14 Yearld Old Emo Rock: How I will never be ashamed I once loved Tori Amos

Listening to my Ipod this Monday morning on the trek to work, wishing it was a Friday morning and I still had a weekend of beer and good times ahead, I started randomly thinking about the things not on my Ipod.  The music I used to listen on repeat when I was an emo teenage gal.  Then I began missing Tori Amos.

Yeah, I know.  It's kinda uncool now to say we once loved Tori.  Actually, the more popular response is probably -- "Tori who?"  For those that still remember they once hearted her, most have written her off as a bit of a kook.  After Boys for Pele, Tori's albums stopped making sense, and well, she claimed that she "talked to fairies."  Whether that remained true or not, her musical immediacy seemed to have passed quickly in the late 1990s.

But once upon a time, every gal I knew had Tori on cassette tape (thus, the reason she's not on my Ipod). She played on our Walkmens on the way to school, on bike rides, on lonely Friday nights spent at home.  Something about her words spoke to us.  We were "silent all these years", we understood how "these precious things" could "wash away," we understood how she could "get a little whole in her heart when she thought of winter."  She could not only write, she was a gorgeous piano player.  We used to have her songbook for piano and I'd looked at the notes again and again, but my hands could never reach the sharps and flats, the chords and beats of her piano.

When I was 14, I saw Tori for the first and only time.  It was in DC at Constituion Hall with friends, her Boys for Pele tour.  While her music had started to change by then, it was still just her and the piano and the crowd.  It was a great concert, one of my personal favorites of all time.  After the concert, we saw a limo waiting at the back of the concert hall.  I suggested to my friends that we wait and see if this was Tori's limo.  A crowd started to form around us, then all of a sudden, people were screaming.  Tori had arrived.  Now, I'm pretty short -- about 4'10, 4'11.  With the crowd, I lost any possibly view I might have of Tori.  So I started jumping up and down.  Then I politely asked the tall person in front of me if she could just move slightly so I could see Tori.  Then Tori looked over the crowd and I guess she'd seen me jumping up and down like an idiot fan I was and she waved her hand at me.  "Come here, little girl!"  She said.  Little?  Well, I sure was short.  And well, sure, 14 could count as a girl.  The crowd parted and I ran up to Tori, and she hugged me.  Cool story, right?

Here's where I became the ultimate geek though.  I once heard that Tori had written a song about a poem a fan sent her.  I happen to well, have poem I'd written in my pocket.  So, yeah, I told her, "I wrote a poem for you to see."  I know. I know.  I'm such a nerd.  She was very gracious about it and took my poem and said, "I'll put it right here."  She slipped the poem in her pocket. 

I can honestly tell you that I have no idea if she read it or ever wrote a song about it.  After the Boys for Pele tour, her music stopped speaking to me as much as Little Earthquakes, Under the Pink, or Boys for Pele spoke to me.  I don't believe I ever saw that poem in any songs I did hear after that concert.  Hell, I even forgot about that story of meeting her until this morning.

But remembering her songs, the first ones that really spoke to me, it reminded me of how I felt when I was fourteen: depressed, angry, and "silent all these years."  And so many of us felt that way.  But for a brief time, Tori's music gave us a voice.  And for that, I'll always be a Tori fan.