Some Really Deep Thoughts...on Little Earthquakes
give me life, give me pain, give me myself again
Hello! I recently did a Twitter thread on my thoughts on the Tori Amos album Little Earthquakes. The response was enthusiastic (thank you!), so I wanted to dig even deeper into one of my favorite albums.
I am 20 years old, so I do not meet many other Amos fans in my collegiate circle. (Except for my friend, Eva. “Hi!” if you’re reading this.) Discussing Tori Amos with receptive individuals is always meaningful to me.
Crucify
“Every finger in the room is pointing at me,” begins Tori Amos’s first album, Little Earthquakes. “I wanna spit in their faces, then I get afraid of what that could bring.”
It is a startling way to begin an album and builds intimacy with the listener. Who has not felt slighted and angry and wanted to lash out, only to “get afraid of what that could bring?” Amos goes on to say that she has been “looking for a savior,” someone or something to rid her of this pain. In the second verse, she notes that she was kicked—just like a dog—because she wanted love. In both cases, holding her tongue and seeking love, she only behaves as society has taught her to act. Women are taught to seek love and sacrifice themselves for it.
The most shocking imagery, however, is the crucifixion itself, an image that equates the suffering of women with the death of Christ. The intensity of such a statement haunts me. Amos is not crucified; she crucifies herself: “Why do we crucify ourselves every day? / I crucify myself, nothing I do is good enough for you.” Why do we crucify ourselves? Why? In the final verse, a chorus of voices comes together to ask the question. What brought us—a collective—to this level of self-hatred and self-abjection? The remaining songs strive for an answer.
In the music video for “Crucify,” she marches into a bath. On the subject of this shot, she said:
“I realized that I needed to rebaptize myself as a woman that is independent of the doctrine that I had been... let’s say, immersed in as a young girl growing up. Now the thing about this shot is that once you get in this bath, you can’t go back to being this Elizabethan woman. So it was really a liberation. And I felt I was being emancipated from the patriarchy.”
“Never going back again, no…/ To crucify myself,” she says near the song’s end. The journey the narrator (and the listener) are about to embark on is not easy, pretty, or simple, but it promises “liberation.”
Girl
We meet Amos’s narrator crawling in a shadow, “clutching her faded photograph / My image under her thumb / Yes, with a message for my heart.” The narrator is not clutching a faded photograph but her faded photograph. She is dissociated, switching between third-person “her” and first-person “my.” The memories of a young and authentic version of herself are fading. But the memories still contain “message[s] for my heart.”
Amos said of the song:
“It's not an aggressive fight. It's an internal fight, that when you need other people's approval, when you walk in a room, you're everybody's—or anybody's—girl. When you don't need that anymore, [it's] because you have an understanding and an agreement with yourself on who you want to be. And when I say ‘who you want to be,’ that's going to evolve.
“Calling my baby / Calling my baby, calling my baby” is a desperate plea to reclaim yourself, to piece dissociated fragments into a whole person. Amos said her 1996 sui generis masterpiece Boys for Pele was a journey to find “parts and pieces of myself that I had never claimed.” “Girl” is thematically similar. She wants to find the “parts and pieces of myself that I had never claimed” and make them whole.
Silent All These Years
“Silent All These Years” begins with a twiddling piano riff, “Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-NUH-nuh-NUH” is how Amy Gentry describes it in her book on Boys for Pele. The piano was “blurred into…a dissonant drone by…the sustain pedal” and “punctuated by peevishly syncopated emphasize.” Gentry remembers not “exactly my first moment of hearing it, but rather my first moment of shuddering over it.” The song is bodily; you can hear the grain of Amos’s voice, her vocal rasps, and gasping breaths.
The song begins with a question: “Excuse me, but can I be you for a while?” I still do not know precisely what this means. Is Amos calling to a younger version of herself, the listener, or a specific person? The song is a fractured fairytale about a woman finding her voice after years of social and self-imposed silence: “But what if I’m a mermaid / In these jeans of his with her name still on it / Hey, but I don’t care cause sometimes / I said sometimes I hear my voice, and it’s been / Here, silent all these years.” In “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen, the mermaid gives up her voice to be human.
The narrator’s partner leaves her for another girl he thinks is more intelligent: “So you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts / What’s so amazing about really deep thoughts? / Boy, you best pray that I bleed real soon / How’s that thought for you?” “Silent All These Years” shines with sardonic wit. Little Earthquakes does not get enough credit for its moments of humor. Tori Amos can be really, really funny. (Hello, “little fascist panties / Tucked inside the heart / Of every nice girl”) Tori Amos’s detractors do not like her frankness and lack of subtlety. They do not recognize the ingenuity required to be so forthright.
So many men want to project their fantasies onto a woman. They want someone who can “inspire” them. But, a real woman with a real body? Her partner thinks he can handle “really deep thoughts,” yet he crumbles when comforted with even a sliver of real female experience:
“In most people’s songs men are always potent, women never have their period, rape’s unexistant and orgasm vaginal or faked. They’re Barbie doll songs, songs without pubic hair or obvious genitals; they don’t fit anatomically. My songs come rather from my womb than from the heart. You know, there’s some fucking going on in other people’s songs, but no one ever gets into an unwanted pregnancy.”
The power of “Silent All These Years” comes from its active striving. Amos has not found her voice; she is finding her voice. Ronald D. Lankford is insightful on this point in his book Women Singer-Songwriters in Rock: A Populist Rebellion in the 1990s: “‘Silent All These Years’ might be seen as exploratory, with Amos’ persona only partially aware of the reasons for her own silence.”
Amos only hears her voice “sometimes.” Her screams get “lost in a paper cup.” Years go by, and she’s still waiting for “somebody else to understand.” She’s tired, and one more “causality” could break her “’til finally there is nothing left.” Little Earthquakes quakes with exhaustion. You get the sense of a narrator getting up and falling down ad infinitum, perpetually grappling for answers.
This is where the limitations of the “confessional” label reveal themselves. Little Earthquakes asks questions. It embraces confusion, intuition, and chaos. “I’ve never thought of myself as a confessional writer because I associate confession with religion and needing to be absolved and forgiven,” Amos said.
Little Earthquakes is often perceived as an album for teenagers. It’s angsty and unsubtle. The narrator is frequently awkward and unstable. One could imagine the stereotype of a petulant teen humming, “and I ride to work every morning wondering why,” on a school bus in the rain. I often see smug condescension towards the album under the guise of it being that “Gen X teen girl album you liked then forgot about.” It’s nostalgic, reminiscent of a bygone era.
I am skeptical of this easy dismissal. The album explores the transition from girlhood to adulthood in a way teenagers can appreciate. But “Silent All These Years” is a song about adults. The narrator’s frustration comes from “years” of silence and pent-up frustration. Nonetheless, Amos is growing. Sometimes, she hears her voice and does not care about judgment or repercussions.
Precious Things
So, as Amos finds her voice in “Silent All These Years,” what does she hear? On “Precious Things,” she hears the angry demon within. We meet the narrator as they are desperately running away from an ambiguous something: “So I ran faster, / But it caught me here.” She compares being “caught” to how her loyalties “turned” away from the Christian dogma she was raised with in favor of her emerging sexuality: “Yes, my loyalties turned / Like my ankle / In the seventh grade / Running after Billy.” I often turn to “Precious Things” in moments when I think I have rid myself of unhelpful thinking, only for it to creep again into my life. Even before the lyric begins, the percussion and frenetic piano create a relentless spiraling fury. The song does not falter once. It is a frantic sprint set to music.
The chorus follows: “These precious things / Let them bleed / Let them wash away / These precious things / Let them break / Their hold on me.”
It’s unclear what precious things she’s railing against. The patriarchy? The “beautiful Christian boys?” Shame? Self-hatred? For an album seen as stark and confessional, it is routinely imprecise. Who is the “you” in “Crucify?” Why would she be a “happy phantom” if she died? Why is a song about death so jolly, anyway? Who is leaving in “Tear in Your Hand?” Lankford says her “explorations are painfully candid but cloaked in obscurity.”
What is a precious thing? I try to think of examples: artworks in museums, jewels, family heirlooms, and keepsakes. Precious things are fragile, pretty, and revered. “Why are you being so precious?” is an insult. It means you are weak and sickly sweet. Is womanhood not the perfect precious thing? Womanhood is conscripted and othered as it’s exalted. I’ve often felt womanhood to be unnatural, like trying to shove my body into a pre-existing box.
I like the idea of taking these ambiguous “things”—gendered expectations, shame, whatever—and letting them bleed. It’s violent purging imagery. Amos doesn’t want her difficulties to leave or disappear. She wants them to bleed, and bleeding isn’t precious.
I was 18 years old when I listened to Little Earthquakes for the first time. I first connected with the frustration of failing to achieve the proper standard of good womanhood. I felt angry and subdued when I did achieve it. I spent most of my time then tired and repressed.
Tori Amos celebrated the anniversary of Little Earthquakes somewhat recently on her Instagram. Someone left a comment: “Thanks for all your music, Tori. But, oh my gosh, I am so happy not to be that girl anymore.” Something about this comment has stuck with me. I have grown a lot but am still messy and in motion. My friends joke about how fast I walk. I think it’s because I am running away from precious things. The song does not build so much as run until it’s over.
“Precious Things” is famous for containing the most epic retort of the album: “He said ‘you’re really an ugly girl / But I like the way you play,’ / And I died, but I thanked him / Can you believe that? / Sick, sick, holding on to his picture / Dressing up every day / I wanna smash the faces / Of those beautiful boys / Those Christian boys / So, you can make me cum / That doesn’t make you Jesus.”
The narrator’s younger self was grateful for any male attention. She dressed up “every day” to please “those Christian boys,” who, in turn, exploited her sexual hunger through objectification and disrespect. They thought she was “ugly” but enjoyed the way she “play[ed]” a sexual illusion.
I see a photography connection between “Precious Things” and “Girl.” Her former self is fading, overrun by the boys’ “picture.” But, she still clutches her “faded photograph…under her thumb…with a message for my heart.”
When an older and wiser Amos reflects on her past experiences, she feels “sick” and wants to “smash the faces.” These boys’ ignition of sexual passion did not make them holy saviors. Little Earthquakes is full of blasphemous imagery. Saying teenage boys gloating from erotic conquest see themselves as “Jesus” has to be the most profane.
Of the lyrics, Amos said:
“Oh, you know very well men sometimes use good sex as a weapon, or as an excuse, like ‘I just made you come, so don’t think I’m also gonna help you do the dishes!’”
It reminds me of Amos in “Crucify.” If she “begs” for love, she sets herself up for abusive treatment.
Lankford says of the end of the song:
“As the final repetition of ‘precious’ brings the song to a close, the residue of pain and anger remains like an open wound. Whether self-sacrifice—allowing the blood to wash these memories clean—will permanently or just temporarily remove these mental scars and allow Amos’ persona to go forward, however, remains far from clear in ‘Precious Things.’”
That the “residue of pain and anger remains like an open wound,” feels accurate. However, I have a more optimistic read. The narrator’s memories, trials, and difficulties will continue to hurt, but she can heal. What will heal the pain and anger? The next song, “Winter,” answers this question.
Winter
“Winter” is the balm or scab for the narrator’s bleeding in “Precious Things.” It’s a song of healing and renewal. It is her crowning jewel, a perfect piece of music, and undoubtedly one of Amos’s best and most enduring musical contributions. “Winter” means a lot to a lot of people. I will try my best to do it justice if anyone can.
“Winter” reminds me of a grand bildungsroman like Middlemarch or Jane Eyre because it focuses on a person’s formative years and psychological and moral development.
The song is told from the perspective of an aging woman reflecting on her life. She has let her dreams pass her by due to a lack of self-confidence: “Hair is grey, and the fires are burning / So many dreams on the shelf.”
Our story begins on a snowy day in her childhood. A little Amos has forgotten her mittens, so she puts her “hand in my father’s glove.” His love gives her confidence to “run off where the drifts get deeper.” She encounters difficulties in the snow drifts when a “beauty queen” trips her. Her dad cautions her that she has to learn to stand up for herself “cause I can’t always be around.”
Winter melts, and our protagonist ages. Puberty means that “boys get discovered” and flowers compete “for the sun,” i.e., male validation. (She will explore female relationships further on her second album, Under the Pink.) “Years go by, and I’m here still waiting / Withering where some snowman was.” Her childhood has ended, and progress, love, and success elude her. She wishes for an impossible future where she can recapture the innocence of her youth. She’s “withering” where some “snowman” (naiveté) was.
Amos feels shame that she still doesn’t know who she is: “Mirror, mirror, where’s the crystal palace? / But I only can see myself / Skating around the truth who I am / But I know, Dad, the ice is getting thin.” These lyrics are not directly about the LGBT experience. But her place in the queer music pantheon makes sense considering her lyrical content.
The chorus is adapted from a conversation with her dad after repeated failure in the music business:
“I didn't like who I was…I was telling him how bad I felt…and Dad said to me—he’d never said it before—‘Tori Ellen, When are you going to accept you are good enough for you?’”
“When you gonna make up your mind? / When you gonna love you as much as I do?” Amos needs to love herself as much as her dad loves her. She needs to find strength inside instead of seeking outside validation.
“Winter” has a bittersweet edge. The outro says that things “never change.” Will Amos keep withering? Will time keep passing her by? On a creative level, this proves to be untrue. The opener to Boys for Pele is called “Beauty Queen/Horses.”
“The record begins with the horses from Winter coming back to take me on this journey, and we ride and go find the demons. The music keeps broadening out.” Amos said.
It is inspiring that the horses from “Winter” take Amos on her journey in Boys for Pele. She described the white horses as “your dreams…[and] opportunities.” In “Winter,” these dreams are “roads that you thought you would go down and haven’t experienced, and all these potential experiences are gone now.” On “Beauty Queen / Horses,” the horses do go down new roads. They travel to increasingly wild heights on her musical masterpiece.
Happy Phantom
In “Happy Phantom,” the narrator muses on what she would do and see if she died. As an invisible phantom, Amos would chase “nuns out in the yard,” “run naked through the streets,” and “wake up in strawberry fields everyday.” The “Happy Phantom” is, well, happy. She has “no right to bitch” about the difficulties of her earthly life, like the “atrocities of school.” The threat of judgment hangs over our recently deceased protagonist: “Will we pay for who we’ve been?”
Divine judgment does not seem to come. Death gives her a “ticket to the universal opera.” There’s “Judy Garland taking Buddha by the hand.” Garland never had peace in her lifetime, but in the afterlife, she spends time with the paragon of zen. A self-assured Confucius “does his crossword with a pen.”
The song can be understood, on a broader level, as being about invisibility. Amos wonders if her lover will miss her now that she is gone: “Or will I see you dear and wish I could come back / You found a girl that you could truly love again / Will you still call for me when she falls asleep? / Or do we soon’d forget the things we cannot see?”
Tori Amos can be a goofball. Her records always contain at least one goofball song. “The Wrong Band” on Under the Pink and “Mr. Zebra” on Boys for Pele are other examples.
China
“China” is the most traditional piano ballad on Little Earthquakes. It is an interesting choice to come after “Happy Phantom.” Both songs reckon with endings. “China” uses the country, and the dinnerware, as metaphors for a disintegrating relationship. Amos may be physically close to her partner, but emotional distance drives them apart: “Sometimes I think you want me to touch you / How can I when you build the Great Wall around you? / In your eyes I saw a future together / Oh, you just look away in the distance.” Amos sings, “sometimes I think you want me to touch you,” with fragile, heartbreaking beauty.
Leather
“Happy Phantom” is jaunty, but “Leather” feels like a 1920s jazz club cabaret track gone completely awry. To introduce the song for her 1991 Live at Montreux performance Amos said:
“I played this song for somebody…a few years ago. Played the piano all my life and…I just stopped playing one day. I couldn't play anymore…So, I stopped playing and this is one of the first songs I wrote to play again and…I played it for a record man. And…he said, ‘If you play this song, you have no career.’ So I'm playing it.”
Amos begins with a volcano of lyrics: “Look, I’m standing naked before you / Don’t you want more than my sex?”
Amos’s partner does not love or value her. She cannot blame their callousness on outside forces like the “weather.” She wonders if she could “just pretend that you love me” to make the “night…lose all sense of fear.”
Why does she even want them to love her when their values conflict? “Why do I need you to love me / When you can’t hold what I hold dear.”
“If love isn’t forever / And it’s not the weather / Hand me my leather” sees Amos grasping for fortitude and courage.
Mother
“Mother” might be my favorite on the album. The song’s narrator is a young girl leaving home and venturing into the world. Her mixture of fear and excitement is palpable: “Here, here, now, don’t cry / You raised your hand for the assignment.” Maybe Amos took inspiration from her early days as a piano lounge performer. She left the house very young, only a pre-teen, to fulfill her creative future.
You can also see it from a broader perspective, as about the pull between girlhood and adult patriarchal values: “Dripping with blood / And with time and with your advice / Poison me against the moon.” The moon is a traditional symbol of femininity and womanhood. If the patriarchy has poisoned her against the moon, she’s turned against herself and her roots. The result is not pretty; it makes her drip with blood and the effects of “time,” or aging. The transition from girlhood to adulthood and its trials is a frequent theme, also seen in “Girl,” “Precious Things,” and “Winter.” “Mother” is the most overt exploration of the topic.
The need to perform proper womanhood as expected overpowers her: “I walked into your dream / And now I’ve forgotten / How to dream my own dream / You are the clever one, aren’t you? / Brides in veils for you.” The archetypical bride is the perfect woman by patriarchal standards: swathed in a dress of virginal white, clean, and heterosexual.
“Mother” can also be about first-time sexual experiences: “He’s gonna change my name / Maybe he’ll leave the light on / Just in, just in case I like the dancing.” If she enjoys the “dancing,” will she be chained to heterosexist ideals forever? Society surely isn’t encouraging her to cultivate her female sexuality, as she is taught to “cross my legs.”
Despite being caught in the “dream”—or really the nightmare, “our…favorite fearscape”—of adult womanhood, she can “remember where I come from / mother mother.” We can interpret these lyrics literally. We all come from a mother, but also spiritually. Even if only a little, Amos still remembers her most authentic self. The lyrics “I remember where I come from” repeat after each difficulty the narrator encounters in the song. She has some magic, even if it’s “buried deep in my heart.”
Amos is always empathic about the experiences of girls and young women. She is never more so than in “Mother.”
Tear in Your Hand
“Tear in Your Hand” is the tenth track off Little Earthquakes. Her partner leaves her for another woman. “I don’t believe you’re leaving cause me and Charles / Manson like the same ice cream” are funny lyrics, exaggerated hyperbole.
In “Silent All These Years,” Amos is frustrated that her “really deep thoughts” go unsaid because of a lack of courage. “Tear in Your Hand” reflects a similar sentiment: “And I think they’re pieces of me you’ve never seen / Maybe she’s just pieces of me you’ve never seen.”
A “tear in your hand” can be interpreted in two ways:
(1) A “tear in your hand” are the cuts you incur from yourself and others: “Cutting my hands up / Every time I touch you.”
(2) Amos is referring to a literal “tear,” as in the protagonist cannot you the power she has while she cries and is lost in the disappointed and depressed haze of rejection.
We see Amos’s protagonist growing. She forgives her partner: “Maybe it’s time / to wave goodbye now / time to wave goodbye now.” She even catches “a ride with the moon,” instead of poisoning herself against it like in “Mother.”
Me and a Gun
I do not want to talk about this song. It is a haunting work of extreme bravery. There are no words to describe it, and I also don’t want to.
Little Earthquakes
“Little Earthquakes” is the title track and the thesis of the album. It is a perfect closer. These experiences, cumulatively, rip us into pieces: “And I hate, and I hate / And I hate, and I hate / Disintegration, watching us wither.” The ferocity of “And I hate, and I hate / And I hate, and I hate” is powerful. Tori Amos is angry.
The lyrics of “Little Earthquakes” are stunning: “We danced in graveyards with vampires till dawn / We laughed in the faces of kings, never afraid to burn…Black-winged roses that safely changed their color.” You miss the album’s ingenuity if you see it solely as a therapy session set music. Little Earthquakes can be catchy and has brilliant pop hooks despite the darkness of the lyrical content. Amos uses her dexterous piano talent in service of interesting creative leaps. She blends genres and musical styles. Little Earthquakes is a triumph because Tori Amos is a good musician, and people enjoy good music.
The chorus is as follows: “Oh, these little earthquakes / Here we go again / Oh, these little earthquakes / Doesn’t take much to rip us into pieces / Doesn’t take much to rip us into pieces.” How can an earthquake be small? I see each “cut” Amos incurs as a tremor until the landscape around her crumbles.
Amos ends with a mantra: “Give me life, give me pain / Give me myself again.” She craves wholeness: the truth in life, pain, complexity, beauty, messiness, and joy. She would rather have “pain” than continue to be numb. Little Earthquakes is empowering because it does not shy away from the murk and mess.
Perfume Genius (another great musician) is insightful on this point: “When I was growing up and listening to music, it was what I looked to for comfort and to find a companion, not to figure anything out or to necessarily make me feel better but to feel less lonely being the way that I was.”
“After keeping it locked away…writing…was freeing. For a long time, I was scared of everything…now I’ve learned to love myself, and I don’t need anyone to tell me I’m okay. I can tell me I’m okay.”
Thank you for reading this and please share thoughts, questions, or comments if you have any!