Telling your story, as honestly as you can, and leaving out the things you don't need, that's vital.

The Moth connects us, as humans. Because we all have stories. Or perhaps, because we are, as humans, already an assemblage of stories. And the gulf that exists between us as people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin color, gender, race, or attitudes, but we don't see, we can't see, the stories. And once we hear each other's stories we realize that the things we see as dividing us are, all too often, illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are in truth no thicker than scenery.

The Moth teaches us not to judge by appearances. It teaches us to listen. It reminds us to empathize.

And now, with these fifty wonderful stories, it teaches us to read.

This is an introduction for The Moth: This Is a True Story, 2015.

VII.

MUSIC AND THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE IT.

"I think that night may have lasted a thousand years, one for every ocean."

Hi, By the Way: Tori Amos

Hi, by the way.

I met her first on a tape, and then we spoke on the phone late at night, and then one night I went to see her play piano and sing.

It was a tiny Notting Hill brasserie, and Tori had already started when I got there. She saw me come in and smiled like the lighting of a beacon, played "Tear in Your Hand" to welcome me in. The room was almost empty, save for the owner, who was having his birthday meal in the middle of the room. Tori sang "Happy Birthday to You," then a song she'd recently written called "Me and a Gun," pure and dark and alone.

Later, we went off through Notting Hill and talked like old friends who are meeting for the very first time. On the empty subway platform she sang and danced and acted out the video she had made that day for "Silent All These Years"-one moment she was a Tori in a box, spinning around, the next a small girl dancing past a piano . . .

That was several years ago.

I know Tori a little better now than I did that night, but the wonderment she inspired then has not faded with time or with familiarity.

Tori doesn't ever ring me. She sends me strange messages by other means, and I have to track her down in odd countries, negotiate my way through foreign switchboards. The last time she wanted to tell me that they served great pumpkin ice cream in the place across from the recording studio, a continent away.

She offered to save me some.

And she wanted to tell me she sings about me on Under the Pink. "What do you sing?" I asked.

"'Where's Neil when you need him?'" she said.

Tori is wise and witchy and wickedly innocent. What you see is what you get: a little delirium, a lot of delight. There's fairy blood inside her,* and a sense of humor that shimmers and illuminates and turns the world upside down.

She sings like an angel and rocks like a red-haired demon.

She's a small miracle. She's my friend.

I don't know where I am when you need me. I hope the pumpkin ice cream doesn't melt before I find out . . .

I wrote this for the tour book for Tori Amos's Under the Pink tour, in 1994.

Curious Wine: Tori Amos II

Riding a train through America I'm seeing a side of the country it prefers to keep hidden: it's truly the world on the wrong side of the tracks, a world of tumbledown tarpaper shacks, abandoned cars and boarded-up buildings. Now-as I type this-I'm somewhere in North Texas, riding the train through a swamp, watching an eagle circle and the play of light through the dusty leaves. I'm listening to Tori going to Venus and back.

"Suede," she sings, music swirling around her voice like eddies in the current of the swamp-river. "Anybody knows you can conjure anything by the dark of the moon." It's a song like black chocolate and woodsmoke, shimmering and remote. "Suede," she sings.

It's too hot outside, but winter is becoming imaginable once more. Summer is rotting in a haze like a neglected peach. The album plays over and over.

Remembering the first time I heard these songs, in early summer: I had spent the day in Dartmoor, visiting friends (Terri's Pre-Raphaelite cottage, with its magic kitchen and elegant messages written in gold on every wall; wandering the Frouds' house, made even more otherworldly by the fact that they weren't actually there, just Brian's paintings and Wendy's elfish dolls smiling and leering at you from every corner of their concertina-maze of a world). I had fetched up in Martian Studios at the end of the day like a stray puppy in need of a home.

Outside the train window now: a wall of red earth strewn with a hundred glass bottles; a seat ripped from a school bus alone under a tree; pines and willows and a vast tangle of wild honeysuckle.

"What red wine is this?" I asked Tori, that night, when the world was quiet and dark.

"I'll send you a bottle," she said. It was a marvelous wine, gentle and wise.

Sharing secrets on the sofa: I told her of the baku, and the fox and the monk. She played me the new album, told me its secrets and its stories, "Lust" and "Bliss," apologizing for a rawness of the mix (which I believed but could not hear), and I settled back and listened.

The curious wine made me expansive. I imagined the story I would write about it: I would tell the tale of each song through descriptions of twelve imaginary albums.

It is a greatest hits album, I told her, from an alternate universe.

Of course it is, she said.

I think that night may have lasted a thousand years, one for every ocean, and at the end of it I slept on the sofa, rag-doll floppy from the fine red wine, dreaming of the glory of the eighties and wondering why I had never noticed it at the time.

Traveling still now: passing a sudden thunderstorm in the hills of New Mexico; then the stately Californian windmill fields and hills signal that the train is leaving the real America and entering the world of the imagination.

And I meant to tell you about my Happy Phantom dream, and how she smiled and said, "I know I'm dead, but why are they making such a fuss about it!" and to talk about the way that she smiled. But we're pulling into Los Angeles now, and it's time to stop writing.

And I'm drunk on a curious wine I tasted several months ago, having traveled to Venus and back.

The introduction for Tori Amos's To Venus and Back tour book, 1999.

Flood: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition, They Might Be Giants

Not to put too fine a point on it, I was, in my mind, already too old for music to matter, too old for an album to change me and definitely too old to buy singles. I was twenty-eight, driving to Gatwick airport when I heard "Birdhouse in Your Soul" on the radio, and it changed my life. And this is the odd thing: I didn't listen to music radio. Then, as now, it was Radio 4, or cassette tapes. But I was listening to music radio as I drove, and "Birdhouse in Your Soul" came on, and I made a mental note and remembered the name of the band-They Might Be Giants, just like the film, where George C. Scott thinks he is Sherlock Holmes (the title comes from a conversation about Don Quixote, who fought a windmill thinking it was a giant-and what if he was right?).

When I got to London I went straight to a record shop, and bought everything they had by They Might Be Giants (Lincoln, and They Might Be Giants). They didn't have "Birdhouse in Your Soul." Flood had not come out yet.

What I loved about They Might Be Giants was that they made stories. The words were put together in a way that left holes I needed to fill in order to know what was going on. I became, whether I liked it or not, a part of the songs.

I called Terry Pratchett, because he loved stories too, and told him that I'd found something he'd like better than chocolate. "Shoehorn with Teeth" became the theme song of the Good Omens signing tour. When we were under stress, we would sing it together. We were under stress a lot.

I bought "Birdhouse . . ." as a single, the first CD single I'd bought. There was an Ant on there too, crawling up someone's back in the nighttime.

I bought Flood as soon as it arrived in the shops. In a break from They Might Be Giants tradition it didn't sound like it had been recorded in someone's back room. There were guest instrumentalists, a lush sound, strange samples. It still sounded like They Might Be Giants, but this time they were bigger giants.

The songs were, for the most part, dispatches from an alternate universe, slices from stories and lives we would never quite know. That didn't stop me thinking about them, though, or making up my own tiny stories to go with them.

It was the first album to come with its own theme, for a start. The world would end, but that was all right, because this album had begun. Yes. It had "Birdhouse in Your Soul," a song by a proud night-light who is descended from a lighthouse. It had "Lucky Ball and Chain," which looked back on an unusual marriage.

It had "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)," which I was sad to discover had never been performed as a sand dance by Wilson, Keppel and Betty. It had "Dead" on it, a song about final things and the meaning of life. "Your Racist Friend," which comes into my head whenever I find myself having a conversation with anyone who begins a sentence with "I'm not a racist, but . . ."

It had "Particle Man" on it, finest of all superheroes. Terry Pratchett liked "Particle Man" so much that he put a watch with an Aeon Hand in it in one of his stories, which I thought was very unfair, because I had wanted to steal the idea for a story myself.

"Twisting" made me sad-I was certain there was a suicide in there somewhere. "We Want a Rock" was surreal in the best sense: it only made sense if taken literally, and then it gained a dream-sense. Perhaps everybody does want a prosthetic forehead, after all.

I think that "Someone Keeps Moving My Chair" is really called Mr. Horrible, and I am afraid of the Ugliness Man.

It had "Hearing Aid" on it. A song with an electric chair in it that somehow seemed to be filled with sweetness and gentle age.

"Minimum Wage" put visions of stampedes in my head, with the cowboys all carrying placards. "Letterbox" was the kind of tiny horror movie in a box I loved, its lyrics all tumbly and twisted.

"Whistling in the Dark" is what we all wind up doing, after meeting people who are not unkind, but still leave scars.

"Hot Cha" never will come back. The prodigal son will remain uneaten.