke to her experience,” I would recall in my Voice review a couple of weeks later.

I remembered well. Seven years ago, my sister, two years of teenage territorial exploration ahead of me, stuck a pair of headphones in my ear and told me to listen. She wanted me to tell her what I thought the song was about; I was 11 and couldn’t say the word “rape.” The album was Amos’s Little Earthquakes, and the song was “Me and a Gun,” an a capella recollection of Amos’ rape at gunpoint. When I was in seventh grade, my sister and I counted the days until our first Tori Amos concert—which we attended with our mother, no less—and were introduced to a fervent fan base, whom Amos had dubbed “Ears With Feet.” Most prominent were the young, white women aping Amos’ flaming hair sporting fairy wings and glitter who lingered in the aisles and whispered along with every word. Toriphiles came in all forms, but I wanted to be that kind.

By high school’s wane, though, I’d gained sufficient distance to be granted a review of Strange Little Girls, Amos’ 2001 effort, for the Village Voice. The writing I’d done for them up until that point was a cache of femaleness, stemming largely from my avowed interest in feminism. By some accident of good luck, I’d already been assigned to write about Amos when Atlantic Records announced that the album would be a collection of covers written by men like Eminem and Tom Waits and bands like Slayer and Depeche Mode, intended to explore the hidden female voice within them.

A month later, just before shopping period and a mere day before terrorist tragedy hit the tail end of New York, I was getting antsy in a conference room at Atlantic’s New York headquarters. I’d been waiting for half an hour, grimly anticipating the moment when the publicist would appear, frowning, and tell me that there had been some kind of mistake, that I wouldn’t be allotted my hour after all.

No such thing took place. Instead, Amos, tiny and red-haired, entered the room, smiled and shook my hand. Miraculously, I forgot that I’d never interviewed anyone I didn’t know before, least of all anyone famous, and settled right into interviewer mode.

She peered at me with wide green eyes. “Can I ask you a question first?” she asked. I nodded hesitantly, wondering where this was going. “So you work for the Village Voice. Are you a student?” Clearly, she wanted to know how some teenager had landed on that couch with her, tape recorder in hand. I dutifully told her that I had just begun my first year at Harvard after spending the spring of my senior year and the summer thereafter writing about music for the Voice. She erupted with excitement.