Tori Amos

Tori Amos - Quick Facts

Profile Overview of Tori Amos

Tori Amos (born Myra Ellen Amos; August 22, 1963) is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. She is a classically trained musician with a mezzo-soprano vocal range. A child prodigy, Amos entered the Peabody Institute's preparatory division at five, but left at eleven, coming of age as a pianist in Washington, D.C. Bars. Amos was the lead singer of the short-lived 1980s pop-rock group Y Kant Tori Read before achieving her breakthrough as a solo artist in the early 1990s. Her songs focus on a broad range of topics, including sexuality, feminism, politics, and religion.

This profile of Tori Amos covers Early Life and Family Background, Career and Rise to Fame, 1990–1995: Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink, 1996–2000: Boys for Pele, From the Choirgirl Hotel, and To Venus and Back and 2001–2004: Strange Little Girls and Scarlet's Walk.

Her charting singles include "Crucify", "Silent All These Years", "God", "Cornflake Girl", "Caught a Lite Sneeze", "Professional Widow", "Spark", "1000 Oceans", "Flavor" and "A Sorta Fairytale". Amos has received five MTV VMA nominations and nine Grammy Award nominations, and won an Echo Klassik award for her Night of Hunters classical crossover album. She is listed on VH1's 1999 "100 Greatest Women of Rock and Roll" at number 71.

Early Life and Family Background of Tori Amos

Amos was born on August 22, 1963, at Old Catawba Hospital, in Newton, North Carolina during her parents' trip from their home in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. She is the third child of Mary Ellen (née Copeland) and Edison McKinley Amos. And was named Myra Ellen Amos.

Some of Amos's ancestors were Confederate soldiers. In her memoir, Piece by Piece, she talks about the experience of these Confederate ancestors, Margaret Little and Grandaddy Calvin Rice, during the American Civil War.

When she was two years old, her family relocated to Baltimore, Maryland, where her father had moved his Methodist ministry from its original base in Washington, D.C. Her older brother and sister took piano lessons, but Tori did not need them. From the time she could reach the piano, she taught herself to play: when she was two, she could reproduce pieces of music she had only heard once, and, by the age of three, she was composing her own songs. She has described seeing music as structures of light since early childhood, an experience consistent with chromesthesia:

At five, she became the youngest student ever admitted to the preparatory division of the Peabody Institute. She studied classical piano at Peabody from 1968 to 1974. In 1974, when she was eleven, her scholarship was discontinued, and she was asked to leave. Amos has asserted that she lost the scholarship because of her interest in rock and popular music, coupled with her dislike for reading from sheet music.

In 1972, the Amos family moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, where her father became pastor of the Good Shepherd United Methodist church. At thirteen, Amos began playing at gay bars and piano bars, chaperoned by her father.

Amos won a county teen talent contest in 1977, singing a song called "More Than Just a Friend". As a senior at Richard Montgomery High School, she co-wrote "Baltimore" with her brother, Mike Amos, for a competition involving the Baltimore Orioles. The song did not win the contest but became her first single, released as a 7-inch single pressed locally for family and friends in 1980 with another Amos-penned composition as a B-side, "Walking With You". Before this, she had performed under her middle name, Ellen, and was considering the stage name "Sammy Jaye" at the time, but permanently adopted "Tori" after a friend's boyfriend told her she looked like a Torrey pine, a tree native to the West Coast.

Career and Rise to Fame of Tori Amos

By the time she was 17, Amos had a stock of homemade demo tapes that her father regularly sent out to record companies and producers. Producer Narada Michael Walden responded favorably: he and Amos cut some tracks together, but none were released. Eventually, Atlantic Records responded to one of the tapes, and, when A&R man Jason Flom flew to Baltimore to audition her in person, the label was convinced and signed her.

In 1984, Amos moved to Los Angeles to pursue her music career after several years performing on the piano bar circuit in the Washington, D.C. Area.

In 1986, Amos formed a musical group called Y Kant Tori Read, named for her difficulty with sight-reading. In addition to Amos, the group was composed of Steve Caton (who would later play guitars on all of her albums until 1999), drummer Matt Sorum, bass player Brad Cobb and, for a short time, keyboardist Jim Tauber. The band went through several iterations of songwriting and recording; Amos has said interference from record executives caused the band to lose its musical edge and direction during this time. Finally, in July 1988, the band's eponymous debut album, Y Kant Tori Read, was released. Although its producer, Joe Chiccarelli, stated that Amos was happy with the album at the time, Amos has since criticized it, once remarking: "The only good thing about that album is my ankle high boots."

Following the album's commercial failure and the group's subsequent disbanding, Amos began working with other artists (including Stan Ridgway, Sandra Bernhard, and Al Stewart) as a backup vocalist. She also recorded a song called "Distant Storm" (which she did not write), which was used in the film China O'Brien. In the credits, the song is attributed to a band called Tess Makes Good. Amos recorded the vocals for the song in 1988, for $150; she was unaware for several years that the song had actually been heard in a film. Other than the appearance in the film itself, "Distant Storm" has never been commercially issued in any format.

1990–1995: Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink

Despite the disappointing reaction to Y Kant Tori Read, Amos still had to fulfill her six-record contract with Atlantic Records, which, in 1989, wanted a new record by March 1990. The initial recordings were declined by the label, which Amos felt was because the album had not been properly presented. The album was reworked and expanded under the guidance of Doug Morris and the musical talents of Steve Caton, Eric Rosse, Will MacGregor, Carlo Nuccio, and Dan Nebenzal, resulting in Little Earthquakes, an album recounting her religious upbringing, sexual awakening, struggle to establish her identity, and sexual assault. This album became her commercial and artistic breakthrough, entering the British charts in January 1992 at Number 15. Little Earthquakes was released in the United States in February 1992 and slowly but steadily began to attract listeners, gaining more attention with the video for the single "Silent All These Years".

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tori_Amos), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.