Tori Amos had a jump on the world of music from the very beginning. She was born Myra Ellen Amos in Newton, North Carolina, August 22, 1963, and moved with her parents to suburban Maryland a year later. By age 3, she was already demonstrating a startling aptitude for the piano; by 4 she was composing musical scores; and at 6 she became the youngest student ever to attend the prestigious Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. Apparently, the idea was to train the young Amos for a career as a classical concert pianist. But she had other ideas in mind, and after composing a piece at age 11 that was deemed too radical by the faculty, she was shown the door.
She briefly gave up playing, but soon returned to the keyboard, performing jazz standards in piano bars in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. At 17, she wrote a song with her brother Michael for the then-
Tori Amos graduated her Rockville, Maryland, high school in 1981 after being named homecoming queen and voted most likely to succeed. All the necessary elements of success seemed to be in place, but the always-
Emotionally upset and in need of a new perspective on life, she moved to London and began working on richly hued, piano-
In a sense, that cover version offered a hint of what was to come on her second album, 1994's Under the Pink. The leadoff single, "God," was Amos's most daring piece of work to date, highlighted by an oddly metered rhythm, and ushered in with an unexpectedly squealing guitar lead. Other key tracks on the album include the bouncy, offbeat "Cornflake Girl" and the warm "Past the Mission." Amos' breakup with longtime boyfriend Eric Rosse (who co-
Following the end of the Pele tour, Tori discovered she was pregnant and was, in her words, "over the moon about it." Sadly, she miscarried after three months. In an interview with Wall of Sound, Tori discussed the tragic event, and how it influenced her latest album, the spring 1998 release from the choirgirl hotel.
"The songs started coming not long after I miscarried. The strange thing is, the love doesn't go away for this being that you've carried. You can't go back to being the person you were before you carried life. And yet you're not a mother, either, and you still are connected to a force, a being. And I was trying to find ways to keep that communication going. Along the way on the search, sort of walking with the undead, I would run into these songs. The one thing they kept saying to me was I had to find a deep woman's rhythmaYou begin to create where you can. If you can't create physical life, you find a life force. If that's in music, that's in music. I started to find this deep, primitive rhythm, and I started to move to it. And I held hands with sorrow, and I danced with her, and we giggled a bit. And this record really became about being alive enough to feel things, no matter what that is."
The album debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard album chart.
In happier news, in March 1998, she married British sound engineer Mark Hawley, at whose Cornwall, England, studio she recorded choirgirl. The pair wed at a medieval castle in the U.K.
For the choirgirl album and tour, Tori "plugged" in for the first time, opting for electric instrumentation over her usual acoustic. In April and early May 1998 she staged a mini-
A new album titled to venus and back —