Still Breathing (How Tori Amos Taught Me to Dance)

The year I turned 13, I listened to Little Earthquakes nonstop. First, on a borrowed cassette from my best friend, Barbara. Then my own. Stretched across my bedroom carpet, watching sunlight play across the wall. Walkman headphones late at night, pretending to sleep. Singing along in Barbara’s basement.

Little Earthquakes was a wildly original and sensual piano pop album grappling with sexuality, violence, alienation, and rage towards the church. The intimacy of Tori’s voice, her percussive breaths, the soaring high notes, primal screams, the sophisticated piano—and the stark exception: “Me and a Gun,” a harrowing a cappella song about being kidnapped and raped at gunpoint by a fan in the backseat of his car after a show. I could do nothing but listen during that song. Could not speak, walk, or do anything with my hands while “Me and a Gun” played.

Barbara landed in the hospital for cutting the same year Little Earthquakes came out. Her mother accused her of lying about the older boys raping her. Barbara and I snuck paper cups of pink strawberry ice cream from the hospital freezer and sat on her narrow cot. The cold sweet melted on my tongue as she whispered to me that she didn’t want to be alone with the creepy male psychiatrist assigned to her. That night in my bedroom, I pored over the Little Earthquakes liner notes. The strange images of phallic mushrooms. The lyrics in their boxes surrounded by white space. I returned, again and again, to “Me and a Gun.” Tori would believe us.

Two years after Little Earthquakes, Tori released Under the Pink—artfully arranged, both delicate and thundering. Just as melodic and confrontational as Little Earthquakes, it continued the themes of sexuality and violence, including betrayal amongst women (“But I believe in peace, bitch / I believe in peace”) and a song about masturbating in her bedroom while her preacher father conducted church meetings downstairs. Barbara and I dissected the lyrics of the first single, “Cornflake Girl,” with the refrain “This is not really / This, this, this is not really happening”—was that also a song about rape?

I saw Tori perform at the Kingston Grand Theatre during her Under the Pink tour. She seethed and writhed. Playing two Bösendorfers simultaneously, she straddled the piano bench with one foot pumping the pedal and the other pounding out time. She lost herself in performance, and at one point a gleaming line of spittle spilled from her lips to dangle over the keys. I held my breath for most of that song.

I went to a slumber party near the end of eighth grade. We whispered, our faces lit by flashlights. Linda’s father was forbidden to be alone with her or her little sister. Amy’s older cousin pulled her into his bedroom and locked the door, telling her afterwards what he planned to do to her the next time. The older boys had taken turns raping Barbara. I cried with my friends, hugged them. I didn’t say that my father hit us, that he swung with terrifying speed between loving me and hating me, that my mother wept, told me she was scared. We went to sleep in a nest of sleeping bags littered with Doritos crumbs and didn’t talk about any of it the next day. 

Violence loomed in our lives. Tori hauled that into the open for us even as her sometimes-impenetrable lyrics alluded to the blurry, fragmented nature of living with unmetabolised trauma. We didn’t need absolute clarity. We needed validation. We needed emotional depth and resonance and that full-throated invitation to feel along with her, whether the mood was mischievous or pissed-off or grieving or carnal or some dizzying combination of them all.

Starting at age six, I withdrew into children’s adventure novels: Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, The Chronicles of Narnia. No raging fathers in these books. No mute, frozen mothers. By age 12 the knots in my back and neck were so tight it hurt to carry my textbooks in a backpack, so I took codeine from the bathroom cabinet daily. At 17 I quit codeine by replacing it with weed. By then “Me and a Gun” started an icy churn in my stomach. I didn’t know why. (Didn’t know either why I got a brick in my throat when my boyfriend and I had sex—sex that hurt, that chafed and left me raw, sex that I struggled to escape, physically unable to speak but still trying to push him off.) But I did know exactly how long to press the fast-forward button on my Walkman to skip to the next song.

That’s when Boys for Pele came out. Dense, crowded, ambitious, and shocking, it featured the harpsichord, which—in Tori’s hands—sounds like the piano’s chaotic angry cousin. I’m not trying to be pretty here, I imagined her saying. This is a breakup album, and I’m still pissed at the church. On the album cover, Tori smiles right at the camera, streaked with mud, lounging with a rifle in her lap. The album art also included a piano on fire, Tori breastfeeding a pig, Tori on all fours on a filthy mattress, her white pants stained. She’d given up trying to be palatable. Critics derided Boys for Pele as self-indulgent, overblown, the lyrics bizarre and nonsensical. For me, it was a different kind of escape, a space to be enthralled, moved, and deeply present—a temporary and private un-numbing.

The last Tori Amos album I bought was her fourth, From the Choirgirl Hotel. With its snaky, slinky production, filtered vocals, and full band, Choirgirl was a turn away from piano-and-vocals towards drum loops, electronica, trip hop and dance music.

Maybe I stopped there because the back pain had become so severe I didn’t dance. Or maybe by then I understood that Tori Amos was embarrassing. Like romance novels, or bleeding through your pants. Like the colour pink. Like victimhood.

Hanging out in my boyfriend’s basement with his friends—brimming ashtray and the sharp stink of skunky weed—we only ever listened to Phish, the Rheostatics, the Beatles, Bob Marley, Dave Matthews Band. All-male productions in which women served only as backup singers. Groupies. Jailbait.

If I had played a Tori Amos CD, the boys would have eye-rolled at her lyrics (nevermind that many male songwriters, including Trey Anastasio of Phish, get every bit as weird as Tori Amos) and laughed at her aching, earnest vulnerability. I didn’t think of the boys in my social circle as unusually cruel, but I knew that for them, Tori Amos would be just too much.‍

Yet even her harshest critics acknowledge her talent. She has gigged since she was 13 years old, creates a new album every two years, maintains a gruelling tour schedule of theatrical and cathartic two-hour sets, continues to experiment with structure, genre, language and sound, is famously available to her fans (talk about emotional labour!) and at one point regularly sold out stadium shows on world tours Still none of that is enough to prevent her dismissal as a “Grade A, Class One, Turbo-driven Fruitcake,”^[i] or the characterisation of her fans (mainly girls, women, and queer people, many of whom are survivors of sexual violence) as unhinged, obsessive, pathetic misfits.^[ii]‍

None of this is surprising. Teen girls don’t get a lot of respect, and Tori has always written from the perspective of girls and adolescents. My father taught me by the time I was eight that nothing scuttles a girl’s credibility quicker than “emotionality.” So I avoided being too much. I buried my pain, confusion, and fury. I smiled on demand. Served as caretaker for my boyfriend, parents, and friends while working two part-time jobs and maintaining good grades. My boyfriend’s highest praise for me was You’re never difficult. I excelled.

In 1998—the same year From the Choirgirl Hotel came out—I finished high school six months early and immediately escaped Ontario for my aunt and uncle’s house on Vancouver Island. No one shouted at me, belittled me, or touched me in ways I didn’t welcome. I went days, weeks, without flinching. I worked minimum-wage jobs, started dating women, tossed rocks into the Pacific Ocean. I slipped out at night after my aunt went to bed, smoked strong BC weed from a tiny glass pipe, and prowled my new neighbourhood alone. I wandered in the dark, stoned and curious, until I was lost—then kept walking, sometimes for hours, until I found our street again.

I kept the sexual assaults (in my boyfriend’s bed, his car) in a dim corner in my mind, next to every reason why I’d needed to get 4400 km away from my father. But I was taking the first steps towards some kind of freedom. Towards an honest and vivid version of myself: less palatable, more difficult.

I had never been good at masturbation, didn’t even know exactly where my clit was, but I found it one night after arriving home with sore feet and, on a whim, while playing From the Choirgirl Hotel on my Discman. I’d come with guys before—entirely by accident—but never alone, and never multiple times. Now it was all mine. Just me and the raw impulses of my hands and hips moving to “Raspberry Swirl” as some barely lucid part of my brain marvelled at this unquiet homecoming, at what my body could do. And afterwards? Maybe it was the weed or the endorphins, but the afterglow was a wholly novel experience. It too was all mine. An overwhelming rush of tenderness and love—for myself—as I laugh-cried towards the end of the song, Tori still breathing in my ear.

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^[i] Ellen, Barbara. “Tori Amos: Ginger Nut.” New Music Express, 11 January 1992.
^[ii] Doyle, Sady. “Birth of the Uncool: In Defense of the Tori Amos Fan.” Bitch Media, 14 Feb. 2011, https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/birth-of-the-uncool