I moved to Long Island in 1993, but because I was taking classes at Teacher’s College on the Upper West Side, I was in the city a few days every week. On a particularly stunning late spring day, I walked down Broadway from 125th Street to the Tower Records on the corner of Broadway and 66th Street.
I wasn’t looking for any music in particular that day, but I was drawn to a large display of the album Under the Pink by Tori Amos. I’d never heard of the album or Amos largely because I had stopped listening to the radio after college. I got new music from my friends’ recommendations or by randomly picking up albums at the record store. Also on display was Tori Amos’ first album, Little Earthquakes. (It’s her first if you discount Y Tori Kant Read, which I do mostly because it isn’t a solo album—and also because it’s best forgotten.)
I bought both and listened to very little else for the next few months. There is not one bad song on either album. Amos’ songs are by turns funny, weird, fierce, and deeply moving. And then there’s her voice and that extraordinary piano playing.
Scarlet’s Walk, her seventh studio album, came out in 2002. As with Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink there are a few songs that are essential listening. That said, my pick for compulsory listening is “Crazy.”
Having an epiphany about the feelings you have for another person when you’re alone is a profound thing. The euphoria that follows, the kind that makes you want to “drive all night,” is partly about the knowing, and not really caring, that you’re falling and you’re just going to let it happen.
Unrepentant Geraldines, which came out in 2014, was the first new Amos music I listened to since Scarlet’s Walk. Initially, it feels like the song “Wedding Day” is going in a different direction: the lift at the remembered joy of the wedding day, the sense of endless possibility.
But the memories turn out to be wistful not joyous and the refrain is permeated with an enduring and terrible melancholy. This song is a journey.
I could easily add another dozen Tori Amos songs to this list.
Tori Amos