Tori Amos

Tori Amos (born Myra Ellen Amos, August 22, 1963) is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. She is a classically trained musician with a mezzo-soprano vocal range. Having already begun composing instrumental pieces on piano, Amos won a full scholarship to the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University at the age of five, the youngest person ever to have been admitted. She was expelled at the age of eleven for what Rolling Stone described as "musical insubordination." Amos was the lead singer of the short-lived 1980s pop group Y Kant Tori Read before achieving her breakthrough as a solo artist in the early 1990s. Her songs focus on a broad range of topics, including sexuality, feminism, politics, and religion.\n', ' Her charting singles include "Crucify", "Silent All These Years", "God", "Cornflake Girl", "Caught a Lite Sneeze", "Professional Widow", "Spark", "1000 Oceans", "Flavor", and "A Sorta Fairytale", her most commercially successful single in the U.S. to date. Amos has received five MTV VMA nominations, eight Grammy Award nominations, and won an Echo Klassik award for her classical crossover album. She is listed on VH1\'s 1999 "100 Greatest Women of Rock and Roll" list.\n', ' Amos is the third child of Mary Ellen (Copeland) and Edison McKinley Amos. She was born at the Old Catawba Hospital in Newton, North Carolina during a trip from their Georgetown home in Washington, D.C. Amos has said that her maternal grandparents each had an Eastern Cherokee grandparent of their own. Of particular importance to her as a child was her maternal grandfather, Calvin Clinton Copeland, who was a great source of inspiration and guidance, offering a more pantheistic spiritual alternative to her father and paternal grandmother\'s traditional Christianity.\n', '