Tori Amos

1Those Formative YearsAccording to the Reverend Dr. Edison Amos, Methodist minister and
father to the woman now known by millions of music enthusiasts as
just “Tori,” at five years old Myra Ellen Amos was already well on her
way to becoming “a twenty-first century Mozart.” Born August 22, 1963,
to the Reverend Dr. and Mary Ellen Amos in the small city of Newton,
North Carolina, little Myra didn’t take long to reveal her gift for music.
“[My mother] says I played music before I could talk,” said Tori Amos,
who lived with her family in Washington state and later the Baltimore,
Maryland, area.The former child prodigy — who calls music her first language, not
English — shared some of her earliest impressions of the instrument
that would come to be such an integral part of her life and career with
Performing Songwriter in 2006: “In my dad’s study, where he would
write his sermon, there was a big black upright [piano] that somebody
in the church had given my family. I remember crawling up onto this
windy stool — you could wind it and it would get taller — and I would
barely reach the keys. I remember feeling that this was my antenna to
the galaxy, that I could cross dimensions through sound and hear back from the outer reaches of the universe. . . . The songs were alive to me,
as alive as the human beings around me that weren’t making a whole
lot of sense. But the songs were making sense.”Her childhood perspective on the piano was that of friendship and
love, and she told Rolling Stone in 2002, “I knew I was a musician before
I was potty-trained. I just always remember playing the piano.” From
the age of two-and-a-half, Tori was playing the piano and considered it
her “best friend in the world. That was the only thing that understood
me and that I understood. . . . When you’re young, you’re being told
what to think. But I’d go to the piano and that’s where I was comforted.
It was my protector, the protector of my thoughts.” In music,
Tori found a sanctuary of sorts as well as an identity: “I knew I was a
musician before I knew I was a girl. You know if you are a musician
because I think music chooses you in some way. It’s very hard to say no
to it — it just envelops you.”Her mother, Mary Ellen, saw the connection her daughter had to
music. In an interview with the Sunday Times Magazine, Mary Ellen
recalled, “Before Tori could even talk, she hummed. By the time she
was two-and-a-half, she would walk over to the piano and copy exactly
what her brother or sister had just been practicing. She used to get
up in the morning before anyone else and play. The piano was her
playmate, and she could reproduce anything she heard by ear, songs
on the radio or even entire scores.” Tori was known as the little girl
who played the piano; her innate musical ability shaped her identity
as people always asked her to play for them. Her father said he wasn’t
“aware of [her talent] like the sun coming over the horizon, but we
were noticing she would come in and play the piano right after [her
brother and sister] had finished and it would sound a little better than
them. But I think when we were astounded was when we took her to
Oliver! or The Sound of Music. I’m not sure which one it was, and then
after seeing that, she came in and sat down, and it seemed to me she
could play the whole score.”