Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Tori Amos

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Well, after a two hour wrestling match with “Tear in You Hand,” i’ve come to the conclusion that not all ideas which begin in my head wind up sounding right once outside of it. Just like the piano in “Crashing” (which sounds quite lovely on it’s own, but clashes like hell with the guitar), an all-me version of “Tear in Your Hand” seems like it would sound cool, but it really really doesn’t. The song is at once too low and too high for me, and even though the microphone generally makes up for what i lack in range, i just can’t carry the song with any kind of enthusiastic tempo. So, it’ll stay on the tape for posterity, but i think i’m done with that little experiment. So… um… did i have something else to record?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/03/2917790/

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Finals are over. My Literature teacher somehow managed to give me a B. I finished all of my studio work. Selina went home for break. I’m sitting in the middle of the floor with my bass (turns out my amp is a bass amp … who knew?) using my suddenly reacquired magic ear to pick out bass runs from “Raspberry Swirl.” It’s a true song, you know…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/03/2800224/

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As an example of the insanity the studio has driven me to, that last post was really only 6 hours into my ordeal, although now it’s ending at exactly 8 hours after i first entered the room. Aside from walking Bill & Laurel to the front doors of the building, i have been inside this room or down the hall at the water fountain for the entire time. No eating, no fresh air, no break.

So, what did i get done? Both mixing labs mentioned below, plus a midi-mockup of Tori Amos’s “Concertina” that sounds incredibly shoddy. I skipped one project because it was plainly awful and i couldn’t get the computer to play any sounds at all by that point. I honestly made my best effort to get all the assignments for this class done, seeing as i managed to miss it for everything from funerals, to being collapsed on the bathroom floor, to my week home with pneumonia. Ironically, scrambling to do all of this catchup work has left me much more competent than i was to begin with in the studio, so even if my professor is kind enough to give me a C i’ll have come away with many more skills than i ever intended to.

Of course, that C assumes he accepts every one of my projects late, lets me take the make up test for one i missed, and that i can somehow manage to pass the final despite not knowing anything on it. yeah… it does look a bit bleak, doesn’t it? Oh well… i’m outta here.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/03/2782193/

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There’s a Tori Amos song from Boys for Pele called “Marianne” that is a partially fictionalized account of a girl that Tori used to be good friends with. The song portrays Marianne as a suicide, but to hear Tori tell the story she was just a beautiful girl who was too engrossed with the wrong people and eventually succumbed to some sort of overdose while she was still in highschool.

Recently a large discussion on Precious Things erupted over the details of the situation … people wanted to know who Marianne really was. While their interest was rather non-threatening at first, some members of the community kept on pushing … when the overdose was mentioned by someone who is familiar with Tori’s hometown community some people immediately wanted to know what the overdose was on and the circumstances it was under, and i found myself thinking … Is that fair? It’s none of our business who this girl was, and we only know anything about it because Tori decided to divulge something about her so that the song could be viewed fully in the context of what occurred in actual life. But, just because Tori wrote a song about Marianne doesn’t make her life public record, despite what some of the more obsessive fans seem to be thinking.

It’s like… i’m reading a book about a woman that Goethe wrote a novel about, and it’s all about how everyone hounds her over forty years later because of what they assume her to be from Goethe’s work, when she never intended to be written about in the first place. It’s one thing to open yourself to close examination by making yourself famous, but that doesn’t give the public a right to scour your entire life for the people who have motivated and inspired you – and to impose upon them similar treatment. It’s not quite the same with someone who’s passed away, because they don’t have to endure the inquisitive public but they do have to suffer the constant pressure against the memories people have of them.

I don’t mind the plotting out of my own Behind the Music, but i don’t know if i’m comfortable with the idea that every album of songs i write opens up the door for someone to track down the person they’re about decades later… it’s especially unfair when that person doesn’t even know what sort of inspiration they’re causing. Oh well… something for all of you overly chatty storyteller songwriters to think about…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/03/2685854/

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What’s weird is that both songs tonight employ a very old-skool Ani DiFranco fingerpicking style which reminds me mostly of “Rush Hour” from her first album. If you’re not an Ani fan you won’t know what the hell i’m talking about, but it’s more of a fluttering of the fingers over the top strings rather than a defined picking routine – and when rushed or played live it quickly descends into the rampant aggressive strumming that i also have stylistically in common with Ms. DiFranco. I swear… new Ani lyrics put me in a mood every time … i can almost track eras of songwriting by Ani albums i was listening to at the time. Tori just doesn’t have the same effect on me; all of my Ani-ish songs make it onto here and my demos, and all the Tori ones are chalked up as artful experiments and then shoved into a corner somewhere because i can’t seem to play them correctly. That makes it pretty obviously where my true influence lies, doesn’t it?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/03/2685374/