boys in their dresses

CW: Rape

Me and a Gun (1992)

Me and a Gun (live, 1992)

Me and a Gun (TV performance, 1992)

Me and a Gun (live, 1996)

Me and a Gun (live, 1997)

Me and a Gun (official bootleg, 2007, Pip set) 

Ibid, video version

It is one of the most harrowing things in the history of pop music. The bulk of adjectives for it seem to fall short, fatally undermined by the fact that they’ve already been used for so many lesser songs. Brave? Raw? Powerful? Obviously. But all of these are understatements. Ultimately, the vocabulary of pop music begins to falter here. “Me and a Gun” exists in a different space than anything else. Alex Reed, writing about industrial music in Assimilate, notes that nose forms an extreme limit that you cannot progress past: there is simply a boundary past which you cannot create more or harsher noise. In its own way, “Me and a Gun” does the same thing. Its aesthetic project is closed definitively after four minutes; nothing else like this can ever be done except as a pale and frankly offensive imitation.

In January of 1985, a few months after moving to Los Angeles, Tori Amos agreed to give a guy a ride home after a show at a bar. He raped her over the course of several hours holding her hostage. He demanded that she sing hymns for him, which she did while literally pissing herself, listening to his threats of how he’d take her to share with his friends and then kill and mutilate her. Eventually, needing a drug fix, he let her go.

For years, Amos was unable to deal meaningfully with the experience. 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. But while in London in August of 1991, Amos went to see Thelma and Louise and found herself assailed by the memories of what had happened six and a half years earlier. Withdrawing into herself for several days, she wrote “Me and a Gun.”

It is easy to see “Me and a Gun” as a simpler thing than it is. Amos’s decision to arrange it a capella and its aggressively vulnerable autobiographical nature conspire to make it seem straightforward: a woman narrates the events of her rape. This obscures the degree to which the song is carefully crafted. To take the most obvious point, Amos’s rapist used a knife—Amos changed it to the more dramatic sounding title. And Amos makes a lot of careful choices about what to focus on. Obviously one cannot narrate one’s own rape without a degree of abjection, but Amos doesn’t really lean into that aspect of it—the detail of her urinating on herself, for instance, comes from an interview, not from the song.…

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Tear in Your Hand (1992)
Tear in Your Hand (live, 1992)
Tear in Your Hand (live, 1998)
Tear in Your Hand (TV performance, 2002)
Tear in Your Hand (official bootleg, 2005)
Tear in Your Hand (official bootleg, 2007, Tori set)
Tear in Your Hand (live, 2014)

Preludes and Nocturnes

We all know where this is going, but let’s start with the actual song: a comparatively uptempo breakup song. The temptation to make another Y Kant Tori Read comparison is obvious from the description, which makes the song all the more surprising given how radically far from that it actually ends up. There are obvious reasons for this. For one, “Tear In Your Hand” is, like most of Little Earthquakes, built around Amos’s piano, which offers a jaunty descending riff doubled by Amos’s initial “yai la la lai lai lai lai” vocal line. This is not a song of swaggeringly wounded pride or of pained yearning, but something altogether more trickster-like. Amos is teasing in her vocal, maintaining a sense of humor throughout, as with “I don’t believe you’re leaving cause / me and Charles Manson like the same ice cream / I think it’s that girl.” Amos is clearly hurt by the breakup, most obviously in the bridge’s “cutting my hands up / every time I touch you,” but has already obtained a position of ironic distance.

Musically, Amos describes the way she sought to keep the song relatively still despite its energetic performance: “I heard the music as a steady motion, no change really from verse and chorus, only the bridge that leads straight back like a loop to the same toll booth where you threw in some change to go around only to end up surrounded by the place you left,” suggesting that the departure and return gives a sense of perspective and little more. It’s a good structure, well-suited to the simultaneous emotional turmoil and stasis of a breakup, and slyly foreshadowed by the opening line: “all the world just stopped.”

But the bridge is not the first moment in which the musical steadiness is disrputed—that comes when the backing music cuts out momentarily while Amos sings, “if you need me, me and Neil will be / hanging out with the Dream King.” Neil, in this case is writer Neil Gaiman, and the Dream King is Morpheus, the lead character of his landmark Sandman series of comics. This invocation marks the first moment of Amos’s trickster role within the song—the first emotion other than her stunned confusion at the breakup, and in turn is the first instance of what Alex Reed has described as “Gaiman’s coinciding with a breaking free of patterns in Amos’s songs.”

A Doll’s House

Chronology is tricky here—ultimately the two phenomenon emerged in my life simultaneously but independently, a Bader-Meinhof phenomenon cross-cutting between the two. I unequivocally encountered Gaiman first, somewhere around 1995. A committed Douglas Adams fan left in the lurch by his failure to publish any books after 1992, I made the sensible lateral expansion into Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books following the release of the 1995 DOS-based adventure game for which former Doctor Who actor Jon Pertwee had done voices, which was enough to get me in the door.…

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Little Earthquakes (1992)

Little Earthquakes (live, 1992)

Little Earthquakes (live, 1997)

Little Earthquakes (live, 1998)

Little Earthquakes (live, 2003)

Little Earthquakes (live, 2007, official bootleg, Clyde set)

Little Earthquakes (live, 2014)

There are two approaches to choosing a title track for an album. One is to pick something that seems a thesis statement for the album, capturing its major musical and lyrical themes while not risking confusion by wanting to be a single. The other is  to pick something with a cool title. It is this latter approach that explains why an album dominated by fairly simply arranged piano ballads featuring confessional lyrics flecked with spots of idiosyncrasy is named after an austerely ominous song whose lyrics are basically wall to wall crypticness. 

Much of Little Earthquakes feels as though it appeared sui generis from nowhere save for the interior of Tori mos’s head. There are a few exceptions—the ruins and traces of Y Kant Tori Read and of the 80s at large lurk throughout the album. But for the most part, Amos feels profoundly singular. On top of that, Amos is historically extremely reticent to talk about her musical influences—one is left to infer them from what songs she chooses to cover, and given that her covers are often hostile takeovers rather than homages, this is an unreliable process at best. Nevertheless it bears mentioning that, excluding songs such as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that were first recorded as studio tracks, Amos’s third most common cover in live shows is The Cure’s “Lovesong,” which has shown up repeatedly on tours starting with Under the Pink and continuing through Native Invader. 

“Lovesong” is of course off of The Cure’s 1989 album Disintegration, which is by far the safest choice if you’re ever cornered by angry goths and told to name the best Cure album. And while it’s not quite clear that Amos namechecks the album in “Little Earthquakes,” given that the song belongs to the same set of recordings where she explicitly references Nine Inch Nails and Sandman, there’s an aggressive plausibility to the suggestion that Amos might have been thinking of an album that had only released its last single a few months earlier when she picked the word. 

The better case, however, is simply found in the “Little Earthquakes”’ instrumentation. Its sweeping waves of dark synthesizers and deep drums conjure something very much like the drowned and moody beauty of The Cure’s masterpiece. The intro to “The Same Deep Water As You” is probably the best direct comparison, but Amos isn’t engaged in any sort of blithe homage of the sort that “You Go to My Head” was for Prince. “Little Earthquakes” is not using the same soundscape as Disintegration, opting to frame its forboding majesty around Amos’s piano instead of sprawling washes of guitar. It’s the difference between imitation and inspiration, and the fact that Amos has made that leap speaks volumes about how much she’s progressed since Y Kant Tori Read.…

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Precious Things (live, 1991)

Precious Things (1992)

Precious Things (TV performance, 1994)

Precious Things (live, 1996)

Precious Things (live, 1997)

Precious Things (TV performance, 1998)

Precious Things (live, 1998)

Precious Things (live at Glastonbury, 1998)

Precious Things (TV performance, 1999)

Precious Things (live, 2003)

Precious Things (TV performance, 2003)

Precious Things (official bootleg, 2007, Tori set)

Precious Things (live, 2011)

Precious Things (2012)

Precious Things (live, 2014)

In September of 1990, Amos submitted an initial version of the album that would eventually be called Little Earthquakes. The track list was in several regards perverse, even given that Amos only had the Siegerson sessions to go on—most puzzlingly, “Mary,” and “Sweet Dreams,” both made it on while “Silent All These Years” and “Upside Down” both missed out. Atlantic rejected this version of the album, however, and so Amos went back to work.

With next to no budget left for improving the album, Amos found herself working at a home studio with her then-boyfriend Eric Rosse. They brought in a handful of session musicians including Steve Caton, Amos’s guitarist from Y Kant Tori Read, and Amos set out to write a new batch of songs. The songs from these sessions generally skew a bit heavier than the Siegerson sessions—Amos’s piano is backed by Caton’s guitar on all of them, and they make much heavier use of conventional drums. This does not mean that they were poppier per se—it’s notable that none of the album’s four videos came from these sessions—but they marked a clear effort to make the album harder and to give it a bit more of an edge.

Even among these songs, however, “Precious Things” stands out. Indeed, there are few if any collections of songs that “Precious Things” would not stand out among. It’s a chilling piece, flush with both fury and emotional vulnerability. This combination is not unprecedented in pop music, but it’s most commonly associated with the genre of breakup songs. “Precious Things” is not a breakup song, although that’s not the worst starting point for understanding what it is.

Like a breakup song, “Precious Things” is at its core an exorcism. The emotional engine of a good breakup song comes from the push and pull between the singer’s anger/contempt and the singer’s pain/sorrow. Its central paradox is that the singer still cares enough about whoever they’re disavowing to be singing an impassioned song about them. Getting over someone is manifestly not the same thing as being over them. And this is the same dynamic at the heart of “Precious Things.” Its furious plea to “let them bleed / let them wash away” is undermined before it begins by the description of these things as “precious.” The song seeks to expunge, but the nature of this is that whatever is being rejected must at the moment of rejection have its teeth in you. “Let them break their hold on me” can only be said from within their grasp.

But again, “Precious Things” is not a breakup song; its targets are bigger than that.…

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A fitting entry for a day I’m snowed in with a foot of snow. Anyway, quick update about where we stand on Doctor Who Series 12 reviews, as it’s just under a month until it debuts. The answer is that we are very, very far from them—the Patreon is at its start of month lull due to declined pledges, but as it stands we’re over $100 from the $800 tier where I’ll do Series 12 reviews. If you’d like me to howl into the void about Chibnall Who, you’ll want to go to Patreon and fix that. And in the process you’ll unlock 26 more Dalek Eruditorum entries.

Winter (live, 1991)

Winter (1992)

Winter (music video, 1992)

Winter (TV performance, 1992)

Winter (live, 1997)

Winter (TV performance, 2003)

Winter (live, 2005, official bootleg)

Winter (live, 2007, official bootleg, Tori set)

Winter (radio performance, 2009)

Winter (2012)

Winter (live, 2017)

Fathers are, of course, a standard of women’s art, whether about an invented relationship (“Papa Don’t Preach”) or an authentic one (“Daddy Lessons’). And traditionally there is a fraught tone to these. The character changes—the father can be treacherous, unreliable, abusive, authoritarian, or any number of other sins. But the basic dynamic is there—a patriarchal authority that must on some level be reckoned with. And then there is “Winter.”

The relationship between Myra Ellen Amos and Edison McKinley Amos is one of the most fascinating in pop music. It should be simple: he the rebel bent on reclaiming the feminine divine from the patriarchal Christian god, he the servant of that same god. And that’s more or less how it plays out in any number of songs—consider “Upside Down” and its tossed away claim that “my daddy would scream” at the idea of an interracial relationship, or Amos’s chanting howl to “wash me clean daddy” in 1997 performances of “Precious Things,” or literally the entirety of “Icicle.” 

The only thing missing is the actual tense relationship between the Amoses. In fact Ed Amos is consistently supportive of his daughter, and has been throughout her life, from chaperoning her as she played Georgetown gay bars in her teens to any number of comments to the press in which he speaks warmly of his daughter’s career. This is not, to be clear, because he’s a radically progressive Christian. By all appearances he’s solidly moderate—Amos has spoken about her father’s support for the civil rights movement, but also made wry comments about how he’s evolved to seeing gay people as individuals instead of as a homogenous mass of “the gays.” Instead there’s a sort of wry pragmatism to his assessment of his daughter—one rooted in a profound respect for her ability. The relationship is perhaps best summed up by a comment Amos attributes to him in several interviews to the effect of “what would you have written about if I had been a dentist?” 

And so we get the bemusing paradox of Amos penning a disorienting and sinister piece of musical ritual about the maternal while her song about her father is warm, sentimental, and loving.…

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Happy Phantom (demo, 1990)

Happy Phantom (live, 1991)

Happy Phantom (1992)

Happy Phantom (live, 2001)

I’m Not Gonna Fuck This One Up/Happy Phantom (live, 2007, official bootleg, Tori set)

Happy Phantom (live, 2014)

A slender, even whimsical doodle of a song, “Happy Phantom” sees Amos larking about on the occasion of her death, or more accurately its immediate aftermath. This, as Amos explains it, came from the collaborative interplay of the rest of her faery circle, which collectively “decided we needed to hang out with death for a while.” Speaking nearly twenty years later, Amos rationalized this as a need for a measure of ego death: “the image that I had created for whatever reason, had to die. If so, she balked big time in crafting the song. By and large, however, other options present themselves.

The song is simple enough—the second shortest on the album, coming in an entire second longer than “Leather,” it uses each of its verses deliberately, establishing a concept, adding depth to it, and finally subverting it. It opens with a jaunty and bluesy piano line which Amos plays with a loud and slightly out of control sounding abandon. The vocals, meanwhile, start off with Amos proclaiming that if she dies then she’ll become the eponymous happy phantom, embarking upon a mirthful post-existence of naked nun-haunting. Amos imagines her afterlife is a sort of eternal celebrity gala—Judy Garland schmoozes with Siddhartha Gautama at the opera while Confucius boldly works the crossword by pen. (It’s notable, albeit in a very white new-agey way, that Amos picks two non-western religious figures as inhabitants of her afterlife.) And Amos is wholly enthused about this, offering a rousing singalong chorus in which her and our approaching spectralities get a firm and unequivocal “woohoo.” 

Amidst the revels, however, there’s an ominous chill appropriate to the song’s status as a ghost story. The cheery chorus gives way in its last line to a cold and empty space as Amos intones, “the sun is getting dim / will we pay for who we’ve been,” abruptly inviting in not only all the judgments and shame of organized religion, but the end of the world to boot. And the last verse continues the move towards pessimism as Amos imagines a surviving lover and frets that they will move on and eventually cease missing her, glumly asking “do we soon forget the things we cannot see?”

From this and a final, slightly more downbeat chorus, the song rallies for one last deeply ambivalent frolic, with Amos repeatedly trilling “and if I die today” as the piano grows ever more excited. But by this point the joy and enthusiasm has curdled that the effect is an unsettling ambivalence, so that the afterlife’s playground-like nature exists without actually altering the fundamental scariness of death.

“Happy Phantom” is also notable for being the first appearance of John Philip Shenale, credited here as Phil Shenale. On “Happy Phantom” his contributions are restricted to “finger cymbal and keyboard programming,” but he will go on to work arranging strings and orchestral parts for every subsequent Tori Amos album save for To Venus and Back and The Beekeeper, including taking lead roles on Gold Dust and Night of Hunters.…

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