Tori Amos

Tori Amos is an American singer, songwriter, and pianist whose three-decade career has produced one of the most-iconic American singer-songwriter bodies of work of the late 20th and early 21st centuries — particularly her 1992 debut album Little Earthquakes. She was born Myra Ellen Amos on August 22, 1963, in Newton, North Carolina, into a Methodist family — her father was a Methodist minister. She started playing piano at age two and was admitted to the Peabody Institute Preparatory at age five — making her the youngest student admitted to the Peabody Institute at the time. She lost her Peabody scholarship at age 11 due to her preference for popular music over the classical curriculum.

Her 1980s career produced the 1988 Atlantic Records hair-metal-style album Y Kant Tori Read with her short-lived band of the same name. The 1988 commercial failure launched her 1990s artistic transformation — pivoting toward the intensely personal piano-and-vocals singer-songwriter aesthetic that would define her 1990s breakthrough.

Her 1992 second album Little Earthquakes — recorded primarily as solo piano-and-vocals tracks — sold over 2 million copies worldwide and produced the singles "Silent All These Years," "Crucify," "China," and "Winter." The Little Earthquakes has been continuously cited as one of the American 1990s singer-songwriter albums and shaped the American piano-and-vocals female-singer-songwriter aesthetic of the 1990s alongside Sarah McLachlan and Fiona Apple.

Her subsequent 1990s and 2000s albums — Under the Pink (1994), Boys for Pele (1996), From the Choirgirl Hotel (1998), To Venus and Back (1999), Strange Little Girls (2001), Scarlet's Walk (2002), and many more — collectively sold over 12 million copies worldwide. Her 1994 co-founding of RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) produced the largest American sexual-assault hotline. She has continued to record and tour into her sixties, including the 2017 album Native Invader, the 2020 album Christmastide EP, and the 2021 album Ocean to Ocean.

Her name Tori is the modern American spelling variant of Tory or Torrey (anchored either in Old Norse Þórr referring to the god Thor, or as a short form of Victoria). Tori has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names for decades.