At 29, Tori Amos had been around for a while but without a lot to show for it. A classically trained pianist, she’d been working with musicians like Al Stewart in Los Angeles and playing at piano bars for years. Her first record – Why Kant Tori Read – went nowhere fast. The demos for her first record were rejected in early 1991. As she neared an age when most musicians start thinking about a second career, she finally released her first solo record.
If Little Earthquakes is anything, it’s personal. It’s an intimate, piano-driven record. When it was first released, it was an outlier: the music was too jazzy and light for the alt-rockers, the songs too personal and stark for the mainstream. It topped the Heatseakers chart, but peaked at 54 on The Billboard 200. But now, over 20 years later, it sounds as fresh as ever, alternately raw and light, funny, and haunting. And it’s just been reissued by Atlantic/Rhino Records, too.
Little Earthquakes opens with “Crucify,” where Amos addresses the listener: “nothing I do is good enough for you / I crucify myself,” over a spare backing. As she sings about driving another nail in, she runs up and down the piano. And it closes with the title track, where Amos reflects on a relationship that’s splitting apart at the seams: “these little earthquakes, doesn’t take much to rip us into pieces,” she sings.
In between, it’s just her and the keys, like on “Silent All These Years,” a song that opens with a little riff and has Amos singing about finding her voice. She once claimed she wrote it for Al Stewart, but never actually gave the song to him.
Arguably the most famous song here is it’s least conventional and darkest one: “Me and A Gun,” where Amos sings about being raped at knifepoint. It’s a visceral, raw performance – Little Earthquakes’ only a capella performance – which is exactly the point: it strips away everything that’s unneeded and forces the listener to focus on Amos’ words and experience. It’s disturbing, but it’s powerful.
There are flashes of light humour: on the jazzy “Happy Phantom,” Amos takes the cliché about being so happy you could die and spins it into elaborate fantasies: as a happy phantom, she’d never need an umbrella and she could chase nuns around. I like the line about Confucius doing crosswords in ink, too. But by song’s end, she’s taken it a step further: “will you still call for me when she falls asleep / or do we soon forget the things we cannot see?”
The remastering job on the Little Earthquakes reissue sounds great, like you’re sitting right beside her piano. And it adds a very nice selection of bonus cuts on the second disc which more than doubles the running time. They range from outtakes to early versions and several live cuts from a show in 1992. They’re nice to have, but the gem of disc two is her cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which strips away all the fuzz and snarl but loses none of its power.
The liner notes are nice, too: in an essay, J.D. Considine writes about the album’s history and reception, liberally quoting Amos. It’s especially interesting to read her thoughts on her music and how she still finds these songs fresh: “… I don’t see these songs as old stuff, for me, because they’re evolving and I learn from them.”
For someone whose career faltered and almost didn’t take off at all, Amos quickly grew. Her second record, 1994’s Under the Pink, was more polished and rose up the charts, peaking at 12 on the Billboard 200. It even had hit singles in “God” and “Cornflake Girl,” too. In the years since, her career’s gone all over the map, but really, it all goes back to this one. It sounded different back in 1992 and it still sounds fresh now.
Between the good remastering, the bonus cuts and the album itself, it’s all you could ask for in a deluxe reissue. If you’ve never dipped into her back catalogue, the Little Earthquakes reissue is a good place to start.
Rating: 4.5/5