Who is Tori Amos?
Myra Ellen Amos was born to Reverend Edison Amos, a
Methodist Minister, and Mary Ellen Amos on August 22, 1963 in Newton, North
Carolina. About a year later, her family moved to Baltimore, Maryland. She
began playing the piano at the age of 2 and a half roughly. After receiving
a scholarship of attendance at 5, she began training at the Peabody
Conservatory in Baltimore, MD (she was the youngest person ever admitted).
"By eight, the bottom started falling out. They were looking for
improvement and I wasn't improving. "What's she doing?" I was going home
and Listening to Beatles records and anything else I could get my hands
on. I studied 30 minutes during the whole week of what I was supposed
to. It was, "I'm here, and they don't get it, and that's the way it is."
You just do that as a kid. You can't say, "Hey, let's have a
conference." I was out by the time I was 11, because I was developing my
own music all this time." At 11, influenced by bands like Led Zeppelin, she improvised with a
rock music-style riff in her yearly audition to Peabody and lost her scholarship. It was the first of many
disappointments in her long journey to musical fame.
"At 13, my father saw me wasting away, some of my friends were
getting pregnant, and he didn't want that to happen to me. So he tried
to find a special interest to keep my hands busy, I guess. He said,
"Your music was so much a part of your life. Why don't you go back to
the Peabody?" So I actually auditioned to get back in. These girls were
auditioning for the voice school, singing Ave Maria. Me, I sang "I've
Been Cheated" [laughs]. They didn't clap, and they certainly didn't let
me back in. So I started played clubs and turning in my songs."
With her father chaperoning, she began performing at clubs in
the Washington area around 13. After a few years, her father stopped
chaperoning all of her shows. Myra Ellen (age 16) and her brother Mike
wrote "Baltimore" for the Baltimore Orioles, this was her first recorded
song. Sometime later, a friend commented she looked more like a "Tori"
than a "Ellen." And, depending on the source, and perhaps her mood, after
learning of the Torrey Pine, Myra Ellen Amos adopted the name "Tori Amos."
Tori graduated from
Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, MD in 1981, being voted
"Most Likely to Succeed" and "Most Talented" her senior year. Also she was
voted "Homecoming Queen" but she says about that "I was the homecoming queen
, but then, all the nerds voted for me."
At 21, she moved to Los Angeles, CA to become
a pop singer.In 1987, she finally got a record contract with Atlantic
and made a glam-rock album, "Y Kant Tori Read," with a band that included
Matt Sorum the future drummer of Guns N' Roses. The album was a commercial
failure, and the critics destroyed it. "All I can say is that that was an
album where I noticed too late that I wanted to satisfy everyone but myself.
I wanted to prove something, but wanting to prove something to the world
is no good motivation to make music."
After much introspection and a long visit to the
farm, which her parents say has become a place of healing for her, Tori
decided to be who she really is. So she returned to her roots as a pianist,
which resulted in the stripped down personal sound of her album "Little
Earthquakes."
Atlantic Records sponsored a trip to England in
1991 to support her EP, Me and a Gun, which proved to be a success.
In late 1991, Little Earthquakes was released and became
a "cult" classic. The EP Crucify was released in 1992. Tori followed
with Under the Pink in 1994. "Under The Pink is a place, it's an
internal place. It's the inner world, the inner life. You have to listen
from your stomach. To me it's all there. But you've got to be willing to
put your moccasins on and walk down the road."
Also in 1994, she founded RAINN
(The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network), an all-volunteer hot line
that connects people to 340 rape crisis centers around the country. The
project is funded in part by her record company as a byproduct of "Me and
a Gun," the haunting single from LE that detailed her own experience with
rape. Read Tori's letter about R.A.I.N.N.
In 1996 Tori released Boys for Pele.
"When I turned in this album, the record company was beyond numb,"
she says. "They all looked around the room, and the first thing they said
was, 'Radio will never understand.' ...
"But I then said: That's not why I wrote this one. This isn't about
that. This is about finding my fire. This is about standing on my own.
And there are a lot of people that are at the point in their life where
they have to stand on their own and face how scary that is.'
"Things are really breaking down right now. Emotionally,
relationship-wise --- things that you thought would last forever aren't
lasting forever. I said that the people that are going through that dark,
on-their-knees descent will understand [this album], and hopefully, this will
be a little [tool] that will help them to ascend and find parts of themselves
that would give them strength. Parts that they were afraid, that I was
afraid, to look at."
"As for the fans --- "I'm calling them ears with feet now," says
Amos; "I think the word 'fan' is a degrading term" --- she had a hunch they
would get what the album was about. "When I thought about ears with feet,"
she says, "I just went, 'Well, my instincts say that quite a few of you are
going through what I'm going through, which is trying to find your own power.
And I have to trust that some will want to take the journey. Or some are
already in the middle of the journey, and this would be like the glass of red
wine --- which, as we all know, is just a necessity once in a while."
Go Back