tori amos

In Love With A Voice

Interviews, photographs, different costumes and looks, different words and ideas… None of those seem to matter. Rather, they matter, but they’re not the most important thing. It doesn’t matter what she looks like. It doesn’t matter what she wears, really. Her words and ideas and opinions matter, if only because I agree with them – though more so because they come to light in her lyrics. But even if those ideas didn’t sit well with my view on life, I still don’t think I could help it.

The first time I heard her, I didn’t appreciate her. I truly, honestly think that I was too young. I couldn’t yet hear the beauty, the emotion, the sheer and utter strength that was in her voice. A few years later, and a need for something different, brought me back to her. One song was all it took. Her voice, without instruments, without accompaniment – she drew me in, and I was in love.

I am speaking of Tori Amos. Many don’t like her. I can understand why. I didn’t like her, once upon a time. Now, though? Her voice sends shivers down my spine and makes my vocal chords quiver with jealousy. Her lyrics, filled with emotion and spirit, make me smile or laugh or want to hug something or need to cry. She is an enchantress, and as her tenth studio album comes nearer to being released, I feel the call of her music to me, and I respond.

It may be insane, it may be silly, it may simply be typical-teenager-stuff, but I can’t help it. I’m in love with a voice.

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Sometimes I Want My Ribbons Back

I didn’t write yesterday.

That was very, very, bad. Granted, the fault was not my own, since work finished late and I had to dash home and then out again within minutes because of a meeting I had planned with Sir B. F. and yet it still should not have happened.

Days that escape our control are hard. I think this is true for many people – we have our days planned a certain way, whether it is the same routine every day or whether we have a schedule we adhere to on certain days. When something gets in the way and changes things, it’s frustrating, it’s hard. We feel the control of our day wrenched cruelly out of our control, and we struggle to adapt ourselves to it.

The real strength is in adapting, and this is something I admire in more spontaneous people – the lack of worry when things don’t go as planned, the ability to drop everything and do something on a whim. Since becoming “an adult” who works and has “important things to do” I feel that I’ve become way too responsible for my own good.

Whenever I feel like this, I can’t help thinking of the Tori Amos song “Ribbons Undone” – and most specifically this line: “From school she comes home and cries ‘I don’t want to grow up, Mom. At least not tonight.'”