songs | interviews | photos | tours | boots | press releases | timeline

Rasputin Manifesto (US)
May 1998



tori
she's your cocaine.....

by Gabriel Wheeler

Myra Ellen Amos has come a long way from the child prodigy kicked out of the Peabody school at age eleven for favoring Led Zeppelin to Beethoven. Her interest lay in her instinctual heart and not her ability to think and theorize but simply do. So facing a major rejection she began her career as a lounge singer. With the full support of her Methodist father whom she told at age five while holding a Beatles album, "This is what I'm going to do." He would take her to and from her many gigs at lounges in the Washington DC area and relentlessly submissing demos to record companies only to find rejection after rejection.

In 1984 facing a career as a lounge performer singing Memories she made the transition from lounge queen to metal goddess by moving to LA and forming Y Kant Tori Read. Before making that fateful decision she had changed her name as she recently revealed in an interview with Q magazine: "If a guy even started to look at me and they heard my name was Myra Ellen, it just created... a limp dick immediately. I couldn't bear it. A friend of mine at the time was dating some guy and she brought him to one of the clubs I was playing and he just looked at me and said, You're a Tori. I just went, you know what? I am."

[end of transcript]

original article

t o r i p h o r i a
tori amos digital archive
yessaid.com