Tori Amos

Tori Amos was born Myra Ellen Amos in 1963, and she was a piano prodigy long before she was a rock star: the Peabody Institute's preparatory division took her at five, she left at eleven, and she learned the rest playing piano in bars around Washington, D.C. In the '80s she fronted a short-lived pop-rock outfit called Y Kant Tori Read. Then she sat down at the piano on her own and made Little Earthquakes.

That 1991 album was a startling thing to hear: a classically trained pianist with a mezzo-soprano voice, singing about sex, faith, politics and being a woman with a frankness that could make a room go silent. "Silent All These Years" was fragile and fierce at once; "Crucify" and "Winter" swung between wry and heartbreaking.

Under the Pink, in 1994, went further, with "Cornflake Girl" bouncing on a lopsided piano figure and "God" riding a skittering, unsettled groove. Boys for Pele, in 1996, was wilder still, and "Caught a Lite Sneeze" carried it. From the Choirgirl Hotel arrived in 1998, the year of "Spark", and To Venus and Back, Strange Little Girls and Scarlet's Walk kept her restless through the turn of the century. She plays more than piano, too: Hammond and reed organs, Rhodes and synthesizers all turn up in her arsenal.

She has piled up nine Grammy nominations and five MTV Video Music Award nominations over the years, and in 2012 she went back to her roots, winning an Echo Klassik award for Night of Hunters, a classical crossover album.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.