Viscous sadness, puberty & the tragic exorcism of Tori Amos
Like any Millennial woman, the bridge to my adolescence was made up of 24% fairy roleplay in Yahoo! chat, 13% lying about hacking into the Hotmail of my hot best friend to whom I was a bitter beta, and 63% Tori Amos.
“Spark” was my formal introduction on the local alternative radio station. Flowing back and forth from menacing, koto-esque strings to feminine, starlit piano and breathy vocals, it was the perfect OST of my terrified and entitled teenhood. From the Choirgirl Hotel was one of the first albums I owned. I remember buying it from a BX when CDs still came in protective plastic cages.
I would only learn later, obsessively scouring fansites and forums on a brand-new Internet, that Choirgirl Hotel was an album about grief, written after multiple miscarriages. Tori Amos has lost or is unwilling to explore this ability nowadays, but at the time she had a sacred talent for writing about personal tragedy in a way that felt cosmic and ancient. The way she sang “Because, cowboy, the snakes they are my kin” and “I guess I’m an underwater thing so I guess I can’t take it personally,” somehow resonated with me like me sending radio waves to myself from another dimension.
(There’s one of these every time she releases a new album, a long and personal outpouring from someone mourning her, feeling betrayed and begging the entity that’s holding Tori Amos hostage to give her back to us.)
Choirgirl regularly carried me to sleep on its black, churning waters. It was the first music I actively listened to and engaged with, laying on the floor with eyes closed, absorbed. No one understood from the poetic lyrics and foaming, night-tide drums that I was being indoctrinated into a tormented cult of one. Adolescence is where our shadow self is born and I met mine and she was dripping with want, thought she was enlightened, stopped taking notes on Sunday sermons, sang badly, slept late, stayed awake till small hours watching music videos and crying for thousands of reasons and no reason.
What a magician she seemed, then, when her last three albums where the raw and fragile Little Earthquakes, the strange Under the Pink like automatic writing from a séance of executed women, and Boys for Pele’s squalling, all fecund hellscapes and exposed god-rot.
In a lifetime that had been defined mostly by violence, abuse, anger, and grief, no one had given me permission to be sad. No one had ever told me sadness could be beautiful or therapeutic or vast or consoling. No one said I could inhabit it or wear it like a dress and feel like myself inside it.
My obsessions with boys weren’t merely hormonal. I always thought they were attempts to feel loved by approaching it as massively as possible, with jaws open like a whale going for krill. But, another possibility: I was trying to break my heart as fast as possible and smell fumes rising from it that were as sweet and haunting as “Caught a Lite Sneeze” or squeeze out rageful, sopping daggers like “Precious Things.”
I haven’t been a Fan for years, but I still dream about Tori Amos fairly often. Usually I’m meeting her after seeing her perform in intimate venues such as my high school gymnasium, and I tell her that she taught me I didn’t have to become a woman without a fight. That I could own and weaponize my weirdness, that I could walk into hell undressed instead of letting demons from youth-group scare-theater drag me there.
The Tori Amos community was melodramatic, as you might expect, and we disagree about exactly when she vanished, or was exorcised from her vessel in a secret Christian intervention. Many point to the somewhat sedated, high-concept Scarlet’s Walk in which Tori played a character taking a trip across America post-9/11. It was nice. It was pretty. It was music, not a grimoire dripping wet from the fae throat it was pulled from. All my memories are of it playing in my car, not my bedroom.
Others say it was The Beekeeper. One fan’s description of it as a “chamomile coma” still stands out vividly. She was married, she had a child. We didn’t know what to make of the album cover like a mom’s scrapbook or songs with smiles that didn’t reach their eyes and lyrics like “boys, I bring home the bacon now.” Fine. Domesticated. Matured. A sorceress and puberty spirit-guide is allowed to go on maternity leave.
But we were aghast and declared mid-life crisis with American Doll Posse, which was somehow both the most high-energy and safe thing she’d ever done. Tori Amos was officially a missing person.
Creative depressives are probably no stranger to the fear of losing one’s edge along with one’s despair. But wearing the dress from one’s teenhood sorrow-prom isn’t a sustainable Look. I’m sure that carving my identity out of hot tears and unloveability helped entrench me in my depression till my mid-twenties, and I never released an acapella song about my rape that defined me as a musical artist.
Artistic departures, yes. Tori Amos had earned some schmaltz and glam, yes.
But my template for fury and lust, for eating apple pie with Satan, for swimming to the bottom of liquid, black diamonds, released a fucking Christmas album.
Was it a character, the Tori Amos who growled and rolled her eyes back into her head and played her piano like a harpy?
I blamed many things for who I was till college. My father’s death, my mother’s abuse and addiction, the small town and small minds I grew up with, the body I began hating right on time. But I was supposed to shake some of the husk off in college. Imagine, slinging my car into an unpermitted parking space and rushing to class because I still hated waking up every morning. Imagine, surrounded by intelligent people and unable to speak to any of them through numb cotton in my throat that makes me sound like I struggle to get from the beginning of one short sentence to the end. I didn’t retain any friends from that time. Depression entombed me. Living in homes that weren’t mine, thinking all the time about the mounting cost of each class I was muddling through, trauma was my companion everywhere.
Four shitty, original Tori Amos studio albums later, I did get help. My first botched therapy attempt, I sat in the lobby alone for an hour because she’d forgotten my appointment and I didn’t blame her. The second round came from a persistent infection cum health psychosis that led to me finally getting an anti-depressant prescription.
The well-lit waters were still deep and salty.
Still haven’t written another novel. Still not convinced that what drove me to write the first one in high school wasn’t a very specific species of depression demon, like a poltergeist drawn to the powerful energy of a pubescent girl. Still not sure that having depression as my only friend isn’t the most powerful motivation to create.
The Tori I loved made albums about fucking and killing male gods. She waved around a never-forgotten bloodthirst for teenage boys that made her feel ugly and wore “hysteria” like a necklace of teeth. She played two pianos simultaneously while high on mushrooms and could shred the keys in a way that makes the entire metal genre seem like a hollow tin can.
In my mind, I did those things alongside her in my youth. In actuality, I hid my suicidal ideations in her abstract lyrics. I kept my sadness jealously to myself.
I started Tori Amos’s fifteenth album with less embarrassment and dread than I started the twelfth. I was surprised to find a little Tori Amos featured in it. Her music isn’t a demonology of heartbreak now, just lightly glazed with references to Greek myths.
Where did Tori Amos go? Maybe she ascended after one too many divine codas or became sea foam during the recording of Choirgirl Hotel. Maybe she finally integrated all her selves and her music now serves to slowly fund a secret sect of screaming women that I never got invited to.
She dropped a long list of names and sensations to get me started. Between a free Nag Hammadi pdf on my phone and Kabbalah podcasts and researching medieval weapons and dark matter for another novel I’ve started, I think I walk on the water of sorrow now instead of drowning in it.
