Tori Tuesday

Like all artists, Tori Amos has been influenced by other musicians. Today on Tori Tuesday, I will feature some of the major musical influences of Tori's life.



"Naturally, I get exasperated with Elton John and Bernie Taupin simply because they wrote many of the great songs that just might have come to me if Elton and Bernie had been abducted by aliens. One the other hand, studying their song structures was sort of like being an architect apprenticing to one of the great songwriting teams of the twentieth century." Tori Amos



"Peter Gabriel taught me, when I worked with him a bit in the early 1990's, that attention to structure is what you have to develop if you're going to be a composer/songwriter generating effective work throughout your life. He said to me in 1995, "Look around you- you have these engineers. You could build a studio, a workshop. Tori, you never know; your workshop studio may be the only way you can keep your art from being tampered with if you are at war with your label but they still want product." (Little did I know that he was reading my tea leaves, forewarning me of an ominous battle that was yet to ensue...)" Tori Amos



My sense of song structure was developed by listening to Lennon and McCartney and Joni Mitchell. I think I was 10 when I said to one of my teachers, "What about the idea of John Lennon? Lennon and McCartney as modern-day Mozarts." That was just blasphemous....." Tori Amos






"...I started to listen to Led Zeppelin, focusing mostly on Robert Plant. I would listen to the records and kind of study him. I wanted to figure out why so many Christian fathers were intimidated by him. I remember this very well; the powerful men in the church didn't want Led Zeppelin records in the house. My father would come home from board meetings and say, "This Zeppelin thing is just a thorn in everybody's side." The girls were moving their hips in a way that was just primal, and it was something that couldn't be controlled or contained- they couldn't stop themselves. See, Robert Plant tapped into something there. The whole band was a part of this, but there was something about Robert that lifted it into a different category. Because he was part of, and continues on some level to be part of, the belief system I was trying to uncover for myself, that marriage of the sacred and the profane." Tori Amos

"As a pianist, my left hand was really kind of developed by listening to Stevie Wonder. I remember just listening to "Superstition" from Talking Book, and the whole of the Innervisions album, and studying them, as a player more than a writer or a singer." Tori Amos