little earthquakes

Crucify (live, 1991)

Crucify (TV performance, 1991)

Crucify (1992)

Crucify (music video, 1992)

Crucify (single mix, 1992)

Crucify (Top of the Pops, 1992)

Crucify (TV performance, 1992)

Crucify (TV performance, 1993)

Crucify (live, 1998)

Crucify (TV performance, 1999)

Crucify (TV performance, 2002)

Crucify (live, 2003)

Crucify (official bootleg, 2007, Tori set)

Crucify (radio performance, 2009)

Graveyard/Crucify (TV performance, 2015)

There is a teenage girl, though she doesn’t know it. I don’t remember how she came to Little Earthquakes. More likely than not, it was recommended to her by someone at CTY, the academic summer camp she went to and met all the other awkward teen weirdo nerds, no small portion of which, it turned out, were self-closeted queers just like her. That or she just saw mention of Tori Amos online in discussions of other music she was into, which, alongside a smattering of the contemporary alternative scene, was mostly female singer-songwriters.

Sitting in her bed, she presses play on the CD. It’s immediately clear that Amos fit the bill of her taste. But it’s just as immediately clear that there was more to this than merely being “her thing.” The first forty-five seconds of “Crucify” are an exercise in quiet tension. Like “Take to the Sky,” it opens with a series of open fifths on the piano, this time played individually between kicks of a drum. The drum adds a sense of ominous weight, while the chords, in their solitude, sound hollow and anxious without their thirds. The song moves swiftly into its prechorus, where the piano begins a bunch of yearning runs that seem to climb up towards some higher ground before breaking and receding. 

The girl does not consciously notice any of this. Her hands burnt by childhood Catholicism, by fourteen she’s become an atheist with neopagan sympathies. Like her gender, these are not a thing she thinks to express. Her parents don’t want a rebellious daughter; they don’t even want a rebellious son. In a year or two, she will come out at school as bisexual, get outed to her parents when someone called the house to rat her out, and be told flatly by her mother, “no you aren’t.” When that’s all that being yourself was going to get you, what’s the point of figuring out who that was?

So obviously what draws her attention are the lyrics. The verse’s description of anxiety and public castigation resonates with her less than it someday will, but the prechorus is something else entirely. “I’ve been looking for a savior in these dirty streets / looking for a savior beneath these dirty sheets.” She isn’t sure what exactly has arrested her. Subsequent efforts at analysis will unpick why the lines work—the way in which Amos uses wordplay to anchor a sharp turn between a relatively standard Christian image of finding god in materially impoverished places and an image that’s implicitly rooted in a rigorously unglamorous sense of the carnal. It might even be that simple for her, though still doesn’t know to phrase it that way.…

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Distance/China (demo)*

China (live, 1991)

China (1992)

China (video, 1992)

China (television performance, 1992)

China (television performance, 1994)

China (official bootleg 2007, Tori set)

China (live, 2009)

China (live, 2015)

An oddity on Little Earthquakes, “China” is a holdover from the Y Kant Tori Read era, where it was recorded under the name “Distance” on a demo tape alongside “Etienne” and “On the Boundary.” This fact makes almost immediate sense when you think about the song, which is about an unsatisfying relationship, in marked contrast to anything else on Little Earthquakes, but very much like most of Y Kant Tori Read. Indeed, its original title played this up further, putting the emphasis on its subject—emotional distance in a relationship—instead of on the deftly shifting metaphor of China, which opens the song in the sense of a country, but in the second verse shifts to china in the sense of dishes.

It’s certainly possible to make too much of this history—the song was, after all, not actually recorded for Y Kant Tori Read, and may well have been deemed musically unsuitable for the project. But it also opens the tantalizing possibility that the Y Kant Tori Read songs were always potentially a lot closer to Little Earthquakes than is assumed. We already noted the degree to which “Etienne” and “Fire on the Side” could have been pressed into service as Little Earthquakes songs, but could things like “Fire on the Side,” “Floating City,” or even something like “Fayth” have thrived as piano-centric pieces? Certainly their later live renditions suggest it possible.

The more baffling flipside, however, is imagining “China” as an overproduced rock mess, given that it is in practice one of the most delicate songs on Little Earthquakes. (Only “Me and a Gun” feels sparser, and, well, “delicate” is not the word for that song.) It ties “Crucify” for the most credited musicians on the album (although two songs have orchestras), but these are all just adding textures in the background of a simple, downbeat piano ballad. It’s worth comparing to “Mother,” the lone song on the album to actually be a straight piano/vocal track, but one that is full of crescendos and moments in which Amos’s vocal take begins to clip the mic. “China” swells occasionally, but save for a couple seconds interlude around the three minute mark there’s not a single moment of aggression or bite anywhere in the song, and imagining otherwise is difficult. It’s worth noting the 1991 Montreux performance, in which this interlude comes with a vocal line in which Amos twice barks “you love to hit me boy” while smashing on the piano before the song slows down again, an addition that practically ruins the song, not least because domestic violence is an utterly shocking escalation for a song that had previously been about emotional withdrawal from a relationship. (The line is not, as some have speculated, a holdover from the Y Kant Tori Read version, or at least it doesn’t appear on the lyric sheet for the “Distance” demo.)…

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