No. 138 - Tori Amos’s “Silent All These Years” changed my life

An early-90s alternative radio find emboldened Sarah Brown to become weird, insufferable, then totally herself

Apr 24, 2026

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• 6 min read •

The summer I turned fifteen was a chrysalis.

It was 1992, which was 34 years and an entirely different world ago. It’s difficult to convey now how truly bored you could be as a teenager in a time before smartphones and Google and social media. If you were lucky, you spent your time waiting for something specific to happen, and the rest of the time you were waiting for just anything to happen. No quick answers or instantaneous communication. There was plenty of time to wonder and ruminate, and while that sounds like a luxury now, at 15 it could feel like a prison. I spent most nights that summer lying on my bed, my portable stereo next to my head, defacing a Lands’ End catalog that came in the mail with a ballpoint pen while listening to the radio.

In 1992, all I had was the radio, and songs taped off the radio. I owned some cassettes and cassingles, but it wouldn’t be until the end of the summer that I would save up enough money working at the neighborhood pool to buy myself a CD player, a 5-disc player that I couldn’t afford to fill with 5 discs until that Christmas. Until then, it was me and the radio, and even that wasn’t satisfying. I would constantly scroll up and down the airwaves, from the ’50s/’60s oldies station my mom liked to the ’70s rock station my dad played in the car to the top 40 pop hits station I had outgrown two summers before, none of it scratching my itch. Until late one night, when my scroll caught a few notes of a song that was totally foreign to me, from a new college radio show that only transmitted between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m., and sometimes only came in clear if I physically kept my finger on the dial.

The fact that I had found a local station that played these unfamiliar but obviously cool songs blew the doors clean off my brain. I started staying up even later just to capture these precious, strange songs on my blank tape. Some nights I couldn’t hack it and would just put the tape in, press record, and fall asleep, then wake up like Christmas morning to sift through any new treasures I’d caught. And the brightest treasure in my net that summer was Tori Amos singing “Silent All These Years.”

Excuse me but can I be you for a while?
My dog won’t bite if you sit real still
I got the Antichrist in the kitchen yellin’ at me again
Yeah, I can hear that

I was aware of alternative music before this, mostly from movie soundtracks or other people’s older siblings, but I had no idea how to source it on my own. And even then, I was only aware of the Pixies, or the Smiths, or the Violent Femmes; cool weird dudes singing cool weird things. But to hear a cool weird GIRL singing cool weird things made me sit up straight and shoot light straight from my fingertips. Who WAS this and how could I somehow consume her?

I bought Little Earthquakes from Musicland on my next trip to the mall. I played that tape until I knew every single word, every single pause. I would play it while watching myself sing along in the mirror. I was hard at work remaking myself in this image — not exactly the image of Tori Amos, but the idea of Different. Tori Amos’s voice saying ‘Cause what if I’m a mermaid/In these jeans of his/With her name still on it? was a key that turned in my brain and unlocked the idea of If You Don’t Have to Listen to Top 40 Radio, What Else Do You Not Have to Do?

The answer, to 15-year-old me, was as basic as, “What if instead of getting jeans from the Gap, I bought… Levi’s?!” But in early-90s Tulsa, Oklahoma, this felt revelatory. I felt freed from trying to force myself into so many cookie-cutter situations. I could try to be weird and cool instead of trying unsuccessfully to be cute and popular! I could like what I liked and stop trying to please everyone! Yes, I probably would have come to this conclusion eventually on my own or by some other trigger, because that’s what adolescence is, but what a heady treat to come about it this way. I consumed Little Earthquakes and I became insufferable.

I started drawing an intricate yin-yang/sunburst tattoo on my ankle every morning with my mother’s brown Almay liquid eyeliner. I quit hanging out with some of my friends because they seemed way too normal to the new, alternative me. Instead, I would take my stereo down to the front porch in the evenings, where I would read Tom Robbins novels while hoping the older, private school kids down the block might notice me. (They did invite me to drink a can of Coors Light with them on the Fourth of July, but it was not the cultured hang I’d envisioned.)

I got in big trouble for writing the lyrics to Led Zeppelin’s “Hey Hey What Can I Do” on our foyer wall while it was stripped of wallpaper before being painted. (“I got a woman wanna BALL ALL DAY?!” my mother’s eyes bugging larger with every word.) I got grounded when, after my mother said there was no way in hell I could have dreadlocks, I decided to just stop brushing my hair for a week. This festered into a Sunday morning pre-church fight where I yelled the word “fuck” and my little brother cried. I had never felt so alive.

I did all these things through Tori who empowered me, until the day I flew too close to the sun. At my job at the pool concession stand, I had a very un-alternative crush on a blond lifeguard that predated my Tori renaissance and was proving hard to shake. Because I still had no idea how human beings signaled feelings, I decided the best way to woo him would be to causally leave Tori Amos lyrics and my yin-yang tattoo design all over the pool office — on the whiteboard, on our timecard station, on my concession stand receipt notepad. And it worked: it definitely got his attention. Only my still-forming brain didn’t clock the actual meaning of the lyrics

So you found a girl
Who thinks really deep thoughts
What’s so amazing about really deep thoughts?
Boy, you best pray that I bleed real soon
How’s that thought for you?

until the moment I watched this boy read them. He raised his eyebrows, crushed his paper snow-cone cup into the trash, and never looked at me again.

School started, and the hand-frayed hem of my Levi’s didn’t make quite the splash I’d expected, but I felt more at peace knowing I now had the fortitude to like what I liked. I bought Under the Pink and Boys for Pele, but they never hit the same as Little Earthquakes.

I saw Tori perform live when I was in college, and I remember feeling annoyed by the presence of her glittery, fairy-winged fan base — I would have preferred Tori sing directly to me in a dark theater, the way she felt in my brain back in 1992. It was a whole room full of sweet weirdos, each one of us certain that we were secretly the weirdest.

I’m so thankful to have found “Silent All These Years.” As much as the lyrics spoke to me, I needed the feeling of discovering it all by myself, not from a movie or a friend, but on my own late-night journey across the radio waves, alone in my dark teenage bedroom. Tori Amos’s croons and howls were the primordial goo my personality started blooming in. Her cool weirdness emboldened my not-cool weirdness long enough for me to learn to rein it in a little, and realize you could wear whatever jeans you wanted so long as you’d found the right song to sing in your head. ◆

About Sarah

Sarah Brown used to document her life online, back when the internet was still one cooling, giant continent full of oversharing weirdos, and it didn’t matter yet what anyone’s kitchen looked like. She now lives a more private existence but writes about fancy candles and lip balm on her Instagram account, @affluentdetritus.

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