Tori Amos is an American pianist and singer-songwriter whose musical career began in , at the age of seventeen, when she and her brother co-wrote the song " Baltimore ". The song was selected as the winning song in a contest for the Baltimore Orioles and was recorded and pressed locally as a 7" single. Shortly thereafter, Amos began writing and recording material that would serve as the debut of her solo career. The following month, after the first track on the EP was receiving more airplay than the title track, the label reissued the EP with the same artwork, but changed the title to Silent All These Years. Subsequent albums with Atlantic were released at approximately two-year intervals. Due to professional conflicts, after working with Atlantic for the first 15 years of her career, Amos decided to seek another label.

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She is a classically trained musician with a mezzo-soprano vocal range. She was expelled at the age of 11 for what Rolling Stone described as "musical insubordination". Her songs focus on a broad range of topics, including sexuality, feminism, politics and religion. Amos has claimed that her maternal grandparents each had an Eastern Cherokee grandparent of their own. When she was two years old, her family moved to Baltimore, Maryland , where her father had transplanted his Methodist ministry from its original base in Washington, D. Her older brother and sister took piano lessons, but Tori did not need them. From the time she could reach the piano, she taught herself to play: when she was two, she could reproduce pieces of music she had only heard once, [16] and, by the age of three, she was composing her own songs. She has described seeing music as structures of light since early childhood, an experience consistent with chromesthesia :. The song appears as light filament once I've cracked it. As long as I've been doing this, which is more than thirty-five years, I've never seen the same light creature in my life.
Watch the video. Looking for something to watch? Choose an adventure below and discover your next favorite movie or TV show. Sign In. Up 7, this week. At age one, Tori and her family moved to Baltimore, where she spent much of her childhood.
At age five, the singer and pianist Tori Amos was the youngest student ever accepted into the Peabody Institute, a music and dance conservatory at Johns Hopkins University. Instead, she came of age performing show tunes and standards in the piano bars and hotel lounges of Washington, D. Her father, the Reverend Dr. Edison McKinley Amos, was her first manager. In the nineteen-eighties, Amos moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in music, forming a short-lived synth-pop band, Y Kant Tori Read. It was a bold and personal reaction to the pressure she felt to behave in a way that might placate men. Fourteen more albums followed. Her new book explores how she developed and nurtured that voice. On a Friday afternoon, during a slightly more normal time, Amos and I met at her sunny apartment in Tribeca. She had recently arrived in New York from the U.