Songfacts®:

• 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." >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Mehves - Istanbul, Turkey
• 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."
• The Trance duo Salt Tank sampled this on their 1996 single "Eugina," specifically the line, "Do you know Carolina, where the biscuits are soft and sweet."