Tori Amos – the Meaning of the Silent All These Years lyricsAZLyrics.com

Tori Amos is a dynamic performer, brilliant songwriter, accomplished pianist, and a cool, cool woman. But sometimes deciphering the lyrics of your poetic songs can be a puzzle, especially your Silent all these years lyrics.

I’m a huge fan of Tori Amos, and I’ve done my best to synthesize the Silent all these years lyrics. Here’s a bit of history and lyrical analysis that I came up with …

The song was released as the second single from Amos’ first studio album. Small earthquakes, although he wrote it long before when he was recording You cant read tori. In 1992, it was picked up by RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) in the UK to promote awareness of the organization, and was relaunched in the US in 1997. Tori claims that the song is not entirely autobiographical. because he wrote it to place it with another artist at the time. (Composers often do this when they are starting out.)

In my opinion, however, the song is biographical in a non-literal sense because it is about an artist who renounces her voice, or her essence as a woman. This interpretation is supported by the fact that Tori was lyrically inspired by Hans Christen Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” in which a female mermaid gives up her voice to ensnare a prince. As an artist who was trying to “make it” by pitching songs to other artists to sing, I think it’s a reasonable assumption that Tori was a symbolic woman who gave her voice to another.

A more literal and completely different interpretation, but not necessarily autobiographical, could be that the singer has just learned of an unplanned pregnancy and is forced to give up her voice or essence during the agonizing yes-or-no decision-making process. have an abortion. Perhaps the singer has been “Silent all these years” because she feels ashamed of having aborted him, added to the shame of not having spoken of the emotional pain that it caused her all these years.

Here are some lyrical references that I think support this interpretation:

“the Antichrist in the kitchen” is one of her parents yelling at her, and she is “saved by the garbage truck” because now she is exposing her emotional “garbage” or mess by confessing these experiences through song.

“Boy, you better pray she bleeds soon” … telling her lover that she might be pregnant.

The “paper cup” could be a pregnancy test.

“As the years go by, I will choke on tears” may refer to the singer’s suspicion that she may live to regret an abortion later in life, even if it is the only solution at the moment.

Whether or not you agree with my literal and non-literal interpretations of Tori Amos’s “Silent All These Years” lyrics, it’s hard to disagree that it’s an intriguing and multifaceted song.