Me and a Gun - 2015 Remaster

Amos was raped at knifepoint when she was 21, and she wrote this about the experience. The song has no instruments, so she sings alone. "It had always been a cappella," she explained in an Australian TV interview. "And when I started writing it… I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I mean, I was almost in a trance writing that song. I was back there in that experience, and yet, another part of me was guiding it on. I felt like I was protected writing it, when it was over, when I had looked at what I had written. And the hardest part is performing it every night because, although I know I'm safe, a part of me has to go to that place to sing it. And what this whole process has taught me is, I'm not a victim. Although when I go in and sing it every night, there's a certain energy I bring to make it very real and then after the performance is over I can go and have an ice cream and have a life and say, 'This is over. I can talk about it and I have love in my life.' And it's really important to get to that stage."

This was Amos' first single from her solo debut album, Little Earthquakes.

Amos discussed this song with Rolling Stone: "Difficult work. Raw. I had seen Thelma & Louise and after seeing it I went off and spent some time by myself. Days. Days. And days. Processing so much that I hadn't been able to begin to become conscious about. And it was through gut-wrenching pain - hysteria, I think - that the music began to come. In the quiet, in the silence, being alone. I couldn't speak to or be with anybody so I just went off to one of my secret private haunts that you go in the world. You just leave everything you know and go. And that's what I did. And when I came back out again, this song was walking hand in hand with me. It became something I had to sing to move forward. I had to claim it and be the necklaces of somebody I came to work with a few years later. She ran the Cedars-Sinai ward; her name was Dr. Rita Lynn. I worked with her for many, many years because after this song came out, I then began to retreat and put up all those shields again because I couldn't deal with the invasion of all the questioning. It became a whole other process [in which] people were getting off on that. Nothing was enough, so I needed to retreat. By retreating, I began to take a few steps back in my process. So I began to work with her after Under the Pink, when things just got to a place where I needed to do that. And she would say, 'We have to bead a necklace of truth.' And sometimes we have to bead little bits at a time so we can assimilate. And that's kind of key, because in singing the song, it was the thing that kept me breathing and conscious."