TORI AMOS

Born: Myra Ellen Amos; Newton, North Carolina, 22 August 1963

Genre: Rock, Pop

Best-selling album since 1990: Under the Pink (1994)

Hit songs since 1990: "Silent All These Years," "God," "Cornflake Girl"

Singer, songwriter, and pianist Tori Amos is one of the most unusual and acclaimed performers to have emerged from the 1990s. With her 1991 debut album, Little Earthquakes, Amos took listeners by storm with achingly honest songs drawn from her personal experience growing up in the South. Throughout the 1990s Amos toured exhaustively, built up a large international fan base, and released more than half a dozen albums with aggregate sales of several million copies. Quirky, idiosyncratic, fearless, and sensual, the flame-haired Amos appeals equally to men and women.

From the age of four, Amos was gifted at the piano; by the time she was a teenager, she knew that she wanted to pursue a career in music. The daughter of a homemaker and a Methodist minister, she was born in North Carolina but grew up in Maryland and attended the prestigious Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore from 1968 to 1974. While attending Peabody, Amos became more interested in rock music, especially Led Zeppelin. In her late teens she moved to Los Angeles to pursue her musical career, playing in bars. Atlantic Records signed her in 1987; oddly, Amos's first professional recording featured her pop-heavy-metal band Y Kant Tori Read. It was a flop, but Atlantic kept her. It was a wise decision—all but one album Amos has released since then for Atlantic have gone platinum, and she has received eight Grammy Award nominations.

Amos's career breakthrough came with her second album, Little Earthquakes (1991). Its inspired, intensely personal, piano-based compositions prompted comparisons to Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush. The album spawned two hits: "Crucify," a plea for self-acceptance, and "Silent All These Years," about a woman trying to find her voice, literally and figuratively. Both songs were successful singles on college and adult album alternative stations. "Me and a Gun," the penultimate track on Little Earthquakes, also commanded attention for its harrowing, a cappella tale of Amos's own experience with rape.

Amos's live shows at this time were a stunning sight: She wriggled, writhed, and pounded away on the piano as if it were equivalent to an electric guitar as a symbol of rock-and-roll prowess and sexuality. Little Earthquakes peaked at number fifty-four on the Billboard Top 200 and reached number one on the Heatseekers chart.

Amos's follow-up album, Under the Pink (1994), is a similarly vulnerable but more eclectic collection that examines everything from female jealousy ("The Waitress") to relationships ("Baker, Baker"). As a minister's daughter she deals compellingly with religious disillusionment in the stirring, chilling "Icicle" and in her duet with Trent Reznor in "Past the Mission." This has been her most successful release, and it produced a few hits, including "Cornflake Girl," a song about prostitution. In the soulful "God," punctuated with squalling guitars in between verses, Amos poses the following question in the first verse: "God sometimes you just don't come through/ Do you need a woman to look after you?"

Never one to worry about offending people, Amos made waves with her next album, Boys for Pele (1996), the cover of which depicts a pig sucking her breast. Her most ambitious and difficult record, it yielded the classic single "Caught a Lite Sneeze." Boys for Pele debuted at the number two spot and quickly went platinum.

During most of 1997, Amos dealt with personal changes, including a miscarriage and a marriage, while working on her fourth album, From the Choirgirl Hotel (1998), which also went platinum. Two years later Amos kicked off a tour with Alanis Morissette with the release of To Venus and Back, a two-CD set with one disc of new material and the other of live concert recordings. The new material is full of harder-edged songs that are epic in scope and owe much to her friendship with the industrial artist Trent Reznor.

Amos switched from Atlantic to Epic Records after the release of her collection of covers, Strange Little Girls (2001), which received mixed reviews. Her first release for Epic, Scarlet's Walk (2002), was recorded in the shadow of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. The album charts the psychological and geographical terrain of her travels throughout every state in the United States. The result is a thoughtful, seemingly effortless collection of eighteen tracks that mark a welcome return to the strong story-songs of her earlier albums, most notably in the first single, "Sorta Fairytale." The work upholds Amos's stature as an uncompromising artist whose quirky feminist musings on religion and sexism have earned her a legion of loyal fans and a secure niche among the creative forces in contemporary American music.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Little Earthquakes (Atlantic, 1991); Under the Pink (Atlantic, 1994); Boys for Pele (Atlantic, 1996); From the Choirgirl Hotel (Atlantic, 1998); To Venus and Back (Atlantic 1999); Strange Little Girls (Atlantic, 2001); Scarlet's Walk (Epic, 2002).

carrie havranek