shilmafone's Full Review: Little Earthquakes by Tori Amos
My Tori Amos obsession was an accident.
Appropriately enough, it started with Little Earthquakes anyway.
All right, so maybe accident is the wrong word--more like a series of events that just led to fandom and, for a time, obsession. See, I had seen the video for "Crucify" when everyone else did, but come on, I was in eighth grade, I didn't know any better than to think it was some pleasant-enough song from some random red-haired chick. So I promptly forgot about it. Then, my English teacher in 11th grade introduced us to "Winter" as an exercise in interpretation of poetry. Maybe it was the time in my life or maybe it's just a better song, but "Winter" stuck with me quite a bit more. After that, I would happen onto "Winter" every couple of months or so, whether it be a friend's favorite song or something I just happened to randomly hear on the radio. Every time I heard it, I loved it more, and eventually, I picked up the CD single, and enjoyed it well enough even if it didn't exactly coerce me into buying a full-length album.
I got to college, and I was a bored freshman. I played piano quite a bit when I was bored, so I looked for some piano music--noting that there were a whole mess of Tori Amos books of piano music at the local Media Play, I went to pick up the one that had "Winter" on it. Now, I had a whole album's worth of piano music, but just one song I knew. So I picked up Little Earthquakes, kind of as motivation to learn the rest of the piano music in the book.
I haven't regretted my spur-of-the-moment purchase for a second.
You see, Little Earthquakes is a document of an artist coming out of her shell, an artist who, after having been in the music business for years, finally "got it". Be yourself. Write about what you know. Tori Amos grabs on to these clichés and takes them as far as they can go on Little Earthquakes, wrapping up nearly every painful and pleasant memory she has into a little ball, sitting at her piano, and splorching every bit of it out onto this album. It makes for a frank, beautiful, painful listening experience, and at that point in my life (a time when I was still hanging on to "grunge" for dear life), it completely blew my freaking mind. I didn't know stuff like this, with this much emotion, with this much melody, this much pure feeling existed. She was like Mozart, Kate Bush and Monet all rolled into one, and I loved every second of it.
The disc begins with the open fifths that define "Crucify", a fantastic choice for a first single that managed to use a whole mess of cheesy production techniques and make them, um, not cheesy somehow. Really, there's just too much reverb on everything...but production is a minor gripe when the music is this strong. It's a song about breaking your self-imposed boundaries and looking inside for the beauty, the savior that's been there all along. A wonderful message, and it introduces the CD wonderfully, as I'm rather sure that it's an apt description of the process in Ms. Amos that led to the creation of the album. "Girl" comes next, and while it's not one of my favorites, it again carries a strong message of empowerment. Lyrically it's excellent, musically it just gets a bit repetitive for me, as the chorus of She's everybody else's girl, maybe one day she'll be her own just seems to show up one too many times for my tastes.
The placement of "Silent All These Years" and "Precious Things" back to back is interesting, as they show Tori first at her most fragile and then at her most violent. "Silent All These Years" is lyrically my favorite song on the disc (I know, real original), with great lines featuring the details (and admirably leaving out the generalities) of a relationship in disarray. My favorite bunch:
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
"Precious Things" is just as good, detailing the formative years of the school outcast. Tori drags up all of her Reznorian rage in this one, all while managing to get a wink in at her black-clad friend:
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
As the tracks progress, the quality just keeps increasing, as "Winter" appears. Still my favorite track on the disc, it's one I still get lost in when I play. Primarily consisting of Tori and an icily played piano, the string of references to memories of a girl and her father builds up to a positively soaring bridge. The strings come out in full force and positively destroy the listener in an outpouring of instrumental emotion, all of which carries over into the final verse. It's a marvel of songwriting, and may indeed be Tori's finest moment to date.
"Happy Phantom" brings out Tori's too often neglected playful side, and it's a romp of a song that would force a smile onto the most cynical of listeners. "China" is an excercise in mood, and is really one of the nicest, best produced pieces of music on the disc, even if it doesn't pack the emotional wallop of so many of the other songs here. "Leather" is another favorite, as it's nothing like anything Tori's ever done--it's got sort of a subtly Andrew Lloyd Weber showtune thing going on. It's playfully naughty, and it's enough to make the listener more than a little uneasy, as there's a positively sinister undercurrent to the cabaret. I really couldn't tell you what much of it is about, but it's a hell of a listen anyway (and another one I've taken to playing quite a bit over the years).
"Mother" is one that took me quite a while to get into--it's very long, and it features some more difficult lyrics. Even so, this is the kind of song where every time you hear it, something else jumps out at you, whether it be the subtle way Tori can build a song using only her piano, or an image of a childhood juxtaposed with one of "present day" (at least as relates to the song). It's a forgotten classic in the Tori Amos catalogue, and deserves more recognition as such. "Tear In Your Hand", on the other hand, is a full, fulfilling song on the surface, with more heartbreaking lyrics, but I can't help but feel like the first time I heard it was the last time I needed to hear it--the extra instrumentation provided seems there to cover up the lack of depth in the song itself.
...And then there's "Me and a Gun".
Words alone cannot express just how emotional this song is, performed only by Tori's fragile voice. Recounting a rape that occurred after a pre-solo career gig, the revelations that come to light here are striking, shocking, and enlightening. The song is a difficult listen, as there's no beat to grab onto, no instrumentation to distract the listener from the severe subject matter--the listener is forced to hear Tori's words, just as she herself was forced in other ways on that terrible night so many years ago. Everyone should experience this song at least once in their life, for their own good.
...and I haven't seen Barbados
So I must get out of this.
After the emotional outpouring of "Me and a Gun," it's easy to overlook closing track "Little Earthquakes," as the brain is still trying to process the previous track. All things said, it's an all right track, with lots of musical development as the track progresses in its majestic way.
When you can get through all of the symbolism and wordplay, all of Tori Amos' albums are autobiographical to an extent, but none more than Little Earthquakes. Perhaps that's because on Little Earthquakes, Tori draws from her entire past, creating a condensed "autobiography-so-far" that packs the emotional wallop of an angry herd of elephants. On this album, Tori Amos found her muse, and used that muse to purge herself of as many of her demons as she possibly could. We, the listeners, are the beneficiaries of those demons, not taking them on per se, but each of us relating to them in our own way. The exact incidents that Tori is drawing on here may not have happened to all of us, but the emotions she puts together to explain those incidents are universal. This is why Little Earthquakes has the appeal that it does, and why many still find it to be Tori's strongest work to date. Personally, I don't find it to be her absolute best, but the simple fact that it kicked off what would be a wondrous musical career is enough for five stars, all by itself.
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