go back to

1994, your junior year of high school. someone will gift you a ticket to see her in concert. you will have heard of tori and listened to her music before, but seeing her live will entrance you. you will be surprised to find yourself crying. you will listen to the albums - little earthquakes and under the pink - often enough that sometimes in the car, your dad will sing along. you will know that ‘girl’ was written for you. and ‘winter.’ oh, and ‘precious things.’

you start talking to other fans on the internet. the first video you watch on the internet - at the fancy computer lab where it’s possible to view video on the web - will be tori performing on david letterman. you will discover an entire community on usenet and this will prove the start of an enduring internet addiction. you will start collecting bootleg recordings and imports and you buy the soundtracks to higher learning and great expectations just to get her tracks. most of all, you will start going to shows, where tori is at her best, pouring so much intensity and emotion into her music that it pours into the audience in thick waves. you become a connoisseur of the different growls she uses for the “tucked inside the heart of every nice girrrrrl” line in ‘precious things.’ you will go early to see her come in for soundcheck. you will learn to recognize her bodyguards.

boys for pele will come out when you most need something in which to find faith, and you will pore over the words and the sounds, hoping they hold the secret to escaping your depression. they don’t, but they help, and by the time from the choirgirl hotel comes out, you and tori are both ready to dance. you are still going to shows, and you are still seeing the same people and talking to them on the internet, and realizing that internet people can be friends.

by the time to venus and back comes out, you’ll just have moved to california. you’ll find a local independent record store and buy it on the release date. but you don’t listen to it as much, and you find yourself spending a lot more time with the fragile, the nin album that came out on the same date. and you still go to shows, you still talk to your friends, but you find yourself drifting away from tori. you buy the next two albums on their release dates but don’t listen to them much. you stop going to shows, having seen her roughly 45 times by now.

but you will still be friends with these people, the same ones you’ve known since 1994. who have gotten married and had kids and gone to school and suffered horrible losses and even died (love you DWC). and most of us hardly listen to tori anymore, but your friendships will endure. she will always be important to you. you will always be able to identify the song within 10 seconds, the lyrics to ‘the waitress’ will often spring to your mind during arguments, you will describe yourself as ‘the sweetest cherry in the apple pie’, and you will never ever be able to listen to ‘me and a gun’ without breaking.

here