Me and a POLL: Tori Amos LITTLE EARTHQUAKES

man i loved this when it came out. owned it on cassette, played it to death in the little toyota celica that was my first post-college car.

This is the only album of hers I even still own and ever have any desire to play. It is STACKED with great songs.

Can't vote before listening again, though. And even then, I'll regret picking whatever I end up picking.

apparently this had almost no billboard presence at all -- peaked at #65 wikipedia says, "silent all these years" charted on the "modern rock" chart only and there only at 27 ("crucify" was barely higher at 22). so i guess it says something about the friends i had then or the radio i was listening to or just that i was 22, but i felt like this was everywhere in '91-'92.

I remember special ordering the import cd singles for the b-sides and everything. She seemed omnipresent, but maybe it was mostly in print and on mtv/vh1 (and not radio).

I also used to play this to death in the early 90s and saw her live quite a few times in London as well. Voted "Silent All These Years", her most enduring song.

still one of my favourite records ever. shame she never got as good again although that's another debate. i went with 'Winter'.
'upside down' should have been on it (instead of being relegated to a b side) as it was clearly one of her best ever songs. she regretted it afterwards and said as much.
great picture up there too!

her next four albums were all better than this! but yeah it's a terrific album and actually incredibly hard to pick a song here. when i go back to it these days i find myself pretty much in awe of her craftsmanship; partly i almost have to respond to it on that level, because responding to anything on the angsty-teenager level when one is grown up feels...inappropriate, basically, but her musical/lyrical prowess here really is genius in places - the endless rolling melodies of "tear in your hand", the way the title track somehow manages to be a prog-structured seven-minute epic complete with chants of "give me life, give me pain" and yet never actually tips into awful gothic cliché schlock. and "silent all these years" is just so biting!

i'm going with "precious things", i think. "so you can make me cum, that doesn't make you je-e-sus", who the fuck else could even go there?! i can't imagine a single one of this era's self-consciously quirky chicks penning a line like that - tori amos is one of the reasons i just can't take bat for lashes, florence & the machine et al seriously - they just don't have the capacity to get down and dirty like that, to scratch some eyes out as well as float ethereally.

actually if we're gonna talk b-sides, "upside down" is very pretty, but "here in my head" is the one that ranks in my top 10 tori amos tracks of all time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTUVGcVVFg

"sugar" was another terrific b-side from this era, but the definitive version was this full-band live version she played towards the end of the 90s, when i think she was at her performative and creative peak - so much power there. "you're just a pussy!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK60HKIiOI8

"i wanna smash the faces - of those beautiful boys, those christian boys..."

<3

i was thinking the same thing about those lines -- those christian boys, so you can make me cum -- how they still jump out but they also don't seem like a shock tactic or anything, they're right in line with the song and the rest of the record.

and lex you really think the next four are better? i like the next two, but i found her harder and harder to listen to after that. maybe i'll go back to those sometime.

the pele through to venus period is the pinnacle of her career for me - partly because those albums came out between the 13-17 age bracket for me, the sweet spot years for getting into someone like tori amos - but especially on choirgirl i still get this sense that in that era she could turn her hand to literally anything and pull it off; on those 3 albums she seems to be going further outwards in every direction at once, both abandoning classic confessionalist modes and traditional song structures, experimenting with sound (whether the insane triple-rounds of "father lucifer" or the electronic forays of "iieee" and "hotel", which still sound unlike anything else i've ever heard), but every so often pulling out a "hey jupiter" or "playboy mommy" on which she displays this astonishing mastery of songcraft and narrative.

I was gonna make the same post about "Here In My Head" Lex! Though the live version is slightly better than the original i think.

Hence why you posted that I'm sure.

haha no i posted that because there are no studio versions of any of her songs on youtube (apart from the singles), which totally sucks - that one is fairly true to the original though. such bewitching imagery! apple green ice cream, thomas jefferson, the bow and the belt and the girl from the south...

been rediscovering tori's back catalogue in a really big way this month - she soooo needs a big critical reëvaluation right about now

'winter' was the first tori amos track i ever fell in love with

title track

For me at this point it's got to be Mother or Tear in Your Hand.

i still remember being absolutely mesmerized by the "silent all these years" video when i was seven. "mother" is the track i keep coming back to", though. (i've somehow never actually owned a copy of this album, but own the next four)

i would have thought it would be harder to decide, but i think i'm voting "mother," too.

precious things is classic, though

definitely

it's funny, we just put this album on last night.

LOOK, I'M STANDING NAKED BEFORE YOU

i sort of doubt i'll vote for it but i've always loved "happy phantom," both the tune and the idea of it. of course it's also one of the most kate bush-y tracks.

Yes, that's such an underrated song.

China is the underrated one on this album, from my perspective. It was always my least favorite, but whenever I've listened to Little Earthquakes post high school, China is the song I'm drawn to. Maybe because it is less dramatic and confrontational than the other tunes.

Okay, so apparently I've gone longer than I thought w/o listening to this album. Playing it now is like looking at an old yearbook or newspaper or something. It's full of "OH YEAH" nostalgic moments pretty much throughout.

otm re "china" - a glimpse into how she could've become a great mainstream pop songwriter had her own career not worked out (see also "cool on your island" from the y kant tori read days)

"Tear in Your Hand," because it's a song that initially seams slight, coming as it does after the emotional tear of "Mother," but one fateful night when you are 12 and there is only you and Little Earthquakes and all else is gone--even the bed or pillow on which you rest has become a vague gesture of air--it lifts its dreamy head in your direction and carries you home.

Also it should be known that I am with lex on Tori's career arc, even though I wouldn't include To Venus and Back (which has both great tracks and tracks that predict the coming decline). Regardless, Pele and Choirgirl are her best records, unhinged examinations of unbearably fragile scenarios. Stuff you really connect to when you are young and falling asleep on your girlfriend's couch knowing that she hates you now and you will never again feel such transcendent certainty when it comes to one person (you will, of course, but despair is your gothic currency at this age). But also stuff that you rediscover later and realize all its horror and ecstasy again, but from an appreciative distance.

no discussion yet of "me and a gun," which i sort of understand -- it's so blunt and specific that it doesn't exactly invite identification or immersion the way a lot of the rest of the record. but it's a great performance, and it has great lines -- "i haven't seen barbados." and it's one of her most southern songs, very appalachian folk-gothic.

So clearly the greatest debut album of all time, in my mind.

So clearly the greatest debut album of all time, in my mind.

― glenn mcdonald

This is a great album, but it's not the self-titled Van Halen.

Went with "Leather" here - a moment of levity in a pretty heavy trip.

I'm probably in the minority here but the way I see her career arc going is that this début showed all the promise that was fulfilled by Under the Pink, which is her highpoint for me. Pele marked the start of her gradual descent into impenetrable kookiness, like Kate Bush without the good tunes.

Hmm. But if anything, she became *less* abstruse after Pele & Choirgirl, anagram. She simply stopped writing good songs.

a tori album poll would be interesting, little earthquakes would probably win but i imagine all of the first three would get some support.

The first four, maybe?

xp well yeah I don't know the post-Choirgirl albums all that well but as far as I can gather a lot of the ones that aren't covers albums are concept albums, which sounds pretty abstruse to me.

we had a poll on the 1st three, at least.

China is beautiful, very Broadway.

i never thought of Happy Phantom as underrated -- it was the first Tori song that every stood out to me. was just humming it on the streets the other day :)

Hmm. But if anything, she became *less* abstruse after Pele & Choirgirl, anagram. She simply stopped writing good songs.

Also her production went to hell. There are a few good songs to be found in Scarlet's Walk but they are done up in bland dressing.

i remember once i played Happy Phantom on the piano for my stepdad and i was like "what do you think??" and he was like "i think you sound like a gay man playing Tori Amos ... "

My friend's mom played Happy Phantom at his funeral (he was a big Tori fan).

Also her production went to hell

That's one of the problems with Little Earthquakes imho, it has four producer credits and was recorded in three separate phases. so it doesn't really ever come together as a cohesive whole. Under the Pink sounds better in that regard.

anagram, they're "concept" albums but a lot of the music wouldn't sound out of place in a douche commercial is what I'm saying.

that's really sweet, lou.

the production on little earthquakes isn't bad -- it's paired-down, which distinguishes it from the subsequent 2. the live band, high-hat sound of her later years, tho, is definitely dire.

yeah it's just very dated, though I remember that the title track on LE did benefit from the recent remixing/remastering

but idk, not even those awful electric guitars will ruin Leather for me :P

Re: happy phantom

Glad everyone likes it but back in the day in some of the crazy Tori forums everyone and their mother hated on that one. Oh, and "Leather" too, apparently because she overplays it. :I

Phantom did always seem like the the most obvious track to me (not a bad thing, obviously)

are we all going to cool-kid the singles right out of this poll? because they're really f'in' good singles imo

have to give it a listen before voting but it'll crucify, silent all these years, tear in your hand or the title track

no discussion yet of "me and a gun," which i sort of understand -- it's so blunt and specific that it doesn't exactly invite identification or immersion the way a lot of the rest of the record. but it's a great performance, and it has great lines -- "i haven't seen barbados." and it's one of her most southern songs, very appalachian folk-gothic.

― hellzapoppa (tipsy mothra), Monday, January 25, 2010 9:06 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

"me and a gun" is a great song; i think of it as apart from the album in some way. or at least, it's hard for me to compare it to other songs in terms of relative goodness. it's a great song.

tim f said on the kate bush thread that tori is closer to some kind of stevie/sinead hybrid than she is to kate bush, and i really think the title track of this album is the apotheosis of that - all that weird mystical imagery delivered with such theatricality. i could definitely imagine sinead at least singing these lines:

We danced in graveyards
With vampires till dawn
We laughed in the faces of kings
Never afraid to burn
And I hate and I hate
And I hate and I hate
Disintegration
Watching us wither
Black winged roses that safely changed their color

also have we polled 'under the pink' yet?

also have we polled 'under the pink' yet?

I'm not even sure it can be done. In any sane universe it's like a 6-way tie at #1.

btw "how's that thought for ya?" is as strong a zing AND as strong a character study as it was on day 1. if the rest of "silent all these years" held to that standard it would be unbearably good.

mhmm joe i think the title track stands the test of time like kate's stuff too

"me and a gun" is so ridiculously powerful and so hard to listen to. and, for someone known for dramatic performances that deliberately channel hysteria, shockingly deadpan, apart from the one or two lines where her voice cracks ("do you know carolina?"). i can't believe it was initially chosen as her debut single.

watching her perform it live used to be one of those real dig-your-nails-into-the-seat experiences. i think she stopped around 2001, and then six years later w/o any warning came back with this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy3tZkvzAZE

just...whoa.

i misread your post joe -- sorry. my main point is that Little Earthquakes, the track, is the track that sounds best NOW, cuz it's kind of different, and not so TORI. i can't really listen to most of her stuff anymore - it has a very specific time.

other bits of genius:
- heavy breathing as percussion on "precious things"
- the kick drum on "crucify"
- Steve Caton's guitar on "little earthquakes"

lyrically "crucify" should really be de trop but the composition saves it. so ominous!

surprising myself given my personal love for "tear in my hand" and "little earthquakes" but i think it's down to "crucify" and "precious things"

- heavy breathing as percussion on "precious things"

what tipped my vote. the intro with that and the alarm-bell piano. and then the rest of the song lives up to that kind of anxious disquiet -- fear, lust, anger all kind of jumbled up together. and then acceptance of some kind at the end of it.

what's most striking about that song is how she throws off the melody on the rhythm of the drums. it's just unexpected enough and catchy enough at the same time

oh christgaupaws...

Little Earthquakes [Atlantic, 1991]
She's been raped, and she wrote a great song about it: the quietly insane "Me and a Gun." It's easily the most gripping piece of music here, and it's a cappella. This means she's not Kate Bush. And though I'm sure she's her own person and all, Kate Bush she'd settle for. C+

What a fucking jerk. I bet he thought he was being cute, too.

oh, who cares what he thinks.

title track, btw

I think I get what that was supposed to say but what a douchey way to say it.

winter

I think it actually reveals a subtle but widespread impatience with the very idea of solo female performers that the "there only needs to be one of these" meme is applied so regularly (and not just to Tori, to heaps of 90s (in particular) artists).

btw Lilith Fair is back in 2010, featuring Emmylou Harris, Norah Jones, Sheryl Crow, Chantal Kreviazuk, Heart and Ke$ha.

tim f. otm. but sexist responses aside, it seems to me that this album at the time was part of this real emergence of a generation of strong female voices, both indie and mainstream (roger's lilith fair reference also otm). and, you know, for all the "year of the woman" bullshit we had to sit through time and again, it's also true that there were four pazz/jop winners by women in the '90s, compared to zero in the past decade. which is a subject for a whole other thread, i suppose.

it's weird, when i grew up with tori and pj and björk and courtney, i took those female voices for a given, and right now i have no idea whether a) things have regressed and there are no emergent voices of similar strength, skill, ambition, chops and vision, or b) i'm just too old now and chicks like bat4lashes and florence&themachine really are their 00s equivalents

but honestly as old-cranky as it sounds i honestly think a) is correct! these new "quirky girls" who are really obviously influenced by tori, kate &c &c are fucking narrow-blinkered pygmies compared to them.

heavy breathing as percussion on "precious things"

can i just say how much i love this, and also that she did it throughout her career. raspberry fucking swirl!

also wtf is "insane" about "me and a gun"??? it's presented as so discomfitingly normal and sane, contra much of her other work, that's where it derives its power from

forget it Lex, it's christgautown

well it's interesting that the strong-woman voice of the '90s definitely continued in other realms -- pop/r&b/country -- but really subsided in indie. i mean, i guess there's feist and fiery furnaces and whatever, but they're a lot more wistful or wispy and introverted than the tori/bjork/liz/courtney era.

i think everything through choirgirl is really good, venus is not very good, and scarlett's walk is pretty good again, but too long, and everything else is dire worse. anyway right now I think the best song on here is Mother.

xpost apparently we're sharing a brain again... i wrote and then deleted a whole thing about how this really only applies to indie since, y'know, dolly parton and really to "indie" artists who are presumed to write/record/perform their own shit since btw madonna oh hell pat benatar etc etc so it's really this notion of ladies with something to say...

which btw this story always starts with tori and liz and courtney (and maybe sinéad?) and always ends with alanis.

there's maybe hip-hop version as well, in which mc lyte and queen latifah are defanged and trotted back out as lil kim and lol queen latifah, but they did it to LL and Cube too so I guess that's a little different.

Yeah "Mother" would be my alternate choice I think.

Lex, I think you're generally right, what seems to have happened is that the very idea of "women's voices" has been submerged such that the individuality/strength expressed now is simply a derivative of the qualities of the chosen genre - e.g. The Fiery Furnaces conform to oddball avant-indie-rock, the quirky middlebrow pop girls conform to quirky middlebrow pop (closer to, say, Mika, than to other "women artists" per se).

The whole notion of "women in rock" et. al. was always suspect but what made it seductive and half-workable as a notion was the sense that these women were sufficiently divorced from their nominal parent genres (if there even is one) that it made as much sense to group them together - i.e. Tori/Bjork/Polly Jean on the cover of Q kinda works because who else would you group each artist with.

And I think maybe what's changed is that the very notion of "individuality" is increasingly reterrorialized back into genre - such that the purported expressions of it really just conform to very defined and codified rules organised around genres - i.e. it becomes paradoxical.

In the same sense that words like "alternative" and "independent" became concretised, loaded down with specific content.

Tori/Bjork/Polly Jean on the cover of Q kinda works because who else would you group each artist with

http://toolshed.down.net/pix/mjktori9.jpg

http://exclaim.ca/images/up-7bjork.jpg

http://www.motjes.com/Cave%20and%20Harvey.jpg

(the major exception i'm leaving out of the recent indie equation is m.i.a., because her context seems different from feist's or cat power's, but i guess she's more "indie" than she is anything else.)

Ha ha yeah but if you had to name two male rock stars who tend to "rise above" critical boxing you'd be hard pressed to come up with better picks than Yorke or Cave (this is not a comment on their singular genius, but the way they are treated).

True but isn't that part of the qualification to group with a Bjork or a PJ? And it's not like the pairings are interchangeable -- there's definitely a common thread in the aesthetic (which of course I'm too at-work to articulate atm so haha "trust me on this")

yeah all the theories on "strong women's voices" seem otm...

i think the ideas of confessionalism and catharsis have also all but disappeared, and replaced with either an inoffensive blue-stocking ethereality or generic "quirk" signifiers as a substitute for substance. i mean, i just can't imagine bat for lashes, florence and so on genuinely scaring anyone.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

good distribution, tho the two that 0 are both good.

that got 0

Yeah, "Girl" was definitely a contender for my vote.

yeah an album so great even the 2 tracks with no votes are still ace. i love 'Girl'. this was actually probably the hardest poll to answer on ilm ever! it's made me realise just HOW good this album is.

hopefully my limited C+P html capabilities pay off now...
I think it actually reveals a subtle but widespread impatience with the very idea of solo female performers that the "there only needs to be one of these" meme is applied so regularly (and not just to Tori, to heaps of 90s (in particular) artists).
THANK YOU. It amazes me that this framework to solo female performers is still so prevalent, but so subtle that it's hard to discuss tangibly. Do Joanna Newsom, Bjork and Karin Dreijer Andersson all sing similarly, or am I just sexist? (Or racist toward Scandinavian/Icelandic musicians?) The question is not so much where do these artists stand in their respective genres as women, but when can we talk about these women as simply artists in their respective genres?

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For anyone dithering about seeing her live, there's been LOTS of this album in the setlists on the current tour.
Winter, Mother, Me And A Gun, Silent, Precious Things... all scattered throughout the 2 UK shows this weekend.

it's posted upthread but i have to bump this for "here in my head."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zQTUVGcVVFg

you see the bow and the belt
and the girl from the south
all favourites of mine
you know them so well

One day a week I'd argue that "Here. In My Head" is the best song of her career. "Maybe I'm just the horizon you run to when she has left you" blarghhh so GOOD.

Oddly enough, I never loved this record the way I loved Pink through Pele, but at the same time I think this record was her at her lyrical peak. Would've voted "Mother" but "Crucify", "Silent" and "Little Earthquakes" are all 10/10. Never loved "Winter" or "China". Never thought she had the comic timing of Kate Bush to pull off "Leather" or "Happy Phantom".

It's interesting Lex that you'd view her "rock trio" setup from 97-99 as her salad days. I've never seen her live but the Venus Live CD really turned me off somewhere around the 7, 8 or 9 minute mark of "The Waitress"

(Oh and I typed "Pink thru Pele" but I meant "Pink through Choirgirl")

she's 50 today.

hb tori!

apparently this had almost no billboard presence at all -- peaked at #65 wikipedia says, "silent all these years" charted on the "modern rock" chart only and there only at 27 ("crucify" was barely higher at 22). so i guess it says something about the friends i had then or the radio i was listening to or just that i was 22, but i felt like this was everywhere in '91-'92.

― hellzapoppa (tipsy mothra), Sunday, January 24, 2010 12:46 AM (fifteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

That's crazy. Silent All These Years and Crucify were omnipresent on WHFS at the time, and to a lesser extent, her cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit. I had a few friends who were obsessed with the album.

And perhaps that omnipresence was one of the reasons I never bought it back in the day, despite really enjoying her music. But I was in Goodwill last week, scanning the CD shelf, when I caught a glimpse of it. Opening it up, however, I noticed that the copy was kinda scratched up. Not worth taking a chance, I thought. But when I went back on Monday, I was hoping it was still there, because I would take that chance. But once I was back in there, not only was the old, beat-up copy of Little Earthquakes still there, but further up the shelf, a much more pristine version. And next to it, a copy of the Crucify CD Single! Score.

I went up to the counter and casually put the CDs down, with the back cover of Little Earthquakes unintentionally facing up. Now, as popular as the album was back in high school, all of my friends had it on cassette, so until this moment I had never seen the phallic mushroom graphic before. And people, neither had the Goodwill cashier, who went wide-eyed. He even flipped the CD over to see what was on the front. I didn't get outwardly flustered, but that was an awkward 10 seconds or so.

Looking on discogs, the mushroom illustration doesn't appear to have been featured on the CD's longbox. Otherwise, I might have guessed that had something to do with the aforementioned low sales.

I assumed this was a bigger deal in terms of sales as well.

This was a big album in my friend group, but I guess not all of is bought it. It wasn’t like Nirvana. A few of us had it and played it for the others who seemed to like it but not enough to pay for it.

I saw her tour for this LE and UTP. The first time was maybe the first instance of me being at a show that was 85% women.

She and this record ramped up in popularity very slowly, through word-of-mouth and winning fans over one at a time. The record might not have peaked very high but it's still outsold Boys for Pele nearly two-to-one, and that record debuted at #2.