Little Earthquakes / Under the Pink

Myra Ellen Amos got used to dazzling and perplexing adults early on. At age 5 she became the youngest-ever student to enroll at Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute. At 11, she was thrown out due to her inability to sight-read as well as she could play by ear. At 13, she started performing at Washington, D.C.’s piano bars, some of them gay, where—chaperoned by her pastor dad in his clerical collar—she’d take requests and try out her own material. And by 24, she tasted failure when her band Y Kant Tori Read released one Pat Benatar-esque 1988 album that instantly flopped as though it had never even existed.

Being misrepresented on its cover as a sword-wielding, flame-haired metal vixen forced Amos to take control of her image while struggling to satisfy expectations that her prodigious genius generated.  ("I had come from child prodigy to 'vapid bimbo,' " she told Rolling Stone in 2009.) Still contracted to Atlantic Records, she paired with former singer-songwriter Davitt Sigerson, and then with paramour Eric Rosse, but the label nixed both batches of results. So Amos kept on writing and recording, streamlining her music until a tearful viewing of Thelma & Louise prompted a song that didn’t need any accompaniment whatsoever. After "Me and a Gun", no suit dared argue that her album wasn’t finished.

Whereas nearly all of her songs invite interpretation, this one is unquestionably about Amos getting raped. She changed a few details: Her real-life attacker wielded not a gun but a knife, and demanded that his victim sing hymns while he violated her. In the song, Amos mimics simple regimented intervals learned from psalms. Abruptly she breaks free from this steady keel as if mirroring how her psyche detaches from her body in order to deal with what’s happening to her. "Do you know Carolina where the biscuits are soft and sweet?" she suddenly wails with startling force before returning to the song's melodic core to explain, "These things go through your head when there’s a man on your back and you’re pushed flat on your stomach."

This snapped Atlantic to its senses. Drawn almost exclusively from the initial reject pile, Little Earthquakes finally appeared in early 1992, right when Nirvana’s Nevermind topped the charts. Amos’ solo debut, though it was rarely talked about this way, was similarly radical—an alternately flirty and harrowing work that juxtaposed barbed truths against symphonic flights of fancy. It was lyrically nuanced and harmonically sophisticated exactly when grunge moved rock in a raw and brutish direction, which made her achievement even more striking. Amos was early Queen, early Elton John, and early Kate Bush with Rachmaninoff chops. Decades after prog-rock’s peak, her technical perfection was particularly shocking in the virtuoso-renouncing '90s: Not even Elton could tear into a song both vocally and instrumentally while staring down attendees with a Cheshire Cat grin.

She did (and still does) this by straddling her piano bench like a lover with one foot pumping pedals and the other beating time, as if sending out long-suppressed erotic urges directly through her music, right at her audience. Listen to the live B-sides sequenced together at the end of each bonus disc that joins these reverently remastered editions of Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink, and you’ll hear this carnal communion evolve: At first her delivery is slightly mannered, and the crowd’s dead silent. But by the second disc, she’s flowing freely, and her following screams ecstatically in kind.

*Earthquakes *chronicles a woman coming to terms with post-traumatic stress disorder. As she’d much later explore on 2007’s American Doll Posse, Amos had split her psyche into separate personas so she could deal with the pressure of being a both a minister’s daughter and prodigy. On this album, Amos finds her truest primary voice, no more so than on her inaugural U.S. single, "Silent All These Years", which chronicles that discovery in real time.

It was here that she discovered how to obey her compositional muse: Establish a theme, wander from it, and then return via pop’s reassuring verse/chorus/verse structure. Amos would soon drift much, much further from her motifs, but here she’s uncommonly focused: The song’s circling introduction references her conservatory roots by evoking practice exercises, yet it’s catchy, and the bluntest moments in the melody fall exactly when Amos sings the title, a reliable songwriter’s trick.

Yet even in the singer’s most accessible song, idiosyncrasies abound: From intro to opening verse, the tempo slows drastically, and remains irregular. Her right hand on the piano doesn’t always sync with what her left is doing and often accentuates different beats, while her lyric references Satan and menstruation amidst soothing classical filigree. "Sometimes, I said, sometimes I hear my voice," she sings in a tone occasionally irked but ultimately joyful: Her real self, muted since childhood, finally comes out to play.

For the outsider women and gay men who initially propelled Amos’ success, this hard-won message served as a clarion call, and they embraced her as if uncovering the challenging and most vulnerable parts of themselves. Tracy Chapman, Melissa Etheridge, Sarah McLachlan, k.d. lang, Sinéad O'Connor, and the Indigo Girls had already begun to reach the same flock, but Amos—by virtue of her sexual intensity and subject matter—instantly commanded a bond only rivaled by Madonna, whose eroticism peaked just as Amos arrived. "Look, I’m standing naked before you/ Don’t you want more than my sex," she teased in "Leather" over strutting chords that recall Queen’s "Killer Queen". Like Madonna, Amos put earthly passions on display not necessarily to seduce her congregation, but to empower herself—and, by extension—her fans.

The difference between '94’s Under the Pink and its predecessor was that by this time Amos had sold enough to keep Atlantic execs at bay. In their absence, she and Rosse accentuated the orchestral pomp on some tracks while shrewdly deviating from it on others. Whereas she’d flatly rejected previous requests to replace Little Earthquakes’ pianos with guitars, here she fits in a few fleetingly noisy ones and bolsters the beat until it grooves.

These adjustments transformed Amos from rising singer-songwriter to major alt-rock upstart: "Cornflake Girl"—the cartwheeling UK hit that preceded the album and showcases one of her spunkiest solos—helped Pink enter the UK chart at #1, while "God"—the grousing, gnarly U.S. single—topped modern rock playlists. It’s nice that Sam Smith and Hozier subvert the religious overtones of their churchy presentations with orthodoxy-slamming videos, but both lack the clarity and courage of Amos chanting, "God sometimes you just don’t come through."

The rest wasn’t as pointed as that, but Pink’s extroverted arrangements worked as hard as Earthquakes’ lyrics and melodies. Amidst other overseas hits like "Pretty Good Year", Amos dug deeper, particularly on "Bells for Her", which suggests a ghost pirouetting across John Cage’s prepared piano. The pitch on certain keys is way off, like an old upright in your grandparents’ basement, but the effect is finessed the way Jimi Hendrix bent notes from music to cacophony and back again. "Can’t stop what’s coming," she moans repeatedly while refusing to name her subject. Adulthood? The rupture of a childhood friendship? Orgasm? Amos’ mysteriousness sometimes subsequently got the best of her, but here she masters it.

Before, during, and immediately after these breakthroughs, Amos generated enough outtakes, covers, remixes, and live tracks to fill several UK and U.S. variations on each album’s many singles and EPs, all of them designed to generate enough sales from devotees to force radio’s hand. Here, on generous bonus discs, they flow like autonomous albums; the Earthquakes addendum favors tracks Amos and Atlantic dropped in search of an ideal launch, while the Pink supplement emphasizes the singer’s knack for reinventing her material on the fly.

Leading with a disc-long alternate version of Earthquakes, Amos’ 2006 box set A Piano: The Collectio**n already argued that "Upside Down" and "Flying Dutchman"—both Sigerson-produced, string-wrapped efforts—equaled most everything that made the cut. Here, those fan favorites better complement Amos’ impulsive material, like "Sweet Dreams", which rewrites David Bowie’s "Panic in Detroit" as a Gallic jig, and "The Pool", an eerie excursion in extended overdubbed vocal tones that proved Amos boasted the harmonic chops to become a credible avant-garde classical composer. As her many cover versions attest, Amos honed discerning interpretive skills in her piano-bar adolescence: Her eerily funereal 1992 treatment of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" gently accentuates Kurt Cobain’s desperation while showcasing her exquisite phrasing. Check her timing and dynamics, the way she estranges his melody by pulling buried notes from chords while riding her sustain pedal and then releasing it as if drawing a breath. Even when she holds back, as she does here, Amos seethes.

Pink’s outtakes aren’t generally as memorable as Earthquakes’: Aside from her ominous "Honey", an eleventh-hour omission she’s said she regrets, the Pink B-sides explore the same mesmeric side of Amos’ songbook as the album’s long and winding ballads. The seven live tracks, however, affirm that Amos could pull more drama from one acoustic piano than ordinary bands draw from several amplified instruments, and not just on the hits. "Here. In My Head", a feather-light flip she also admits should’ve been on Pink, gets the knockout climax its studio incarnation denies, while "Winter"—her disciplined and devastating invocation of childhood’s paradise lost—gets elevated to the level of "Me and a Gun", as Amos emotionally amplifies and musically fleshes out every quietly anguished second. It’s astounding.

Tori Amos arrived in an era when an unconventional, confrontational artist could also be commercial. Both Earthquakes and Pink went double-platinum in the U.S., and although American Top 40 radio never accommodated her, Amos managed to generate modern rock, adult contemporary, and dance club hits for 10 solid years before settling into cult-heroine status. Naturally, others came to wear her crown of anomalies and thorns: Lana Del Rey remains the sole mainstream act to adroitly juxtapose and underplay personal trauma with classical finery, yet the legacy of these milestones linger over today’s underground: Sufjan Stevens, Bat for Lashes, John Grant, Lykke Li, Owen Pallett, St. Vincent, Perfume Genius, FKA twigs, Antony Hegarty, and others all wear their sensitivities as strengths as she did. Effervescent, but at this peak still grounded by adversity, Amos taught her strange children well.