“Six years earlier, I had stood in line at the Tower Records in Pasadena, California, trying to remember the lyrics to a song I’d heard on the radio. “Why do we crucify ourselves?” I sang to the cashier with pink Betty Page bangs and L7 shirt, “Every day, I crucify myself, nothing I do is good enough for you.” She huffed, I followed, “Amos,” she said, dryly, pulling it from the middle of the “A” section and handing it over. I stared, transfixed by the cover, Tori, a confident figure in blue; a small smirk on her face, as if to signify self-awareness, ‘you can’t trap a voice in a wooden box’. Much later when I finally sat down and read the actual lyrics, it turned out that I had memorized many of them incorrectly, but it didn’t change the terms of urgency and realness I’d felt at fourteen, coming through the speakers on the late night KROQ call in sex show I’d heard it on, alone in my room nearing the AM on a school night. What was important was that I had felt the connection at all. It was the first time I recognized my fear and anxieties expressed in song: invisibility, the desire to be accepted by the popular girls, a silent distance growing, concerning my day to day actions, where before there had been vocalized participation.”