All My CDs, pt 2: Little Earthquakes

This could take me well over a year if I hurry, so let’s get right back into it. I’m reviewing all my CDs one by one.

Little Earthquakes - Tori Amos

While Under The Pink was a relatively early acquisition, Little Earthquakes entered my life very recently, in late fall of 2013. I was in the midst of preparing for my first marathon, which I ran in May of 2014, and this album became one of the ones I listened to while running during the coldest months of winter. I know that Tori Amos, with her pensive and sometimes entirely beatless art-songs, is an odd choice for running music, but I could find no more appropriate fare to accompany me on an hour-long, solitary run through a bitter cold, snow-filled park. A few of the songs even make good conventional workout music, such as Happy Phantom and Crucify. The only one I tended to skip over during such times was Me and a Gun, which was simply too slow to keep me moving. But Little Earthquakes, the title track, is one of the better running songs I've encountered, despite a relatively stately tempo.

“Doesn’t take much to rip us into pieces...”

Because it’s only been half a year since I got this album, it hasn’t had a lot of time to sink all the way into the depths of my consciousness. In many ways, it’s still very fresh and unfamiliar to me. I believe that, like with Under the Pink, it may take me several years to really get a sense of what these songs mean to me personally. But that doesn’t mean I don’t already have some ideas.

My impression is that this album is more interconnected than Under the Pink, with songs referring subtly to one another or mirroring each other’s themes in interesting ways, despite differing just as broadly in style and mood. The motherly images in Mother echo the fatherly ones in Winter, and both convey a sense of lost innocence. Other losses and pains are felt in Crucify, Girl, and Me and a Gun, the later of which is definitely the darkest both in words and in sound.Other songs are more cheerful, but still with dark or morbid images, such as Happy Phantom, which opens with the line “If I die today I’ll be the happy phantom.” If that’s not about making the best of a bad situation, I’m not sure what is.

That’s perhaps the central theme, if there is one, of the whole album. Earthquakes may tear our various worlds apart, but they are little, and even the darkest situation may contain some humor. Me and a Gun, while describing a violent rape and its aftermath, says “You can laugh, it’s kind of funny.” We’ve been given permission, then, to not have the end of the world be the end of the world, and to continue seeing good and happiness in a world that also contains death and pain. After all, pain may be what defines our life in the long run.

“Give me life, give me pain, give me myself again.”

Next time: Worlds Collide.