FEATURE:
Seismic Tremors
Tori Amos’ Little Earthquakes at Thirty
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RELEASED on 6th January…
IN THIS PHOTO: Tori Amos in 1992/PHOTO CREDIT: Jay Blakesberg
(although some sites say 13th January) in the U.K in 1992, Tori Amos’ debut album, Little Earthquakes, is about to turn thirty. It is one of the great debuts, in my view. Such an honest, hard-hitting and beautiful album from the then-twenty-eight-year-old. Considered one of the great albums and, no doubt, one of the very best ever, it features the staggering singles Silent All These Years, China, Winter and Crucify. After Atlantic Records rejected the first version of the album, Amos began working on a second version with then-boyfriend Eric Rosse. Prior to coming to a couple of reviews for Little Earthquakes, Bustle spoke with Amos at the end of last year about her new album, Ocean to Ocean. They also asked about her incredible debut of 1992:
“In 1988, Tori Amos made a promise to the muses: Help me write this music, and I promise I will always be honest in my lyrics, always use my art for good. At that point in her career, things were not exactly off to a raucous start. Her synth-pop project, Y Kant Tori Read, had just bombed, and her debut album had been rejected by her record company. Amos had once been the youngest person accepted to Johns Hopkins University Peabody Institute at 5 years old, but after a decade of playing in piano bars, she was wondering if she’d ever fulfill the promise of her early success. Thankfully, the muses came through, and in 1992, a 28-year-old Amos released her extremely successful debut album, Little Earthquakes. Immediately, it cemented Amos’ place in the pantheon of greats.
It wasn’t your standard singer-songwriter fare. Little Earthquakes was radically vulnerable, filled with reflections on Amos’ religious upbringing, sexual experiences, and innermost vulnerabilities; the lead single, “Me and a Gun,” detailed her rape. Amos wasn’t sure how it would be received. “I didn't know how people would respond because the piano was not cool at that time,” the 58-year-old singer tells Bustle. “But people started coming up to me after the shows, they would line up and talk to me about their experiences and how this record reflected what they had been through. It was as if I hadn’t realized just how many people had gone through trauma in their life.”
Sixteen studio albums later, Amos continues to give people permission to feel and talk about their trauma, both as a musician and as the first national spokesperson for RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network). She’s never been afraid to write about what scares her most. The candor goes hand in hand with her searing voice, which sounds like a mash-up of Kate Bush and Siouxsie Sioux, if they were screaming into an ancient cave. When you hear Amos sing — particularly on her famed Live at Montreux album, recorded in 1991 and 1992 — it feels otherworldly, as if she rose from the sea one day, shook the salt off her bright red hair, and sat down at a piano.
What was your life like at 28, in 1991?
In 1991, I had a single come out, a little EP with “Me and a Gun” and “Silent All These Years.” After having just seen Anita Hill on television say “I could not keep silent” — that was on October 11, 1991, and then “Silent All These Years” came out soon after that. [I had] no idea she was going to say that [testifying against Clarence Thomas]. She had great courage to speak up and speak out, and I think that was a real testament of the time — almost an underscoring of what was to come, with women finding their voice over the next year, and years, really.
Little Earthquakes was such an intimate debut album, covering everything from your childhood to your violent assault. How did it feel to bear your soul at 28?
Well, I didn’t know what was coming. I don't think anything can prepare you for it, because honestly, I had no idea that there was going to be a response. I wasn’t thought of as a commercial-type artist; I wasn’t a pop princess. I didn’t know what to expect. I just knew I had to play these songs because it was what I had been through. I was shocked, I was totally shocked that people would come stand in line. [That] they would buy a ticket to hear my songs after playing piano bars since I was 13 years old where people would spill beer all over the piano and me, playing everybody else's songs. It was quite something that people would actually pay to get a ticket and come hear my own songs.
What was the process of making Little Earthquakes like?
The record was written in different stages because it was rejected when I first turned it in. I needed to go add some songs to it, so we took a road trip. We were in California and we went to the Southwest and we went up to Colorado and came back through Utah. Songs like “Precious Things” were inspired by that trip. I guess I have been applying that idea over the years, which is to take a pilgrimage, to go to a different place to get inspiration to break your routine. We would do that we would go to the desert and do that and come back. I’ve been doing that ever since really, trying to take a pilgrimage.
I hear so much that writing is all about routine, about waking up and sitting at your desk every day. But that doesn’t seem like your process at all.
Yeah, I don’t do that. I have total respect for people that do that, [but] my thing is researching, intake, taking in thoughts, stories, documentaries, reading books, and even hearing music — especially music someone will play me that I haven't heard before. There is a point when the muses arrive, and I cannot tell you when that is going to be, and that drives everyone insane. If I am on a deadline, especially, I think, “Okay, can’t you just show up? Björk’s fine, leave her back in frickin’ Iceland, she is absolutely fine without you, where are you anyway?” (I say that with an absolute affinity for Björk.)
I can’t tell you when they are going to show up but I know when they are not here, because the music doesn't have the same ... it’s not the same. So I can sit there and put some tunes together, but it is not the same thing as when the muses pop in. It has been happening forever, since I was little. When they don't show up, I get a little anxious, especially if it's been a little while.
After it came out, Little Earthquakes charted quickly and then you immediately embarked on a world tour. How did you take care of yourself and adjust to life on the road?
I had played at a piano bar for so long, it helped give me stamina in order to do these shows, three on, one off, six shows a week. I guess I was in the peak of my physicality at that time, but I had worked up to it for many years. My mom came out on the road with me and she would hang out with me and visit, and it was such a fun exchange that we had. I treasured that.
I am not sure whether I heard the entirety of Little Earthquakes in 1992. I definitely heard Winter and Crucify. These songs opened my eyes and moved me. Amos was (and is) such a powerful, potent and amazing force. I got the same sort of tingle and shivers hearing her sing as I did when I heard Kate Bush for the first time when I was about four or five. Although Tori Amos has released so many exceptional and timeless albums, I think that her debut remains her best work. There are some great features about the album. In 2012, NME (who reckoned the album was released on 13th January, 1992; though I am sure it is 6th January) marked twenty years of a classic debut:
“Reeling from the failure of her Y Kant Tori Readsoft-rock band (dodgy barnet alert!), Amos had recorded most of the tracks for ‘Little Earthquakes’ already, giving Atlantic Records a demo in 1990. The label agonised over the final tracklisting and choice of singles. The singer was shunted between Bangles producer Davitt Sigerson in LA, Tears For Fears producer Ian Stanley in London, and finally then-boyfriend Eric Rosse.
The version that was finally released incorporated all these versions, but you can’t tell that by listening to it. It doesn’t sound stitched together. It stands as a complete whole, revealing itself like an autobiography.
It opens with ‘Crucify’, a bitter recollection of a childhood brought up under the cloud of Catholic guilt. The lyrics stuck the boot in (“I’ve been raising up my hands, drop another nail in. Just what God needs/One more victim“) to organised religion, but Amos also upbraided herself for remaining under its power (“My heart is sick of being in chains.”
The idea of “chains” is one that’s explored obsessively on the album. In the next track ‘Girl’, Amos casts herself as the heroine of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, balancing the expectations of society with her own (“She’s been everybody else’s girl/Maybe one day she’ll be her own”).
Similarly, in ‘Silent All These Years’, she’s searching through the clamour of everyone else’s voices for her own. The double header of ‘Winter’ and ‘Mother’ find her alternatively running into the arms of her parents and bristling against their ideals of who she should be (“I walked into your dream/And now I’ve forgotten how to dream my own dream/You are the clever one aren’t you”).
But perhaps ‘Little Earthquakes’ most stunning moment was ‘Me And A Gun’, a revelatory song of unflinching honesty. Singing acapella about a rape she suffered, we’re driven to exactly that place, time and feeling. The stream-of-consciousness intensity she summons during this song almost feels like a piece of guerrilla theatre, but perhaps that is because it’s so shockingly real.
Amos’ piano confessionals and theatrical sensibility made many cite her as Kate Bush’s natural successor. That didn’t quite come to pass. Post-‘Little Earthquakes’, she followed a slightly different path. You can, however, draw a line between ‘Little Earthquakes’ and the likes of Alanis Morrisette and Fiona Apple, but also the punkier likes of Hole and riot grrrl.
She would never top ‘Little Earthquakes’ but she didn’t need to. It’s a monumental confessional masterpiece”.
Prior to finishing things off, I want to source two different reviews of Little Earthquakes. This is what AllMusic offered when they sat down to review the masterful debut from Tori Amos:
“With her haunting solo debut Little Earthquakes, Tori Amos carved the template for the female singer/songwriter movement of the '90s. Amos' delicate, prog rock piano work and confessional, poetically quirky lyrics invited close emotional connection, giving her a fanatical cult following and setting the stage for the Lilith Fair legions. But Little Earthquakes is no mere style-setter or feminine stereotype -- its intimacy is uncompromising, intense, and often far from comforting. Amos' musings on major personal issues -- religion, relationships, gender, childhood -- were just as likely to encompass rage, sarcasm, and defiant independence as pain or tenderness; sometimes, it all happened in the same song. The apex of that intimacy is the harrowing "Me and a Gun," where Amos strips away all the music, save for her own voice, and confronts the listener with the story of her own real-life rape; the free-associative lyrics come off as a heart-wrenching attempt to block out the ordeal. Little Earthquakes isn't always so stomach-churning, but it never seems less than deeply cathartic; it's the sound of a young woman (like the protagonist of "Silent All These Years") finally learning to use her own voice -- sort of the musical equivalent of Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia. That's why Amos draws strength from her relentless vulnerability, and that's why the constantly shifting emotions of the material never seem illogical -- Amos simply delights in the frankness of her own responses, whatever they might be. Though her subsequent albums were often very strong, Amos would never bare her soul quite so directly (or comprehensibly) as she did here, nor with such consistently focused results. Little Earthquakes is the most accessible work in Amos' catalog, and it's also the most influential and rewarding”.
In a matter of days, Tori Amos’ acclaimed debut, Little Earthquakes, turns thirty (there is quibble as to whether it came out in the U.K. on 6th or 13th January). It is an album that resonates to this day. It seems that Amos is very proud of that time, even though it presented its challenges. I want to end with the BBC’s review of Little Earthquakes:
“Cathartic, confessional and wilfully contrary, Tori Amos’ debut set the template for 90s female singer-songwriters; a look in the mirror before leaps like Lilith Fair.
Now if there are two things that tend to land a reviewer in trouble, they are lumping female singer-songwriters together and ‘lazily’ comparing a leading light of the genre to Kate Bush. Yet there can be little argument that Amos influenced scores of followers and that this, in 1992, sounded very much like a candid, original voice who happened to love Bush’s first two, piano-and-voice-based albums.
For all the tinselly keyboards that could have been Rick Wakeman on a 1970s session, Amos’ use of imagery and flayed soul-baring meant that Little Earthquakes was a ubiquitous bed-sit favourite. Blokes either took it seriously or never got to talk to a woman again.
And it took itself seriously. Classically-trained Amos, now a major international star, was then playing tiny clubs. She was brought to London from Maryland by a major label who’d been patient with the sessions but figured the Brits would be kinder to her eccentricity. Poetic, often anguished songs about religion, sex and identity were rendered strangely accessible by her rippling melodies and steel-dressed-as-sugar voice. Silent All These Years and Winter became unlikely hit singles, with Amos performing with quiet subversion on mainstream TV shows. Her cult grew and grew.
Crucify, Precious Things, Leather and Mother all touch on various aspects of her preoccupations: the big, Freudian themes. It was Me and a Gun which raised the most eyebrows, her voice alone narrating her own trauma as a rape victim. It sometimes sounds like she’s striving to blank out the ordeal by leavening it; at other times it’s unbearably frank. It drew praise and opprobrium in equal measure, yet confirmed that this was a genuine artist with loftier aims than transient popularity.
Musically one hears also early Cat Stevens, Laura Nyro, and Joni Mitchell’s lyricism of course. Yet Amos had arrived on her own commendably idiosyncratic terms. The album’s title resonated: she was causing mighty tremors with tender tiptoes”.
A staggering and hugely moving debut album from an artist who is still creating music of the highest order, spend some time listening to the mesmeric Little Earthquakes. It is definitely one of my favourite albums ever. A very happy anniversary to…
A seismic debut.