The Album: Little Earthquakes Tori Amos
The Story: This is one of those albums that has a lot of connections to me. I was listening to this album when the boy finally came to his senses and told me he was in love with me and I experienced those kisses that mark the purity of fire that somehow ONLY 'teenager in love' kisses can ever achieve. Not my first kisses by any means, but the ones that really imprinted.
Tori handed this demo to Neil Gaiman at one of his signings because she was so inspired by his work on Sandman. I'd be listening to her music at a local musician's house a few years later when he handed me my first Sandman comic and told me I'd love them.
The biggest connection is with Gail, my best friend of what feels like 9000 years.
We became best friends when I was a junior in high school. We'd met the year before, but we weren't friends yet. Gail says one of her earlier memories of me was in math class. I'd been put in a cluster of some of the biggest asshole bullies in school and she thought 'oh that poor fat girl is doomed.' She watched as I would hold my own with them, trading barbs with an unkind smile on my face and eyes full of what was only thinly veiled hatred. I was fully back in control of my narrative by my sophomore year and people like that were only minor difficulties.
My junior year, I joined the local writers' group and she was the only person my age who also attended. We started talking and soon the friendship started. The first time she spent the night with me, I made her watch Dune, Labyrinth, my collection of Siouxsie videos. She was still talking to me the next day, so I knew I'd found a kindred spirit.
She was a year older than me, so my senior year, she left for college. Talaquah still didn't have MTV (honestly, it seems like I wouldn't have access to this station at all until after they stopped playing videos), but it DID have VH1. She would record VHS tapes of videos she thought I'd like. We'd watch them on the weekends when she would come home.
One weekend she came home with the video for "Silent all these Years." The video had too much light exposure and this girl with a shock of dyed red hair (dyed over other red hair) with a piano and a song about the frustration of not being able to express yourself. There was this little girl with dark hair following her around. They never meet in any scene of the video and this made me deeply sad.
I didn't understand why I was so sad until there was just a close up of Tori's face. This woman looked like my mom. Not how Mom looked later, not even how she did at that moment, but in my head, when I thought of her from the perspective of the four-year-old she would read Tolkien to, these were the eyes I saw, these were the expressions.
She looked like my mom. She would sing things that sounded like what my mom would say. She would sing things that I'd not realized my mom was probably also thinking. This beautiful, talented, amazing woman singing about how she's trying to fight for recognition, love, and significance.
This is seriously the hardest post I've had to write. Memories of bad stuff happening are one thing, but my mom passed away when I was in my 30s and I'd not watched this video since. I cried all the way through it. I just wanted to scream that all that love and recognition and significance she was begging for were hers for the taking. She just had to realize it, look inside and claim it. Like the ruby red slippers, she had that power the whole time.
Anyway . . .
Tori composes from the piano and that is always the backbone of her music. Her lyrics are complex, blending conversation and metaphor seamlessly. She talks about betrayal and anger and guilt. She wrote a song about being raped that is so vivid and raw that even now I have a lot of trouble listening to it.
The first three songs ("Crucify" "Girl" "Silent All These Years") plus "Winter" and "Mother" (songs I could see her singing to her own parents) were this mini soundtrack of anguish I'd put myself through when I'd let myself miss Mom.
Tori's voice has a great deal of purity to it and her music is beautiful. This is always a fascinating contrast to the lyrics that are often about the darker facts of being alive.
And maybe that's why there are so many connections here. This album held a lot of truth for me, a lot of truth for many people. I'm not sure it healed us. Maybe it just reminded us that we needed to heal.
Thank you to: Gail, for bringing the gift of this music to me.
The Lesson Learned: The deeper you bury the pain, the more it's going to hurt you when it starts to heal.
Sometimes when you have a surgery where they cut deep into you, they stitch you up in layers, connecting what needs to be reattached then pulling the next layers together and stitching them. Most of the time, the stitches just dissolve. Other times your body isn't willing to wait for that.
Those deeper stitches will push through the upper layers, working their way to the surface to force their removal. It hurts a lot. It's bloody and easily infected. Often this becomes a self-surgery situation where you find yourself with tweezers and tiny scissors, pulling on the stitch so you can hook the loop, cut it open, and pull it out. It's hell.
When we heal over emotional wounds, the same kind of thing will happen. We bind down the layers of hurt and pull protective emotional tissue over them. We have to. Often this is the only way we can continue to function. Eventually, something will start pushing that pain to the surface, making you do whatever you have to in order to deal with it. This can be sudden and it can be very scary, but remember, your body IS trying to heal you. It's just going to be agonizing in the meantime.
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