Me and A Gun - Tori Amos Live

The power of this song, for me, comes from the paradox of Tori singing it - her voice is soft and light and controlled (well, with the odd wrenched lift and cry) but the emotional labour and emphasis of the song  is carried in the expressiveness of her face. I've seen other performances where the characters in the story seemingly flit across her face as she sings the lines, and she flirts with the audience a little in the beginning, small smiles and steely eyes and quirked eyebrows and tongue to the corner of the upper lip, to end up dragged into the current of despair and anguish and hopelessness, a torture that is the direct response to her experience.

She says it took her seven years to open up, to allow vulnerability to be intertwined into self-expression sufficiently to release herself from the psychological suffering that was an outcome of the rape:

"In the song, I say it was Me and a Gun but it wasn't a gun. It was a knife he had. And the idea was to take me to his friends and cut me up, and he kept telling me that, for hours. And if he hadn't needed more drugs I would have been just one more news report, where you see the parents grieving for their daughter. And I was singing hymns, as I say in the song, because he told me to. I sang to stay alive [italics mine]. Yet I survived that torture, which left me urinating all over myself and left me paralysed for years. That's what that night was all about, mutilation, more than violation through sex.


I really do feel as though I was psychologically mutilated that night and that now I'm trying to put the pieces back together again. Through love, not hatred. And through my music. My strength has been to open again, to life, and my victory is the fact that, despite it all, I kept alive my vulnerability."

My mind chases over and over the lyrics:

'I don't think you'll be back in three days time
So you choose well'

I resonate, far far too strongly, perhaps, with these lines.


Not Gods. Not Eternity. Not Ephemeral. Not Known.