In Praise of Tori Amos
(This is a love letter, not an album review.)
Middle-age has added two flaws to my growing list, both unavoidable. First, hairs of startling length growing out of my eyebrows, and second, nostalgia. I’ll speak no more of the former, but oh, nostalgia—the fondness with which I remember my teens is proof that I’ve forgotten most of what actually happened. I’m declaring this now, up front, because all that follows will stink of nostalgia. I can’t help myself any more than I can stop those damn hairs from growing.
First, the dry facts. Little Earthquakes is the debut solo album by the American singer-songwriter Tori Amos. I was freshly seventeen when it was released in the US — on February 25, 1992 — and I can stick a pin in mid-March when I first encountered it, late in my junior year of high school.
Oh, to have five minutes alone with that scrawny high school butthead. The choices I would caution against! The big decisions I would encourage! The permission I would give to just be. What a waste of daydreaming, this kind of hopeless reflection. No matter my present post-hoc regrets, though, I would happily sit back and watch that awkward teen walk into a music store and come out holding Little Earthquakes.
The three flavors of suburban music stores were well known to every middle-American nineties kid. Flavor one: funky eclectic — down on Grand River Avenue, across from the university. The decor was posters stapled on posters, the aroma was incense over musty carpet over weed, and the merchandise on offer were cassettes and CDs geared toward the savvy collegiate crowd, with enough stock to satisfy us skater kids too. The defining trope: hand-sharpied band names on the plastic CD dividers. My dream—to work there, or at the used bookstore up the block, with a whole section devoted to the Beats. Alas, any manager who took even half a glance at my skinny poser ass knew my true destiny. Fast food. Back of house.
Flavor two: Tower Records. Huge, busy, bright, clean, crisp. Promotional posters and listening stations. Over-marketed pop schmear. Tower Records was where (it seemed) half the people I knew were getting their CDs for free, benefit of a check-out system that was easy to beat, and the fact that everyone who loved music hated Tower Records, including their own staff.
Flavor three: picture Tower Records shrunk to fit in a half-sized, mid-mall storefront. Packed with stuff; no vinyl. Home to the amazing poster carousel, fulfilling the three foundational needs of hormonal teens: something to enhance your high (Dark Side of the Moon, Lord of the Rings), something to uh… no comment (Baywatch, Sports Illustrated swimsuit models), and something to proclaim both your deep emotive side and your awesome taste in music (The Cure).
The store I bought Little Earthquakes from was an exception to the above, and so not destined to survive for long. The strip-mall where it lived also housed the sandwich shop where I worked. I remember an aesthetic of neutral grey and wood veneer, like a late 80’s airport waiting room. Corporate-liminal. Shelf space was largely given over to classical and jazz — I guess the idea was to make the store look and feel like a Magnavox ad from Stereo Review magazine. The register, though, was operated by an intimidatingly attractive post-punk college student. Definitely older than me by a few agonizingly important years.
The meet-cute goes like this. I handed her Little Earthquakes. With the practiced grace of the professionally disinterested, her eyes slid from the CD to me and (without even the suggestion of a reaction) back to her register. Then she remembers she’s been directed to make small talk, so, “Buying this for your girlfriend?”
Huh, what? I didn’t — couldn’t — answer beyond a stammered “no” and I took my CD, receipt and bag, and got out of there. An eight-second encounter, maybe, followed by thirty years of unpacking it. Multiple realizations sprang from that moment:
- As with jeans, shoes and bedroom decor — there was music meant for girls and music meant for guys.
- I had just transgressed that boundary.
- This was not the first time I had done so (the play kitchen I got was a naive early example). Oh, well; the heart wants what it wants.
- Or, maybe, there’s more to unpack about all that? (Yes, yes, there is.)
- If I actually had a girlfriend, a CD would be a good gift.
- It was not entirely unimaginable that I could have a girlfriend.
No, friends, I never encountered the meet-cute again. As if. After all, this is about Tori Amos, and Tori was for me a secret, singular obsession. Utterly unshared until Under the Pink came out in 1994, when I realized that shared love of Tori was actually attractive to some women (realization six fulfilled!).
What I’ve been meaning to get to all along is that I played that CD. How to describe that, the first thirty or so listens of Little Earthquakes? Impossible. Impossible that this came as a second-ditch effort after the total bomb of Y Kant Tori Read. Impossible that this was “produced,” as in a bunch of musicians went into a room and pieced together a collection of chords, melodies, beats, and lyrics, then went to lunch.
These were not songs on an album. This was a cleaving of the world; a laying bare of secrets beneath the crust. This was the sacred feminine, finding space to be sing among the ravings of Old Testament white-bearded prophets. This was a Victorian attic scattered with yellow bones and lace, phantoms of sirens, whispering accusations and confessions, conjuring mythologies that solidified in the dusty air. Yeah. Seriously. It was at least twenty years before I could consider something like “Crucify” (Track 1) as being made. Transmitted, maybe; ritually pulled from the ether and bound to a CD.
What I most remember is physical. And I don’t mean hormonal; I’d been through that wringer already. This was a different kind of transformation; liberating in the most uncomfortable sense. Transcendent, and transgressive. It felt like a violation of propriety; like sneaking downstairs at midnight to find your prim grandmother having tea with Lilith and Medusa, laughing a brazen, throaty laugh that you’d never heard before. A dagger on the table. Cigar smoke in the air.
I remember the power of “Me and a Gun” (Track 11) in particular. I didn’t even know a song like this could exist, that a human experience could be presented so starkly, brimming with pain and power at once. “Me and a Gun” is a capella — soft, solo voice, mic’d so close that it’ll trigger ASMR. A part of me really wanted to turn it off. I remember that part of me; the part that was clinging to propriety; to the idea that I was normal in some important way, or that with some more effort I could be, or even to the idea that I knew what normal was. That normal was a thing you could be. That part of me, thirty years later (happy anniversary Tori), is now sulking in the basement.
The other part — the weird, neurodiverse, feminine part, the part that adores the unfathomable and indescribable, the vulnerable, quiet, trusting, affectionate me, the mythic me who was born in a deep stony well in a hidden glade in a sunless forest — well, I got out.
I now believe that no matter what, I would have got out eventually — Indigo Girls and Ani DiFranco were waiting close behind, after all; but Little Earthquakes did so much of the work all at once. It wasn’t a key, and there was no locked door. It was a wavering light, a swampy will o’ wisp leading to the edge of a labyrinth. A short walk, just 57 minutes and 11 seconds long, replayed an infinite number of times, and here I am, thirty years later, hopelessly, joyously, infinitely lost.
Music, man. What are you doing to my head? What complex cultural signifiers are translating wavelengths of sound combined with words that aren’t even good poetry into me sobbing into my pillow or whooping from the back of a pick up truck, or sweetening that first kiss to the point of drowning; even — wow — dancing unselfconsciously for a minute, so filled with the ecstasy of someone else’s everything?
I don’t understand, and so will not digress into the biochemistry or neurology of all this, just as I have no interest in memorizing the constellations of the night sky. I love all kinds of art (more love letters to come), and I’ve been moved many times in many different ways by paintings, movies, books, live theater, poems, sculpture, and the rest. But I’ve never been invaded, conquered, slowly and irrevocably terraformed as with Little Earthquakes, this alien spore coming down strange and pure from the night-plum sky.
