little earthquakes

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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Silent All These Years (live, 1991)

Silent All These Years (TV performance, 1991)

Silent All These Years (1992)

Silent All These Years (music video, 1992)

Silent All These Years (TV performance. 1992)

Silent All These Years (TV performance, 1994)

Silent All These Years (TV performance, 1996)

Silent All These Years (TV performance, 1997)

Silent All These Years (live, 1997)

Silent All These Years (TV performance, 1998)

Silent All These Years (TV performance, 2003)

Silent All These Years (live, 2005 official bootleg)

Silent All These Years (radio performance, 2007)

Silent All These Years (live, 2007, official bootleg, Tori set)

Silent All These Years (2012)

Silent All These Years (radio performance, 2014)

Silent All These Years (TV performance, 2017)

In many ways, it is Amos’s signature song. It’s not her biggest hit but it’s the song one turns to in order to encapsulate her. It was the one picked for rerelease as a single to benefit RAINN in 1997, the one she’s played on scads of TV and radio performances across her career, and the one picked as the leading single for the album in both the US and UK (even if the first UK release was titled “Me and a Gun,” that was track three on a four-track single that led with “Silence All These Years”). Even within the context of Little Earthquakes it’s clearly given an iconic status, its video being the one whose central visual image of Amos straining against the sides of a wooden crate got adapted as the album cover. 

Like any attempt to summarize an artist in a single song, it leaves lots out—indeed in many ways “Silent All These Years” is a highly atypical Tori Amos song, though that’s in many ways the way of singular songs, which are by their nature singular. But the song is in the end iconic and deeply relatable. Its chorus—“sometimes I hear my voice / and it’s been here / silent all these years”—captures an experience of discovering one’s previously unknown strength and vision that is near universal among women, and frankly not even that uncommon among men.

What is easy to miss in the face of this weight and impact is how utterly weird all of this is. Yes, the title drop is a big relatable moment that effectively captures an important experience in a way that has enormous cultural significance in the larger context of women in pop music. But let’s look to the other end of the chorus, where Amos calmly asks “what if I’m a mermaid / in these jeans of his with her name still on it?” Sure, the image of wearing your boyfriend’s old and mostly discarded jeans that have an ex’s name stitched on them is at least emotionally accessible, if not exactly a universal experience, but… a mermaid? 

I could go on—certainly the first verse gives several opportunities for extreme puzzlement. But my point isn’t to have a good laugh about how wacky Tori Amos is. For one thing, I don’t actually think that’s a fair description of her.…

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Mother (1992)

Mother (live, 1992)

Mother (live, 1996)

Mother (live, 2005, official bootleg)

Mother (live, 2007, official bootleg, Tori Set)

Mother (live, 2014)

“Mother” unfolds with strange formality, opening with a minute-long instrumental prelude in Cm before the song proper begins in Gb. (The official sheet music omits this entirely, beginning at the start of the main piano line.) It’s scarcely the only time Amos will use an approach like this—she’ll use the same trick next album on “Icicle,”for instance. But it grounds the song more in Amos’s classical training than anything else on Little Earthquakes, giving the song a strange and almost ritualistic feel when compared to anything around it. 

This fits the strange confrontation within it. “Mother” is structured around a relationship of authority—it opens in the imperative: “go, go, go, go now / out of the nest it’s time,” and with instructions to “tuck those ribbons under / your helmet be a good soldier.” But Amos is in no way content to play the submissive underling. The song’s narrative voice bleeds from mother to daughter, shifting midway through the first verse. And the daughter is far from compliant, keeping secrets and plotting her escape. 

Within this slippery dynamic, meanwhile, something is clearly very wrong. This comes through not in any clear flashes of trauma but in oblique shadows—the mother’s strangely cruel comfort in the first verse as she coos, “here here now don’t cry / you raised your hand for the assignment,” or the eerie description of a disconnected phone “dripping with blood and with / time and with your advice.” The result is unsettling and creepy, especially given Amos’s performance—“Mother” is the only song on the album that’s recorded as just Amos and her piano, and Amos works her way across the song’s odd, enjambed lines by offering unexpected and asynchronous crescendos between the vocal and piano lines. 

Talking about the song, Amos stresses its mystical origins, saying that it “came on a bit like a dream sleep. It was early morning when I made the way to the piano. I knew that ‘they’ were trying to show me something. A memory of ‘the fall.’ Not the one we’ve been taught, but the other side of the story, which is the belief of certain ancient mythologies.” Speaking later, she elaborated on this: “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.…

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Leather (live, 1991)

Leather (1992)

Leather (live, 1997)

Improv/Leather (live, 2003)

Leather (official bootleg, 2005)

Leather (TV performance, 2005)

Leather (official bootleg, 2007, Tori set)

Leather (live w/orchestra, 2012)

Leather (live, 2017)

The confessional mode of songwriting is full of pitfalls for a critic, and “Leather” offers us opportunities to topple into all of them. The song creates as aggressive an intimacy as is possible: “Look I’m standing naked before you,” it opens, immediately making its singer vulnerable with regards to the listener. From there we plunge into debasement: “don’t you want more than my sex? / I can scream as loud as your last one / but I can’t claim innocence.” There is an immediate sense of knowing more than we should—a feeling that we’ve been brought into a space we do not belong. 

It’s a trick, of course. To state the obvious, Amos is not standing naked before us. The line is a sly game of medium. “Look,” Amos proclaims in an entirely auditory form. “I’m standing,” she says on a recording that was already two years old when it was released to the public. “Naked before you,” she declares from a position that is almost certainly nowhere near the speaker her voice comes out of. Even in a live performance, the song is an exercise in baldly lying to the audience. To take its most semiotically dense iteration, at a 1997 benefit for the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network Amos sits on her piano bench and makes eye contact with the audience as she begins plonking the middle C note that begins the song. She bows her head, then waves briefly before sitting up and stopping to explain that the person she first sung it to is at the concert and that she hasn’t sung it to him since that time. She then lets out a single “ha,” smiles, plays the opening again, and then, clad in jeans, a black tank top, and a light red overshirt, dives into the opening line.

I recognize that I’m belaboring the point here, but without highlighting the intensity of the artifice involved in that line it’s impossible to quote something like her 2009 account of the song in Rolling Stone that “I think there was a side to me that was trying to—in the shedding—to also really collect my shadow portions. And I would go visit them and take these sides that I had judged. And one side that had been very crucified was the sexual side that did not yet understand erotic spirituality, did not know how to bring this into being. Very far away—years away from this. Little did she know when she was writing ‘Leather’ that we would be years and years away from knowing how to integrate that” without things going catastrophically wrong. And it’s even more dangerous to quote something like her 2001 interview with the UK queer magazine Boyz in which she talked about her life in LA in the years before writing “Leather” and says, “I didn’t want to be anybody’s guinea pig sexually.…

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