The song that made me a Tori Amos fan was “Talula,” featured on the soundtrack to Twister.
I was vaguely aware of Amos’s music before then, enough so that when I first heard Joan Osborne’s “One of Us,” I thought, Hmm, is this that Tori Amos person? I’d looked at her CDs in stores, even though I didn’t have a CD player, so that people might notice I was looking at something cool. Music was my life: I’d gone through a Paula Abdul phase at seven and by eleven was hooked on Mariah Carey. The onset of adolescence, though, made me think that I should branch out. I started wearing a lot of black and listening to college radio.
When I heard those few seconds of “Talula” while Helen Hunt worked on her complicated tornado-reading machine, I was sold. I had found the last piece of my weirdo puzzle. I fast-forwarded to the credits right then and figured out that I had finally, for real, heard Tori Amos. I misread the title as “Talua (BY’s Tornado Hymn)” on my thirteen-inch TV screen. Coincidentally, I’d also recently stopped wearing my glasses.
A few evenings later, having obsessed quite vocally to my family about 30 seconds of a remixed Tori Amos song, I was in my room doing homework. My dad yelled for me to come to the living room. “Isn’t this that girl you like now?” he said just before David Letterman introduced her. She came out in a white dress, curls barely tamed, and played what I would later learn was “Father Lucifer.”
Next trip to Walmart, I scanned the Tori Amos CDs for the one with “Talula” on it. It was a peculiar song to be sure, but it had sounded sort of poppy so I figured I could dance to it in front of the mirror. I hadn’t properly heard Letterman say the title of the album, but I remembered the cover was sort of blue.
When I found Boys for Pele, I immediately assumed that Tori was Hawaiian while also associating the reference to Pele with The Unicorns Go Hawaiian, the Sweet Valley Twins Super Edition book that introduced me to the volcano goddess. All of this canceled out the rifle, the dead chicken, and the dirt on Amos’s face. The rags she wore, the decrepit front porch she guarded: those meant nothing to me. I grabbed the tape when no one cute was looking and put it in the shopping cart. Still quite churchy, I tried not to flinch at “Father Lucifer.”
Before dinner, I locked myself in my room and listened to the whole album while perusing the liner notes. I was terrified. I loved it.
That’s what I’m talking about when I’m talking about Tori Amos.
The lyrics spoke to me, even as I listened with my stereo’s volume super low, ear to speaker, since I hadn’t yet bothered to acquire a pair of headphones. I was afraid my parents would think something was wrong with me if they heard “Blood Roses” or “Professional Widow” blaring out of my room.
Those songs in particular became my soundtrack when my freshman-year boyfriend betrayed me: “Oh, you ate lunch with her today instead of me? Well, I shaved every place where you’ve been! ” (He had been precisely nowhere, which is probably why he finally decided to eat lunch elsewhere and, eventually, send his friend Tucker to break up with me on his behalf.)
The experiences Amos sings about on Boys for Pele are so very adult, and I was still a kid. I longed for the kind of pain she sang of because it made so much sense, but I still related things to Sweet Valley Twins Super Editions. I’d been through some stuff by that point, but it was all so confusing and seemed so unnameable that I found places inside to box it up. Boys for Pele made me want to write; writing made me remember and helped me understand. Writing forced me to come to terms with what I never wanted to admit to being: a girl, inexperienced, with a messy heart.
That, too, is what I’m talking about when I’m talking about Tori Amos.
My writing found a home with my English teacher. He expected one collection of poetry from me each quarter, usually ten or twelve poems in each bunch, which seems like so many now. I still have all of them, and while some make me cringe, they also make me proud that I found it somewhere within myself to be so fearless.
Behold, an example, from “Untitled” (naturally):
I wanted to be an Amazon
when I was five, but instead
I told stories about butterflies.
Are wings so necessary for flight?
Can’t they just be pretty?
This is all so me:
from glitter and stars to
the foil wrapped around the bottom of the candle to
forgetting my wings were a metaphor.
This is all so me:
sparkly regardless of all circumstance.
Amos’s first five albums became my holy texts. I was devoted, and from what I could tell, she was equally devoted to her fans. I started to understand patriarchy; I started thinking about things like systematic oppression and representations of the feminine. I was obviously great fun at slumber parties and later, around bonfires with boys there, a couple of wine coolers and the lyrics to “Muhammad My Friend” circulating in my blood. I brought my burgeoning feminism everywhere.
In college, one of my literature professors, an aging white man of course, was the first person I’d ever heard speak cruelly of Sylvia Plath, openly denouncing confessional writing as undignified. The moment I heard those words, coming from one of the men it was my job at that point to impress, I stopped even thinking about writing poetry or fiction and threw myself at the task of constructing dry, academic sentences. Obviously, there’s no crying in lit papers.
I should have laughed him off; instead, I took his words into my messy heart. I felt ashamed of everything non-academic I’d ever written and all of the music (Amos and everyone else) I’d ever loved, and of the fact that sometimes I had more of Plath’s words in my head than my own. I felt silenced by academic writing, whereas undignified confessional writing had opened me up to the world.
I’m also talking about that when I’m talking about Tori Amos.
This year, Amos released her fourteenth album. I felt the same way I did at fourteen, at sixteen, anticipating the release of From the Choirgirl Hotel and To Venus and Back. This year also marks eighteen years since I heard “Talula” and found my first fandom.
Time flies, and sometimes I feel a little lost in it. When I write, I sometimes hear the voice of my teen self, not saying the same things but instead trying to be fearless. Boys for Pele was released when Amos was only a year older than I am now, so I know that fearlessness is still possible.
My life is nothing like the future I pictured at 13. I’m married, for one thing, and although “have enough money to travel” was one of my life goals then, I’ve come to realize I hate traveling. I had no way of knowing that Paula Abdul would have another moment in the spotlight or that, somehow, we’d circle back around and Sweet Valley references would be relevant again.
And, honestly, I would never have believed you if you’d told me I’d still be talking about Tori Amos. I didn’t believe enough in my capacity for commitment.
Tags: jeanette solomon, music, tori amos
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My husband introduced me to Tori Amos. We met when I was 17, and he had a couple of her CDs, and something about the way she sang and the stuff she sang about just clicked with me.
This was a really good article.
Tori’s lyrics gave voice to a million things I wanted to say at the same age:
“maybe she’s just pieces of me you haven’t seen”
“and you would if I would/ but you never would”
“or do we soon forget the things we cannot see?”
“happy for you/ and I am sure that I hate you”
“I walked into your dream/ And now I’ve forgotten how to dream my own dream”
“We’ll see how brave you are /We’ll see how fast you’ll be running”
“Deck the halls I’m young again /I’m you again”
All snatches that still stay with me.
oh god yes. all these & so many more.
“I’m trying not to move / it’s just your ghost passing through.”
Every aching moment I had about a boy summed up in one line.
“god knows I know/ I’ve thrown away those graces”
this is how I grew up.
Also, Jacob from TWoP wrote High School = Tori Amos + Feelings and I have never read anything more autobiographical in my life.
At 15, I went on a school trip to Mexico. On the plane, one of my much more popular and socially adept classmates asked me what I was listening to. It was Boys For Pele. I gave her my discman and she got through about 30 seconds of Horses before giving it back with a strange look.
For all my love for Tori when I was a teenager, I stopped keeping up with her music after Scarlet’s Walk. I just couldn’t relate anymore and it felt like it was just the same old stuff, recycled and repackaged and with the emotions dulled. I was so excited for The Beekeeper, and it was a big letdown. But her latest album has gotten a lot of positive reviews, so maybe I’ll check it out.
I have most of the stuff that Tori’s released post-Scarlet’s Walk, but I don’t listen to it much.
Personally, I don’t find it to be the same old thing, but a manifestation of the fact that people age and change. I’m certainly not the same person that I was in 1992, or 2002, and neither is she.
The first song I ever heard by Tori Amos was “Bells for Her” after I read Francesca Lia Block’s “Violet and Claire,” where it was referenced. This was in 2001. I haven’t looked back.
Not long after, I found “Little Earthquakes,” an album that I find new meaning in every time I hear it. Every song is equally important to me, which I can’t say about many other albums.
Tori has helped me get through so much in my life. Even now, when I feel like I’m up against the wall, I find myself hearing a little voice singing, “we’ll see how brave you are…” and it helps me get through.
Tori/FLB/Romeo+Juliet: the holy trinity of a certain kind of 90s girl.
Truer words.
i also found tori through violet & claire! one of several music-from-books discoveries i made around that time.
Aw man, there’s nothing like Tori Amos to propel a teenager from a pretty simple, if a little angsty, worldview to a much, much more complicated (although still angsty) one. I know allllllll of these feelings.
Also (bear with me, I’m going to be in this thread a lot today), why should confessional writing be “dignified”? It’s honest; it’s open; it’s messy; and it’s deafening. Should it be any other way?
So, he thought Hemingway was undignified? Hearing a professor say something to the effect of ‘women are icky’ pops a pretty red balloon, doesn’t it? What good was his education?
I relate to this so much. even as I’ve mixed a lot of non-Tori into my listening repertoire over the years, & Boys for Pele remains one of my all-time favorite albums.
I got into her via Under the Pink (purchased from BMG on a tape [I am old] because my parents had a couple extra albums on their order) along with Jewel’s Pieces of You. I was more excited about the Jewel until I heard Tori. & then immediately I had to get a CD version of UtP, then Little Earthquakes, & then Pele…& then all the singles with the B-sides & then the book of sheet music so I could learn how to play Silent All These Years on the piano…& then the giant poster with Tori’s face on it…etc.
also my husband was similarly into Nine Inch Nails when he was younger, so our relationship reinforces a long-held theory that NIN was for boys what Tori was for girls (although obviously that’s a vast oversimplification, & certainly their fanbase isn’t limited by gender).
Lots of cross over with NIN and Tori Amos for gay boys of a certain age and inclination. We can appreciate stuff like ” so you make me cum , that doesn’t make you Jesus”.
This has sent me back to Boys For Pele all afternoon.
Listening to Tori Amos is, for me, like scrubbing the frost off a window to try to peer inside. I liked goth girls and their colourful faux-gypsy cousins, and would listen to them – and anything they said was good – to distraction. They showed me these tapes. Sometimes the music was beautiful, and mostly I didn’t get it, but I wanted to, because I wanted to be liked by those same girls.
Blood Roses on half a dozen mix tapes. I like the harmonium. The twangy non-piano. Father Lucifer, the reference to nine inch nails.
Years later, a man would calmly wreck the experience, explaining to me that Amos had been involved with Trent Reznor, which made perfect ugly sense – how’s your Jesus Christ been hanging, indeed. It wrecked it, like stepping off the train when you see the new life in the field. He said the whole album was for Reznor and I resented it, that it’d be for any specific man, much less one so incredibly greasy.
I hadn’t listened to this since then, but the appeal of Blood Roses seems to have grown back. Unlike so many other calmly ruined things.
Also I still have the most powerfully angry feelings about being forced to choose, implicitly, Reznor or Amos, Amos or Reznor, and I was incredibly angry about not understanding either, I think, and therefore Garbage.
In later years, Garbage would release Cherry Lips, which is about being between genders, and it is really possible that this is a zen koan of shitty radio rock that tells me a lot about how queer boils out, later.
WITH YOUR CHERRY LIPS AND GOLDEN CURLS god I love that song so much
I was never a Tori Amos fan, but I clung (and still cling!) to Shirley Manson and Garbage for dear life. They are always there when I need them.
Eh, who says the muse has to be “worthy” of the art that results from his/her presence?
Sweet Valley High! When Regina died of a cocaine reaction..still so sad after all these years.
The music that speaks to us when we are first finding our way is such an amazing thing. When I listen to an album from age 17 I get to have dual experiences: reliving what was happening and what I saw then, and a different I guess more mature interpretation now. Both experiences are real and valid and what makes music such an important part of my life.
Confessional writing. Don’t even get me started on men who don’t like it because it isn’t pretty. Argh.
God, Mr. Zebra is an unfairly clever song, and I am commenting about it because Killer Queen was my favourite fucking song when I was 8 and I had forgot all of this.
Ha! I have such a hard time listening to Tori now and I think it’s an almost second-hand embarrassment for my 14 year old self. Tearfully singing along with the lyrics to “precious things” when the boy I made out with on the last day of school was dating another girl that next september. specifically, “so you can make me come, that doesn’t make you jesus,” as if I even had a good grasp on the concept at that point.
TORIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII. I first started listening to her as a freshman in college, which I deeply regret because I wish I’d had her earlier, but man, am I glad I had her music at all. (Choirgirl is my favorite album, but so much is so great.) I’m seeing her next month and I’m so excited, still.
I feel like I’ve been seeing a bunch of articles and blog posts about authors – women – coming to confessional, emotional music later in life, naming bands and artists who might be more “respectable” or “cool” and definitely gained their popularity later, and it’s… odd, to me, to read it. Because other artists like Tori have been singing about these messy uncouth feelings for decades. But I guess because they were being so open about it they weren’t as cool? (See also that weird Sad Girls piece. But then, Tori’s not just a Sad Girl, Tori is a righteous fury and a siren and a girl and a mother and who knows what else.)
maybe I should just save this for my livejournal~
You will love love love the show. I saw her last night and it was the best time I’ve seen her (I say that every time). I want to hear what you thought of it and what the set list was!!
She played Bachelorette and Here in my Head and and and…
Tori was my first “grown-up” musical obsession. I started listening to her in junior high, right before Under the Pink came out (I’m old too!!) and I was blown away by the rawness and honesty of her lyrics. I was a b-side and boot junkie too…I remember calling our local alternative station’s Sunday show to get them to play her b-sides so I could record them off the radio before I had a CD player. I got to see her live for the first time at 16 during the Dew Drop Inn tour, and have seen her live probably 10 times since then. When I was in high school I performed a lot of her music with a friend of mine who also loved her (and plays piano gloriously) and was able to introduce other people, even my mom, to the beauty of her music. She has been so, so influential on me as a writer, a woman, and a feminist. I’m finally going to get the chance to tell her that when I get to meet her during this tour and I know I’m going to probably cry all over myself when I do!!
when i go back and listen to tori now, i understand why my parents were “worried” about me in the 90s. saying that, the older i get, the more applicable her lyrics are to my life.
“little earthquakes” still makes my eyes burn like a bitch when i hear it.
“give me life, give me pain; give me myself again…” “doesn’t take much ti rip us in to pieces…”
“hey jupiter” – ALL OF THE FEELS FOREVER.
My parents didn’t mind me loving Alanis Morissette, but when I broke out the Tori and Ani, they started side-eyeing me and suggesting I see a therapist.
I listened to Choirgirl SO MUCH in 1998, and having a miscarriage (of an unwanted pregnancy but still) at the end of the year meant I spent much of 1999 listening to Playboy Mommy over and over again.
:hugs: to you ipomea.
Oh Tori – my first exposure was ‘Under the Pink’ long after it came out. I was 15 and at Record & Tape Traders with a friend who listened to a lot of riot grrrl music and asked her for some recommendations. I must have listened to that album every day for at least a year – especially ‘Pretty Good Year’ and ‘Bells for Her’ – and quickly bought *coughnapsteredcough* all the Tori I could get my hands on. I was an angry teen going to a Catholic school, and I identified so much with the rebellion and anger and angst I head in her music.
Scarlet’s Walk came out in the beginning of my freshman year at college and all the songs were SO PERFECT for that time and that place for me – discovering yourself, navigating being with boys without letting them consume you. I felt it all so deeply – one of the things I regret about adulthood is that it seems to me you never connect with music in that same wholehearted way again. I’ve heard some people say that Florence & the Machine is this generation’s Tori Amos, and maybe I’m too old but I just want to reject that notion and make them listen to original Tori.
I can relate to being an angry teen in Catholic school listening to Tori. I was already questioning my childhood Catholic beliefs when I first heard her music, but yes, hearing the” rebellion and anger and angst” (as you put it, and so would I) was so instrumental in helping me to figure out what I really believed in.
My boyfriend’s brother gave me a copy of Little Earthquakes when I was 17. I felt like she was singing everything that was in my heart. I love this article, it reminds me of how falling in love with her music made me feel like I had a voice as an almost woman.
Mmf, very little lodged in my bones the way formative-years Tori listening did. My older sister (and brother-in-law) introduced me to Little Earthquakes when I was 11 or 12, starting with Crucify, and that “heart is sick of being in / chai-i-i-ins” run never left. I picked up Under the Pink and Boys for Pele shortly thereafter, and the amount to which I didn’t register some of the innuendo/implications: CRIMINAL. Though I solidly love Boys for Pele now, I found that I didn’t really connect with it ’til I put it away for a few years; I got really into it in late high school and college. I remember obsessing over Choirgirl Hotel. I remember being unimpressed with most of To Venus and Back (but I loved that live disc so!). Like, it seems, many of this crew, the intensity of connection (let alone the need to ingest, become, spout every shred of the lyrics) has dimmed over the years, particularly for her newer work; the older work still feels natural as breathing, but no longer quite so immediate. SIGH YES TORI GENERATION FOREVER.
OMG! I went to Tori last night. It was amazing.
Now to read the article.
I loved this article and everyone’s comments.
*sigh*
I saw Tori and her piano on the Little Earthquakes tour in 1992, with my best friend from college. We’d just graduated and were starting jobs, but we spent that night crying together and reliving late-night talks in dorm rooms.
My best friend from college passed away at age 27 from intestinal cancer, and I can’t listen to Tori anymore without thinking of him and missing him. But Little Earthquakes always has a special place in my heart.
I first met Tori my junior year of high school, when the girl my boyfriend was two-timing me with called me and read me the lyrics from pretty much the entirety of Under the Pink in what still may be the longest, most intense conversation of my life (six hours on the phone. Ah, teen girls). Like all y’all said, she settled in my bones and helped strengthen them. I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that my inchoate feminist ideas snapped into focus listening to her — and soothed me when I finally, an embarrassingly long time later, broke up with that asshole.
I first heard Leather ca 1994 on a cousin’s mixtape. It was all I listened to on Little Earthquakes after I bought the CD, probably until I got to college and then holy hell did ‘give me life/give me pain/give me myself again’ make sense after breaking up with a guy I never should have dated in the first place. Her music is almost inseparable from my life between 14 and 24.
It took me awhile to warm to Pele; I much preferred Choirgirl when it came out, but now I find when I do go back to Tori, Pele is where I go first. I’ve seen her maybe seven or eight times on tour, and cried on her when she signed a copy of Piece by Piece on her book tour. She was very gracious and gave me a hug.
While I’ve not connected with anything she’s put out since Scarlet’s Walk, I should give Geraldines a listen. Sorry I missed seeing her when she toured in the UK this spring, but hopefully she’ll be back soon.
Related: everyone should read retired pro wrestler Mick Foley’s piece on how he discovered Tori Amos and what her music means to him. I love that her music is able to touch so many different people on such a profound level.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/201…
Ahh, this is lovely. I’ve been going through a Tori kick recently and remembering how central her music was to me in college.
I honestly never, never, never, never liked Tori. AT ALL. When I was a kid, I felt alienated from my friends because they all loved Tori so much. When I was older, my college friend accused me of trying to be “too cool” to admit that I had actually enjoyed her once, This couldn’t have been further from the truth: I had felt profoundly uncool as a kid because I couldn’t access whatever it was that my friends has accessed. Then, when I finally had words articulate all the things I hated about Tori (namely: histrionic, self-indulgent, narcissistic, no sense of humor), my college friends who had loved Tori as kids accused me of being anti-feminist for reacting to her the way I did. But really, I don’t like a lot of MALE writers and performers for the same reasons I don’t like her. People like David Foster Wallace, all the beat poets, too many men to name. Le sigh. Poor misunderstood me. ::happily throws self away::
Now, can we talk about KATE BUSH?
Yes. Yes. Yes. It feels like that moment when the friend you always looked to to help you articulate your feelings suddenly took on a corporate job and started talking about synergistics and economies of scale and whatnot.