MUSIC BOX NO. 3

bitterness, rhyme structure, and five favorite poems.

“Poetry and music are the best at the highest level of the human mind. Out of poetry, out of their need for poetry, human beings have developed the idea of God. And so when we sing, when we dance, when we speak poetry we are speaking out of God's mouth, each other out of the music from God's heart.” — Maya Angelou

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ONE. ROTHKO CHAPEL 5 BY MORTON FELDMAN || PELICAN ISLAND BY DEENA METZGER.

Pelican Island exists in the mind.
No one has ever traveled there
except the dead who soar invisibly
along the transparent currents
that ring the white cliffs.
What can I speak of here 
without revealing
whether I am one of the dead?

How do I come by this knowing?
Spying and stealing. Plagiarizing.
Repeating old texts, myths and legends,
even though Pelican Island
is invulnerable
to my assault and your curiosity.
This is not another idyll 
devoted to the forbidden.

You cannot go to Pelican Island.
I cannot go to Pelican Island. 
Nothing will change this.
The dead have escaped us,
and the birds, recognizing
a sanctuary, circle and circle
          in endless joy.

- Deena Metzger

At age fifteen, I sat down with a book of Deena Metzger’s poems— Ruin and Beauty, given to me by an English teacher who saw me as a talent worth fostering—and when I finished, I walked away with a new favorite poem. Pelican Island still is my favorite poem, even though I must have read hundreds of poems in the years that have since passed. And I don’t know exactly what drew me to it in the first place, what made me draw a star next to the title and then say this is my favorite poem out loud as if someone who cared could hear me, but there was something there. Soul connection, like a seed had been planted in my heart. It would never shoot up and never be seen by others, but it would stretch its roots down until it ran out of body to move through, acting as something to hold me together.

When I first read it, I was having trouble with my dreams. I’ve gotten good at dreaming now. I didn’t used to be. Fifteen was the age where I was always operating a plane’s radio sometime during World War II, waiting for someone to tell me something and decide my life. The weather is hopeless and the plane goes down. It’s not bad at all until I start dream-burning and lose my dream-leg, which hurts like real-burning and losing a real-leg, but I don’t live long after that. It’s temporary, existing only in the mind. I don’t know what happens to the rest of the people on the plane. It might’ve been the first battle dream-me was ever in, and I might’ve froze, and I might’ve forgotten the radio and the constant rattle of machinery and the crackle of artillery while I looked out a window at the muzzle flash sparking below. I’ve got some lucidity in the dream— I know I’m in a dream and I know what’s about to happen, but the events cannot be dissuaded from running their course.

To phrase it bluntly, you feel like a bird until you feel like a scared bird until you feel like a dead bird, and then you’re awake. Good morning, I slept fine, how about you?

Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel was something I discovered several years later while I was dipping my toes into the pool of unstructured music. Structure within music is entirely relative, of course. Depending on the genre and artist and all that, a song having “structure” can mean anything from being a verse-hook-verse-hook-bridge-hook pop song to simply having an identifiable key or tempo. Feldman tended to resist both conventional tonality and time— he had a habit of focusing on only one note at a time, making it effectively impossible to tap your foot along to, or creating dissonance that would feel like an assault if it wasn’t subtle, so unstructured is the most accurate word I can come up with to describe his compositions. Rothko Chapel— dedicated to abstract painter Mark Rothko, following his suicide in 1970— premiered in 1972 at the actual Rothko Chapel, which is a nondenominational spiritual site in Houston built for hosting some of Rothko’s work. The composition is a companion to the building, meant to help the viewer explore the textures and visual impact of the paintings.

Rothko Chapel 5, the finale of the piece, contains what most listeners would name if asked which part stuck out to them. Emerging from the towering desolation of the previous 21 minutes comes faint vibraphone, the notes echoing over one another and creating a slight dissonance that manages to be pleasant to listen to, almost reminiscent of a waterfall. Soon after, a viola melody takes center stage. It’s simplistic, mournful, bordering on a sort of solemn resignation like it knows the piece is coming to an end. Vocal melodies are eventually added in, so distant that when I first listened to Rothko Chapel 5, I thought it was someone harmonizing with the whistle of a train. The combination of these three instruments is probably as close to the feeling of lucid dreaming we will ever reach in sonic form, and signifies a departure from Feldman’s signature solitary, vertical sounds.

The connection would be more overt if it had lyrics— which would’ve also ruined the fragility of the song— but there’s something about it that reminds me of being stuck in my head, watching those bombs go off. Have you ever seen light move under heavy fog? It blossoms. The viscerality of knowing in the dream that those orange-red blooms meant death was stifled, wrapped in gauze and turned into something pretty. Eventually the dream changed, of course, and the battlefield went away and was replaced with a dozen other terrible situations that I had to teach myself how to leave, but I still remember the lights under the fog.

Pelican Island started taking on flesh as I gained control of where my mind went while asleep, becoming a place I would go instead of a place I would think about. It pinned itself to my map, adding its stories to my mythos. If I didn’t want color in the dream, I would go to Pelican Island, because the Pelican Island of my mind exists in grayscale. If I wanted to walk at night, I’d go to Pelican Island, where the sun never rises. If I didn’t want to be talked to in the dream, I’d go to Pelican Island. There are only birds there— birds and scraggly black trees and a single white horse on the beach and stones and bones, endless fields of bones as you move closer to the black lake at the center of the island, bones from every creature in the world. Your bones will be there one day.

The birds do not deny your presence, but are waiting for you to go home. The viola waltzes you to the center despite their eyes. They’ll save themselves until you’ve passed, following your footsteps until once again, they can fling themselves off the white cliffs into currents we can’t see.

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TWO. BLACK LAKE BY BJÖRK || THE VICTORIAN ON EDGE BY SANDRA SIMONDS.

When I scream     the carnations rise
above the tors        and when I slam

doors     the cooling   jellies tremble
on my pantry shelves   and when I fuck

the man I fuck   the house sinks another
foot into the mud   There’s no bedrock

to these feelings    that whip around
like spirits stuck in bodies    they despise,

bodies that never give   them what they want:
a house that          explodes to splinters.

- Sandra Simonds

Lyrical excellence and poetry often go hand in hand when it comes to songwriting. Artists that I consider good writers are also often good poets, either in the sense that they literally have published poetry or that if you looked at the lyrics with no music backing them, they would still have an impact. That’s only half the lyrical struggle, though. Delivery is just as, if not more, important. You could have the most beautiful string of words in the world, but if they don’t fit the song they’re in or if you can’t deliver them with the force and energy required, it’ll fall completely flat. It’s not an easy thing to do by any means, but it is possible— rare, as most artists only have a few instances of perfect musical-lyrical harmony in their discographies, but still possible. Of course, when has Björk ever been most artists?

Her 2015 album Vulnicura was originally written in 2013, right as her long term relationship with filmmaker Matthew Barney dissolved and plunged her into depression. They were together for eleven years, during which they had a daughter— the fracturing of family is one of the central themes of Vulnicura, along with the heartbreak Björk was feeling and the healing from that heartbreak. The album cover, photographed by frequent collaborators Inez and Vinoodh, depicts her in front of a white and yellow gradient in a black latex suit, a headdress made of blue and yellow quills, and with a gaping, yonic wound in the center of her chest. “For her, that was really the basis of the imagery around this album, this transformation and soft, waxy, yellow-pink coloring— and again, the idea of having emotions circling around her,” Inez van Lamsweerde, one half of Inez and Vinoodh, says of the album cover. “She said she wanted to have a wound on her body, on her heart area, in an abstract way. Imagine you’re Mata Hari, a seductress, but you’re wounded, and there is an incredibly alluring softness around you.”¹

I could go on forever about the specific reasons this album is so special, but I’m trying to be brief, so the other big things that make Vulnicura unique was that it was produced by Arca and that there were no promotional singles released before the album. The album was leaked in January 2015, and Björk released the official version two days after, even though it was supposed to come out in March. The music videos for Black Lake and Lionsong also premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, where a retrospective on Björk’s career was being held, and the music video for Stonemilker was released at MoMA PS1 a little later on.

But I digress. The fourth track off Vulnicura, Black Lake is a ten minute long, agonized, pulsating torch song, comprised solely of strings and bass-heavy electronic beats. It flows, swirling around and stalling in single, sustained chords in between the verses. It’s also probably one of the most potent expressions of heartbreak from the 21st century. The first time I listened to it, I was blown away. The second time I listened to it, I thought hey, aren’t these lyrics kind of simple? The third time I listened to it, I thought oh my God, the simplicity of the lyrics just makes it more visceral. Poetry, right? Björk is very carefully walking the line between telling it exactly like it is with heartbreaking, almost clumsy sincerity and expressing herself through metaphor. She swings with frightening grace from blunt lyrics like “family was always our mutual sacred mission/which you abandoned” to lines with heavier imagery, like the final lines of the song where she describes herself as a shiny rocket that is burning up upon re-entering the atmosphere. She gets her heart broken, her safe place wrenched away from her, and so she goes to the only other safe place she knows— her home. And when I think of home, specifically bitterness in relation to the home, The Victorian on Edge is what I think of.

As is the case with many of these poems, I don’t actually know much about the poem itself or the author. What I do know, though, is that it is an incredibly succinct and effective use of abrupt language. Stylistically speaking, I’m not someone who is drawn to Romanticism in poetry— maybe I’m just impatient, but I tend not to connect with overly flowery language, as the message and emotion feels like it gets bogged down in excessive words. There are some Romantic-leaning poems I enjoy, but generally, I gravitate more towards Imagist traditions. With that in mind, it’s obvious why The Victorian on Edge left a mark on me from the very first time I read it. The sheer rage and exhaustion in it was remarkable to me. It also reminds me of my favorite Edgar Allen Poe story, The Fall of the House of Usher², so bonus points for that.

The common link between Black Lake and Victorian can be found about halfway through the song. In the beginning, Björk is mainly lamenting the loss, but eventually, she starts to get angry— “I am bored of your apocalyptic obsessions/did I love you too much?” Suddenly, a dance break begins to bloom out of the previously mellow strings, which is depicted in the music video by Björk beating her chest like she’s trying to break her ribs while a volcano spews blue lava around her. It’s a turning point in the song and the album. Her enormity of emotion is turned away from herself and furiously redirected at her ex-partner. If the first half of the song is saying I am suffering, the second half of the song is saying …and it’s your fault. You can almost see the rising carnations and the trembling jellies and the sinking house, a house that is about to explode into splinters. There is no other way to describe Black Lake but explosive.

You know, I’ve been in one place for a long, long time. My house sinks a foot into the mud every day I’m stuck here. Pressure is building— there is an undeniable explosion on the horizon. And while I wait for my dance break to come, for my house to explode into splinters, I bide my time in the black lake.

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THREE. ALL WE EVER WANTED WAS EVERYTHING BY BAUHAUS || NIGHT WALK BY FRANZ WRIGHT.

The all-night convenience store’s empty
and no one is behind the counter.
You open and shut the glass door a few times
causing a bell to go off,
but no one appears. You only came
to buy a pack of cigarettes, maybe
a copy of yesterday’s newspaper—
finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.
It is freezing, but it is a good thing
to step outside again:
you can feel less alone in the night,
with lights on here and there
between the dark buildings and trees.
Your own among them, somewhere.
There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It’s unendurable, unendurable.

- Franz Wright

I’ve been trying to go outside more, lately. It’s difficult with the wildfire smoke and the heat— I’ve always been a bit sensitive to environmental stressors— but the weather is finally taking the hint that it’s almost autumn and beginning to cool down. The smoke will leave when the rain comes, and the rain will come soon. Then it’ll be dark all the time. Any walk I plan on taking will happen at night, in that dark.

Night Walk, although it’s a poem I continuously find myself thinking of, is slightly different than I remember. It’s one of those situations where your memory entirely warps something and narrows it into a single pinprick of light, but when you revisit the thing it’s obviously a lamp, and you remember it was a lamp now and not a tiny spark, and how foolish of you to have ever believed it was a spark. I remembered the convenience store, everything after “there must be thousands of people dying”, and of course the “unendurable, unendurable”, but everything else managed to slip through a crack. Despite that, it’s still on my list of favorite poems. I’ve recently come to the conclusion— which has been obvious for a while, let’s be honest— that I’m emotionally repressed or stunted or something, but despite that, who hasn’t felt that little twang of otherness while looking into people’s windows at night?

Actually, I was reminded of Night Walk because of those windows. While I was going through old journals earlier this week, trying to find any poems that I had written down for safekeeping, I didn’t find Night Walk but I did find a short entry from when I was seventeen. Went for a walk in the dark through the rows of houses. The windows were glowing orange against the superblue night and full of people, and I was out on the sidewalk, watching the lights steady. It’s different than loneliness— it’s alienation. It doesn’t hurt my soul, but I know this is the life I’ve always longed for. It’s written in pencil, only legible because that was the year I stole my sibling’s handwriting as my own, and it’s accompanied by a blur of blue crayon that depicts nothing in particular. When I re-read it, I was going through a bit of a phase with Bauhaus’s All We Ever Wanted Was Everything. I’ve loved that song for as long as I can remember, but my obsession with it was reignited by this one edit of The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976)³. Now, here’s a journal entry I forgot about, very much in line with the song. All my seventeen-year-old self ever got was cold.

All We Ever Wanted Was Everything is a song that objectively doesn’t make sense, but manages to not make sense in such a way that it makes perfect sense. Talking about eating jelly and the calling of a drum is almost confusing when isolated— in the larger context of the song, and with Peter Murphy’s vocal delivery slowly transforming from monotone into passionate, it coheres perfectly. The meaning of the song has never been confirmed, but it’s not too hard to figure out that it’s about something along the lines of living a dull life and wanting more. The fan theory goes so far as to say that it’s about Bauhaus being formed. Murphy did work in a factory before forming Bauhaus and probably felt stifled by that, so it’s plausible, but the vague specifics of the song make it easy to pretend it’s about any form of wanting more. Like, let’s say, walking home at night and almost believing you could start again.

I’ll be going out tonight because it’s finally cold enough for me to wear a big jacket and a long skirt. I’ll probably be listening to this song, because my obsession with it hasn’t faded quite yet. When I get home, I’ll probably play it on the guitar as quietly as possible, because my father will be asleep in the next room and I figured the tab out a few months ago. My window will not be orange against a superblue night— I never turn a light on if I can help it. But that’s the life I’ve always longed for, and it’s unendurable, unendurable. Oh, to be the cream!

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FOUR. GIRL IN AMBER BY NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS || I AM SO DEPRESSED I FEEL LIKE JUMPING IN THE RIVER BEHIND MY HOUSE BUT WON’T BECAUSE I’M THIRTY-EIGHT AND NOT EIGHTEEN BY SANDRA CISNEROS.

Bring me a drink.
I need to think a little.
Paper. Pen.
And I could use the stink
of a good cigar–even
though the sun’s out.
The grackles in the trees.
The grackles inside my heart.
Broken feathers and stiff wings.

I could jump.
But I don’t.
You could kill me.
But you won’t.

The grackles
calling to each other.
The long hours.
The long hours.
The long hours.

- Sandra Cisneros

The first thing I read by Sandra Cisneros was her book The House on Mango Street, which we had a unit on in sixth grade English class. It was the first time I ever confronted that ugly, panicky feeling of being flayed alive by something that the people around you either don’t care about or find annoying, but that’s just the tragedy of getting a book assigned in class— people will refuse to read with any sort of enthusiasm or emotionality because they view it purely as homework. I can’t fault my classmates for that. The school was in a middle to upper middle class neighborhood, which about three quarters of my peers were from; the rest of us were bussed in because it was the closest middle school to the less well-off neighborhoods where we lived. It’s difficult to connect to a story like that when you’re eleven and have never experienced any financial discomfort before. No, I can’t blame them for it at all.

The second thing I read by Sandra Cisneros was this poem— I had come across it scrolling through Tumblr, but it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been assigned for school or not, because online school has an incredible way of making you feel like you don’t have any classmates. It absolutely wouldn’t have been assigned for school, though, if only because the title is an allusion to suicide. Thank God! My poem-induced suffering was only shown to people who either cared about me or were also suffering from an acute case of poem-induced suffering. By the time I read this poem, I had already heard Girl In Amber, and it was the first thing I thought of.

Funnily enough, I came to this Nick Cave song in a very similar way that I came to that Sandra Cisneros poem— they were both seconds. The first Nick Cave song I heard was Into My Arms, which I adored for both its literary prowess and effectiveness as a love song. The second Nick Cave song I heard was Girl In Amber, thanks to this post by Ra. Even though the memory is distant because it was over two years ago, I’m pretty damn sure I had it on repeat for a full week after I heard it for the first time. Girl In Amber became my bosom pal because, freshly flared up into a state of chronic unlivability, I was a girl in amber. And I still am.

So of course, I read I Am So Depressed and immediately thought of Girl In Amber. Although they’re about different things— Cisneros is discussing suicidal urges, and Cave, in a state of “uncanny clairvoyance”⁴, was writing about his wife after the death of their son— they approach the subject matter with the same sort of stationary fatigue. It almost feels like a continuation of the same person’s thoughts as they move from inside their home (the ringing phone, the record player, the bathroom door) to outside, in the yard or the street (the sun, the grackles, the river). Girl In Amber is a dark room; I Am So Depressed is a sun-dappled back patio. They are both oppressively still with grief and the lazy thickness of heat. That connection is an easy conclusion to come to, especially now that I’ve sat with both of them for years, but it’s not the similarity that originally came to mind.

Here’s the first two lines of Girl In Amber: “Some go and some stay behind/some never move at all”. That’s thirteen syllables contained in fourteen beats, because he pauses slightly before he starts singing, beginning the song on the second beat of the fifth measure instead of the first beat.

Revisiting the first few lines of I Am So Depressed: “Bring me a drink./I need to think a little./Paper. Pen.” Fourteen syllables. Do you see what I’m getting at here?

The similar tone was present in the back of my mind when my brain decided to connect them, but the foremost thought was hey, you could sing this poem to the tune of Girl In Amber pretty easily. And this, to a certain degree, is true— Girl In Amber has a lot more words than I Am So Depressed does, but the three stanzas of the poem adhere to the structure of the song. Stanza one, starting at “bring me a drink”, almost perfectly matches the rhythm of the verses, although the “stink of a good cigar” sentence is a little awkward. Stanza two, starting at “I could jump”, matches the rhythm of the chorus. The first line of stanza three (“the grackles calling to each other”) is also clumsy, but fits the last lines of the chorus, and the rest of stanza three (“the long hours”) fits the outro. The I Am So Depressed version would only be a little over a minute, as compared to the nearly five minute original, but you could finagle it into working.

If I’m being honest, there are really only three reasons why I’m writing this. Number one, which is about twenty five percent of it, is because I was in the mood to share some of my most beloved poems. Number two, which is about five percent of it, is because I get a kick from writing about music. Reason number three, the other seventy percent, is because I think of how rhythmically similar Girl In Amber and I Am So Depressed are at least twice a week, and making some throwaway three-note post about it on Tumblr would not properly express the way that this has occupied my mind for several years. I’m not going to bother running the math on that— the point is that I’ve thought about it, am thinking about it, and will very likely continue to think about it, from here to eternity.

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FIVE. WE FLOAT BY PJ HARVEY || SALVAGE BY HEDGIE CHOI.

I have seen deer split open on the road and thought

that’s exactly what
those

soft and gentle
fuckers

deserve.

Some things happened to me in my formative years that I don’t want to tell 
     you about
but some things happened to you too.

- Hedgie Choi

It doesn’t need to be explained. The whole point, actually, is that it’s not explained. I can’t imagine it’s too difficult to grasp, but some things happened in my formative years that I don’t want to tell you about, so there’s bias there. Instead, let’s talk about PJ Harvey.

This summer, I got really into two of her albums, Rid of Me (1993) and Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea (2000). Harvey is one of those artists that, if I was more self-centered, I would think was created in a lab specifically for my taste in music. Obvious blues influences? Check. Raw vocals? Check. Experimentalism? Check. The list of things that I love— things that happen to coincide with the places her career has taken her— is infinite. Of course, in that line of thinking, We Float also feels like it was created in a lab to be one of my favorite songs ever. It’s not in the number one spot⁵, but it’s definitely up there. I love songs over five minutes long, I love songs that use the piano as a percussion instrument, I love songs that have a clear build and release, and I really love when sparse instrumentation is used to it’s full potential.

Austrian composer Ernst Pauer described the key of C Major, which We Float is in, as “a pure, certain and decisive manner, full of innocence, earnestness, deepest religious feeling”.⁶ That’s certainly not the impression you get from the beginning of the song— the main piano riff is just D D E F over and over again, which lends a very tense atmosphere to the song. If we’re talking in octaves, that riff would be II II III IV, which is a lot less spacious than the typical blues progression of I IV V VIII. When you finally hit the chorus, it feels like the sun comes out or maybe it starts raining or maybe you’re going downhill on a bike. Really, it just feels like anything that makes you want to throw your arms out to your sides and close your eyes like those pictures of Nicole Kidman from 2001. The chord progression finally opens up into G B F (or V VII VI in octave speak), which isn’t actually more spacious than the first riff, but it gives the illusion of space by being in non-linear order and going to a low VII instead of the one that would fit within the one-octave scale we’re doing. There we go. There’s that decisive innocence.

As the chordal tension releases, the narrative tension releases, too. Harvey’s descriptions of losing touch and causing trouble while looking for freedom firmly become a thing of the past once the chorus hits. It’s only two lines, “we float/take life as it comes”, but it has a calming effect, assuaging most of the listener’s worries. The tension never fully resolves because it switches to future tense for the last chorus (“we’ll float” instead of “we float”), implying that Harvey and the subject of the song never quite reached the floating stage of life, but you get the feeling that everything is fine in the moment and the majority of their demons are behind them.

Some things happened to Harvey in her formative years. Some things happened to the subject of the song, too. And it’s kind of about you and it’s kind of about me, and right now we’re all looking at the roadkill on the street— young animals, old animals, all free from the corruption of humanity and only seeking survival— and thinking it got what it deserved. Pure things always end up dirty, don’t they? Life gets off on touching the untouched. You get eaten if you stay soft.

I’m bitter, obviously. I’m kind of always a little bitter. Them’s the digs. But I’m not too bitter to hope that one day, we’ll all float along, able to look at dead animals and think about sadness instead of justification.

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BONUS TRACK. WINTER (LIVE AT MONTREUX 1992) BY TORI AMOS || THE DROWNED CHILDREN BY LOUISE GLÜCK.

You see, they have no judgement.
So it is natural that they should drown, 
first the ice taking them in 
and then, all winter, their wool scarves
floating behind them as they sink
until at last they are quiet.
And the pond lifts them in its manifold dark arms.

But death must come to them differently, 
so close to the beginning. 
As though they had always been
blind and weightless. Therefore
the rest is dreamed, the lamp,
the good white cloth that covered the table,
their bodies.

And yet they hear the names they used
like lures slipping over the pond:
What are you waiting for
come home, come home, lost
in the waters, blue and permanent.

- Louise Glück

Here’s the thing. I’ve been a drowned child before— a surprising amount of times, actually. You would think I’d start to know better or at least try and do something about not it, but no, I never learned. In my defense, if we compare the amount of times I’ve gone unconscious for water-related reasons (three) against the age I started spending as much time as possible in the ocean (also three), it’s a pretty good record. Children have a tendency to do a little bit of drowning at one point or another. I also have a tendency to collect near-death experiences without any of them actually sticking, which can make me a bit cocky around safety issues. So yes, I’ve drowned, I’ve felt the way salt burns in the lungs and the fade to black and the surprising quiet of it all. I know what it feels like to be lifted in the manifold dark arms of the water.

I’m sure, aside from it being an incredible poem, that’s the reason The Drowned Children is one of my absolute favorites. The details differ, but it’s a similar situation. Those children fell through the ice into a pond, I walked into the ocean three separate times and I didn’t stay dead; it’s close enough. And while it took me a while to find a song that would correspond— that’s an understatement, actually, it was hours of scouring through random playlists about child death and drowning and anything possibly related to the poem— I eventually settled on Tori Amos’s performance of Winter from the 1992 Montreux Jazz Festival, which isn’t about any of those things. It is on Spotify, but I linked the video version of the song instead because watching her play adds an impossible amount of weight to her performance, especially with the context of the song right before it in the set list.

This all kind of started because my YouTube homepage loves to recommend videos of people reacting to music that I like, which I then love to watch— it’s always nice to watch someone find joy in something that brings you joy— and the cycle repeats itself. A week or so ago, a video popped up where the person was reacting to Me and a Gun and Winter, which were played back to back at her 1992 set. I didn’t watch it because I wasn’t familiar with the songs, as I had really only listened to her 1996 album Boys For Pele, but I did take note. A few days after that, another video of someone reacting to Me and a Gun and Winter popped up, which I still didn’t watch, but after that it was off to the races. Me and a Gun and Winter seemed to be everywhere. It got to a certain point where I just decided to watch the performance myself, so I found a YouTube playlist of her at Montreux 1992, and I hit play on Me and a Gun.

Yeah. Holy shit. I knew literally nothing about the song, except that it was off her 1992 debut album Little Earthquakes, and I don’t know if me walking into that completely unaware was a good thing or a bad thing. I don’t even know what I thought it was going to be— some kind of murder ballad, maybe.

I cannot emphasize how much I wasn’t expecting to watch Amos recount getting raped. There’s no music backing the song. She’s onstage, next to her piano but not touching it, facing the audience and singing acapella about being sexually assaulted. I cried a bit. Mostly, I just felt nauseous. Tori Amos was still Tori Amos, but for those five minutes, she was also every woman I know— my mother, my cousins, my aunts, my grandmothers, my friends, me. I went through the list in my mind and I don’t think I know a single woman who hasn’t at one point had their own metaphorical experience with a gun and a man on their back. The comment section was full of it, people saying yes, yes, it happened to me, I know this story. And there Amos was, looking straight ahead at nothing in particular, chin firmly set like she was trying not to cry. Once she finishes the first chorus and you realize what the song is about, your stomach drops right to your feet. The audience is so quiet you could hear a pin drop. Then, while still feeling this immense dread and sympathy and sorrow, she finishes the song, puts her microphone back in the stand, turns to her piano, and starts playing Winter.

The narrative of Winter revolves around Amos’s relationship with her father and his love for her— it has none of the unease I typically associate with songs about fathers, it’s just about how he wants the best for her. The tonal shift from the harsh reality of Me and a Gun to the sweet nostalgia of Winter is a little jarring. There’s a connection there that became obvious the more I listened to them, as Me and a Gun is about getting harmed by a man and Winter is about feeling protected by a man, but either way, you’re carrying the sadness of the the last song into Winter, turning it even more bittersweet. The stages of her life become seasons, and she is always trying to get back to her childhood. Even though the song is about growing up, something that Glück’s drowned children will never do, the wintry setting and reminders of Amos’s childhood are inevitably tied to the poem for me.

In my mind, her performance of Winter at Montreux is a completely separate song from the album version, which is full of swelling strings and belted vocals— the only instrument on the stage is the piano, which makes for a much softer rendition. It also allows for a lot more freedom as far as phrasing and dynamics go, which she uses to her advantage, stretching the song to its full potential. While the album version is undeniably beautiful, the Montreux version is alive, moving around the room like a child jumping through snow drifts.

The Drowned Children comes with a variety of distinct images to me. I’d like to credit that all to the writing, but I also have an overactive imagination— I can feel it unfolding in front of me. The children are playing, tumbling through the dry-wet snow and veering closer and closer to the pond, which waits for them like an expectant mother. Scarves are going akimbo. Hats, placed onto little heads by amused parents, are in constant need of readjustment. They dive through the white like a piano’s black keys until they don’t. Fear takes the place of joy, but only for a moment— the crack is loud, the water is cold, it’s not long before they calm themselves into a hypothermic sleep and don’t wake up. There’s panic and despair and grief when the parents, calling for their dead-serene children, see the hole in the pond. The bodies are fished out. In a dark room, they are cared for in death the same way they were cared for in life. The grief stays. The lives don’t. When are you going to make up your mind? When are you going to love you as much as I do?

I’m sure, at one point or another, I’m probably going to end up drowning again. It just seems like fate at this point. I came into the world through water— it’s only right that I leave it through water, too. But that’s not up to me, and it certainly won’t be happening anytime soon.

The ocean, the same one we crawled out of billions of years ago when we first began our journey on land, will wait. I’ve got things to do. It’s time that my white horses wake up and get out of bed.

1. https://www.artsy.net/post/editorial-as-bjork-opens-at-moma-behind-the

2. Which you can read here!

3. It’s free on Internet Archive, by the way.

4. https://www.theredhandfiles.com/who-is-the-girl-in-amber/

5. That would belong to I’ll Never Learn by the Shangri-Las, which I have also written about here.

6. https://interlude.hk/feel-key-c-major/