When I was nineteen, in my first year at university, I had a vivid dream telling me to go out and buy every single album by Tori Amos, and being a suggestible sort of person, I did just that. Her music changed my life, but no record more than Little Earthquakes, her first solo album, which shook my world. In fact, you could say it was a SEISMIC experience. (Buckle up, there’s plenty more where that came from.) It was like a mirror, reflecting back all the confusion, pain and exhilaration I felt as a young woman, and it was funny and sexy and vulnerable and FURIOUS. It felt like something I’d been waiting for all my life.
I interviewed Tori many years later – an almost out-of-body experience – and told her about my dream, and she mused: “I wonder if it were my father… trying to get another sale.” I knew her father was a Methodist minister because that’s one of the first things every good Toriphile learns. She grew up in the church, turning up to teach the children’s choir in red leather trousers and challenging the church elders on why there weren’t more women in positions of power in Christian theology. How could I not fall in love with her?
Tori’s questioning of organised religion is everywhere in her music and perhaps particularly in Little Earthquakes, which is thirty today . It’s a deeply personal album about God, sex and survival, which Amos often compares with a diary. The opener Crucify begins breathlessly with more than a touch of paranoia. “Every finger in the room/Is pointing at me/I wanna spit in their faces/Then I get afraid of what that could bring.”
As a nineteen-year-old student, when I found Tori – or she found me through that dream – I was all too aware of the chains she sings about in Crucify – the chains of being a good girl: the pressure to hand in the essay, achieve the grades, stay slim, write thank you letters, compile guilty lists, smile sweetly, sit in the chair and be good now… But I was also aware of something wilder, more fierce, in me, and the struggle between these conflicting forces throughout Little Earthquakes spoke to me. “Why do we, crucify ourselves, every day?/I crucify myself and nothing I do is good enough for you,” Tori sings. But who is the you? Maybe it’s her father, of course, or organised religion, or patriarchal society as a whole. Maybe it’s herself, her own impossibly high standards. Either way, she’s “looking for a saviour”, as the cliché goes, in all the wrong places.
Little Earthquakes often makes greatest-album-ever lists for good reason. Girl, the second track, is followed by Silent All These Years, followed by Precious Things, followed by Winter. Each of these songs is extraordinary – a little masterpiece – but they’re here, one after another, and every bit as powerful and relevant now as they were thirty years ago. Written in the third person, the chorus of Girl, a classic coming-of-age anthem, lingers in your head for days afterwards: “She’s been everybody else’s girl maybe one day she’ll be her own.”
Inspired by the story of the Little Mermaid, Silent All These Years belies the listener with its gentle, tinkly opening riff. There’s that tension between the good girl and the wild one again. It begins politely (“Excuse me, but can I be you for a while…”) but it builds and builds into something unstoppable. “It’s counterpoint, pure and simple,” Amos has said of her most requested song, which started life as a track she was writing for Al Stewart. It’s a song about finding your voice – and the cost of ignoring that call to arms.
“Years go by, will I still be waiting for somebody else to understand
Years go by, if I'm stripped of my beauty and the orange clouds raining in my head
Years go by, will I choke on my tears ’til, finally there is nothing left
One more casualty, you know we’re too easy, easy, easy.”
(Small sidenote: I wanted to use that as an epigraph for my first novel, The Girl Before You, but that didn’t happen in the end, though it’s not insignificant that the novel features a flame-haired beauty, not dissimilar to Tori, on the cover…)
Tori has been with me throughout my writing life. My very first published piece was a love letter to her almost twenty years ago (thankfully now pretty well hidden in the wilds of the internet) – and I could write a book about Little Earthquakes. In Winter, a tender song about paternal love, Amos proves it’s possible to rail against the patriarchy but love the father. Tear In Your Hand – the first song to reference her pal Neil Gaiman, who picked it as one of his Desert Island Discs – is nostalgia and yearning distilled, and contains the best bittersweet riposte to an ex (“Maybe she's just pieces of me you've never seen”). China, a delicate ballad, proved she could do more traditional love songs too (“Sometimes I think you want me to touch you/How can I when you build a great wall around you?”).
And then there’s the penultimate track, the point near, but not quite at, the end, where in a novel, you might find the dark-night-of-the-soul moment: Me And A Gun. The haunting a cappella song was inspired by the traumatic sexual assault that happened when Amos was twenty-one. It’s a difficult song to hear – Amos always seems to enter a trancelike state to sing it – because you know, to an extent, she has to go back there, and, as the listener, you have to go with her.
“You can laugh, it's kind of funny
The things you think at times like these
Like I haven't seen Barbados
So I must get out of this.”
I wasn’t to know, back then when I was nineteen, that I would go on to have my own encounter with a man and a gun in the years to come, nor that I would turn to Tori in the weeks, months and years that followed, but I guess the nature of songs we love is that they grow with us. We return to them, as we return to beloved books, and find something new every time.
Little Earthquakes closes with its title track – a reminder that it “doesn’t take much to rip us into pieces”. It is an empowering song, though, a slow-burning powerhouse that builds gradually and rhythmically to its, ahem, climax…
“Give me life,
Give me pain,
Give me myself again.”
It’s there – the answer to the question in Crucify about who is going to save us. We do it: we save ourselves, every time. Unless we’re lucky enough to find a flame-haired genius to guide us along the way.