You are Tori Amos. Year after year you've opened a vein for your public, serving up for their consumption every painful detail of your personal life, including your own rape. Despite the fact that your very own father is a Methodist minister, you've stared down the Christian patriarchy and offered listeners the escape of a mythical, pagan, faerie world. You have given till it hurts in interviews and sung your lungs out in hundred of live show a year - critics call you "sensuous," "electrifying" and "possessed," and fans flood backstage for your healing touch.

Yes, you're all that, plus tax. You're sometimes dismissed as an ineffectual sprite, but you've managed to rally major corporate funding for your charity, RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. And despite having been assured that your girl-and-her-piano schtick will never, ever play, you've become, as one observer put it, a "moon child for lost souls and misfits" with a million devoted followers worldwide.

Next thing you know, your hard-won success is opening the door for a new generation of rock ladies with personal revelations of a more polite nature. And here they come: the Joan Osbornes and the Sarah McLachlans, the Paula Coles and Shawn Colvins and Jewels, mild-mannered Pottery Barn poets, who one by one, get all the multiplatinum albums and pop radio play and Grammys that have always eluded you. Then there's this little piano-playing glam freak Fiona Apple - a teenager, yet - who even has among her musical-journal entries a song about being raped. The press being the press, gives her the benefit of the pout. What's a girl to think?

"Isn't it great, all this diary stuff?" gushes the real Tori Amos. "So much better than it was a few years ago, when record companies had a quota of, like, ten female signings a year. I'm so uncompetitive, really.

"You can't control your popularity; I know I'm an acquired taste - I'm anchovies," Amos explains with typical monn-child exuberance. "And not everybody wants those hariy little things. If I was potato chips, I could go a lot more places, but Im not. On my second record I thought that way, like with the song 'God': 'Why don't people want to hear about God getting a blow job? I thought those born-again Christians would love that. But then I realized that even my sister wouldn't buy my records if I wasn't her sister - to her, I sound like the psycho in Reservoir Dogs, Mr. Blonde. She says, 'Why do I want to listen to that on my way to work?'"

The erstwhile Mr. Blonde is presently cooking up her latest sardine platter down among the gentle quilted hillsides of Olde England. The country of Cornwall is England's most westerly and independent-minded and also its mythical: The wind-swept province, with its own language and culture, was the setting of the Tristram and Isolde fable, and according to legend, King Arthur convened his Round Table here. Among the scattered possessions in Tori Amos' playback room is a shopping bag full of books from the King Arthur Bookshop in neighboring Tintagel.

It's appropriate that Amos has elected to record in Cornwall, being something of a far-out, mystical type herself. Her last album, Boys for Pele, was named after a Hawaiian volcano goddess, and Amos rarely forgets to thank "the faeries" on her liner notes; her publishing company is called Sword and Stone. And asking her the most straightforward question is liable to produce a radical and unnerving detour into any number of ancient cultures or religions - show the slightest unfamiliarity with names like Osiris or Persephone or Demeter, and Amos will simply fix you with the indulgent smile of a grade-school teacher addressing a slow learner.

If there's one well-known mythical name you would expect Amos to drop, it's Lilith, the figure ancient Jewish lore, adopted by the defining event of the femme-rock era. Surely the uncompetitive and surprisingly well-adjusted Amos must find her spirtual home in the pagan bosom of the festival for which she is unofficial den mothers. Then again, maybe Amos is not quite that well-adjusted. "Well, I would have a good bottle of wine with Sarah [McLachlan, Lilith Fair's founder] any night of the week," she allows. "But my shows are theater, and I've worked a long time to get them to this point. This isn't just about eating some chicken and hearing a few of your vaorite female singers. You walk into my show, you walk inot a world - it's a film every night. I can't impose that on Lilith and vice versa.

"Plus, I'm not into the all-male, all-female thing," says Amos with growing agitation. "Where's Dionysus? Where's Hades? You can't cut out the testosterone. And we need some pansy-ass people, too, like little camp Hermes. Even though I'm sure some of those women have more testosterone then Hermes," she adds with a slightly unsisterly roll of the eyes.

As she speaks, Amos clasps in her hands an Eeyore tea mug. In between sips, she presses it to her jaw to ease the discomfort of a bone deformity that's troubled her for two decades. "When I was fifteen, I thought it was a brain tumor," Amos says ruefully. "Well, of course I did!" The condition is sufficiently grave to give Amos headaches she compares to the pain of a tooth abscess. Surgery is not an option, and since painkillers do not agree with Amos' constitution, she simply gets "Tiger Balmed-up" backstage before every show and iced down afterward. The condition is "a little, tiny handicap," according to this ethereal survivor. "It's so boring for everybody - and I hate to bore people."