Tori Amos

Tori Amos was born Myra Ellen Amos on August 22, 1963, in Newton, North Carolina, the daughter of a Methodist minister; she grew up mostly in Baltimore, Maryland, with summers spent at her grandparents' home in North Carolina^[1].

She began playing piano by ear at two and a half years old and was admitted to Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory of Music at age five, the youngest student the school had ever accepted. Her time there was uneasy from the start: she resisted learning to read sheet music, preferring to improvise, and was expelled at eleven, losing her scholarship a few years later^[1]. That early conflict between formal instruction and instinctive playing became a defining thread in her later career.

Her first attempt at a recording career came in 1986, when she co-founded the synth-rock group Y Kant Tori Read, whose name nodded back to her Peabody days. The band's sole self-titled album, released in 1988, was a commercial and critical failure despite substantial label promotion^[1]. Amos rebuilt her sound from the ground up afterward, stripping back to just piano and voice for her solo debut, Little Earthquakes, in 1992.

For the 1994 follow-up, Under the Pink, Amos worked with her then-boyfriend and producer Eric Rosse in a home studio built inside a 150-year-old adobe hacienda outside Taos, New Mexico, which the pair nicknamed the fish house after their recording equipment arrived shipped alongside crates of seafood^[2]. The album's lead single, "Cornflake Girl," grew out of a piano riff Amos began playing in a London flat while reggae music drifted in from outside, a fragment that took her more than a year to finish^[3]. She has said the song's central metaphor emerged from a conversation about Alice Walker's novel Possessing the Secret of Joy and its depiction of female genital mutilation, and specifically about how the women closest to a girl are sometimes the ones who lead her toward harm^[4]. Amos and Rosse split not long after the album's release^[2].

Amos's debut solo album, Little Earthquakes, took shape only after an early version of the record, cut at Capitol Studios with producer Davitt Sigerson, was rejected by Atlantic Records as unsatisfactory^[6]. She rebuilt much of it with Eric Rosse in his home studio, and it was Rosse who insisted she keep “Silent All These Years,” a song she had written with the folk musician Al Stewart in mind, telling her the song was too plainly her own life story to give away^[8]. Amos has traced the song's lyrical spark to reading Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid to her niece Cody and recognizing, in the mermaid's bargain, her own long habit of making herself smaller to be loved^[7].

The same album includes “Me and a Gun,” Amos's unaccompanied account of being raped at knifepoint after a concert in the mid-1980s. She has spoken about that assault publicly since the album's release and helped found RAINN (the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) in 1994. In 1997, “Silent All These Years” was re-released as a benefit single for the organization, paired with a live recording from a RAINN concert at Madison Square Garden^[5].