Hello everyone! I hope you have all had a lovely week. As always I am very excited about this week’s Original Girl, Tori Amos! Born in Newton, North Carolina, Tori was originally named Myra Ellen Amos. She changed her name because when she was younger she had someone tell her she looked like a Torrey Pine, which is a tree from the west coast. Tori is one of those artists who was born gifted in music. At the age of two she was able to learn songs on the piano by only hearing them once, and she was writing songs at only three years old. Tori has said that she has experienced chromesthesia since she was
a little girl. If you are like me and had to look that up, it is where the person can see color and shapes with sound, which is super cool! If that did not impress you, when Tori was five she became a student at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. I mean, come on! You have to be wicked talented to achieve these goals to begin with, but to be so young! It’s incredible, but I think my favorite part is that when she was eleven she was asked to leave because she had a liking to rock. What is more rock n’ roll than that? As you can imagine Tori has released many albums: Little Earthquakes (1992), Under The Pink (1994), Boys For Pele (1996), From The Choirgirl Hotel (1998), To Venus And Back (1999), Strange Little Girls (2001), Scarlet’s Walk (2002), The Beekeeper (2005), American Doll Posse (2007), Abnormally Attracted To Sin (2009), Midwinter Graces (2009), Night of Hunters (2011), Gold Dust (2012), Unrepentant Geraldines (2014), Native Invaders (2017), and Ocean To Ocean (2021). For time reasons I will be focusing on her second album, Under The Pink, and the eighth song on the album, Cornflake Girl. The song was very successful internationally. It reached number 4 on UK singles chart and number 9 on Australia’s Triple J’s 1994 hottest 100 polls. The story behind the song is very interesting. It is about how grandmothers and mothers in Africa would betray their family members and perform the act of female genital mutilation to their children. If you are not familiar with this, it is a terrible practice in other countries to try and control women’s sexuality in terms of beauty. Most of these procedures are done when the girl is five or younger, but the operation causes many terrible health conditions. In addition it has been researched to find no benefits. Many families feel they have to put their girls through this because if they don’t they can expose them to social exclusions. Tori grew up calling girls who would hurt one another cornflake girls. The term cornflake and raisin girls came from the cereal. It implies that raisin girls are more open minded and hard to find, unlike cornflake girls. Tori was able to take a terrible issue and turn it into a beautiful song.
Not only is Cornflake Girl a very powerful song lyrically but also musically. The song starts off with guitars, percussion, bass, and piano. It is one of those songs that I can recognize immediately when it is played. She then adds a whistle which gives the song a very western feel, which I absolutely love. Tori Amos has an amazing piano piece on this track. Tori uses the bass note in the piano to really bring out more depth to the song, and it gives it power! Tori’s lyrics start off saying “Never was a cornflake girl. Thought it was a good solution hanging with the raisin girls.” This song comes from the perspective of a girl who is one of the few who has not had this procedure done. The girl understands how awful this is and can’t believe that this is her life. During this, Tori's voice begins to grow stronger with the music. For the chorus Tori goes into her head voice and it brings another element to the song; her voice sounds more serious. The lyrics in the second verse are so clever. “She knows what’s going on. Seems we got a cheaper feeling now. All the sweeteaze are gone, gone to the other side with my encyclopedia. They must have paid her a nice price, she’s putting on her string bean love.” Tori is telling us that these girls know what is going on with them and that they feel belittled. She’s saying that common sense is thrown out the window and that these young ladies have no reason to go through something so awful. Merry Clayton, a soul gospel singer, was featured in the bridge. Her deep, strong voice is the perfect combination for Tori’s falsetto to do some ad libs. The lyrics here are also great: “And the man with the golden gun thinks he knows so much, thinks he knows so much, yeah.” The men in these countries are controlling the women’s bodies and they think they are doing what is right. Towards the end of the song Tori’s piano playing becomes even stronger using the whole range of the keys. Overall this song is purely amazing with the storytelling and the musical aspects.
I know this song is about a very difficult topic but music isn’t always about love and heartbreak. Music is such a great way to inform people about real life, even if that life is very difficult to talk about. Tori is an amazing artist who pushes the limits of songwriting, and because of that she will always be a Lydia’s Girl.
Author: Lydia MacDavid
Chief Editor: Jacob Tomeny
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