"I was feeling so sick that I wanted to be put out of my misery. And then I get this presence. It's like a light, a blueish-greyish light... The message was, `You need to learn something out of writing my story'." - London Independant 1/16/94

"Yes, I agree. I'm not a big believer in rhyme. Who decided that rhyming was the way to do it, who was that guy? Let's go find him and have a little chat because this has really cramped writers for a long, long time. Believe me, when I wrote, "We'll see how brave you are, we'll see how fast you'll be running, we'll see how brave you are, yes Anastasia," I didn't think of it as an assonance, though it is if you do it tonally." - Performing Songwriter 3/4/94

"KF:Anastasia? Want to identify her? Tori:Anastasia Romanov." - Bay Area Musician 3/11/94

"Poppy is the little girl who was in 'Silent All These Years' " - Bay Area Musician 3/11/94

"It's a journey. Anastasia Romanov...it's not like I've read loads of books on her. I was aware of the family and that's about it. So I'm in Virginia, and I had crabs...I keep saying that! I had crab sickness, I had eaten bad crabs in Maryland! But I couldn't cancel the show. I was at soundcheck, and needless to say, when you are very, very ill, it is easier to communicate with your source...you are fragile and vulnerable. Well, her presence came. Now I have only heard of her in history, I've got no point to make. She comes and goes 'you've got to write my tune.' I 'go ohhh, now's not really a good time.' She says 'no, you've got to understand something from this, there's something here that you've got to come to terms with.' And that night came. 'We'll see how brave you are,' and that was really about the whole record. That came just about before everything. And whenever I sing that chorus, 'we'll see how brave you are,' it means so many different things to me. It's part of my self, my spirit self saying to the rest of myself, 'if you really want a challenge, just deal with yourself. The funny thing is that Anna Anderson, who claimed to be Anastasia, died very close to where I was playing an hour or so from there in the 80s. The feeling I got that Anna Anderson was Anastasia Romanov. She always tried to prove it and a lot of people believed her and some people didn't want to believe her, because of what that would have meant. And again, it's really working through being a victim. 'Counting the tears from ten thousand men, and gathered them all, but my feet are slipping.' You can't blame the men anymore; there's always you. It comes back to us; it comes back to me." - BSide April/May 94

"...'Anastasia,' which is the final of the finale." - BSide April/May 94

"...that's my big epic. A lot of Debussy influence on the first half, and the Russian composers on the second half. I was real excited working with Phil Shenal, who arranged the strings. We'd had quite a famous arranger arranging and Eric and I erased it all after we had some margaritas. No, we purposely did, it was shit. So we erased it, and we started with our friend Phil. And we loved what he did. I just thought it was so perfect, everything." - Beat Magazine 7/14/94

"Well, the first part of 'Yes, Anastasia' is a good example free form. 'Anastasia' was written how you would hear it. I wrote that whole first half with a tape recorder: The second half was written first, and then I was just noodling, just stream of consciousness with my ghetto blaster on. It took me six weeks to learn the first half of 'Anastasia' from that tape, because it was all about free form. I'm much better when I've never done something before, because when I try to do it the second time, I'm recreating instead of creating. That changes everything. I usually don't get it together enough to finish a work like that; it's like I've got too much pesto on my noodles. I'll only get a couple of measures, and then it gets all jumbled. Then I start screaming and hating myself. It's just bratty prodigy behavior, because I get in my own way a lot. Sometimes I don't have the discipline of a more formulated person. Bridges have always been my strength, but sometimes the rest of the song is like pissing in the wind: The land masses on either side of the bridge ain't so great. I've got my Coleman stove and my little jacuzzi on the bridge, because sometimes there ain't nothin' on the other side." - Keyboard 11/94

"When we get to 'Anastasia' -- I had some visitation on this. I was in Richmond. It was after the Washington show, and I had food poisoning. Very ill. I was in Richmond the next night- SUN: Which is where she (Anna Anderson, a woman claiming to be Princess Anastasia) died, isn't it? TORI: Around Richmond, Charlottesville, yes, that area. And her being visited me, and said, 'You need to tell my story.' And I'm like, 'Oh, come on. I'm losing crab at both ends. Can't we, like, negotiate this?' And it was a bit of -- that's where my experience from the violent kidnapping that I went through with 'Me and a Gun' kind of made me able to understand the horror that she went through, and yet, the incredible understanding that she came to which is the first half of 'Anastasia,' that whole, 'Show me the ways to get back to the garden' and 'Driving on the vine over clotheslines. But officer, I saw the sign.' You're very aware of what's happening, that you're being changed and that you're numbing yourself, but how do you turn it around? And that's where 'We'll see how brave you are' -- when you're 18, you know everything, and it's, yeah, I can handle anything. Well, any of us can be brought to our knees real fast. And with 'Anastasia', I would be looking kind of down on myself through different parts of my life, going, 'We'll see how brave you are.' And I get such hope from that one." - Baltimore Sun 1994

"I hope I told your story correctly my friend. So many codes it was hard for me to decipher but I believe anastasia's story is everyone's in a way. She tried to tell me that and I blew her off." - Under The Pink piano book

"Yeah, I was reading about Anastasia Romanov, and sometimes just certain stories kind of grab you by the throat. It was interesting - I've lived in England on and off for four years - and they're much more interested in these kinds of things, I think. I would be reading so much about how they hadn't still determined whether they had found Anastasia or not and that this woman who died a few years ago, everyone believed that she was lying. Not everyone, but most people said that she really couldn't have lived through that. I tend to believe that it was. So she had died, and when I was very ill in Virginia, I kind of got visited by this figure and said, 'Write my story' and that's what I tried to do." - UCLA 1/27/95

"No, you have to...sometimes there's no room to run the other way. I mean sometimes you run into somebody and...I think one of the favorites of the crew is this guy that says he's Anastasia and he used to come to the shows with a handcuffed briefcase and said that he really was Anastasia and that he needed to get backstage and had a million dollars that he needed to give me so that I could give it to someone but he wouldn't say who and it was about excavating her past and all that." - CFNY 102.1 Canadian radio 8/30/02