Happy 30th Anniversary to Tori Amos’ debut solo album Little Earthquakes, originally released in the UK January 6, 1992 and in the US February 25, 1992.
My friend Nikki was the one who introduced me to Tori Amos. It was ’92 or ’93, and we were freshmen in high school. Nikki was new to our school, and to Germany, and she lived on one of the lush green mountains that overlooked the city in a cozy little apartment with her mother, who was recently divorced. I remember going over to her house for the first time and looking through her music collection on the little shelf next to her bed, and sliding out the Little Earthquakes cassette. Yes, she had it on tape—that’s how old I am. And I remember thinking, ‘huh, this chick looks weird.’
There was Tori, with flame-red hair, crammed into a small wooden box with a blue miniature piano at her bare feet. Nikki was effusive about how much I would love her, but I wasn’t sure because I wasn’t totally sure about Nikki yet. I thought Nikki was weird, too, but in way that seemed almost like an exotic vacation from my regular life.
Freshman year I had fallen in with a group of preppy popular kids. I had spent my life on that American army base in Germany, and so friends always ended up moving, but the summer before high school had been the worst because my entire friend group had moved all at the same time. So, somehow I had fallen in with some very nice, very wholesome and very uncomplicated people who sort of made me want to shoot myself, even though I liked the popularity by proximity.
I also think—no, I know—that I hung out with these people because that’s who my dad, a very popular but very strict teacher at my high school, wanted me to hang out with. But then I met Nikki. Every time I think of her, a line in Liz Phair’s “Flower” comes to mind: “Everything you say is so obnoxious, funny, true and mean.”
Nikki had moved to Heidelberg from a suburban town in Pennsylvania. Her father was a doctor, and not long after her parents’ divorce, he married a woman not much older than we were. Nikki hated her. From a young age, Nikki had taken a passionate interest in ballet, singing, and acting, and so her parents had schlepped her back and forth to nearby Pittsburgh for lessons and recitals and productions. So when I saw Tori crouched in front of that miniature piano, I thought she might be a little pretentious like Nikki. But Nikki made up for her pretentiousness by cussing a lot, smoking Marlboro Lights, and regaling me with salacious stories about her brother’s friends at college. So I decided to trust her.
It was a gut punch. Over the last 30 years, I’ve listened to Little Earthquakes thousands of times, but I can say with certainty that the first time I heard it was a total gut punch in the way that you ponder your entire existence in that short, shocked space without air. With that one album, Tori Amos was able to encapsulate everything I had ever felt, and everything I would likely ever feel. There was something exhilarating about that, and validating, but terrifying in the way that intimacy can sometimes be. It ran the gamut from songs of rejection and alienation, to finding oneself and one’s voice, to feelings of objectification and sexual shame, to all-too-familiar daddy issues, to mother issues, and everything in between. It was a masterpiece, both in terms of emotional honesty and expert musicality.
Little Earthquakes appeared in early 1992, right when Nirvana’s Nevermind topped the charts. In the way that Kurt Cobain was able to tap into a collective experience or attitude particular to my generation, so was Tori Amos. But while Nirvana encapsulated a specific type of anger and disillusionment and ennui, Amos tapped into what felt specifically very female, or feminine. While Nirvana was creating a signature buzzing, sludgy sound, Tori Amos was doing melodic, sexy, bench-straddling piano that hadn’t existed since Carole King, and never in this exact way. Her voice was keening, careening and wailing in the way of Robert Plant, and whatever depth of emotion her voice didn’t cover, she found it in her deft but wild piano playing.
The album begins with Tori’s voice, somewhat quiet and slightly echo-y against a backdrop of sparse beats: “Every finger in the room is pointing at me / I want to spit in their faces, then I get afraid what that could bring.” It’s a sentiment that almost any teenager feels deep in their bones—the self-consciousness, the not fully belonging, and the sense of being punished for it. But then Tori sings, conspiratorially, “Why do we crucify ourselves / Every day I crucify myself.”
We all grew up on Madonna, and so crucifixion as pop-music metaphor wasn’t particularly groundbreaking, but this notion of finding a way to love ourselves that wasn’t about fierceness and dancefloor fabulousness was. The idea that we might find a way out of self-punishment just by naming it, confessing it, felt like a worthy and possible endeavor.
“Girl,” the album’s second track, sees a young woman crawling out of the shadows, clutching a faded photograph, presumably of the person she once was: “She’s been everybody else’s girl / Maybe one day she’ll be her own.” The song is dark and moody, Bell Jar-like in its depressiveness, but then it shifts in mood to a pop-filled, hopeful, celebratory center, only to shift back to its moodiness in the final third. “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,” Amos told Rolling Stone. “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.”
One of the songs I often skipped over was “Me And A Gun,” a harrowing account of Amos’ rape. Nikki had warned me that it was there before giving me the tape, and I had listened to it intently the first time, allowing myself to bear witness to a pain I didn’t know, but within which every woman lives with its possibility. I deeply respected Amos’ courage in telling it, and I respected that Little Earthquakes was about much more than I could understand right then.
I was hanging out with Nikki more and more, ditching my other friends on the weekends to ride the Strassenbahn downtown to Bismarckplatz, where we’d walk the length of the Hauptstrasse, the main street, dropping into the little shops and stopping to buy soft pretzels from the street vendors. Soon, we both turned 16—the drinking age in Germany—and we started going out to bars and clubs, dancing until closing and then laughing as we trekked up the 90-degree mountain drunk, sobering up just enough to shush each other so as not to wake her sleeping mother as we tiptoed into the tiny, dark apartment.
Our favorite Tori songs, we agreed, were “Silent All These Years” and “Precious Things,” back-to-back songs about getting screwed over by crappy dudes, something each of us was starting to have experience with. And because we were melodramatic teenagers, prone to drama (literally—we were both in Drama Club), we liked to imagine ourselves as the long-suffering girlfriend who says, “Boy, you best pray that I bleed real soon.” Or telling the self-absorbed jock who dissed you for a girl named Jodi, “So you can make me cum / that doesn’t make you Jesus.” Burn.
Nikki loved the song “Happy Phantom,” which was a rollicking, fun and funny song about a ghost that wreaks playful havoc on a town. I thought it was cheesy. However, the song is also, at its literal core, about mortality. “To talk about death was really important on Little Earthquakes because there was a part of me that had to die,” Amos said. “The image that I had created for whatever reason, had to die.”
The two other songs that appear on the middle of the album—“China” and “Leather”—also remind me of Nikki, mostly because there’s a musical-theater quality to them. By a certain point in our friendship, Nikki had begun to find her performance niche in Heidelberg and was doing more and more in terms of rehearsals, plays and recitals. She had big dreams of studying acting at Carnegie Mellon when we graduated. “China” is a slow, sweeping ballad about a lost love that I can imagine appearing in some sort of Andrew Llloyd Webber production, and “Leather” is a Cabaret-style romp that implores of an objectifying lover, “Look I’m standing naked before you / Don’t you want more than my sex?” Nikki would always sing it in a slowed-down, exaggerated “va-va-voom” style, like she was lounging across a piano, or wearing a boa and shaking her sequined tits.
But “Tear In Your Hand” was a song I kept for myself. Out of every song on Little Earthquakes, it’s the one that resonates most deeply for me. I remember listening to it on my headphones on the bus to school, staring out the window, always playing it on repeat because I now owned my own copy on CD. Its melody is happy and yet much of the message is sorrowful, and somehow the whole is much greater than its parts.
All the world just stopped now
So you say you don’t want to stay together anymore
My parents divorced at the end of my sophomore year. It wasn’t really a surprise. My dad moved out and found a job at a different high school on a nearby base an hour away. I felt guilty for enjoying the sweet, exuberant freedom at school without his looming presence. But I was also no longer everybody else’s girl. At the same time, there was something surreal about how life kept going on, how lyrics like “If you need me / me and Neil will be hangin’ out with the dream king” made me giddy because I had a crush on a boy named Neil in my Computer Science class, even though I was also so incredibly sad.
I started drinking more, and smoking more, and hanging out with kids who were getting me into trouble, while Nikki spent grueling hours rehearsing for the lead in Man of La Mancha. I still hung out with my popular friends from time to time, but then one day I got arrested by the MPs for drinking wine coolers in the library’s gazebo with my “dirtbag” friends when I was supposed to be at youth group with my wholesome friends. The drinking age on base was 18. “You’re going to end up living in a trailer park,” Nikki told me. I fucking hated her in that moment.
But I took her words to heart and started getting my shit together. I quit the Drama Club, and joined the school newspaper, which was more in line with my interests. Leah, one of the friends involved in the Bartles & Jaymes incident, introduced me to one of her German friends, and he and I settled into a stable long-term relationship. I got my grades up, and I graduated. For the rest of high school, Nikki and I remained friendly, but not in any way that someone who just moved there would have known that, at one point, we had been best friends.
Oh, these little earthquakes
Here we go again
The final song on Little Earthquakes, its title song, is a catharsis. It was written when Tori was experiencing her own miscommunication with friends and family. “You don’t know how the meltdown happened within a group of people,” she said. “Lots of finger-pointing and I couldn’t cope.” By this point on the album’s journey, we’ve laughed and we’ve cried and we’ve loved and we’ve lost and we’ve loved again. We’ve also lost and found ourselves. So now there’s nothing to do except to recognize the cyclical nature of life, shrug our shoulders, and say “Here we go again.” Even when it feels like it might rip us into pieces.
Enjoyed this article? Read more about Tori Amos here:
Boys for Pele (1996) | To Venus and Back (1999) | Ocean to Ocean (2021)
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