The Living Muse

When I was in seventh grade, I borrowed a tape from Kelly, who got it from Sharon (who borrowed it from her older sister) and listened to it on my Walkman at the playground. It was a cool evening, and the kids from the neighborhood gathered on yellow and red monkey bars. I ignored them. I became lost in a woman’s voice, songs whose lyrics were risky and direct, a piano that leaped into my ears.

The woman was Tori Amos, and I was listening to her debut album Little Earthquakes for the first time.

Later, I got Under the Pink and then, one Saturday afternoon while my friends and I were at the mall, I splurged and bought the tape Boys for Pele. We put it in the tape deck of Katie’s mother’s van on the way home. If ever there was music ill-suited for a half hour ride with someone’s mother, it is Boys for Pele. What were blood roses, and why was she calling Lucifer “father”?

I didn’t quite get the music. I knew it was powerful, and something about her voice and her beauty haunted me, drew me in, but we often furrowed our brows and skipped tracks when we sat on the floor of Kelly’s bedroom. “God” was good. “Cornflake Girl” was a hit. I especially liked “Cloud on My Tongue.”

It wasn’t until I was in college that I got to see Tori Amos in concert. In the weeks leading up to it, I listened to tapes in my car. I was older now, and I knew what she was talking about in “Icicle,” the way the high notes of the piano mimicked the pitter-patter of fingers. I ran a college radio show and played Tori every week, highlighting a different song that spoke to me. For her concert at the Electric Factory in 1998, two friends and I stood outside for hours so that we could get a good spot in the front. (FYI: If you’re short like me, this will do you absolutely no good.) Finally, there she was, in smoke and lights, her voice clear, her red hair firing around her.

I realized recently that if I had to pick a living muse, a source of inspiration through the years, it’s Tori Amos.

When I’m filled with shame or self-doubt, when my mind veers into dark and unkind places, her music is a comfort. It’s why she has such a devoted following, people who will put on fairy wings in the front row or follow her from venue to venue on a tour. Loving Tori Amos’s music says something about you: That you’re probably a bit of a depressive, feel often alienated, are sensitive and emotional and probably imaginative, struggle with your own vulnerability, and have little, if any, discomfort regarding the power of a woman’s vagina. Her music is not for the faint of heart, not the kind of thing you want wailing in the background as you get dressed for work at six o’clock in the morning. She’s as much a force of nature as a musician, and there is a particular kind of mood that lends itself to her work.

She’s become my muse, I think, because her music is fearless. She does not cower from her art, from the demons within. Instead, her words and voice display the beauty of rawness, of pure vulnerability. In the past, I equated vulnerability to weakness. Yet I’m learning that there is strength and trust in letting other people see the inside of you. Something magical happens. Instead of stomping on you, those people start holding you up.

Usually.

Tori has a new album coming out this month, and I listened to its entirety at my dining room table yesterday. As I sat in an unusually quiet house, the large tree across the street rustling with the cooling wind, I wandered on a journey of pianos and cellos and clarinets and this woman’s voice that has been with me since childhood. I don’t know her, but I know her voice. It is a kind of mother to me, and hearing it feels like coming home.

Who’s your living muse?

Image of Tori Amos from http://obsessedmuch.envy.nu/home.html.

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Tagged as: Little Earthquakes, muse, Night of Hunters, Tori Amos, Under the Pink