the songlines of feminist voices

I was listening to the episode of 60 Songs That Explain The 90s about Tori Amos. For me, it wasn't so revelatory about her life and music so much as reconnecting with the absolute fire that Tori lit for me and my journey of unrelenting feminism from late high school.

It's no coincidence my favourite album of Tori's, still after 20 years, is Boys For Pele. Named after Pele, the Hawai'ian goddess of fire and volcanoes. The goddess to throw sacrificial boys to in order to appease her. The album forged in the fires after Tori's own breakup from her boyfriend.

And it's no coincidence it's the album I turned to within hours of my husband walking out on me, and fed on its fire.

It, along with others of Tori's early works, were fundamental in establishing what it was to be a woman as I aged into one. The artwork, shot around New Orleans, is both dirty and sexy. I mean, literally dirty; mud-covered limbs and blood-stained mattresses. She provokes you from the album cover: barefoot, legs casually spread, eye contact while nursing the most phallic of phallic objects. A serpent of temptation loops around the rocking chair. It all says Don't Fuck With Me with a smile. It is sexy as fuck.

The album is famous not just for this, but for its use of the harpsicord, which at the time just felt like such a natural progression of Tori's work with piano-related instruments. It is harsher-sounding than a piano, however. It is a brittle, unforgiving tonality that the album gave up in spades, highlighted best when its lower registers are harnessed in both Blood Roses and Professional Widow.

I have come back from a writing weekend run by the fearless Clementine Ford. As I'm listening to this podcast episode, I marvel at the formative education I gave myself through obsessively playing Boys For Pele and Under The Pink, and can draw a through-line, a song-line if you will, directly from buying my first Tori CD in 1994 and my attendance at this writers retreat. What I loved about and learned from Tori's lyrics and interviews was that it was necessary to draw on feminine energy. To embrace the gays in your life. It was permissible to wear red lipstick while doing the laundry, and to interrogate and call out the patriarchal systems in organised religion (like giving kerosene to me, who was brought up on and had rejected Christianity long before). And vital to call on the witchier, darker forces to fight against everything.

[Sidenote about lyrics: I used to run one of the biggest websites hosting of Tori lyrics in the web 1.0 days. You're welcome.]

And with this throughline that still buzzes through my veins today, I joined a group of women on my writers retreat that could've easily been sitting alongside me as I pressed play on my Boys For Pele CD for the first listen. In one of the songs, Tori sings, "I need a big loan from the girl zone" and I have never understood that line more than I have in the past twelve months. Even if Clementine Ford herself has never listened to Tori in her life, she fundamentally imbues the same earnest questioning, the fearless quest to tell the uncomfortable truths in a still-deeply misogynistic society.

"Moses I know / I know you've seen fire /

But you've never seen fire / Until you've seen Pele blow."