Little Earthquakes: 20 Years Later

Everybody who reads this blog knows that I LOVE Tori Amos—emotive, confessional singer-songwriter; kick-ass pianist; and musician extraordinaire. I was hanging out in Ellen's dorm room freshman year, and her roommate Jen was listening to something. I asked who it was, and she said Tori Amos. I don’t remember which song it was, but it was love at first listen. I have since bonded with my high school friend Kristen over Tori, and she is helping me blog today as we listen back to her solo debut album Little Earthquakes which came out 20 years ago last week or so (we both got a little behind).

In 1986 (back when I was born), Tori formed an ‘80s hair band Y Kant Tori Read which released a self-titled album in 1988. It was a commercial flop and the band disbanded. Tori reinvented herself as the girl with her piano, and Atlantic Records shipped her off to England where they hoped she would have more success as the English are more welcoming of eccentric performers. She is after all the musical daughter of Kate Bush, and there were some at Atlantic wanted her to be a female Elton John.

In 1992 Tori Amos released Little Earthquakes and helped usher in the wave of ‘90s alternative female singer-songwriters (though some like Ani DiFranco and Sarah McLachlan had already released albums by this time). It is an emotionally raw album exploring such issues as her religious upbringing, search for identity, sexuality, and rape—a series of little earthquakes. The album was a critical, artistic, and commercial breakthrough. Within a year it was certified gold, in 1995 it was certified platinum, and in 1999 double platinum. In 2002 Q Magazine named it the fourth greatest album by a female artist, right after Bush’s Hounds of Love. It remains one of her most revealing and accessible albums (and my "desert island" record). To celebrate its 20th Anniversary, Kristen and I are going to go through the album track by track (in a format shamelessly borrowed from The Critical Condition and Low Resolution), and while the music videos and outfits may be firmly stuck in the early '90s, I think the music itself has a more timeless quality.

Please keep in mind that neither of us are professional critics in any way, not to mention that music criticism is extremely difficult. Besides, we don’t have much objectivity when it comes to Tori Amos.

Crucify

Greg and Kristen’s Key Lyric: I know a cat named Easter / he says, will you ever learn / you’re just an empty cage girl / if you kill the bird

Greg: In the very first track Tori Amos takes on religion, one of her primary concerns throughout her career from “God” to “Past the Mission” to “Father Lucifer” to “Beulah Land” to . . . you get the idea. I actually wrote about Tori Amos and religion in my unofficial college dissertation “Unprodigal Daughters.” The lyric I chose is about the religious dichotomy between body and soul. Throughout the song, Amos infuses religious imagery, particularly that of the cross, in a song where Tori gets to play the victim, crucifying herself because she's never good enough, as defined by others. At the end, though, she decides she will no longer crucify herself.

This song really highlights the piano, Amos’s instrument of choice. Here the piano is lush and melodic with a driving drum beat. In the beginning, this was one of my all-time favorites, though it's not quite so high anymore. Still there’s a lot going on here; it’s not only a strong song, but as the first track it challenges and provokes the listener. From the beginning you know this is something special.

Kristen: It’s not surprising to me that Tori’s first solo album begins with such vivid religious imagery. As the daughter of a pastor, she no doubt knew how powerful this imagery can be. My personal opinion is that the song starts much stronger than it ends. The beginning sets up a specific instant and the piano is, as Greg noted, “driving.” As the song progresses however, the repetitive “crucify ourselves/myself” wears on me and the piano is all but lost. For me, this song opens the album not because it’s the strongest, but because it tells us what’s to come. Tori’s album continues unapologetically through a series of uncomfortable topics without due reverence (“Happy Phantom” comes immediately to mind). Why should she, after all, crucify or here, conform or censor herself on an album all her own?

Greg’s Rating: 8 Little Earthquakes (out of 10)
Kristen's Rating: 6 Little Earthquakes

Girl

Greg’s Key Lyric: well I’m not seventeen / but I’ve cuts on my knees / falling down as the winter / takes one more CHERRY TREE
Kristen’s Key Lyric: she’s been everybody else’s girl / maybe one day she’ll be her own

G: This feels like one of the more minor songs from the album, but I don’t think it’s filler. In fact, I almost never skip any of the songs when listening to the entire album. Lyrically, this may be one of the more obscure songs from LE. Why isn’t Amos singing in her usual first person? Who is this girl—who has been everybody else’s girl but not even her own person—what is her relationship to Tori? The percussion creates a hypnotic rhythm till things get musically interesting and lyrically surreal during the bridge—a brief surge of independence—and then it is subsumed again by the repetitive structure. But perhaps there’s hope, perhaps one day she’ll be her own girl.

K: The idea that you can exist as someone other than yourself “she’s been everybody else’s girl/ maybe one day she’ll be her own” is a universal ontological crisis. Who am I? and Am I the person I’m supposed to be? The idea that women should be obedient "'sit in the chair and be good now'/and become all that they’ve told you” resonates well as women were historically raised to be not their own selves, but their husbands’ property. Even post-suffrage & Title IX, this idea lingers, especially for those who choose a conventional path.

What I have always wondered is whether Tori is her own girl, calling out to a friend, or whether this song, although in third person and with lines to hint the girl spoken of is not Tori, e.g.“my image under her thumb” is another song like "Crucify," where Tori asks her listeners, but also herself, why do we conform?

At the end of the day, my favorite part is the bridge. I once made an MP3 loop of just the bridge and listened to it as part of my morning playlist.“Dreams with the flying pigs.” Excellent.

G's Rating: 6 Little Earthquakes
K's Rating: 7 Little Earthquakes

Silent All These Years

Kristen’s Key Lyric: so you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts / what’s so amazing about really deep thoughts?
Greg’s Key Lyric: your MOTHER shows up in a nasty dress / it’s your turn now to stand where I stand / everybody looking at you / here take a hold of my hand

G: Back when Amos was playing in Marriott hotel lounges, she was trying to place songs with people. Tori originally wrote this song for Al Stewart, “and I went to Eric [Rosse], who I was with and who partly produced Little Earthquakes, and he didn’t produce this bit so he was totally objective. And he looked at me and said, ‘You’re out of your mind. That’s your life story.’ And I went, ‘Oh.’ So needless to say, Al Stewart didn’t get that song” (VH1 Storytellers). The song is about finally finding your voice and standing up for yourself. It begins with this minor key thing that repeats throughout the song, what Amos calls “the bumble bee piano tinkle.” But then we get to the bridge, and what a bridge it is! It gets me every time. It’s just gorgeous, especially with the layered vocals. This was the very first Tori Amos song I downloaded, and I burned it onto a CD and played it in my car. It’s still one of my favorites.

K: This is the song that creates Tori fans. It’s my favorite on the album, and one of my favorites of all time. How glad I am that Tori found her voice! (Even if, as I have only just learned from Greg’s comment, the song is not about her.) I think it’s also noteworthy that Tori works to help women who are victims of sexual abuse and rape find their voices again through RAINN.org.

Although the piano in the song is excellent, it’s the lyrics that get me every time. It’s amazing how perfectly absurd comments (e.g. “what if I’m a mermaid” and “been saved again by the garbage man” string together to infuse poignancy into the song.

And finally, just because I enjoy it so much, I love Tori’s jealous statements to those breaking her heart. It’s so different from the anger you’d expect from Alanis Morrisette or Fiona Apple. In this song it’s “so you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts/what’s so amazing about really deep thoughts?”I also love “you're off to the mountain top/I say her skinny legs could use sun” from “Putting the Damage On.” Ah, Tori! How many times I thought these things when I was dating!

G’s Rating: 10 Little Earthquakes
K's Rating: 10 Little Earthquakes

Precious Things

Greg’s Key Lyric: I wanna smash the faces / of those beautiful BOYS / those Christian boys / so you can make me cum / that doesn’t make you Jesus
Kristen’s Key Lyric: no one cared / to tell me where the pretty girls are / those demigods / with their NINE-INCH nails / and little fascist panties / tucked inside the heart of every nice girl

G: Back in the heydays of MySpace, I once took a What-Tori-Amos-Song-Are-You? quiz, and this song was my result: “School, Sex, Religion. All disappointments. Let them bleed.” I thought that result was quite perfect. Here Amos attacks the piano keys with frenzied control. In the album version there’s a (keyboard?) effect that sounds like a rain stick which is perfect as this song is a storm of frightening intensity spinning from deep personal hurt and rage. When Tori shrieks “Iiiiiiiii” into the mike, I get chills.

K: This song holds the anger you expect from a female ‘90s alternative artist. Tori reflects back on what should have been precious things in her life: school, sex, religion, and particularly childhood friends, and, as Greg says, finds them disappointing. The song itself is powerful, but I dislike its placement. “Silent All These Years” leaves me on such a high, and “Precious Things” is so angry and depressive in comparison. I suppose this was done on purpose. Little Earthquakes gives no one rest, and does tend to disrupt the highs. [G's Note: I think LE is actually perfectly structured: it never gets bogged down in sentimentality, it never stays angry for too long, and it keeps you on your toes!]

Greg’s Rating: 9 Little Earthquakes
K's Rating: 6 Little Earthquakes

Winter

Greg’s Key Lyric: SKATING around the truth who I am / but I know Dad the ice is getting thin
Kristen’s Key Lyric: when you gonna make up your mind / when you gonna love you as much as I do?

G: This may be the best song from the album and one of the best songs of her entire catalog. The song is like a Russian music box. In this video, Tori says it’s for her dad, and it takes her back to the vulnerable child, her father, memories, the past becoming present. It reminds me a bit of this line from Eliot’s The Waste Land: “Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow.” But the snow melts, memory and desire mix, children outgrow their fathers (but never fully), things change, and the horses forge on ahead.

K: Tori explicitly says this song is about her dad and her childhood. I think, though, it can be extrapolated to the trust we place in anyone we love, or even, to continue the religious themes Tori’s music suggests, in deity. It is interesting to me that in most imagery, we consider Winter as the end or death, whereas, here, it represents a suspension of time. Spring is coming and things “are gonna change so fast.” The little earthquakes theme might be getting old in my comments, now, but here is a peaceful moment where Tori prepares before another earthquake hits.

G’s Rating: 10 Little Earthquakes
K's Rating: 9 Little Earthquakes

Happy Phantom

Kristen’s Key Lyric: the HAPPY phantom has no right to bitch
Greg’s Key Lyric: they say Confucius does his crossword with a pen / I’m still the angel to a girl who hates to SIN

G: This is a jaunty, lilting song about—what else?—death! Tori joyously proclaims that the time is getting closer to become a ghost, one who will never need umbrellas and can haunt the school nuns of her youth. However, the rapture occasionally gives way to somber introspection: will her lover forget her once she’s dead? will she pay penance for who’s she been?

K: I laugh when I hear this song. I like to think Tori was having a good day when she wrote “And if I die today I’ll be the happy phantom.” As unrepentant as she is, I don’t know what to think when she asks “will I pay for who I’ve been?”

G's Rating: 7 Little Earthquakes
K's Rating: 6 Little Earthquakes

China

Greg and Kristen’s Key Lyric: china decorates our table / funny how the CRACKS don’t seem to show / pour the wine dear / you say we’ll take a holiday / but we can never agree on where to go

G: Of all the songs on Little Earthquakes this is the most straightforward ballad featuring gorgeous piano work and string orchestration. The tagline for the film The Painted Veil (which takes place in China!) is “Sometimes the greatest journey is the distance between two people.” Originally titled “Distance” and the first song completed for the record, this is the story of a couple who shares a bed but couldn’t be farther apart. Even if they travel from China to Mexico to New York, they will never bridge the gulf of everything that goes unsaid or breach the defensive walls they each build to rival the Great Wall.

K: I like this song, again, for its lyrics. The transition from the country China to the table china to the individual who has built the great wall around him/herself. Awesome. I also love the music. This is one of only a handful of songs where Tori’s piano is soothing and an added bit of percussion takes care to keep the song going.

G's Rating: 8 Little Earthquakes
K's Rating: 8 Little Earthquakes

Leather

Greg’s Key Lyric: look I’m standing naked before you / don’t you want more than my sex?
Kristen’s Key Lyric: I could just pretend that you love me

G: One of the minor cuts from the album—it’s the shortest and may be the most ambiguous--I’ve always felt this song has a certain cabaret/burlesque feel to it. A smoky little song about realizing the other person wants you only for your body (or is it?). So when you can’t blame the weather, when the love is gone, when nothing else matters, then it's time to “hand me my leather” and move on.

K: I admit that this is one of the songs on the album I’m prone to skip. Greg nails it with his cabaret/burlesque feel. You can just see the performer’s knees bob with each staccato note. In that limbo between realizing a relationship is over and actually ending it, you start to see the other person and the relationship you have with that person with a much more critical eye. I think that’s where Tori’s at here.

G's Rating: 6 Little Earthquakes
K's Rating: 4 Little Earthquakes

Mother

Kristen’s Key Lyric: somebody leave the light on / just in case I like the dancing / I can remember where I come from
Greg’s Key Lyric: I walked into your dream / and now I’ve forgotten / how to dream my own dream

G: This song, which features only the acoustic piano and Tori’s vocals, has always seemed to me to be about the complex and even fraught relationships that daughters and mothers sometimes have. It could also be about marriage and identity. Tori says it comes from the untold story of The Fall: “Mother changed me because I began to remember, where I believe, we come from” (Little Earthquakes Songbook).

K: To me, this song is about the risks we take as we age and venture away from our homes and the protection of our mothers. What if we forget where we’ve come from, or how to get back “bread crumbs lost under the snow.” Particularly if we get caught up in the new experiences “just in case I like the dancing.” I once or twice wondered if part of this might relate back to Tori as she started to find fame.

G's Rating: 7 Little Earthquakes
K's Rating: 9 Little Earthquakes


Tear in Your Hand

Kristen’s Key Lyric: maybe she’s just pieces of me / you’ve never seen
Greg’s Key Lyric: maybe it’s time to wave goodbye now / caught a ride with the moon / I know, I know you well / well better than I used to

G: This song is stunning, and one of my personal favorite songs of all time (only “Cooling” has more plays in my iTunes library). From the very first notes, I sigh and smile and feel happy of myself. The song is about the end of a relationship and all of the attendant and contradictory emotions surrounding that, yet the music is not dirge like or overly mournful. It goes from verse to chorus to the bridge or two and then loops back to the chorus. Tori says in the end you’re right back where you started, but by taking the loop you can see finally see where/what that place is: “some sadness, a whole lot of cornfield, and a puddle” (Little Earthquakes Songbook).

One of my favorite things about this song is the Neil Gaiman reference: “if you need me, me and Neil’ll be / hangin’ out with the DREAM KING / Neil says hi by the way.” Tori was deep into The Sandman comics at the time, and the story goes that she placed a demo tape of Little Earthquakes with him—tapes he usually rerecords over—but for whatever reason he listened to this one, loved it, didn’t even catch the Neil reference initially, and called her up. They felt a deep kinship and have been friends ever since. Dream’s sister, Delirium, is even based in part on Tori Amos. Anyway, I once saw Neil Gaiman and had him sign my copy of The Sandman with “Hi by the way,” and it just makes me indescribably happy.

K:I also love the Neil reference (though my personal favorite is from “Space Dog” on Under the Pink.) [G's Note: "Space Dog" 4 Evah!] Tori and her writer friend/confidant Neil sometimes mention each other in their works. (See the bottom of this page for a complete list: hereinmyhead.com/neil). If I ever write anything famous, I’m going to mention my friends, too!

This song doesn’t seem to hold the same power for me that it does for Greg. After “China” and “Leather”, and even to a lesser extent, “Mother”, it makes sense that there is a breakup song on the album. I do like its treatment, that it’s not a “Precious Things” remix, but instead full of the lame excuses “cause me and Charles Manson like the same ice cream” and “maybe she’s just pieces of me you’ve never seen.” Mostly though, it captures the sadness that comes in those first moments as you breakup “All the world is danglin’ dangling'...danglin' for me darling.”

G’s Rating: 10 Little Earthquakes
K's Rating: 8 Little Earthquakes

Me and a Gun

Kristen and Greg’s Key Lyric: you can laugh / it’s kind of funny / things you think times like these / like I haven’t seen BARBADOS / so I must get out of this

G: Perhaps the biggest seismic wave of the album, this a capella song is about Tori’s own rape after a show at a club, though it wasn't until after watching Thelma & Louise that she wrote it. If I ever skip a song, it’s usually this one, only because it’s such a difficult song to listen to. Here’s Amos’s quote, “the hardest part is performing it every night because, although I know I’m safe, a part of me has to go to that place to sing it. And what this whole process has taught me is, I’m not a victim. Although when I go in and sing it every night, there’s a certain energy I bring to make it very real and then after the performance is over I can go and have an ice cream and have a life and say, ‘this is over. I can talk about it and I have love in my life.’ And it’s really important to get to that stage” (hereinmyhead.com).

K: You know this is going to be different when the piano doesn’t join Tori in the first measure. This song seems to be the origin of some people’s belief that Tori’s music is “angry girl music.” I think the title is undeserved. That Tori included this song is testament to her desire to bring these issues to dialogue. It’s not one I like to listen to, but it’s one I’m glad is out there.

G's Rating: 8 Little Earthquakes
K's Rating: 5 Little Earthquakes

Little Earthquakes

Kristen’s Key Lyric: and I hate / and I hate / and I hate elevator music / the way we fight
Greg’s Key Lyric: here we go again / oh these little earthquakes / doesn’t take much to rip us into pieces

G: And that brings us to the final song, the title song: “Little Earthquakes.” It’s one of the longest songs on the album, and Tori says she wanted it to have three bridges, so it’s a bit ungainly. It is nothing more than the effective summation of the album, of everything that preceded it. It ends with the mantra “give me life / give me pain / give me myself again” repeated again and again with backing vocals by Tori, Eric, Steve Caton (guitarist), and best friend Beene.

K: At nearly 7 minutes, this song was never intended for the radio. That puts it in a different category than the other songs. I prefer to think of it more as an experiment than a summation, just as other ‘90s bands included instrumental or experimental songs at the ends of their albums (e.g. Smashing Pumpkins “17” on Adore). I like to think of this last song as being a little earthquake. So many of the other songs on the album represent big events. Sometimes, though, it’s the little things, an argument or a fight that “rips us to pieces” because, after all, “it doesn’t take much.” To me, this song is another love song about a relationship that is not working. I think it stands on its own, in its own right. And as a final thought, the reference to vampires is very vogue. Tori is truly timeless!

G's Rating: 5 Little Earthquakes
K's Rating: 7 Little Earthquakes