Tori Amos

After spending her youth studying classical piano, child prodigy Tori Amos' first foray into rock - with her hard-rock band Y Kant Tori Read - was mercifully short. It was a return to her beloved piano and the development of an intimate style of pop songwriting that brought her widespread success.

The youngest of three children of a Methodist minister father and homemaker mother, Amos showed signs of being a gifted musician when she began tinkering on the piano at age two and a half. At five, she began studying classical piano at the prestigious Peabody Institute at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University. After she insisted on playing her own pop compositions for the school's examination board, her scholarship wasn’t renewed. By the time she was 13, Amos was performing her songs at clubs in Washington, DC.

In 1984 Amos moved to L.A. to pursue her dream of becoming a rock star; she also began calling herself Tori. Three years later she signed a deal with Atlantic Records, and in 1988 her band Y Kant Tori Read, which included future Guns n’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum, released one self-titled album. Adorned with teased hair and sporting a low-cut corset, Amos appeared on the LP’s cover brandishing a saber.

The album’s quick failure and a cathartic experience at the piano resulted in many of the extremely personal songs that eventually appeared on Amos’s solo debut, Little Earthquakes. The most revealing, “Me and a Gun,” detailed Amos’ experience of being raped by an acquaintance.

With her record company’s encouragement, Amos moved to London to perform in that city’s small clubs - and to help break her album in a smaller market. By the end of 1992 Little Earthquakes had gone gold in Britain; a year later, it went gold in the U.S. as well. Crucify, an EP of mostly covers, included a soft, understated “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

With her more ornate platinum followup, Under the Pink (#12, 1994), Amos continued to embrace songs about the female experience: “God” questions male authority; “Cornflake Girl” explores what happens when one woman betrays another. Boys for Pele debuted in 1996 at #2 and quickly went platinum, despite being her least accessible album to date.

Amos collapsed during a grueling world tour in support of Boys for Pele. In 1998 she married Mark Hawley, an engineer working on From the Choirgirl Hotel (#5, 1998). That album departed from Amos’ “girl with a piano” image with fuller instrumentation and dance-music twiddles, and it included “Jackie’s Strength,” a ballad in which she compares Jacqueline ¬Kennedy’s wedding day with her own. The two-disc set To Venus and Back (#12, 1999) comprises one disc of new studio tracks and one disc of live recordings from her 1998 tour.

Amos released a collection of covers interpreted from a female perspective in 2001. Strange Little Girls revealed the pianist’s renditions of everything from the Beatles’ “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” to Slayer’s “Raining Blood.” It also officially drew Amos’ contract with Atlantic to a close. She soon signed with Sony/Epic. Scarlett’s Walk (2002) was an extensive American cross-country trek through Amos’ imagination, across dozens of political and personal themes. It was soon accompanied by the thematically related Welcome To Sunny Florida, a collection of live footage released on DVD in 2004. Amos explored a more diverse, R& B driven musical range The Beekeeper (2005), frequently playing a Hammond B3 while continuing to explore lyric themes of femininity and personal transcendence. Her autobiographyPiece by Piece was published simultaneously in February 2005. In 2007's America Doll Posse Amos plays with a variety of alter egos, creating elaborate celebrations of the female persona and dissecting the rigidity of what she considers the modern dichotomy of woman as a either “mother or whore.”

In 1994 Amos cofounded RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, which operates a free 24-hour hotline and works with more than 600 crisis centers across the country. She continues to serve as a chairperson on RAINN’s board and participates in fund-raisers such as pay-per-view video downloads on the Web, ticket auctions, and benefit concerts.

from The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001)