Crucial Track for March 19, 2026

"Silent All These Years" by Tori Amos

Share the first song you ever heard from your favorite artist.

I remember where I was and exactly what I was doing. There was a David Copperfield special on the TV that same night. I was on the phone with a boy named Jason and telling him that a girl named Jessica liked him and he should call her, which is what she told me to tell him. I had a crush on him too, but didn’t quite have the vocabulary in 7th grade to tell him that. So, I told him Jessica liked him and he should call her. Each of us had the TV on and we’d flip channels at the same time so we’d be watching the same thing. We switched over to MTV, and there was this woman in a wooden box. And I said we needed to watch the rest of whatever this was because neither of us had seen anything that looked or sounded quite like Tori Amos did. I don’t know what ever happened to Jason or Jessica, but I do know I bought my first Tori Amos album soon after that night. And I do know that Tori Amos was the first concert I ever went to by myself a couple years later. My collection of Tori Amos stuff today is significant, although most of her recent work isn’t as gripping as it was that night that I was on the phone with Jason, who I had a crush on, telling him that Jessica liked him.