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"I don't talk about the details because I can't, but it's freeing to sing that song [Me And A Gun]. I have to go in a trance to sing it. ... It gets exhausting singing it. But there's so much going on that nobody talks about, and I just found that out with myself after so many years of not talking."
-- Tori; The Washington Post, March 22, 1992
"I'll never talk about it at this level again, but let me ask you. Why have I survived that kind of night, when other women didn't? How am I alive to tell you this tale when he was ready to slice me up? In the song I say it was Me and a Gun but it wasn't a gun. It was a knife he had. And the idea was to take me to his friends and cut me up, and he kept telling me that, for hours. And if he hadn't needed more drugs I would have been just one more news report, where you see the parents grieving for their daughter. And I was singing hymns, as I say in the song, because he told me to. I sang to stay alive. Yet I survived that torture, which left me urinating all over myself and left me paralyzed for years. That's what that night was all about, mutilation, more than violence through sex. I really do feel as though I was psychologically mutilated that night and that now I'm trying to put the pieces back together again. Through love, not hatred. And through my music. My strength has been to open again, to life, and my victory is the fact that, despite it all, I kept alive my vulnerability."
"I wrote it after I saw Thelma and Louise. And that had, humm, I had to let out all that incredible hurt and anger. The anger came. The song was written in the afternoon that I had seen Thelma and Louise and completed. It it had always been a capella. And when I started writing it, it was as if the blinded was on. I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I mean, I was almost in a trace 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."
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