Tori Amos

ABOUT this week’s guest:

This week we take you back to the Sheroes archives for a conversation with Tori Amos, recorded back in 2021 for a series I made called Mixtape Memoir. The format is just what it sounds like: an artist sharing their life story, and the songs that were its soundtrack. In this episode we learn about Tori’s musical beginnings as a classically trained child prodigy, who started playing piano at age two,  and by age five became the youngest person ever to be admitted into the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, which she attended on a full scholarship, until she was expelled at age eleven. Tori’s father was a minister, and popular music wasn’t allowed in the house, but Tori will tell us how she still found a way to hear the devil’s music when her dad wasn’t around. We'll hear how Tori ended up going from the conservatory to playing gigs at piano bars in D.C. as a teenager, and moved to Los Angeles in her 20’s, traded her piano for a synthesizer to fit the sound of the 80’s, and landed her first record deal with her band Y Kant Tori Read. It didn’t take long to realize that she needed to reconnect to her childhood roots at the piano to find her true voice. That voice has now recorded some of the most important albums of all time. Now 35 years into an incredible career, Tori Amos has earned nine Grammy nominations, and three Brit award nominations, and has written a musical, two memoirs, and last year’s children’s picture book, Tori and The Muses. Now as Tori has just released her eighteenth studio album, In Times of Dragons, it felt like the perfect time to revisit Tori Amos’s mixtape memoir.