233. Tori Amos, "Little Earthquakes"

 


This album is so emotionally raw and soul-baringly confessional that I felt kinda bad just listening to it, like "this album is not for you,  a middle-aged hetero white dude, this album is for girls who have been wronged and who have complex interior lives that you will never be able to understand."  Which, fair, it is for those people, but I doubt Amos would want only those people to experience it.  It's like saying the last entry, Black Sabbath's Master of Reality, is only for metalhead stoners.  Of course, that's the intended audience, but Black Sabbath didn't know that when the album came out and I'm sure they wanted everyone to hear it.

I have very little prior experience with Tori Amos, so this was all fairly new to me.  My wife, who was a teenage girl when this came out, knew a lot of the songs, which makes sense.  Anyway, after overcoming my initial discomfort with the material, I tried to reckon with this album on its own merits.

So Tori Amos was a classically trained pianist, and the songs are all piano-based, which is fine.  She has a really intense voice that can modulate from a near whisper to a powerful roar, and she puts both of these elements to great effect here.  It's very sparse, with a lot of songs featuring almost nothing besides her voice and the piano, and one, the very difficult "Me and a Gun," is completely a cappella, just her singing.

A lot of the songs are, musically speaking, kind of show-tuney or cabaret-baroque.  Take "Leather," for example.  It certainly isn't anything like what was contemporary pop at the time; it sounds more like a number from an avant-garde off-Broadway show.  But there are also songs like "Crucify," the album opener, which is more richly instrumented, and closer to mainstream pop.  There's a lot going on; verses, choruses, and the real emotional center, a sort of post-chorus (the part where she drags the word "chained" out into seven or eight syllables).  

But we have to talk about "Me and a Gun," the searing, haunting account of Amos' own sexual assault.  It is impossible to listen to this song and not be moved in some way; I felt like I was holding my breath through the whole thing.  I can't imagine having the kind of force of will and bravery it must have taken to write and record this and then bare it to the world.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Yes.

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