Really Deep Thoughts

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?

Somehow, dear reader, I had forgotten just how much I fucking love Little Earthquakes by Tori Amos. Easily one of the very best albums of the 90’s and one of the 37 LPs that reside in my mythical ‘Top 10 LP’s Ever’.

I remember my mate Geraint lending me the cassette of Little Earthquakes and telling me how great it was, even though it wasn’t metal*. Strong words, I thought. He was bloody right though.

Straight away it was the boldness that grabbed me, female singer songwriters** weren’t supposed to be like this, they were supposed to be sensitive and arch. Tori Amos stomped in and gave us her full-throttle songs of innocence and experience, mostly the latter, wielding her keyboard like an exquisite axe; I didn’t stand a chance, I fell hard. There aren’t any songs here couched in artifice or theatricality, it all feels very real indeed, bracingly so.

---

Let’s start with ‘Winter’, the best track on Little Earthquakes and pretty much every other album ever made. It’s a stunningly realised take on growing up and losing childlike innocence that somehow manages not to be mawkish despite being heart-breaking. Amos’ piano playing here is delicate and gorgeous, add in some understated swelling strings and a wonderful vocal performance and it’s almost all too devastating. It is Dylan Thomas’ ‘Fern Hill’ with white horses standing in for the owls^.

And since we’re being all emotional check out ‘Mother’, another track aided and abetted by some sublime piano-ing. To my mind it is the song of a bride waiting for her wedding car (‘green limousine for the red head’) and all the attendant anxiety, expectation and excitement, but at the same time it is a rebellion against someone imposing their morality upon you.

Let us veer back across the tracks and hit up the blunt, confrontational side of Little Earthquakes with ‘Precious Things’. Angry doesn’t quite cover this clenched exculpation of sex, blood and urges (‘I want to smash the faces of those beautiful boys’) and two of my very favourite lines on the whole album, her description of the ‘the nine-inch nails and the little fascist panties / Tucked inside the heart of every nice girl’^* and the sneering putdown:

So you can make me cum
That doesn't make you Jesus

---

For all the focus on relationships in Little Earthquakes I think the main theme of the album is self-discovery and if not quite self-love, then a hard won self-tolerance. Take ‘Girls’ with its plea for the protagonist who has been ‘everybody else’s girl, maybe one day she’ll be her own’. Even the form of the stately ‘China’, where she realizes she can never bridge the gap to her lover, tells a tale in and of itself.

The brilliant ‘Silent All These Years’, a song about finding a voice, continues this journey of discovery. It’s a clever beastie though, you can hear the uncertainty behind the sass and I love the image of a heaven where all the lost screams go.

---

Sex does figure pretty large in the majority of the tracks here, seemingly as the field of battle for relationships, the rock on which they splinter and break. I love the swaggering line in ‘Leather’ about screaming as loud as his last one, ‘but I can’t claim innocence’. Amos is never crude on Little Earthquakes, well not wantonly so at least*^. She isn’t phased by sex, she owns it, is in control of herself and not in any mood to flatter the male ego, songs like ‘Crucify’ hint at religious barriers and mores overcome to reach that poise. And then we understand more.

We get ‘Me And A Gun’ tucked away almost at the end of the LP. It is a hard listen. A harrowing and true tale of rape and disassociation made even more stark by being sung unaccompanied. You can hear the disgust, fear and anger in every note, moments of detachment, defiance and decision. It is such a brave song and through its prism, our understanding of the album and its treatment of relationships, innocence and sexuality shifts into an entirely different focus and we are left with nothing but admiration and thanks for her strength.

---

Of course when Little Earthquakes was released the standard comparison was with Kate Bush, you know – woman/songs/piano = exactly the same. I thought this was excruciatingly patronising and sexist at the time; still do. They are very different jellyfish indeed.

One thing that gets a little overshadowed at times is just how great a pianist Tori Amos is, seeing her play live, straddling the stool, beating time and attacking it is one thing. It really is another entirely to hear the delicacy of her playing at times; don’t worry I’m done banging on about ‘Winter’ again. I really love the jolliness of ‘Happy Phantom’s wellspring of well-sprung joy.

---

I have written far more than I meant to about Little Earthquakes and I’ve ignored two songs to save your patience. The LP cover trades on little boxes and these songs refuse to be stuffed into them easily. These songs are by turns sweet, strident, regretful, angry, earthy, harrowingly real and then spiritual; all life captured, transcribed and boxed.

How’s that thought for you?

1153 Down.

PS: Because I think the vid for ‘Winter’ detracts from the song, I found this for you.

*I suspect her link to Neil Gaiman swung it for him, Geraint is how I first read The Sandman. Gaiman was name-checked in ‘Tear In Your Hand’ ‘If you need me, me and Neil’ll be hangin’ out with the dream king / Neil says hi by the way‘.

**I’ve never liked singer-songwriter as a category, it always smacks of something early 70’s and suspiciously Californian to me, something terminally toothsome.

^one for the poetry geeks in the audience there. My second favourite poem if you’re interested^^.

^^my favourite poem is by Ogden Nash, here it is in its’ entirety:

Shake, o shake the sauce bottle
None comes out and then a lottle

^*‘little fascist panties’ entered the lexicon of the 1537 household to describe a certain type of behaviour, male or female.

*^although I suspect the titular disturbances are far more likely to be orgasmic than tectonic in nature.