Transcript | Ep. 86: How to Be Tori Amos

[Stinger]

Caroline: To get started, if you wouldn't mind just introducing yourself, telling us who you are, where you live and what you do.

Tori Amos: Hi, everybody. I'm Tori Amos. I'm a musician, and I live between the States and Cornwall, England. And I'm in Cornwall right now at my husband's house, which in the barn is the recording studio that we record all the records at.

[Theme music]

Caroline: Cristen, today on the show, we are basking in the presence of a Gen X goddess. A piano prodigy. A pop cultural ICON —

Cristen: — And definitely someone who belongs in the Unladylike Hall of Fame.

Caroline: Oh, yeah. I still kind of can’t believe it’s true, but listeners, this episode, we’re talking to motherfucking Tori Amos. Her music was one of the soundtracks of third-wave feminism in the 90s, full of middle fingers to the patriarchy and ethereal arrangements, like in Silent All These Years, one of the biggest hits off her first solo album

[CLIP Silent All These Years]
Cause what if I'm a mermaid, in these jeans of his with her name still on it
Hey, but I don't care 'cause sometimes, I said sometimes I hear my voice
And it's been here silent all these

Cristen: This year, Tori’s published a new memoir-slash-manifesto called Resistance: A Songwriter’s Story of Hope, Change and Courage.

Caroline: Cristen, in a lot of ways, 'resistance' has defined her career and what still endears her to fans. The kind of songs she's written, the way she's played them and the politics they've given voice to have continually broken the rules of how female solo artists are supposed to perform.

Cristen: She’s still breaking rules, too. For one thing, female solo artists are essentially put out to pasture at 35, but 56-year-old Tori is in her Cornwall recording barn working on a 16th album.

Caroline: Yes, and even if you aren’t a Torihead, you’ve probably witnessed her pop cultural influence.

Cristen: Yeah, think of Lady Gaga's most avant garde piano performances, or Billie Eilish's anti-pop queen aesthetic. She’s talked about how her daughter Tash has been like, mom, they're cribbing your moves!

Caroline: Yeah I mean I really feel like Tori Amos is the mother of a lot of the music I was constantly listening to growing up and am honestly still listening to — Fiona Apple, Sarah MacLachlan, Alanis Morrissette. And so listeners, I CRIED after we wrapped our interview with her.

Cristen: Aw you CRIED?!

Caroline: Yes! By the end of our conversation, I was just overwhelmed by her warmth — AND what it really took for her to make the music career that really changed a lot of lives.

Cristen: But Caroline, I've gotta be honest that I missed the Tori Amos boat growing up. Like, by the time I was in high school and was forming my own musical tastes, I was waaay too worried about fitting it to get into an artist like Tori who was known by then as this super intense, mystical feminist, which was just NOT on brand for girls in the early 2000s, Britney Spears era.

Caroline: Well Cristen, your ship has finally come in because today, we're finding out: Why is Tori Amos such an enduring feminist icon?

[Stinger]

Caroline: The way Tori tells it, she was basically born with music in her blood. She inherited it from her Mom’s Dad, whom she adored.

Tori: Everybody called him Poppa. He had a beautiful tenor voice. He would come off the shift from the factory, they worked in the mills, and he would sing to me. And we believe that that's what triggered the music DNA, or the music language, really, came from him. My mother says she always told me that by 2 and a half I was playing the piano. And it would be hard to reach, so they would find ways, there'd be phone books that I could step on to climb up to get on to the stool.

Cristen: Aw, remember phone books? Now I guess little piano prodigies have to perch on stacks of old iPhone boxes

Caroline: Baby Tori really was a legit prodigy though! By the time she could tie her shoes, she was pretty much a classically trained pianist. At the age of 5, she became the youngest person accepted to the uber prestigious Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore

Cristen: Fun fact, y'all: Tori Amos is still the youngest student ever admitted to Peabody.

Caroline: Problem was, Tori and Peabody weren't a great match. Sure, she could bang out Bach with the best of them at school. But at home, Tori was secretly falling in love with rock gods like Led Zeppelin.

Tori: My mother would be spinning records once my father went to church in his minister outfit, and she would close the door and take off her apron and start playing deejay. And then when my brother would come home from school, he would have albums of things that my mother didn't have. So they would get me then to play everything before my father would come home, and he had no idea when I would break out into the Stones. He thought I was just practicing stuff for the Peabody. Cause you know, Jim Morrison was the devil, and then Robert Plant was a, you know, Satan and all that stuff.

Cristen: Y’know Caroline, Tori’s rebellious streak also reminds me of preachers’ daughters I knew growing up who were queens of sneaking around.

Caroline: Well, little Tori wasn’t much of a sneak when it came to her skepticism about church. Her grandmother on her dad’s side was always on her about minding her Christian p’s and q’s and told her dad that Tori didn’t know how to love Jesus! To which, Tori told her dad, ‘Jesus is not the problem. Grandma is the problem.’ Meanwhile, she was also dealing with being by far the youngest student at school

Cristen: How did being a child prodigy affect you like at that time and also as you were kind of growing up and finding your own voice?

Tori: Well, ladies, it is a double-edged sword. Because on one hand. You can't process the emotions of others and their expectations. I couldn't anyway at that age. So the idea that you could hold so much promise and then you start to realize, wait a minute, I'm not a concert pianist. That isn't my path. That isn't my - that isn’t my skill set. It's a particular skill set to be able to play somebody else's work for eight hours a day. OK. And commit your life to that. So you have to be one of the best in the world to do that. And I'm thinking, no, no, no, wait a minute. These guys, they were documenting their time. And this was, you have to remember, this was the late 60s and the revolution was being driven — when I say the revolution, the change was being driven so much by music and art. And so I wanted to be part of that. I wanted to document the time. So very early on I started to deviate. And that's why I'd have to trick my dad so he thought I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, practicing my lessons. So then when I got kicked out of the Peabody at 11, then I think he was brokenhearted. Bless him. And I was seen as a failure and somebody that had had so much potential. And that was a lot to take on. So I started to smoke pot.

Cristen: Well why did the conservatory kick you out?

Tori: So you would analyze music in theory. You would look at music and be taught theory in a certain way. And they were teaching classical and they were teaching jazz. But I wanted them also to look at the songs from the Beatles. And somebody said, “They're not going to be around in 30 years’ time. Nobody will know who they are.” And I just looked at them. I said, you crazy see people. You are out of your freaking minds. And that was at 11. And that didn't go down. So there was a rebelliousness that I guess I had because I loved this music so much, whether it was the Beatles or Joni Mitchell or Nina Simone, or we can go on and on. Stevie Wonder. And they wouldn't allow it at the time. And it seemed like, wow, I was a disappointment really to everybody. And that was that was a lot to hold. That's the double-edged sword we were talking about.

Caroline: Well, where where did this rebelliousness come from? Because I feel like, you know, a lot of kids might have just said, OK. This is my assignment. This is what I'm supposed to do. This is my responsibility. I have to toe the line. But here you are coming to these conclusions about your own voice and this moment in musical time at 11. So like where did that streak come from?

Tori: So being exposed to such great music just made me more bloody minded, I think, to steal from the Brits and just dig my heels in and say, no, I'm going to write more. I'm going to - I'm going to do this.

Cristen: And Tori's father remained convinced she was going to do it, too. In fact, he was kind of a stage dad and helped her secure her first paying gig at a VERY surprising venue.

Caroline: Each week, 13-year-old Tori Amos played a downtown DC gay bar called Mr. Henry’s, and eventually that earned Tori other piano playing spots in bars and hotels around the city

Cristen: Why do you think your dad, though, changed his mind and was like OK with you playing music, like secular music too, in a gay bar? I mean, that feels like a real pivot.

Tori: I think, yeah it was a pivot. I think - with the capital P. I think that there is a bit of Mama Rose, Gypsy Rose Lee, her mother, in my father. And there is a side to him, like he wanted to be Billy Graham. So he was drawn to that flame and he wouldn't give up. And I don't think he could accept my - my failure. He couldn't accept it. I kind of accepted being kicked out of the Peabody because I was writing my own music in secret, like you guys are in closets, I'd be writing, you know, whatever under the bed, whatever, just creating. And when he wasn't around, really working toward that. But then I think it just - he decided, no, I'm gonna get on side. And if you're gonna do this, then do it right and do it well and be good at it.

Caroline: And with that, the child prodigy had become a teenaged professional. But before teen-pro Tori could become adult-pop-icon Tori, she first had to learn how to fail.

Cristen: When we come back, Tori flops at the start, pops on the charts, and introduces us to her muses

Caroline: Don’t go anywhere!

[Midroll ad 1]

[CBS clip]

Announcer: Music came naturally to her

[Tori singing]

Announcer: But songs, she says, sometimes came from another world entirely.

Tori: It’s not as if I hear voices, but I call them the Muses. All of a sudden I am getting full structure, and I have not thought of this before.

Announcer: Oh, wow.

Tori: It is being plugged in, almost like I take a plug, plug it in, and all of a sudden I’m getting “Reindeer King.”

Announcer: Yeah

Tori: Just there. And it’s a seven-minute song.

Cristen: We’re back, and that was Tori Amos on CBS This Morning in 2017 explaining the songwriting inspiration she gets from her own personal muses

Caroline: And she means that quite literally. Tori says nine muses have been with her since she first started playing music as a kid. They feed her bits and pieces of songs, but the hard work of putting it all together falls on Tori.

Tori: They're not you know, they're not faint of heart, these - these muses. They can be very, very tough with me. And that's fine. They they expect a certain amount of, you know, work. I have to work for it. They do. They don't just drop a whole song on me, usually.

Cristen: Early in her adult career, Tori learned the hard way what happens when she doesn't pick up what her muses drop down.

Caroline: Yeah, so Tori left the DC piano bars and moved to LA in her early 20s. There, she started a synthpop band called Y Kant Tori Read. Here’s the single ‘Big Picture” off their one and only self-titled album, released in 1988.

[CLIP of Y Tori Kant Song ‘Big Picture’]
The big picture
Staring at me, staring at me

Cristen: The band’s music was pretty commercial and a distant cry from the piano-heavy "sonic novels" that would become the quintessential Tori Amos sound.

Caroline: Yeah and y’all, we have to talk about the cover for this album for a second. It was peak-80s. Tori’s red hair is HUGE, and she's wearing black bra, metallic bustier and black elbow gloves. And she's inexplicably holding a giant sword across her shoulders. Tori is basically Guns n Roses meets Three Musketeers.

Cristen: Both commercially and critically, Y Kant Tori Read’s album was a lemon. After two months, the record label pulled the plug and quit promoting it.

Caroline: After that project flopped, Tori repented to the muses and got back to basics. That meant playing piano in bars again to make rent and writing a new album as just Tori Amos — no band and no big hair schtick.

Tori: Because I betrayed myself on that in 1988, the crawling back out of that hell is something. But the piano forgave me and the muses forgave me. So the writing of Little Earthquakes was that journey.

Cristen: When Tori finished her new solo album — the one that would become her 1992 breakout Little Earthquakes — record label execs had a different sound in mind for her

Tori: When I turned it in. They wanted to mute the piano and insert the guitars instead.

Caroline: Yeah, with the major exception of piano-playing Kate Bush — who Tori was instantly compared to when Little Earthquakes came out — the known formula for successful female singer-songwriters had been pretty-girl-with guitar, like Bobbie Gentry or Carly Simon. But Tori was having none of it

Tori: There was something that just said no. No. Sell me. Sell me, sell, sell me.

Cristen: What did it feel like, though, when - so you did - you did stand up to those record execs who wanted to mute the piano, but in especially as a still emerging artist at the time. How did you effectively resist their power, though?

Tori: It was just one of those things whereby. The lesson of getting out of that bustier, that I put myself in. And I don't know what possessed me to think that that was my feminist self expressing herself. I don’t know what happened. As my mother said to me on the phone, she goes, Honey, you got out of that bustier you're not going back, are you? I went, no, no. That corset - that. No. So that you can’t breathe and find your voice. I mean, it became very metaphorical. You know, women of the last several hundred years. And I started thinking, what? No, no. And it was just so clear. It was clear as a bell. And the muses were there and they said, we stand firm. And they also said. But you better come up with a plan, young lady, because they want a different tone. And so my plan was for them to sell my contract to somebody else, but they wouldn't sell me because he said, if so-and-so wants you - Tori, if so-and-so wants you, why shouldn't I want you? And I'm like, Oh, my God. And I'm locked in for an eight-record contract. And it's their option. It's a - it's a system then. And unless you know how the music business was working and can work. It’s so outdated, you can’t imagine these contracts. So they can shelve you, don't you see? They can hold on to you. And then you can't create for anybody else. So we had to come up with a solution. And the offering, the Muses showed me, was offer to produce with someone who I respected called Eric Rosse at the time. And we were in a relationship. Yes. And they agreed. So we brought forth four more songs. And then one of the execs, Doug Moores. He actually, he called me up and said, Tori. I just heard Silent. And I totally get it. I said, OK. I'm glad you totally get it, since that wasn't one of the four that I've turned in, but OK. And he said it was originally there from there was the bones of Little Earthquakes.

Caroline: Little Earthquakes was released in the US in 1992. The cover is white and sparse with a wooden box in the middle where Tori is squatting in overalls next to a tiny piano. And this record was no lemon.

[CLIP David Letterman show]

David Letterman: Our next guest is making her network television debut and we couldn’t be happier that it’s taking place on our program. This is her first solo album right here in the very popular CD format. It’s called Little Earthquakes. Ladies and gentlemen here she is, Tori Amos.

Cristen: The album ultimately went double platinum, and critics were into it too. Rolling Stone reviewer Elyse Gardner praised Little Earthquakes as "a collection of introspective piano-laced ballads.”

Caroline: What would you tell your younger self now about dealing with these record execs?

Tori: I would tell her that sometimes to negotiate with the boys club, you might be wise to have some champagne in the room, metaphorically, a little bubbly, and get what you want as a badass negotiator instead of, you know, being a pirate and dicks on the table and swords out. But the problem, ladies, is that that was a time when playing two women on alternative radio - one was too much, and especially if you were doing something that they didn’t understand.

Caroline: When Tori was coming up in the early-to-mid 90s, she was often pitted against radio-friendlier contemporaries like Alanis Morrisette, or conflated with more cultish artists like Bjork.

Tori: They would just say, “Tori, you're gonna destroy your career.” And I'm like, well, if I can't wake up and look at myself in the morning, who cares? Self-respect, right? But that wasn't the currency. When you go to battle, you need to know who you're battling against. And you need to know how they hear. Because some people cannot hear a confrontation from a woman. You are going to get the door slammed in your face sometimes. I'm not saying you play pussycat. I've never I've never played pussy cat with these guys. I'm - I play lioness, but, you know, some days it's best not to put salt on their arm and eat it.

Cristen: “Little Earthquakes” reached #14 on the Billboard charts and won Tori a legion of loyal fans almost overnight. And they were drawn to her exactly because of what she fought the boys club to sing about: giving a middle finger to religion, talking about abortion and disclosing sexual assault.

Caroline: Those songs echoed the experiences and traumas of female and queer fans in particular who'd never really had a space to safely express them before hearing Little Earthquakes.

Cristen: Including that breakout album, Tori has released 15 studio albums — all of which have charted on Billboard’s Top 100. And she’s hoping to release her sweet 16th in time for the 2020 presidential election.

Caroline: That’s intentional, y’all. Tori says she felt called to observe and document our collective moments. moments. So, for instance, 9/11 and its aftermath inspired her 2002 record Scarlet’s Walk. Her 2007 album, American Doll Posse, took aim at the US government and the Iraq War. And climate change and native land rights are woven into 2017’s Native Invader.

Cristen: Even the physical way she plays has been political. Caroline, I found a gem of a paper titled “Pianosexual: Fascinations of Tori Amos’ Sexualized Virtuosity in Performance.” Amazing. And for listeners who were unaware, like I was, Tori straddles her piano bench and splays her legs out facing the audience, and people could just NOT handle it. Apparently, some feminists in the 90’s even gave her shit for it, telling her that she was debasing herself for the patriarchy. But in fact, going spread eagle just allows her to pivot around more easily between her multiple and keyboards that she plays.

Caroline: Yeah, it’s an amazing sight seriously worth a google image search if you haven’t seen it. I will never sit on a piano bench with my legs closed again

Cristen: I mean I’m gonna buy a piano bench just so I can straddle it defiantly.

Cristen: And with that… We’ve gotta take a quick break, and when we come back, Tori tells us how she spearheaded the national rape crisis hotline and how activism continues to inform her role as an artist.

Caroline: Plus, Tori turns the tables and asks us a few questions!

Cristen: Stick around

[Midroll ad 2]

Caroline: We’re back with Tori Amos, and heads up to listeners, we will be discussing sexual assault.

Cristen: Caroline, when I was internet-researching for this episode, because I noticed that whereas Tori content is all over tumblr, there’s barely a stitch on giphy. And that feels like an apt analogy for her irl fandom because it is DEEP. And SIGNIFICANT. And the feelings that Tori Amos evokes simply cannot be contained in a GIF.

Caroline: Yeah, the love is too deep Cristen, it’s too deep. And her connection to feminist fans has really remained so strong over the years. Like, one Tori move that I loved was her 2001 album Strange Little Girls, which consisted entirely of covers of songs written by men — but reinterpreted from a woman’s point of view. One of the standouts is her cover of Eminem’s “97 Bonnie and Clyde” -- which she sang from the perspective of the fictional wife that Eminem kills in the original lyrics.

[CLIP: Eminem cover song]
See honey, there’s a place called heaven and a place called hell
There’s a place called prison and a place called jail
And Daddy’s probably on his way to all of them except one
Cause Momma’s got a new husband and a step son

Caroline: Amazing.

Cristen: And look Caroline, I had figured that her lasting feminist cred just came from the politics of her music. But she’s also inspired incredible, real-world activism ever since she went solo in the early 90s.

Caroline: Yeah, one of her biggest hits off Little Earthquakes is a song called Me and a Gun. It’s about when Tori was raped at gunpoint when she was 21. It was terrifying and traumatizing, and like so many survivors, she didn’t report it to the police.

Cristen: She only shared the details of what happened a couple times in interviews, but for six straight years, Tori performed Me and a Gun at every single one of her live shows.

Tori: It's acapella, so no accompaniment. And the song is written so that you were there with her with me as it's playing out

[Me and a Gun clip]
It was me
And a gun
And a man
On my back
And I sang "Holy Holy" as he buttoned down his pants

Tori: And it was something that. When I was writing it. I didn't realize until later the heaviness of the burden that I would need to carry and then work through and then the damage of all that until because I I was traumatized. And once it was released, I could not hold the energy. The exposure. Feeling naked under under a microscope. I. I couldn't hold that well at all. So. What happened is, I began singing it every night but then not talking about it because I couldn't talk about it anymore. And then in 94. And There was a young girl who fainted during this song at the show and she told us backstage that her stepfather would rape her when she got home that night, he raped the night before and he would rape her the night after. This was her life.

Caroline: And countless other fans also came up to Tori at shows and wrote her letters sharing their own stories of assault and sexual abuse — so many, that Tori wanted to do something about it. She reached out to the DC Rape Crisis Center in Washington, and they hatched a plan to establish a national, toll-free hotline that folks in crisis could call. Tori then convinced her label, Atlantic Records, along with the Warner Music Group, to provide the seed funding to launch it.

Cristen: And that’s how In 1994, Tori Amos became a co-founder and spokesperson for the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, or RAINN. It operates that 24-7 hotline and connects tens of thousands of callers to rape crisis counselors every year.

Caroline: And just a sidenote, Cristen: You and I have cited RAINN stats n facts for years, and somehow I’m just now making the Tori connectionnnnn.

Cristen: Same!

Caroline: So what was the sort of social awareness and conversation about rape and sexual assault like at the time?

Tori: The EP Me and a Gun, which had a song called Silent all these years on it as well, came out a month after being the Anita Hill testimony, and everyone was riveted by that and if you go watch it, it's very difficult to watch. It was at the time, but it's it's very difficult to watch it now. And I watched it when the testimony of Dr. Ford was happening. And then RAINN, the hot line, had more calls than it's ever had since it's 24 year existence at the time.

Caroline: So it felt kind of like an echo of that earlier time.

Tori: Well it did in that so much time had passed, and yet there there was such a disconnection between Mitch McConnell's, quote, “plow this through,” and just the words, the guttural, sexual thrust of that penetrating hook. It became, “All right then Mitch. Yes. You were able to do that through your boys’ club and possibly the women that serve in that to put someone on the highest court in the land.” And people watching this happening, I'm very curious to ask you both what you felt and what you all went through when you saw that.

Caroline: Oh, I remember crying, I was on my way to Cristen's house to record an episode and I remember crying in my car listening to the testimony.

Cristen: It was really rough. Partly because of just all of the conversations that it sparked among female friends in particular, who had, you know, gone through similar experiences as Blasey Ford. And also, you know, Caroline and I had had done a lot of research and made podcasts about the Anita Hill hearings, so we'd watch those testimonies. And like even though when they were you know, when they were happening in real time, we were we were little babies. But like, it still felt so unreal because there were so many of the same male faces sitting in front of Anita Hill as there were in front of Blasey Ford. So, yeah, it was it was gut wrenching.

Tori: Yes, it was gut wrenching. And I think the art that has come out and will come out from that will document that. It's just something that won't go away. As a piano player, usually both hands know what each other's up to. For that to work, they really need to know what each other's up to. So, however, at this point in my mind, the right hand in our world is dealing with the pandemic, which is horrible, and people are losing loved ones and their lives. But there’s complete and total focus on this with the right hand that I have no idea what the left hand is up to. The policies that are getting passed, the things that are - freedoms that we could be losing. We all need to be very focused on what things are happening by some of our lawmakers who helped make “plow this through” possible because they banded together to make sure that they had a quid pro quo sitting in that chair on the Supreme Court. And that is terrifying.

Cristen: Well, Tori. We have just one final question for you that we ask all of our guests. And it is, what is the most unladylike thing about you?

Tori: That's really intriguing. Can you tell me what it is for each of you?

Caroline: Oh, well, for me, in addition to the cursing and drinking, it's probably that I don't want kids, I would think is the most unladylike aspect.

Tori: I have so much respect for you saying that. You know, there are so many people who have kids who have come to shows and said to me, I'm not taking to this. My mother is more of the parent or the other person or the partner or the duh-duh-duh, and not everybody has that calling. And wow, how brave of you if you're not if you're not being called, it's not for everybody. It can be heart wrenching and again, humbling and humiliating. What about you, Cristen?

Cristen: The most unladylike thing about me is that I will not laugh at a man's joke if it's not funny.

Tori: Oh, yeah, that's very good. Yeah, that's very good. Well, I like all the cursing. I mean, Selina Meyer is one of my heroes.

Cristen: Oh, my God. Yes.

Tori: She’s on my altar And sometimes, you know, as a songwriter, you do get you you do get that look of if you can write such pretty music, how can you use those words? And I say, OK, they’re words, but two things. I think there there is an art, to - I really like a good cusser. It really kind of makes my day. It it did kind of shock me when Tash - I'll leave it at here, wouldn't she was about, I don't know, in grade school, so about 7, and everybody had to do on Mother's Day here decide what great thing their mother did. And you know, one of them was a doctor and one of them this and clearly I was in my career at the time still and she just looks and says, “My mummy is a great curser.” And I all all those years I hadn't said a curse word to any of those mothers at school. I tried so hard. And then I thought, OK, game’s up. Here we go.

Cristen: Caroline, I’d like to call myself a Torihead now….if the Toriheads will have meeeee! I have 15 albums-worth of music to catch up on, but I’ve really fallen in love with her.

Caroline: OK unladies … are you a Torihead? Is there music you love that is getting you through the quarantimes? Let us know! You can email us at hello@unladylike.co, find us on social @unladylikemedia or join our private facebook group and jump into the thread for this episode.

Cristen: Visit unladylike.co to find this episode’s sources, transcripts, and our weekly Unladylike newsletter. You can also stop by our shop while you’re there to grab a tie-died Unladylike sweatshirt, perfect for brightening up the countless Zoom calls you’re on.

Caroline: Nora Ritchie is the senior producer of Unladylike. Gianna Palmer is our story editor. Shruti Marathe transcribes our tape. Our music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzin. Mixing is by Andi Kristins. Sound design and additional music is by Casey Holford. Executive producers are Chris Bannon, Daisy Rosario and Unladylike Media.

Cristen: This podcast was created by your hosts, Cristen Conger

Caroline: And Caroline Ervin of Unladylike Media.

Cristen: Next week…

Mattie Rogers: I think once you you really like put your body to use in whatever it is. It could be a sport. It could be if you just like doing something that takes some sort of physical energy. I think committing it committing yourself to to something like that kind of will change how you think of your body. And it's not just like, what can I look like? It's like what can I do and what can this body do for me?

Caroline: We’re talking to Olympic weightlifter Mattie Rogers about how to lift heavy shit. Plus, Casey Johnston from VICE is unpacking some weightlifting claptrap with us.

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