Crucify, by Tori Amos
We don’t deserve the pain we inflict on ourselves
I chose this song after revisiting the Tori Amos album, Little Earthquakes, from 1992 and remembering my teenage angst. It was an album I played over and over and “Crucify” was always a favourite, although the whole album is good. She is a singer that makes use of every expressive facility in her voice to give the deepest of meanings to everything she sings. Her lyrics are deep, her music often dark and her vocals so emotional and fascinating.
How do they do that?
So what is it that creates that feeling of darkness in this song? Well, it uses some interesting harmonic devices, so that tonally we’re not always in a very comfortable place. By that I mean it doesn’t always use the type of chords that sound ‘nice’ to our ears. The piece opens with a sequence of bare fourths in the guitar - that is the first and fourth note of a scale played together with nothing else. Our ears prefer thirds, so a fourth jars a little. And bare fourths sound, well, bare. Partnered with a heavy bass drum, it is a pared back, yet powerful and weighty beginning.
The mood brightens a little at the words “I’ve been looking for a saviour” as the piano enters with its more traditional western harmony. But the pace of the arpeggios (chords broken up into their individual notes, rather than played together simultaneously) retains a sense of agitation. We keep the heavy drum and the vocal fairly low in Tori’s register so everything feels like its being weighted down, beaten, crushed (bearing our burdens).
Then something new happens at the word “chains.” We enter another harmonic realm. This time using the pentatonic scale, literally meaning “five tones”, which is uncommon in western harmony, but prominent in Chinese music. On a keyboard, the black notes (a group of three and a group of two) make a pentatonic scale. The effect when used in this song is transporting. Musically we are lifted out of the darkness, just for a moment, as the lyrics talk about breaking free. Yet the narrowness of the five note scale reminds us that we are still restricted: we are harmonically restrained.
After the repeat of all that, the vocal harmonies that enter at “crucify myself” add their own disturbing character. This is a chorus from the underworld: a horde of harpies, rather than the choir of celestial angels that Tori is looking for. They keep up the refrain, “why do we crucify ourselves,” almost to the end of the song and it’s not only vicious, but mocking. Overall it is a dark song, but as I’m always the optimist, I hear light in it too. Whilst the words and the music speak of darkness and (self-inflicted) suffering, in asking us the question of why we do it to ourselves, it’s a song that also has the ability to set us on a new path towards self-forgiveness and freedom…
I hope you enjoy it or feel inspired to listen to something new today.
