‘At that point, Little Earthquakes was my first, um, attempt at getting out of the egg. You know, that little chicken that kinda kicks out the egg [imitates chicken] and says, ‘Okay, um, what have I really not been saying all these years?’ You know, you can wear the plastic snake pants and put 15,000 holes in your body, which is fine. Enjoy it [laughs]. But what am I saying? I’m just saying absolutely nothing. So I started to think about… what is the most powerful thing I can do for myself? The truth is actually the most shocking thing you can do because nobody really hears it much. So when you start saying things truthfully, and I mean truthfully, there’s no greater freedom than that…’ -Tori Amos, in a 1995 speech to UCLA
Y Kant Tori Read may have been a total flop, but Amos was still stuck in her record contract with Altantic, who expected her to deliver another record in 1990. By this point, she’d gotten so far away from her piano playing that didn’t even own one. Rediscovering her love of the piano was key to finding her voice, as she told the Washington Post in 1992: ‘And then one night I went to a friend’s house-she had a piano-and as she sat away in the dark, I played for hours. … There was a feeling of ‘Who am I without you? Am I anything without you?’ And then it was like [smiles].’
As such, she decided to strip away all of the excess of her previous record and return to the basics — just the piano and her voice. She submitted a 10-track piano/vocal demo to Atlantic that year, but her new direction made them nervous. They couldn’t fit what she was doing into a marketable box, so they sent her to work with producer/journalist/novelist Davitt Sigerson, who was tasked with talking her out of her new piano-based style. He was so impressed with her new approach that he defied the label and encouraged her to stick with it.
She recorded a full album with him, but Atlantic still wasn’t happy, as she told Nieuwe Revu in 1994: ‘At first the boss of my American record company hated Little Earthquakes. Half of the staff hoped I’d be a white Neneh Cherry, the other half wanted to make me into a female Elton John. It took a long time before they wanted to accept who I was, and realize I could make them money that way.’ She responded to their dissatisfaction by working on more songs with her then-boyfriend Eric Rosse, replacing several of the originally intended songs with new tracks that had a darker tone.
The results satisfied Atlantic, but they felt she might have more success in the UK market, so they flew her to England to work with ex-Tears for Fears keyboardist Ian Stanley. The third time was the charm — Atlantic finally accepted the record. The final album was assembled with 6 songs from the original Sigerson sessions, 4 from the more heavily arranged Rosse sessions (‘Girl’, ‘Precious Things’, ‘Tear in Your Hand’, and the title song), and 2 from the Stanley sessions (‘China’ and ‘Me and a Gun’). The result is surprisingly cohesive, despite the constant shifts in sonics.
Little Earthquakes finally saw the light of day when she was 29 — surprisingly late in life for the proper debut of a child prodigy. Nonetheless, it lives up to her early promise, as she essentially pioneered the ’90s piano/vocal singer/songwriter style with this album. It’s one of those records that’s been so widely copied that it may not even strike you as original without taking in its historical context — but once you do, you’ll recognize how truly singular her voice was at the time.
This album found success at a time where no one else was doing anything remotely like this — some of the singles from this album were the only songs on the guitar-dominated charts of the time where piano was the dominant instrument and that did not feature drums. It would be easy for an hour of piano/vocal songs to get monotonous, but the album is well-paced. Cheeky uptempo tracks like ‘Happy Phantom’ (a nice jaunty little song about death) and ‘Leather’ alternate with balladry like ‘Winter’ and ‘China’. The more stripped down songs contrast with the more arranged tracks from the sessions with Rosse.
The instrumentation wasn’t the only thing that made the album unique — the subject matter was also unusual for the time. Little Earthquakes is largely an album about growing up. It’s about the process of splitting with her parents to become an adult, the struggle of finding her own voice, and the trials in romantic and peer relationships that occurred along the way — the rifts between people. It explores how her father was a minister and his mother was a repressive religious fanatic, and how she had to reject religious indoctrination from them in order to embrace her sexual awakening. As she told Times Union in 1994: ‘I think Little Earthquakes was really about looking at things I had to look at, my first door opening up to things I’d closed off since I was a little kid. I’d numbed parts of myself so they wouldn’t get hurt.’
The songwriting on this album is absolutely excellent — most artists are lucky if they can effectively communicate one emotion in a song, but Amos manages to express several at once. There’s an incredible amount of nuance and detail in these songs, and their emotional complexity allows them to truly capture the messiness of the subjects she tackles. It’s an intensely personal and daringly honest record which managed to strike a delicate balance between being open to interpretation and being just clear enough to effectively communicate.
On top of that, her performances are immaculate — she’s a very skilled pianist and a top-notch vocalist. Her immaculate control of air gives her a much wider range of dynamics and expressiveness than most singers are able to access, and her intonation is spot on. Part of what makes this record work is her restraint — she delivers intensely emotional material in a quiet way that only serves to make it all more intense. Her delivery is nonetheless very dynamic, but in a way that prioritizes subtlety and nuance over belting. She’s still able to go to extremes of intensity when needed, and takes those much further than most would dare to go — but that mostly shows up in her later work. We only see hints of it here.
All of this is evident in the album’s opening track (and highest charting single), ‘Crucify’, which addresses the issues that led her to make Y Kant Tori Read right out of the gate. It’s a song about social anxiety, self-hatred, people pleasing, and finding the fortitude to break that cycle, all delivered quietly and casually. It managed to be contentious thanks to lines like ‘Looking for a savior beneath these dirty sheets / I’ve been raising up my hands, drive another nail in’, leading some to accuse the song of blasphemy. Musically, it’s an unassuming opener that reveals its depth over time, setting a precedent for the way she makes big statements in a quiet way throughout the record.
This is a true solo album at its core — as her solo live performances of these songs have clearly demonstrated, these songs are strong enough that they don’t need any additional instrumentation to shine. Nonetheless, the album features an array of session musicians, particularly on the Rosse sessions, which feature guitar by Steve Caton (who played on Y Kant Tori Read), bass by Will McGregor, and drums by Carlo Nuccio. There are real string arrangements on two of the singles (‘Silent All These Years’ and ‘Winter’), but a few other songs feature synth strings. Only three songs feature a real drum kit, while two feature percussion by Paulinho da Costa and a couple more have programmed drums.
It doesn’t feel like she’s completely broken free of the grasp of the ’80s here, though massive strides have been made towards that end since her disowned debut. The drum kit sounds on this album are huge, to the point that they sometimes overwhelm the rest of the music, as in the choruses of ‘Crucify’ and ‘Precious Things’. The drum production sometimes feels a bit dated, as do some of the keyboard sounds and details like the finger cymbal in ‘Silent All These Years’ or the excessive guitar heroics near the end of ‘Leather’.
Moments like these can make the record feel over-arranged — while it’s generally pretty spacious, there are times when the producers went a little overboard. As such, some of the arrangements can feel a bit saccharine and dated to modern ears, and you may need to listen past them to get to the core of the songs. Luckily, the songs are strong to overcome these arrangement missteps. Moments which may initially feel cheesy, like the orchestrations on ‘Silent All These Years’ or the chorus of ‘Winter’, end up revealing themselves as profoundly moving once the lyrics enter the picture.
I mentioned that she found a unique voice on this album, which is the topic of lead single ‘Silent All These Years’. It’s a song she wrote — at least musically — for Scottish folk-rock musician Al Stewart to sing, as she’d been working on a number of tracks for him and Y Kant Tori Read producer Joe Chiccarelli. Thankfully, Eric Rosse pointed out that she’d written her life story in the lyrics and convinced her to keep it for herself. The song explores various scenarios in her life where she couldn’t be her true self, including with her paternal grandmother (‘I’ve got the antichrist yelling at me in the kitchen again… Yes, I know what you think of me. You never shut up’) and lovers (‘So you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts. What’s so amazing about really deep thoughts?’). It feels like the ultimate embodiment of a very particular ’90s aesthetic, and yet the message and expression of the song still feel potent today.
‘Girl’ addresses similar themes, but from a different angle. She divides herself into parts, as if her true self is singing about her current less fully realized self: ‘She’s been everybody else’s girl / Maybe one day she’ll be her own.’ It’s one of the simpler songs here, with a string-synth driven chorus and programmed drums, but the lyrics display hints of her future more surreal direction: ‘and in the doorway they stay and laugh as violins fill with water / screams from the BLUEBELLS / can’t make them go away.’
The song directly addresses the situation that led her to make Y Kant Tori Read, as she told Rolling Stone in 2009: ‘It’s an internal fight, that when you need other people’s approval, when you walk in a room, you’re everybody’s — or anybody’s — girl. When you don’t need that anymore, [it’s] because you have an understanding and an agreement with yourself on who you want to be. And when I say “who you want to be,” that’s going to evolve. But at least you’ve got to get your palette, your paint, your canvas, and say, “I’m not choosing to tell this story, which is doing anything to have success.” I don’t want that kind of success.’
‘Precious Things’ is probably the most well-known track from this record in rock circles, despite the fact that it wasn’t a single. It’s one of the darkest tracks here, with a bit of an almost goth edge to it, including a desperate and urgent electric piano part and pounding drums in the chorus. The lyrics explore how she left Christianity behind for boys, only to have those boys degrade her and make her feel like she was competing with prettier girls. The expression here is a bit more outwardly intense than most of the record, with the classic line ‘So you can make me cum… that doesn’t make you Jesus’ and a Nine Inch Nails reference, but it’s still got quite a bit of complexity. It’s a clear album highlight that ends up contextualizing and coloring many of the other songs on the record. It’s also likely a form of therapy for her, as she told Joe Jackson in 1992: ‘I didn’t confront my religious past until I was 24 and I’d become so ill from sexual guilt I sought help.’
It’s not the only song in which she discusses her sexuality — in ‘Leather’, anxieties about love meet kink in a cabaret-inspired song about bad sex that became an ironic pole-dancing anthem. When asked in 1998 if she was being deliberately provocative with songs like this, she replied: ‘I don’t have to try in the least to shock people. My beliefs are sufficiently shocking, because we live in a culture where passion and sexuality have been replaced by shame. We are miles away from our hearts, our feelings. I grew up in dirt-poor hillbilly country. If you were a sensual woman, you were in league with that which is un-Christlike. My songs aren’t just about me, either. That’s a misconception. But I am the character in my songs so that I can identify with that person, even if it is the devil. That’s the craft of songwriting. I’m not just a confessional songwriter.’
My two favorite tracks here are the songs about her parents. ‘Winter’, a song about her father and grandfather (and one of the album’s biggest singles), captures much of the emotional complexity of their relationship. Nostalgic recollections alternate with reflections on how difficult it was to break away from them, despite their encouragement for her to learn to stand on her own. As she told VH1 storytellers in 1998: ‘Now my Dad, he’s like James Dean or Billy Graham, though there’s no real difference there. I was telling him how bad I felt cause of the first album being so bad and Dad said to me — he’d never said it before — “Tori Ellen, When are you going to accept you are good enough for you?”’
It’s a real tearjerker of a song, with a memorable and moving verse melody, a soft and tender major key chorus gets intensely emotional, and an intense climax in the bridge. The orchestration is just subtle enough to enhance it in just the right way — though it was buried in the original mix because the label felt it made the song unmarketable, and later brought more to the forefront in the 2015 remaster.
The 7-minute long late-album track ‘Mother’ is a bit more unnerving. It’s the album’s only true solo piano/vocal track (it was wise that no arranging was done on this one, because it truly doesn’t need it), and it features a long piano intro. She perfectly captures the conflict of feeling suffocated by your mother while also feeling terrified to go out into the world without her, while even throwing in a pre-chorus about periods. The tone of the song and lyrics allows all of this to be expressed in a way that feels more heartwrenching than defensive, and the feelings it captures are so complex and multifaceted that they defy attempts at articulation.
At the same time, it’s a song about leaving the source and coming down to physical reality. As she told Rolling Stone in 2009: ‘I knew that “Winter” needed to be written, which represented not just the father, but the grandfather — Poppa, my mother’s father. So the positive male energies in my life, and also moments with men, with their disappointment in themselves and how that plays out. I wanted — I needed — the polar opposite, so I felt like this needed to go beyond the human mother. This needed to go back to ideas of Creatrix and that God is not just male, but of the Creator being female and male. So this is the feminine story coming down to earth, leaving this soul space and saying goodbye to Mother Creator as I go to Mother Earth. And the last thing is somebody leaves the light on.’
While ‘Mother’ is an incredible late album deep cut, the album is nonetheless a bit front-loaded. It begins with five amazing songs, but there’s a bit of a lull at the center of the record. The album’s shortest numbers are its most upbeat tracks, ‘Happy Phantom’ and ‘Leather’ — and while they are both very good and serve as necessary contrast, they pale in comparison to what preceded them. Sandwiched in between them is the album’s weakest track, ‘China’ — a cheesy piano ballad about a dissolving relationship with an inaccessible lover that was evidently inspired by Barbara Streisand.
It was the first song written for the album (in 1987, making it a leftover from the Y Kant Tori Read era, as is obvious from its subject matter), but ended up being one of the last songs to be added to the running order. It sits right at the center of the album, and while its inclusion makes sense from a pacing standpoint, I’m not entirely sure why she resurrected it. The lyrics reference ‘China’ both in the sense of the country and the dishes, but they aren’t quite as clever as they want to be — lines like ‘You build the great wall around you’ show the song’s age. ‘Tear in my Hand’ approaches the same topic in a much more interesting way which feels more stylistically aligned with the rest of the album (including the first of many references to her friend Neil Gaiman), but the arrangement still feels a bit more dated than most of the other material here, and it isn’t one of the album’s more memorable tracks.
The closing title track is the record’s epic — it’s a near-7min song with a cathartic three-part bridge, moving through multiple moods and levels of intensity. It explores rifts between people in an abstract way that makes it feel like one of the more fully realized examples of her mature lyrical style here (‘Yellow bird flying gets shot in the wing / Good year for hunters and Christmas parties / And I hate and I hate and I hate / And I hate elevator music / The way we fight / The way I’m left here silent’). It doesn’t let the listener in as easily as the rest of the record, but neither will most of her later work, and so it ends the album with an apt bit of foreshadowing.
The album’s most intense moment is the final song she wrote and recorded for it— its penultimate track, ‘Me and A Gun’, which is about her experience being sexually assaulted at knifepoint at age 21. She described this experience to Joe Jackson in 1994: ‘I’ll never talk about it at this level again but let me ask you. Why have I survived that kind of night, when other women didn’t? How am I alive to tell you this tale when he was ready to slice me up? In the song I say it was ‘Me and a Gun’ but it wasn’t a gun. It was a knife he had. And the idea was to take me to his friends and cut me up, and he kept telling me that, for hours. And if he hadn’t needed more drugs I would have been just one more news report, where you see the parents grieving for their daughter.
And I was singing hymns, as I say in the song, because he told me to. I sang to stay alive. Yet I survived that torture, which left me urinating all over myself and left me paralyzed for years. That’s what that night was all about, mutilation, more than violation through sex. I really do feel as though I was psychologically mutilated that night and that now I’m trying to put the pieces back together again. Through love, not hatred. And through my music. My strength has been to open again, to life, and my victory is the fact that, despite it all, I kept alive my vulnerability.’
After being unable to talk about the experience for seven years, she decided to own her experience and use it to raise awareness. As if singing about this wasn’t already brave enough, the track is a capella — unaccompanied voice, with no instrumentation to hide behind. Amos has cited Tracy Chapman as a big influence in changing her sound after Y Kant Tori Read, so I wonder if the decision to make an intense a cappella song was influenced by Chapman’s ‘Behind the Wall’. ‘Me and a Gun’ is similar, albeit even more personal.
The minor key melody and her delivery of it have a fittingly dissociated feel, while the lyrics dance around the topic just enough to give you the general feel of what happened. It expresses her hopes for the future, implies her contemplation of suicide in an indirect way that makes hit harder, and challenges rape myths, all while periodically returning to her need to escape the situation. It’s partially fictionalized in a way that feels very deliberate, as if she carefully crafted it to avoid being excessively graphic so that she would be able to frequently revisit it.
Recording this song was commitment enough to not running from her past, but she took it even further and made it a regular part of her live sets. A whopping 454 performances of it are listed on setlist.fm, mostly from the 90s — and that site hardly has a complete archive of her 90s tours. She was determined to make a statement, unflinchingly singing it every night while looking straight at the audience and yet fully inhabiting the song’s dissociated trance. She also started engaging in activism around this — she was the cofounder and first national spokesman of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), who run a crisis hotline that connects people who have experienced sexual assaults and domestic violence with local service providers.
‘Me and a Gun’ feels like the album’s core statement. As Elizabeth Sandifer wrote in 2020: ‘Much of the vapidity of Y Kant Tori Read comes from the fundamentally doomed contradiction of an artist whose internal landscape is dominated by one thing trying desperately to write about anything but that. Even Little Earthquakes has an odd relationship to it, spending most of its time processing adjacent thoughts and emotions… “Me and a Gun,” in other words, makes Little Earthquakes about something other than Amos getting her mojo back after recording a really bad first album. It’s why the album is so seminal and so landmark. Rape and survivorship simply weren’t topics pop music had considered in any confessional depth.’
Her willingness to tackle this taboo had a wide impact. A 2009 gender studies thesis by Deborah Peta Finding explored the attitudes this track engendered: ‘In examining the multiple audience responses to Tori Amos’ part-fictionalised, yet autobiographical, rape narrative, ‘Me and a Gun’, a picture emerges of authenticity as a far more complex notion to listeners (and other receivers of art) than more widespread media representations seem to suggest. Finally, in examining the narratives of Amos’ listeners, with regard to their own experiences, it becomes clear that Amos’ music, Amos herself, and Internet communities built up around Amos, are vital sources of support for those who have been traumatised by sexual violence.’
She also found that Amos’s listeners were far less likely to believe rape myths than the general public — and while it’s hard to say whether that is due to Amos educating her fans or her music simply attracting more socially progressive people, it seems likely that her brave expression opened many peoples’ eyes. It certainly led many to call Amos and share their stories, and it also opened the door for many other musicians to open up about their experiences in their music. She helped change the landscape, which has completely transformed since 1992 — opening up about such things feels far less taboo than it did back then.
Her bravery created a safe space for many people who had nowhere else to go. Sady Doyle described this in Bitch Media in 2011: ‘…Amos, who was both achingly, publicly vulnerable and openly defiant, fit most easily into a shadowy third category, feared by performers and lambasted by critics: the hysterical, shrieking female. It had claimed Sinead O’Connor before her, and would claim Fiona Apple after. But her fans loved the combination of public hurt and defiance. The story of the wounded ugly duckling turned rock-star swan spoke to women. It spoke to social outcasts. It spoke to survivors of sexual violence or abuse. And it spoke to LGBT people, especially young gay men, who had particular reason to connect with Amos’s recurring themes of religious repression and sexual shame, and who still constitute a large part of her fan base.’
‘To go to a Tori Amos concert was to seek catharsis. Her performances were known for being unpredictable and hugely expressive. There were lots of tears, there was lots of screaming, and sometimes both of them were coming from the stage. To some degree, the passion around Amos was disquieting because her performances asked the audience to surrender control, to commit themselves to experiencing huge, sometimes scary emotions, to leave the realm of rational thought behind and make intuitive connections between the words, the noises, and the sheer physicality of the woman on the stage, who might be grinding herself orgasmically against her piano bench or angrily clawing herself. Of course it made people uncomfortable; it was about leaving comfort zones behind, about surrendering inhibitions.’
Even without ‘Me and a Gun’, Little Earthquakes would still be an extremely brave record — vulnerable, courageous, and real. It’s interesting to contrast this with the Ross Robinson productions I’ve been reviewing, as those qualities are exactly what Robinson was truly to capture. This album tackles some some similar subjects to the ones you hear on his records — bullying, sexual assault, heartbreak, figuring out your sexuality — but it does so in a way that’s significantly more relatable because the emotional expression is so much more complex and nuanced. The resulting social impact was also much more unambiguously positive.
This reveals exactly what Robinson got wrong — the way to get people to reveal their true emotions and capture an honest performance isn’t to torture them and upset them — that just makes people angry and defensive, which are unsurprisingly the primary emotions he managed to capture on his albums. It’s the exact opposite — you need to make the artist feel comfortable enough to truly open up. Sometimes there’s even more power in a whisper than a scream. Little Earthquakes is an album of powerful whispers.
