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music that matters: natalie talks tori amos

By on November 26, 2013
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If you’re lucky, once in a lifetime, maybe twice, you stumble on a piece of music or even a whole album that opens up everything… your jaw, your eyes, your heart and your mind.

I remember the day in 1992 when I was struck by such luck. I was twenty one, living several hours away from my family and friends and merely existing in a lonely relationship with my man at the time in our tiny apartment on the edge of Little Italy. The radio was on, it was evening, dinner was finished and then I heard it– the solo piano and a voice laid bare, a voice that knew where I stood. The song was Silent All These Years and the artist was Tori Amos. I sat and listened to that half hour of radio spotlighting the record Little Earthquakes (I would wake up the next morning, bus it downtown and buy it) and it floored me in multiple ways: the honesty, the nakedness, the imagery, the sweeping orchestral arrangements juxtaposed against quiet whispers. I was a budding songwriter at the time, trying to find my own voice and it was a time when few women were singing with any truth in commercial radio, a time when the only women in the fame machine were cookie-cutter sex symbols belting out fluffy lyrics about love in perfect formulaic pop structure.

I had only a handful of female icons I respected–like Annie Lennox, Tracy Chapman–but none were piano players. As I listened to Tori all I could think was, “She’s on the radio, playing piano and singing her own songs? A woman can actually do that? People will listen?”

It was the beginning of the paradigm shift in popular music that started as a crumble and became a full-on breakdown and rebuilding of the music scene. And indeed it was the beginning of my own shift, back to the girl I had left behind.

The Grunge fans had their Nirvana and I had my Tori, to play me through the deep heartache and soaring happiness that would be the remainder of my twenties. Each song would come to represent some part of myself: Me and a Gun would open up the date rape wound that I had never faced; China would play on the car stereo as I painfully ended my 7 year relationship; Crucify would give me permission to stop lashing myself over every choice I made. And as a fellow songwriter, she showed me the freedom in being brutally honest, and that even the darkest truth can become light if we are courageous enough to say it out loud.

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Little Earthquakes, Tori Amos, 1992

Track listing

1. Crucify

2. Girl

3. Silent all these Years

4. Precious things

5. Winter

6. Happy Phantom

7. China

8. Leather

9. Mother

10. Tear in Your Hand

11. Me and A Gun

Available on iTunes

 

beauty_backNatalie Hughes, editor, writer, performer and songwriter, is a gifted interpreter of the human experience, expressing passion, humor, heartbreak, healing and freedom to a depth that few writers reach. Natalie is also the Musical Director for Crystal Andrus Productions, providing music for short films, international speaking engagements, and powerful meditations. Hear her in music and conversation weekly as the co-host on The Crystal Andrus Show. Natalie lives along the picturesque waterways of Peterborough, Canada with her husband – photographer Michael Hurcomb – and her two children. For more, visit nataliehughes.com and find Natalie on iTunes,  Twitter and Facebook.

 

 

 

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