Written by Newt

When Mary Ellen and Dr. Edison Amos first looked at their newborn baby girl on August 22, 1962 in Catawba Hospital in Newton, North Carolina, they probably were not thinking about how Myra Ellen was going to be a good friend of the piano, going from the talented young girl with her gigs at bars and hotels to a doomed ‘80s band member, and at last to a hit alternative performer with millions of fans dying to cram into a stuffy auditorium for a couple of hours to watch the magic that is Tori Amos performing. After all, who would have guessed, anyway? But, mix a Methodist minister father, a little bit of Cherokee blood, undying love for the piano, and a little imagination, and you get the unique cocktail that is Tori Amos.

Born Myra Ellen, Tori had two siblings, Mike (who helped with Rubies and Gold, a song created in Tori’s earlier years) and Marie, two parents, and one piano. From the beginning, Tori had an astounding gift for playing the instrument, and was soon enrolled in the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore where the Amos family resided. The youngest student ever admitted, she was later kicked out for her nonconformity in a place where conformity was expected.

Tori’s special spark for life, a want to be creative, and her own different ideas set a difficult path for the young Myra Ellen, both in school and at home. Today, Tori reveals how she didn’t quite concur with some of the ideas presented to her, once saying that, as she was taught, when you marry, you "give your body to your husband and your soul to Jesus, and keeping nothing for yourself," an idea she found rather upsetting.

Also tainting her life was a need to please everyone, including her father. On MTV revue, Tori revealed a shattering moment involving the daughter of her neighbor, Mr. Jim, spoken of at the end of a song by the same title; a moment when she remembers thinking that "nothing I could do was ever good enough."

After debuting her first single, Baltimore/Walking With You, she soon went on to make a very certain, sole album by an artificial Tori made of hairspray and thigh-high boots. By then, she had acquired the name "Tori" from a friend’s boyfriend, a name she clung to like she clung to her piano. But with the making of Y Kant Tori Read, that grip on her beloved instrument seemed to loosen as she donned a sword and push-up bra for the band that didn’t last.

Y Kant Tori Read’s members included Steve Caton, Tori’s guitarist since Little Earthquakes. Sadly, the album didn’t contain any of Tori’s piano playing, as she relinquished her seat on the piano bench and wrote meaningless songs to please the public, not herself. The band released the one album and the singles The Big Picture/You Go to My Head and Cool on Your Island/Heart Attack at 23, and it all quickly flopped. Truthfully, Etienne, the Big Picture, and On the Boundary weren’t bad songs at all, even though they weren’t Tori’s true colours, though the quality of the second song is arguable, depending on your tastes.

Feeling like a failure, Tori soon came back to her beloved instrument with a little help from a friend, and began work on Little Earthquakes.

Little Earthquakes was an album that took time, patience, and more money than Tori was allowed. Despite the quality of her work and all the soul-searching she’d done to give Little Earthquakes a touch of the real Tori (and herself an idea who that really was), she met rejection while constructing it. And so, Tori gathered up the shattered pieces of her work as Atlantic records sent her to England, where she began to put them all back together, and things began finally to fall into place.

Some of the original tracks of Little Earthquakes were left off of the album and downgraded to the status of single tracks, such as Upside Down, Mary, and Flying Dutchman. Nonetheless, the album was fine-tuned to perfection, and was finally released in 1992, in which a thick web of critical reviews was woven—some good and in awe of the sensational sound of the album and it’s maker, others bad and dismissing Tori as a "weird chick".

One track on the album received great attention, however: Me and a Gun. This is the chilling account of the night in Los Angles six years before Earthquakes, when Tori agreed to give a fan at one of her gigs a ride home. While in the car, the man held a gun to her head and raped her, an event that Tori told her parents of in a letter with the unforgettable words "the girl and the piano are dead. I have to accept that." Her mother came to comfort her, but after that, Tori never spoke a word of it, and locked it up inside, remaining silent those six years.

Despite some bad reviews, if Little Earthquakes was the "yellow bird flying", as described in the song with the same name as the album, that yellow bird kept on flying to success, even after a shot in the wing.

Not long after completing a sold-out world tour, the songs began to show up in Tori’s head again, resulting in an album as unique as Little Earthquakes. With the help of boyfriend Eric Rosse, whom Little Earthquakes couldn’t have been made without, Under the Pink was in stores two years after Earthquakes. Though critics continued to call Tori strange, the album was highly acclaimed and went Platinum Plus, like the previous album and the future Boys for Pele. England was drooling over Cornflake Girl, and Tori was certainly doing all right for herself as yet another, soon-to-be sold out world tour began. Tori was under the pink and in the lime light.

Though at the height of her career, Tori’s troubles began again. Eric Rosse broke up with her, crushing her thoughts of marrying him and having children with him. Turning to her piano for psychiatry, she vented her anger in song fed fuel to a fire that became Boys for Pele, an album about anger, passion, learning not to "steal fire" from the men in her life, and finally, letting it all go. One senses the latter when listening to Putting the Damage On and Twinkle, in which the words tell you that Tori’s getting over it and her mind is slowly moving on to other things, recovering.

The album is also about love, and not just the kind of love that was between Tori and Eric, but between friends, as Marianne expresses, a song about a girl Tori knew who committed suicide. The album was something rather special, as Tori debuted the harpsichord and began the metamorphosis from a lone girl and her piano to what she has now. It also contains the first "explicit" lyrics in a Tori Amos song, Professional Widow.

Despite the anger, Tori still keeps her cool as she plays in a way that makes her fans want to groove with her in In the Springtime of His Voodoo. They hear Tori’s emotions crying out in Hey Jupiter, and watch as she sits amidst a burning building like she feels she has nothing to live for in the video. She throws out her anger in Caught a Lite Sneeze, and gives us something we can tap our feet to in Talula, which the movie Twister claimed The Tornado Mix of for its own.

All in all, another sold-out world tour and Platinum plus album proves that people around the world love Pele.

However, Tori had a troubled tour, this time around.

Sometime during the Dew Drop Inn Tour, as it was christened, Tori must have realized she was pregnant. Earlier that year, Tori had found herself wondering who was doing the sound engineering, and she "looked up, and [she] was lost". Mark Hawley, was that very certain sound engineer, and Tori delighted her fans with the news that she had found someone.

But happy endings didn’t come yet. Three months into the pregnancy, Tori miscarried. Devastated by her loss, Tori slowly began to realize that, though she "couldn’t create as a mother, I could create as a writer."

In May 1998, From the Choirgirl Hotel came into stores and left some puzzled by "she’s addicted to nicotine patches," as sung in Spark, dancing to Raspberry Swirl, and teary eyed by Playboy Mommy, a recollection of her miscarriage.

Some fans, sadly, dismissed Choirgirl as no good, disappointed by the missing girl and her piano, though she was still there. At the same time, Tori drew in new fans. Tori was tired of being all alone, and she and her piano had decided that they wanted to work with other people, and supports her new album by saying she’s happy with it, and "it’s something I can tap my feet to." And the new tour, Raspberry Swirl Girl, also known as Plugged ’98, as her band accompanied her, was a success.

Shortly after the album was finished, a happy moment finally came. Mark and Tori said "I do" and were married in a medieval style wedding, complete with carriage and torch bearers. Sweetly enough, Mark had asked her, and Tori had thought, "I don’t really want to be with anybody else" and the two were soon hearing wedding bells.

Maybe now Tori could really be the Happy Phantom, indeed.