Tori Amos was such a unique voice when she came into our musical lives with Cornflake Girl, arguably the progenitor of the confessional female singer-songwriter genre.

It’s a genre (arguably a sexist notion, with its connotations of sin and guilt) that brought us the likes of Fiona Apple and Suzanne Vega, Alanis Morissette and Jewel, through to Taylor Swift, Marika Hackman and St Vincent today.

I confess (once a Catholic…) that I’d slightly filed Tori Amos away as a one-hit wonder because I had forgotten about this powerfully emotional song. And somehow I’d forgotten her heart-wrenching debut Me And A Gun – an a capella recital of her real-life rape at the age of 21.

Crucify was the fifth single from her debut studio album Little Earthquakes, released in 1992. It’s an anthem for anyone who fears judgment from others, especially religious institutions – she is the daughter of a Methodist minister – while remaining their own harshest judge.

She says she wrote it because she was aware that she had a difficulty sticking up for herself;

I never knew til now that Amos’s music career had started out in a synthpop band called Y Kant Tori Read (do band names get any worse?!) who released a self-titled 1988 album that was a spectacular failure, leading to the break-up of the band.

The experience of rejection (one critic called her a “vapid bimbo”) – of high hopes and shattered dreams – worked its way into the lyrics of Crucify “because I wasn’t used to failure; I had been a child prodigy.”