Every Saturday, Paste will be revisiting albums that came out before the magazine was founded in July 2002 and assessing its current cultural relevance. This week, we’re looking at Tori Amos’s late ‘80’s synth-pop debut—a little-known record whose commercial misfiring afforded the pianist a reintroduction on her wildly successful solo follow-up, Little Earthquakes.
Before Tori Amos was the multi-Platinum musical heroine she is now, she was a young Peabody Conservatory student with a penchant for rebellion. Amos arrived at the renowned Baltimore institute at the age of five on a full-ride scholarship—a scholarship that was rescinded six years later when she continually refused to learn sheet music or adhere to her instructors’ preferred genres. “My gift was composing music, and they’d have a completely different way of thinking,” Amos said in 1998. “At that point there’s no room for experimentation for an artist to develop themselves, so I just figured that [it] was making me sick.”
For the first time in her professional life, Amos was at a crossroads. She confided in her Methodist minister father about her desire to play piano on her own terms, and he began driving her to gay bars to test her chops behind the keys at 13. “He had his minister’s outfit on and we knocked all around Georgetown. Finally, at the last place, Mr. Henry’s, they let us in,” Amos would later recall. “I didn’t know that until I looked up and realized they were all staring at my father. They asked me if he was in a costume, and I said, ‘No, no, no, he’s really a minister!” Thus began a regular cycle of performances that would not only help sharpen Amos’s attunement to her instrument, but grant her a steady audience more accepting of her evolving repertoire.
After exhausting the D.C. circuit, Amos moved to Los Angeles in 1984 with a taste for the theatrics of the city’s emerging hair metal scene, which would come to be dominated by Sunset Strip heavyweights like Mötley Crüe and L.A. Guns. Ratt had just unleashed Out of the Cellar, Bon Jovi’s eponymous debut was setting the New Jersey natives (and Cinderella, who Jon Bon Jovi helped discover and toured with extensively in support of Slippery When Wet) up for stratospheric success, and Hanoi Rocks’ Two Steps From the Move would be their triumphant last effort before the shocking passing of drummer Razzle. All signs pointed toward rock preparing for a glamorous refashioning, and as an avid fan of the likes of Led Zeppelin and Prince, Amos intended to fix herself a scoop of the genre’s newest flavor.
“I’m ashamed to say it, but in those days I had a can of Aqua Net in my handbag at all times,” Amos said, calling the city of angels a place where “a man’s size mattered by his hair” during a 2005 cover of Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer.” She formed Y Kant Tori Read with guitarist Steve Caton, bassist Brad Cobb and future Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver drummer Matt Sorum, and enlisted the help of producer Joe Chiccarelli (Frank Zappa, Etta James, Elton John) for the creation of their major label debut with Atlantic Records. Named sarcastically for Amos’s lack of interest in reading sheet music back at Peabody, the record went underway with the decadence and brash sexuality of glam in mind. “It was that whole dressing-up moment, Adam Ant with tits, but not really,” she joked to VH1.
Amos is pictured with a samurai sword behind her back on the album’s cover, and she’d “write with [a] sword in [her] hand” four years later on “Take to the Sky,” but in 1988, it was a vision that failed to translate into the music. “I wish that the LP would sound the way the cover looks,” she said in 1992, praising genres that maintain a consistent sonic statement like thrash metal does. Instead of coming out of the gate as the next Doro Pesch or Jan Kuehnemund, Amos found herself reaching for any identity whatsoever. “Cool on Your Island” had her assuring she was “much stronger than you know,” but the record lyrically was less about strength, and more about learning to feign it. “It is simple to play a tough chick, but it is really boring and, above all, it is sad,” she went on to say, “because it shows a deep uncertainty. And when you are uncertain, you can not be strong.”
Lead single “The Big Picture” kickstarted Amos’s decades-long comparison to Kate Bush, but when its release failed to garner support, the band quickly buckled under the weight of commercial underwhelm. Amos starred in the accompanying music video alone, as if to take full responsibility for its sour reception. Atlantic effectively turned its back on the band at that point, and “Cool on Your Island” didn’t receive a video as a result. With its singles shunned, the rest of the record didn’t stand a chance. The “Etienne Trilogy” is regarded among fans as a clear precursor to Amos’s later work, and tracks like “Fire on the Side” and “On the Boundary” were glimmers of rocking light, but critics seemed to disagree. Kerrang decided she was “just too damn bizarre.” In their eyes, she was “destined, [they] fear, to enter the realms of eternal obscurity.”
A night at Hugo’s in Los Angeles in the wake of the album’s dismal release solidified things for Amos. “I felt these snickers ’cause my hair was totally pumped up six feet high, and I had my plastic boots that went up to my thigh and my little miniskirt. And I understood for the first time that I was a joke,” she said. “I walked out of that room going, ‘They can laugh at me, but I’m walking out of this place with dignity. Hair spray and all.’” Going from child prodigy to being called a “bimbo” by Billboard could have been brutal enough to stave off any future projects, but she wasn’t going to just lay there and bleed. “I was chasing what Joni Mitchell called the ‘star maker machinery behind the popular song.’ I was chasing the commercial road,” she said in 2020. “Once you’ve done that and the muses still show themselves to you, you don’t ever do that again.”
Y Kant Tori Read excluded a demo called “Distance,” which Amos would not release until it was renamed “China” and included in her solo debut five years after its conception. She also recorded demos for songs with titles like “Friends?” and “Looking For Eldorado,” but these have since been mostly forgotten, save for the audios being uploaded by fans on YouTube. And while Amos has since embraced “Cool on Your Island” and “Etienne,” reworking them into slow, more contemplative offerings during live performances to match her current style, the rest of the record has mostly ceased involvement in her ever-changing setlists. You’re far more likely to hear a song improvised on the spot, or, like I had the pleasure of experiencing in Los Angeles last summer, a deep cut like Boys For Pele’s eerie “Way Down.”
Amos returned in 1992 with solo debut Little Earthquakes, which featured knockout singles “Me and a Gun,” “Silent All These Years” and the new version of “China,” along with an abundance of top-notch album tracks like “Girl” and “Leather.” A major contributing factor to the record’s success was her newfound, often cutting knack for verbalizing vulnerability—Amos was raped when she was 21, and she has expressed that, for years, the trauma was too fresh to write about. “You feel like your boundaries have been crossed to such an extent that there is no law anymore, that there is no God,” she said of the rape in 1992. “You feel like the Mother in you will do anything to protect the child in you from being shredded before your eyes. You’re thinking “I gotta get out alive, I gotta get out alive.” After watching Thelma & Louise and “breath[ing] for the first time in seven years,” Amos sat down, wrote “Me and a Gun” on the Bakerloo Line to North London, and played it at the Mean Fiddler that very night. It has been a critic- and fan-acclaimed discography fixture ever since. More importantly, it helped establish Amos as a voice of truth and triumph for those who’ve experienced the same horrors she did.
Despite being most widely associated with her Bösendorfer piano and haunting voice, Amos knows exactly how to rock the more traditional route. The grit and glamor of Y Kant Tori Read’s cover is executed masterly on Under the Pink’s “The Waitress,” (she believes in peace, bitch) as well as weightier live versions of tracks like “Sugar” and “Father Lucifer.” Her performance of the latter for Hard Rock in 1999 epitomized everything I wanted to be as a woman. She was pounding away at the keys, letting mauve lip gloss stick to her fiery hair, and improvising the bridge as she usually does, but this time, she was singing of Steve McQueen, 1984 and taking a boy “through a door.” I could only guess what the lyrics meant, but I felt them knock at my ribs nonetheless, as goes the carnal language of rock ‘n’ roll. There was no book report awaiting me when the screen went dark. The feeling was the lesson.
As for exploring sexuality byway of her work, on 1996’s Boys For Pele, she’d face the term “provocative” yet again. That album had more direct references to sex than Y Kant Tori Read did; on “Professional Widow,” which is rumored to be about Courtney Love, she asked for “peace, love, and a hard cock.” She posed for a photo nursing a piglet for promo, which was, of course, misconstrued as soon as it reached the eyes of the public. On the harpsichord-steeped “Blood Roses,” she sang of blood, a “warm little diamond,” and being nothing more than meat. But the overflow of vilification that came with Pele’s quirks and kinks was well worth it, because she was defending herself, rather than flailing desperately to defend Tori Read, as many would mistakenly call her in the late ‘80’s.
If there’s anything Y Kant Tori Read teaches us as listeners, it’s that potential is easy to recognize in hindsight. It takes little faith to wonder why your Platinum-selling favorite band ever dealt with rejection from labels or audiences. We have the privilege of knowing everything they would come to achieve once the wheels started rolling. What does take faith is uplifting artists in their embryonic years—parts missing, style discombobulated, lineups not fully cemented—and screaming their praise for the world to hear, knowing the project could be driven into the ground at a moment’s notice. Amos was bound for success, but had she not worked up the gumption to break from her synth-pop cocoon, the rest of her career might have been lost to the shame of having tried and failed. “In L.A., the worst disease you could get was failure,” she’d go on to say, “but failure was my greatest teacher.” On “Fayth,” she thought aloud what came to be her ticket to a second wind four years and some intense self-reflection later: ”Maybe I could start again.”
