"Do you remember ever playing with a prism? Every time you hold it differently in the light, you find a whole new world. Sound. That is a world. The ancient Egyptians believed in the power of the tone. The tone of a word. Not just the definition of the word, as in Webster’s, but the resonance, the bloodline of the word. Combinations of words bring up pictures… with the song lyrics, I always try and pull back and see how the word makes me feel… languid, covert, direct, coded, honeysuckle, roses, wood, horses, sweat, stale—these words are universes—we could follow the family tree of a word, like we could follow a ski trail down a mountain, there are offshoots—some get harder to traverse, there are obstacles to overcome, there are challenges, a word can blow open doors that you didn’t know were trapdoors in the floor."
Tori Amos
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