She started playing the piano when she was 2 years old. At age 5, she won a scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland, becoming the youngest person ever admitted. By the time she was 11, the school ousted her for suggesting they add contemporary music to the curriculum.
Her birth name is Myra Ellen Amos; she changed it to Tori Amos when she was 17. She nearly called herself Sammy Jaye until a friend's new boyfriend christened her Tori. "Then of course I found that it meant 'little chicken' in Japanese," she told Q magazine.
Her favorite pianos are Bosendorfers.
In the mid-'80s she formed a band called "Y Kant Tori Read" with Guns 'N' Roses drummer Matt Sorum in the lineup. They got signed to Atlantic Records and released their self-titled album in 1988, but it flopped and they broke up the following year.
When she was 16, she played in a piano bar in Washington, DC, where she learned to play just about any song that was requested.
Amos told Event magazine that her earliest memory is "playing a black upright piano and not being able to reach the keys very well." She added: "My mother says I was two-and-a-half when I started playing. My father was a minister and when he went to church in the morning she would put on Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and Cole Porter records. I'd crawl up on the piano stool, sit on a phone book and play. I played with both hands from the start."
Tori Amos was easily obsessed as a preteen. She recalled to The Metro: "I was crazy. I was writing long letters to basketball coaches. I had to take a step back."
Tori Amos spent was raised in Baltimore, Maryland, where her father had transplanted his Methodist ministry from its original base in Washington, D.C. Her first-ever single, "
Baltimore," released as a 7-inch when she was 16 under her middle name Elin Amos, is a cheerful tribute to the city.
She suffered three miscarriages in the late '90s. Her song "
Spark," from the album
From The Choirgirl Hotel, was inspired by the first loss.
On February 22, 1998 she married her longtime sound engineer, Mark Hawley. A year earlier, she relocated with him to his native Cornwall - an experience that would inspire her song "
Welcome to England" more than a decade later.
She gave birth to her daughter, Natashya, in 2000. Natashya's vocals can be heard on Amos' 2011 album,
Night Of Hunters, including the track "
Cactus Practice."
She had a brief romance with Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor, who contributed vocals to her 1994 single "Past The Mission." Apparently Courtney Love's meddling caused their breakup and allegedly inspired Amos' tune "
Professional Widow (Its Got To Be Big)."
Amos is good friends with fantasy author Neil Gaiman, who gets a mention in many of her songs, including "
Space Dog," where she asks, "Where's Neil when you need him?" Gaiman is also the godfather to the singer's daughter.
Despite eight nominations, Amos has never won a Grammy. Her first nod was for her sophomore solo album, Under The Pink, which was nominated for Best Alternative Music Performance in 1994.
Tori Amos' first children's book, Tori and the Muses, was published on March 4, 2025. The story is semi-autobiographical, following a young, fiery version of Tori who is frustrated at having to practice boring songs for a piano recital instead of playing the music her Muses inspire her to create. The 11 Muses, who have visited her since she was a baby, give her a floating pink piano and send her around town to discover how other people find their inspiration. The book came with a surprise nine-track album written and produced by Amos to accompany the story.
She would have fit right in on the Lilith Fair and was offered a headlining slot, but she turned it down. Why? "I was trying to find my sovereignty," she told Rolling Stone. "Being a part of a festival like that didn't feel like my path to find it."
