No. 084 - Tori Amos’s “Cornflake Girl” changed my life
Emily Curran rekindles her love for a forgotten favorite
🌸 A Grace favorite
This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.
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• 6 min read •
Choosing a song for this assignment was u n c o m f o r t a b l e. In many ways, this is my nightmare — asserting a true musical preference publicly, and in print, for anyone to see, judge, and refer back to for all eternity feels like being naked onstage. Usually when someone asks what I like or I’m put in the position of selecting music for a party or a car ride, I don’t say what I want, I say what’s safe. By which I mean, unimpeachably cool or universally beloved. Sorry, you don’t like R.E.M.? That one’s on you, loser.
It isn’t that I don’t have preferences — at any given moment, I can tell you exactly what I want to listen to. Sometimes it’s cool, but if it’s unironically Blues Traveler, well, I’m certainly not going to tell you. Musical preferences, unlike what you drink or whether you like the crunchy Cheetos or the puffy ones, are deeply personal by nature. When you love a song, it’s because it connects to something inside you that isn’t usually visible, so to say you love it is basically to reveal your internal organs for public consumption. Sometimes they eat ‘em up, sometimes they decide you’re too squishy and lame to live.
I don’t know if everyone feels this way. Like almost everything else about me unless I temper it, the way I love music is just a little too much. I worked at a radio station for years and I can’t tell you the number of times I watched some self-proclaimed music nerd’s eyes glaze over as I went on about the absolutely essential contributions of Kim Deal, or demanded they listen to that arrangement on “Last Goodbye” just one more time, but like really listen to it. Oh, you’re super obsessed with music? It’s all you want to talk about? We’ll see about that, sir.
My first encounter with Tori Amos was through the roommate of a woman I’d dated in high school — I was 16, she was 21, and as I had entered a period of my teenhood mostly free of parental supervision (that’s an essay for another time), I spent a lot of time at her apartment. Her roommate — a deeply sane trans man who to his credit, thought our relationship was wildly inappropriate — correctly assessed that my musical taste at the time was mostly garbage and made me a collection of mix CDs that to this day is one of the best collections I’ve ever owned. I listened to them over and over on my drives to their apartment, to school, and to my part-time job at Best Buy where I worked in the music section and spent most of my time poring over albums from the artists on those CDs, plotting which ones I’d buy with each future paycheck.
The CDs included four Tori Amos songs — “Past the Mission,” “Take to the Sky,” “Leather,” and “Cornflake Girl.” I listened to those songs so many times I could hear them in the silence, and to this day, still expect to hear the skip on the CD at the same place in “Past the Mission.” I was mesmerized. Obsessed. I looked her up and watched her videos. Every time those songs felt like a new thrill and something I knew deep in my bones. I knew she wasn’t cool — her singing was all yodels and moans, wails and exhalations, she hovered over her piano like she was casting a spell, she closed her eyes and tossed her head — she wrote songs so extravagant they would make a theater kid blush with secondhand embarrassment. So I kept my love a secret, never once admitting her to my high school friends and listening only in the secluded safety of my car. And then I lost her entirely.
By senior year, I was dating someone in a band who, along with his impossibly cool bandmates, introduced me to a whole new world of music to love. At the Drive In and Fugazi took the place of Throwing Muses and Ani DiFranco, and as I desperately sought a place amongst these cool boys, Tori was eventually banished completely to my past life. I found new songs to feel, and I forgot about her.
And then in 2020, I stopped listening to music altogether. Following a particularly harrowing streak of app dating in which I liked too many people too sincerely, a failed dream job where my wide-open enthusiasm was foully taken advantage of, and a decade of living in New York City where sincerity is crushed laughingly under the foot of ambition and coolness, I stopped listening. I was heartbroken by everything, and now, the very thing that had made my soul feel free and full was crushing me. Even the happy songs were wrenching. Any feeling was too much. Music’s constant presence in my life was replaced by far safer podcasts, and I started loving music like a secret girlfriend — covert longing when I caught a few bars drifting out of a car window, opening Spotify and crying over it only when I got too drunk. It wasn’t safe for daylight. Keeping music at a distance, I passed the pandemic numbly, tired of feeling and feeling not much of anything at all.
In 2021, I started listening again. I’d moved back south, I’d started to forgive myself, and the many heartbreaks of the city were beginning to fade in intensity. And then, an episode of one of my regular podcasts assessed “Cornflake Girl.” There she was. No cooler than she was before, but then again neither was I, only now I couldn’t care less — to hell with cool and all its robberies — and that’s what she had been waiting for.
I jumped back into Tori’s catalog with gusto, rediscovering old favorites and hearing new ones for the first time. I listened to “Cornflake Girl” hundreds of times, I told everyone how excellent that piano solo was, I made my partner like, really listen to it, I got a tattoo. And in 2023, I flew across the country alone to see her live on the last stop of her tour that hadn’t sold out yet. I sat in the dark in the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco with a couple hundred other terminally uncool souls and cried, uncoolly, as the past three years, or maybe the past thirty, caught up with me.
The irony of course is that to me, Tori Amos is the apex of cool. She says exactly what she wants, she doesn’t try to make herself or her music smaller or less or more palatable for anyone, and lately, that’s how I’m trying to be. So I’m starting here by admitting that I absolutely love Tori Amos in all of her way-too-much glory.
In the words of another great, uncool champion, Yasi Salek, I am cringe but I am free. Or at least becoming so, one outrageous piano solo at a time. ◆
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About Emily
Emily Curran is a writer, producer, editor, and semi-unprofessional storyteller from North Carolina. She has enjoyed past lives as a circus performer, journalist, and radio DJ, but she’s still figuring out what she’s going to be when she grows up. When she’s not writing, you can find her playing outside or pursuing a new area of study with an uncool amount of enthusiasm.
Instagram @emily_inrealife
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Categories
Friendship • Family • Coming of Age • Romance • Grief • Spirituality & Religion • Personal Development
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What song changed your life?
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i'm obsessed with this concept! what a wonderful way to explore personal connections with music and each other. excited to follow along for more writing in this series!
Wow. Great piece of writing.
Also shoutout Yasi