Myra Ellen Amos was born in North Carolina in 1963. Her family moved to Baltimore, MD when she was 2. She was a child prodigy who taught herself to play the piano that same year. In 2009, she told ABC about her first attempts at playing: ‘[The piano] had a swivel stool. I would try and reach the keys, but I couldn’t quite reach them, so I would grab a phone book and somehow crawl up and sit. And my mom said she would find me there, just happy as a clam, playing that piano.’ She was almost immediately able to replicate music she’d heard after hearing it only once, and started writing her own songs at age 3. Part of the appeal for her was a form of synesthesia which she described in her 2005 book with journalist Ann Powers, ‘Piece by Piece’:
‘The song appears as light filament once I’ve cracked it. As long as I’ve been doing this, which is more than thirty-five years, I’ve never seen the same light creature in my life. Obviously similar chord progressions follow similar light patterns, but try to imagine the best kaleidoscope ever — after the initial excitement, you start to focus on each element’s stunning original detail. For instance, the sound of the words with the sound of the chord progression combined with the rhythm manifests itself in a unique expression of the architecture of color-and-light. … I started visiting this world when I was three, listening to a piece by Béla Bartók; I visited a configuration that day that wasn’t on this earth. … It was euphoric.’
She became the youngest person ever to be admitted to Peabody, winning a full scholarship to study piano at age 5. She was later ejected from the school at age 11 for ‘musical insubordination’ — namely, she was one of those kids (like myself) whose ear was so good that she didn’t see much of a need for sheet music and never had the motivation to master it. On top of that, she was interested in rock and pop, and Peabody was a strictly classical institution. By age 13, her methodist pastor father began taking her to gay bars for her first gigs. Around this time, she adopted a new name — Tori.
Despite this precocious start, her debut was still a long way off. She worked with producer Narada Michael Walden (who you may know as the drummer of the second incarnation of Mahavishnu Orchestra) after sending him some demos at age 17, but these sessions never saw the light of day. She eventually moved to LA, as she described on the Welcome to Sunny Florida DVD:
‘It took me moving out to LA when I was 21 and really ditching the way I was composing, because I kept getting rejected for over seven years — my work. I had so many rejection letters, and they kind of basically just said, if you don’t fit into this slot or this slot, then you’re gonna stay in a piano bar for the rest of your life. So, I started to make myself fit into their shape. And, as that went down, you know — very well — so well that, um, it was a joke, because you cannot become something that you’re not. You just can’t.’
This change in sound nonetheless got her where she wanted to be — or so she thought. This shift landed her a deal with Atlantic Records, where she formed synth pop band Y Kant Tori Read (roasting the reason she was ejected from Peabody) in 1986. The band included Steve Caton on guitar (who continued to play with her for over a decade), Matt Sorum (The Cult, Guns N’ Roses, Velvet Revolver) on drums, and Brad Cobb (Stryper) on bass.
The sessions for their sole album were protracted over 8 months. The band tried out many songs, only to repeatedly discard them. Increasing record label influence ended up steering the sessions off track. Part of this was the studio’s insistence at including more polished session musicians, leading the band to break up before the album was even finished. As Amos told Keyboard in 1992: ‘The band was together for about two years. We rehearsed three times a week and only played one gig. That’s all we did — we stayed in the rehearsal studio, made a tape, got signed, and split up. As a writer, I didn’t know what I wanted to express, really, at that point. I can say this now — I couldn’t say it then — that I wasn’t doing it for the love of music. I was doing it because I had something to prove to the boys who trashed me when I was 13.‘
The album was finally released in 1988. It was produced by Joe Chiccarelli, whose resume includes Frank Zappa, The White Stripes, Oingo Boingo, Morrisey, U2, Elton John, Minus the Bear, and many other huge names. In 2010, he told HitQuarters that Amos was happy with the record at the time, and that she ‘had a very strong vision of what she wanted to do on her first album. And despite the lack of success of that album, it was an interesting process because she was very vocal and very passionate about how she wanted it to sound and what her influences were and the emotions she was trying to convey.’
Both Amos and the label soured on it quite quickly, as she told German publication Visions in 1992: ‘Joe Chiccarelli produced and I really liked his productions, but just before the recordings the band split up, we took studio musicians and so the songs lost their direction. I believe that the record has its moments, but I tried too much to be everybody’s girl, because I was not able to listen to myself. You just have to be strong and not only pretending. It is simple to play a tough chick, but it is really boring and, above all, it is sad, because it shows a deep uncertainty, and when you are uncertain, you can not be strong…. …I wish I would have been stronger then and had not listened to those idiots [at the label]. One day they tell you how wonderful your record is, and when the sales figures failed to materialize, the same thing suddenly is shit.’
As such, the album has a huge credits list, including ubiquitous Brazilian percussionist Paulinho Da Costa, drummer Vinnie Coliauta (Frank Zappa / Joni Mitchell / Sting), bassist Fernando Sanders (Lou Reed), fusion fretless bassist Tim Landers (Al Di Meola, Billy Cobham), guitarist Steve Farris (Mister Mister), ‘Gimme Shelter’ backing vocalist Merry Clayton, Robin Zander and Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick, a bagpiper (providing the album’s outro, ‘Skyeboat Song’), a bouzouki player, and more. Bassist Brad Cobb doesn’t play on the record (though he co-wrote one song), and there are at least 4 other guitarists besides Steve Caton.
Instead, Amos’s main creative collaborator here is keyboardist Kim Bullard (of Crosby, Stills, & Nash and Elton John fame), who co-wrote four of the songs in addition to playing additional keyboards all over the record. Half of the material was solely composed by Amos. I’m not sure exactly why she chose not to bill the album as a solo record, but the title caused a lot of confusion — evidently, many people were under the impression that it was a solo record by someone named Tori Read, since her last name isn’t used anywhere on the packaging.
The album was described by Amos in 2003 to the Boise Arbiter as ‘Madonna and Kate Bush in a head-on collision after eating bad mushrooms.’ Amos has frequently been compared to Kate Bush, but the comparison makes more sense here than anywhere else, even though the record lacks the depth and artsiness of Bush’s work or Amos’s later material. She certainly had quite a bit to write about by this point, but was not ready to bring all of it to the forefront until her next record. As she told Visions: ‘Do you know the cover? I wish that the LP would sound the way the cover looks. The record is just not heavy. It doesn’t have a clear statement. I mean, when someone plays Thrash Metal, then that has a point of view… But at the time the album was created, I was not able to take a clear position.’
Chiccarelli, on the other hand, objected to the cover: ‘To be frank, I actually brought her to tears — I will never forget the day […] they brought in the proof of the album cover from Atlantic New York, and she showed it to me, and I remember saying to her, ‘Tori, you can’t put this out, you can’t do this. This looks like some New Wave tramp on the cover. It doesn’t make any sense […] the record is this layered kind of deep record, and this says slutty rock chick on the cover.’ In any case, the cover certainly deceived many into thinking this synth-pop record was actually hair metal.
Regardless, this album is every bit as 80s as the cover would have you believe — and coming a little too late in the decade to be properly trendy. It’s got the the plastic synths and big gated reverb drums, keyboard slap bass, lots of ‘oh yeah’s and ‘baby’s, pseudo-rapping in the verses of ‘Fayth’, lots of songs about relationship problems, and a full blown Pat Benatar-esque power ballad (‘Baby, it burns to be your fire on the side. Taste my tears. See how they burn.’). And then there’s the hilariously dramatic ‘Heart Attack at 23’ (‘If I have a heart attack at 23, I’m loving you too much… wave bye-bye, you’ll miss me, baby’), which opens with a teenage monologue delivered with a smirk (‘I don’t know why I did it / Took the keys to my brother’s car / Why should I hang around here anymore?’).
With all that said, the essence of her voice is still detectable behind all of the cliches and dated production. Her piano style was allowed to shine through in the intro of ‘Heart Attack at 23’, and appears more fully in the closing 3-part epic, ‘Etienne’. She was already an excellent singer, even if her performances here are often less refined than her later work. Her voice is instantly recognizable, and her performances are often passionate and spirited, not to mention extremely technically adept. While her songs had yet to catch up with her technical abilities, some of the choruses here are quite memorable (see the moody chorus of ‘Fayth’).
While a lot of this record is standard ‘80s pop fare, there’s a bit of surprising quirkiness hiding at the heart of the record. In ‘Pirates’, she responds to feeling misunderstood by envisioning herself running to a far off land and… becoming a pirate, I guess. It’s a silly song, but it shows that she wasn’t just coloring in the lines even when under strict constraints. ‘Floating City’ is a fantasy about getting carried off by aliens (or perhaps an appeal to God to show up in her life?). ‘Etienne’ is a bit of lyrical medieval fantasy romance cosplay — a penchant which will only emerge once more in her early work.
Hints of her later lyrical style are visible on the opening song, ‘The Big Picture’, a very Kate Bush-inspired song that touches on personal misfortunes, ladder climbers, possessions, parents, and rediscovering your own needs. It isn’t an obvious choice for a single, but was nonetheless used as the lead single — perhaps that contributed to the flop. The second single, ‘Cool On Your Island’, is actually a pretty decent slice of ’80s pop if you’re into that sort of thing. Despite lacking her later nuance and strangeness, it really feels like a Tori Amos song. It’s easy to imagine her playing it solo without all the corny ‘80s-Carribean production, and the song indeed adapted well to that format when she approached it that way later on.
All of this is to say that the album really isn’t truly terrible, even if it does have its comical and cringeworthy moments. It’s not a patch on her ’90s work, but there are far worse ’80s pop albums out there which were much more commercially successful. That’s not a high bar, as the sales of this record were so bad that the record label withdrew all support for it within two months. On top of that, the critical reception was savage, as Amos told London Independent in 1994: ‘I was called a bimbo in Billboard. To go from child prodigy to bimbo is a very hard thing… It’s like, how could I get this so wrong?’ (This is not technically correct, as the quote was ‘Unfortunately, provocative packaging sends the (inaccurate) message that this is just so much more bimbo music.’)
She reflected on her image at the time to Keyboards in 1992: ‘I walked into this restaurant and saw an acquaintance, and I went over to the table, and he was, like, pretending he didn’t know me. And I felt these snickers ’cause my hair was totally pumped up six feet high, and I had my plastic boots that went up to my thigh and my little miniskirt. And I understood for the first time that I was a joke. And I walked out of that room going, “They can laugh at me, but I’m walking out of this place with dignity. Hair spray and all.’
This dress-up extended beyond her outfit: ‘The positive thing is, I play the piano much differently today because of that experience. I led myself to believe that, because I’d been playing the piano since I was two-and-a-half, I could play anything. But that didn’t mean that I was any good at it. That didn’t mean it was coming from here [she points to her stomach]. There’s nothing worse than seeing a kid play dress-up just to please Aunt Louise. It’s awful if they don’t do it because they want to do it. At that point in my life I was on auto-pilot. My self-worth was all wrapped up in whether or not this thing was a success. I didn’t really consider the girl in all of this. I didn’t understand that I was a girl until four years ago. I was just a musician who became very needy. That’s the hardest thing with musicians, I think, is that we’re so sensitive. We start listening to other people. How much can you take before you start asking yourself, “Maybe they’re right?” How many years can you take it? Seven? Twenty? Two? You lose faith in what you’re doing.’
While the album’s failure was clearly extremely painful for her, it undeniably ended up working out for the best in the long run. She had to completely lose herself to find her voice. It’s extremely hard to recover from being ridiculed by the world, but she wasn’t in a position to be able to give up. Despite the album’s commercial failure, Amos was stuck in a six album contract with Atlantic, who expected her to deliver another album by March 1990. She had to find a way forwards, which ended up entailing returning to just her and a piano, stripping everything down, and saying all the things she really needed to say. However, if she’d found success playing the industry game, she could have lost herself in it permanently and never found her true voice.
Atlantic’s withdrawal of the album led it to become a rarity. After the success of her solo career in the 90s, the record became a collector’s item, with the original CD selling for up to $1000 and vinyls selling for $300–500. The album was extensively bootlegged in response to its scarcity. When asked about that, Amos told the New Haven Advocate in 1994: ‘I only have one thing to say about that. Why?? The only good thing about that album is my ankle high boots.’
She began playing solo piano versions of ‘Etienne’ and ‘Cool On Your Island’ live in 1996. She gradually came to terms with the album, and started rotating all but two of these tracks through her setlists in 2014, though many of the songs received just one or two performances. In 2017, she announced that she’d made peace with the record. She quietly released a remastered and expanded version of the record for its 30th anniversary, giving her fans what they wanted while attracting as little attention to it as possible. I’m glad she did — while I understand why she was embarrassed by this, there’s some enjoyable material here and it feels like an important part of her story.
