On Sunday I’m going to read a eulogy for my friend Elissa at her memorial service.  It has taken this long to marshall the resources necessary to handle the thousand or so people who will be there to mourn her and to say goodbye.

The thing I loved the most about Elissa (and it’s a tight race) was the music inside her.  She just had this voice.  You know, sometimes you know people in bands and they have good voices, but you can kind of tell that they listen to a lot of Dave Matthews or a lot of Sarah McLachlan.  Their influences are out there on their sleeve, still, because they haven’t truly inhabited their voices yet.

Elissa wasn’t like that.  Her voice was the sound of her soul.  It had a certain restful quality, a whisper in every note that made her singing so, I dunno, intimate.  It’s the same quality that Sade and Roberta Flack have, that "Shhhhhhhh, listen…" thing.  It’s the opposite of a high lonesome sound.  It’s a sound that says, "I am close to you, so close that I can whisper.  Listen to me". 

Here she is singing Peter Gabriel’s The Washing of the Water.

One of the singers we completely bonded over was Tori Amos.  I know some people just hate her and I will admit that she has her occasional moments of moist, pink overkill, but most of the time there’s just nothing like her.  She is a singer’s singer, doing brave, miraculous things with melody and harmony.  She can be clear and bracing or wild and lush or ice cold and distant, sometimes all within the space of a single line.

I understand, though, why guys like my brother and my ex run from the room screaming with their hands over their ears the moment she starts to really let loose.  It’s all just a little too hectic and loopy and feminine for those guys.  They have to go wash their brains out with some Motorhead or Led Zeppelin.  It’s not butch music at all.

But that’s not what Tori is for.  I listen to Tori when I’m overwhelmed, tangled up, and stressed out.  She is my musical crazy redhaired girlfriend.  Not my sex girlfriend, no, but my, like, *snap!* girlfriend!  You know what I mean?  Your girlfriend who you can call on the phone and tell her about the guy you have a crush on, or about some bitch who pissed you off, and whatever she’s doing, no matter what time of the day or night, she’s right there with you.

She’s your friend who tells you to get in the car so you can drive across town and whoop somebody’s ass.  Old fashioned white-trash yard fight, baby!  Tori’s there.  She’s your girl.  She’s the one swinging the bottle of Jack Daniels, and banging on their door, shouting, "GET YOUR PUNK ASS OUT HERE, YOU BITCH!  I’M GONNA KICK YOUR ASS RIGHT HERE IN THE YARD!!"

Hell yeah.  Everybody needs a friend like that.  She’s always got your back, but she’s always the first one to jerk a knot in your sorry ass if she sees you getting above yourself, or as my French friend used to say, "Farting higher than your asshole."

Back in October of 2001, when everyone was still in shock from 9/11 and it felt like the end of the world, Elissa and I got tickets to see Tori Amos at the Fox Theater in Atlanta.  It was just Tori, a grand piano, an electric piano and a few thousand fans and that night, Tori turned it out.  She played for two and a half hours, stopping only for a couple of short breaks between encores.  She laughed and told stories and jokes and just showed that crowd some serious love.  And we needed it. 

I have never heard a crowd of people that large be that silent, ever.  Between songs it was the usual rock concert rumble of sound, but as soon as she started to sing, the whole room went still as we all strained on the edges of our seats trying to catch and savor every single note.  Elissa and I were in raptures.  She’d seen Tori in concert a bunch of times, but I’ve only seen her that one time.  Elissa kept turning to me and saying, "Oh my god!!  She never plays this one live and it’s one of your favorites!  She knows you’re here!"

She was kidding of course, but Elissa could say stuff like that and you kind of wanted to believe it anyway.  Just to be around her was to briefly be swept up in her slipstream.  She had the gift of making you feel like a witty, delightful companion, regardless of the circumstances.  You could have a flat tire on the side of the road in the middle of the night with no spare with Elissa and it would be the best time you ever had in your life.

So you can imagine how we felt there in the sold out Fox Theater, holding hands as one of our favorite artists spun out notes and words and stories for hours.  It was one of the happiest moments of my life.  And it was definitely the best concert I’ve ever seen.  It was a whole different approach to the wall between performer and audience.  Tori Amos cares about her fans.  She worked really really hard that night to make us happy.

I have a bootleg of that concert.  It’s remarkably clear.  I put a couple of tracks from it on the Tori compilation CD I made for Christy.  Like most bootlegs, the crowd is pretty loud, but like I said, as soon as she’s singing, the crowd just vanishes.  It’s like we were all holding our breath.  

And I imagine that in the roar of the audience between songs, somewhere in all that sound is the sound of me and Elissa, clapping and cheering and having the time of our lives.  Sometimes I listen in the headphones so I can hear us cheering at the beginning of "Lust", an obscure album track that I think only Elissa and I truly love.  As soon as she started to play it, Elissa and I went "WHOOOOOOOOOO!!", while everyone else around us was kind of like, "What’s this song?  I don’t recognize this."  If you listen very closely, you can just barely hear us, two happy voices in an ocean of sound.

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