MUSIC FILES - A Love Letter to Tori Amos (PART 1)
I remember when I first discovered Tori Amos, it was at age 14. I was at a record store in Camden, and a double-album boxset containing Little Earthquakes and Boys For Pele was in their sale section. I bought it, thinking a gal with her piano would be likely to make some lovely music. When I got home I placed Earthquakes into my walkman, and from that opening line...
"every finger in the room, is pointing at me. I wanna spit in their faces, but get afraid of what that could bring..."
... I knew I had found an artist that spoke to my soul, that had something to teach me. I had just come out of an intensive Pentecostal environment, where my budding queer sexuality meant my soul was damned, and my gentle sin ensured I was being sent to hell. Her fiery red hair matched her spirit and spoke to mine, her pain and joy came from this authentic place. I realised that what set her apart from others singing about the same topics was that she didn't just write about sadness or trauma or anger, she confronted it. Stared it down and danced with it. Seeing her play was its own revelation, I had never seen a musician play two piano's at once before. Her fingers dancing along the keys in complex arrangements as she straddled her piano stool and sang, performing with her entire being, like the songs wrapped themselves around her and bent her body to their will.
Tori Amos was born Myra Ellen Amos in 1963, and had also come of age in a conservative environment with a Methodist minister father in North Carolina. She spent a brief time in the 80's making the music that the record labels expected of her, putting the piano away and replacing it with guitars. She performed to make ends meet, and it was during one of these shows she offered a fan a ride home. He raped her, holding her at knifepoint, and the experience would be suppressed until she saw Thelma & Louise at the movies a decade later. A certain scene triggered a breakdown, and she composed Me And A Gun, lyrically altering the weapon used against her. Then the songs that would comprise Little Earthquakes began to take form.
"So I turned over my opinions to everybody else and refused to express what I was feeling in music and invented this character for myself... I forgot that if it isn't in my heart or if I'm not getting off on it, maybe people could tell. When Y Kant Tori Read bombed, I didn't have any respect for myself. I didn't even have a piano in the house. I'd trashed that before. So I rented this old upright and just started to write what I was feeling, and it became 'Little Earthquakes'".
So after seven years of rejection letters that she stuck to her wall, she finally scored a six-album record deal with Atlantic Records. Tori realised that Y Kant Tori Read wasn't the way forward for her, and through some negotiation tactics that would become a signature of her business savvy throughout her career, she was able to finally record and release Little Earthquakes in 1992. It was an album recounting a religious upbringing, the breakdown of love, and sexual assault. Though her voice drew comparisons to Kate Bush, sonically her music was unlike anything else heard before.
Her follow-up Under The Pink (1994) was predominantly about pushing back against the confines of institutionalised religion that were inflicted against women, attitudes that were all-pervasive, challenging notions of God and the church, and recounting sexual awakening (it also contains Tori's most famous single, Cornflake Girl. Then Boys For Pele (1996) came after a long-term relationship (as well as a brief affair) ended bitterly, and in the words of Tori the album was written to "reclaim her fire". Pele was followed by From The Choirgirl Hotel (1998), which was written in a haze of devastation amidst of her third miscarriage. Desperate to escape her increasingly suffocating deal with Atlantic she released a double album in 1999 To Venus And Back, which included a live album that contains some of her greatest performances. In 2001 after the birth of her daughter, she composed the beautiful and halcyon record Scarlet's Walk. Finally, over the following twenty years she would release another ten albums (American Doll Posse and Native Invader are stand out releases), with her next album due to drop this month. Overall, she never stopped being bold and brave, each album channelling rage, beauty, humour and fire in equal measure.
Tori is an exceptional piano player and performer (her live performances will have their seperate top ten one day), but also a powerful lyricist. Her lyrics are cryptic, but if you are tuned into her wavelength, they perfectly articulate the secrets and mischief of the slightly broken ones that don't fit into boxes. Were it not for Tori, I wouldn't have survived the homophobic abuse, broken hearts, sexual assault, and the ostracisation that comes when you are a passionate girl, unapologetic in all the very best ways. This list will be a little different to my other lists. Tori refers to all her songs as "girls", so I will approach it as a conversation with the music that healed me.
So, Tori’s five essential songs, to start with:
I remember being a shy and quiet teenage girl (though never weak). Sensitive, passionate, inquisitive, thoughtful and quirky. When you carry yourself throughout the world with compassion and kindness, it attracts the attention of those that carry themselves with hate and open wounds. You become a target for bullies and abusers, and you also observe a world indifferent to their behaviour. You become conditioned, thinking you are the one that must adjust and relent and submit. But then the opening notes of Silent All These Years are played to you by a red-head, and she sings lyrics like the ones that follow, accenting every second or third word with a whisper of ferocity:
Throughout this beautiful and calm track Tori's stunning vocal work and her uncomplicated piano arrangement are complimented by an orchestra. It weaves in and out of her verses and chorus, and that bridge... when Tori's harmonies, piano and instrumentation all swell together, the result is breathtaking. When I first heard it, something shifted in my heart and mind, inspiring me to find my own voice for the very first time.
The opening track of Tori's second album starts with a simple yet enchanting series of chords, as she recounts images of broken Americana. The notes are her signature. This was the first song where she experimented with structure in a real way, as the first two versus and initial chorus are nimble and perfectly lovely, displaying some of her best lilting harmonising so-far -
"some things, are melting now..."
Then... that chord change. My god. Her delicate voice work suddenly gives way to crashing guitars and roaring vocals and -
And then it resumes, to that calm and layered melody like nothing ever happened. I remember playing it to my best friend Aaron, who hadn't heard Tori before. Right at that moment in the song his head dropped as he mouthed the word "fuck", and I knew I had converted him to Tori for life. It remains one of my favourite opening tracks of all time.
Putting aside Beauty Queen, the opening intro attached to the album version of Horses, this is the song that beckons us into the beautiful, intense and disquieting world of Boys For Pele. This was the record that was always the true testing ground for Tori Amos fans, whether they were in it for the long ride, as tracks like the violent Blood Roses and Professional Widow were discordant, disobeying every rule and refusing to make us comfortable ("give me peace, love, and a hard cock"). There is still calm and breathtaking beauty hidden in the darkness, as she shows her vocal virtuosity in the rapid-fire final verse of Mohammad My Friend, alongside quirky, spirited songs like Talula and Caught A Lite Sneeze. She wrote love songs to Lucifer and stole back her fire from men that hurt her. It remains my favourite Tori Amos album to this day. As for Horses...
"I got me, some horses...
to ride on
to ride on..."
I remember being 19. My love lay down behind me, one arm wrapped around me as he breathed me in, in that familiar spot beneath my ear where my cascading honey-brown hair fell along the nape of my neck. Tori plays the arpeggio arrangement delicately, her voice a quiet whisper, with the more sonorous notes brief and quickly restrained, as if she is afraid to wake up something darker. His free hand ran soothingly along my arm and leg as we listened to Tori's lyrics... "they say that your demons can't go there... ". For us, those words became a cocoon, enfolding us in our own little universe, where we could find release from the usual chaos of our thoughts and the world. In this mythical world she conjures, we are never immersed in it, it's like she is describing what she can see on the horizon. The place she sung about is calm and peaceful, what he and I always were with one another, and woven in among these words, a promise:
"And if there is a way to find you I will find you..."
To understand my love of this song is to revisit the wild and untamed spirit that felt enlivened by the world ahead of her, eyes locked on adventures she was yet to have, people she was yet to love. Aside from the fact that "raspberry swirl" is Tori's euphemism for cunnilingus, it became my theme song as I dyed my hair brightest red and partied every weekend with the weird, wonderful queer freaks of the world. My shoulders thrust in time with the opening undulating beats and rhythmic bass, my head swinging from side to side while my hair fell about my face as Tori breathlessly orders us to "hey hey hey - let's go". Then her tone changes, as she sings...
"I am not your Senorita, I am not from your tribe...
... If you want inside her world, you better make her raspberry swirl..."
Then that rapturous chorus hits, the drums and fractured guitar kick in, the beats quicken. The piano work is not unlike the rock and roll of the 50's, yet when combined with the whirlwind of her synthesiser electronica and her band, its as though our own music has come back to us. A gift, from an alien red-head visiting us from a distant future-land. As the song raged on at whatever party or social gathering I was attending, my arms swayed in line with my body as my hips writhed, and I channelled all my energy into keeping up with her, jumping and dancing along with the chorus. It's a song that aligned with my mischief and sensuality. It let me feel nothing but my own ebullience and bare feet twirling on the ground as I danced till dawn.
These songs barely touch on what has been a twenty-two year relationship with the creative love of my life. She showed me kindness the first time I met her, when it was all too much and tears fell uncontrollably. She kissed me on the cheek and gave me a hug, and her eyes helped me remember to just breathe. My reaction made sense, I was 18 and the assaults and abuse she pulled me through still incredibly raw. But many years later, when I would meet her again as a free-spirited and independent 24 year old, I was composed and blissfully happy. She accepted my compliments with grace, and hugged me then too. I didn't need to tell her how far I had come since she last saw me, she somehow innately knew how to read us after meeting thousands of fans in the course of 30 years. As always though, she showed me kindness and warmth.
Next week, I look forward to exploring the final of my top ten, as well as my first thoughts on her latest album. Until then... thank you Tori. For everything you have taught me. 💋
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