Eight-time Grammy Award-nominated pianist, singer-songwriter and composer Tori Amos joins Peter on Linked Music this month.  Perhaps best known for her confessional, piano-driven ballads, Tori’s influences range wide–from conservatory, to her own pop band, to alternative rock, to electronica, and more–contributing to her own sound.

The daughter of a Methodist preacher, she began playing piano and singing at church at the age of four.  She went on to study at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory where, outside of her classical music studies, she loved rock and roll, especially Led Zepplin.  At 21, she moved to Los Angeles where she delved into mainstream music as head of the synth-pop band Y Kant Tori Read.  Within a few years later, she embraced the piano and lyric-driven musical styles of Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell, launching her recording career with her breakthrough 1992 album Little Earthquakes.

Although her signature remains swelling, filigreed piano rock, she has experimented with different musical styles and instruments over the last twenty years, from the baroque dusk of Boys for Pele (1996) to the electronic experimentalism of From the Choirgirl Hotel (1998) and To Venus and Back (1999).

Her two most recent albums showcase her classical music influences and ability to cross genre boundaries.  The song cycle Night of Hunters is a conceptual work based on familiar motifs by composers Satie, Chopin, Schubert, and Bach.   She collaborated on the recording with the string quartet Apollon Musagete, arranger John Philip Shenale, and clarinetist Ernst Ottensamer.  For her latest album Gold Dust, she re-imagined earlier songs as orchestral pieces and recorded them with the renowned Metropole Orchestra in the Netherlands.

Her internationally-acclaimed music has earned her eight Grammy Award nominations, the Klassik Ohne Grenzen (crossover classical) Prize, and an induction into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame.

(Information adapted from artist bio materials.)