Your Love is Killing Me / Promises

“Break my legs so I won’t walk to you/Cut my tongue so I can’t talk to you/Burn my skin so I can’t feel you/Stab my eyes so I can’t see”

Fuck, that sounds outrageous just to read it, doesn’t it? Not so when Sharon Van Etten sings — no, wails — these lyrics in her new song “Your Love is Killing Me,” the most recent single she’s shared off her forthcoming album, Are We There.



I didn’t think she’d be able to produce an even swifter kick in the gut than she did with “Serpents,” from her last album Tramp, but I’ll be damned with this one. I'll. Be. Damned. Before we get to the requests for leg-breaking, tongue-cutting, skin-burning, and eye-stabbing, she begins the song:

"it’s understood
you’ll be a man
by the time I see you
we’ve been through
better days
and you’ve tasted all my pain"

At least, I think that’s what she’s singing. With each listen — and I’ve listened to it maybe 10 times in the last several hours — I keep straining toward my speakers, trying to catch every syllable through all the emotions she’s managing to convey with her voice. I mean, her voice: just listen to how it bends and turns and wrecks you in this song. No wonder I’m having a hard time understanding things like:

"try to tell you this when I’m sober
how I feel about loving you
try to remember all the turn of events"

and later:

"You love me as you torture me."

I absolutely cannot wait to hear her perform this live. Whenever that may be, I hope I’m just a little wine-drunk, enough not to care if my knees buckle and I choke back a sob or two.

I don’t know when that will be, but as Owen Pallett wrote in his The Talkhouse review on the new Tori Amos album: “In the meantime, I’m a trembling mess.”

Sorry to get a little out of order there, but being a "trembling mess" described it all too well. But this leads me to the next song I’d like to write about, the other new song that has me hitting replay and feeling in utter awe about the badassery of my favorite female musicians.

Yes, it's by the one, the only: Tori Amos. She’s just released her 14th album, and boy, are people talking about her. Over at NPR, one take wasn’t enough, so they gave 10. (It’s amazing. Read it.) And, as I mentioned, Owen Pallett has written a rather incredible piece on his fandom experience with Tori Amos, which I identified with on many levels.

My complete experience with loving Tori deserves a standalone written ode, though, so I’d like to focus on this one particular track from Unrepentant Geraldines. It’s called “Promise” and I’d really love it if everyone would listen to it, now:



You’ll notice that this isn’t Tori alone on the vocals: her daughter, Tash, sings with her on this, this utterly gorgeous “mother-daughter vow” — as Pallett describes, “their voices joining together like ivy and brick; it is devastating.”

“Where the sun shines/ I will be there/ You are the light/ That follows you everywhere”

“Will you look for me?”

“I will rescue you”

Devastating. Well, Ann Powers at NPR might describe it as an "alternately intimate and trivial mother-daughter exchange," and maybe that's also so, and maybe that's why I find it so devastating.

It, like "Your Love is Killing Me" is a song I don't want to end, but when it does it's almost a relief, because I can take a deep breath and just think about how beautiful it is. Even the parts that are painful.