I REMEMBER...Tori Amos

Singer-songwriter Tori Amos, 58, arrived on the music scene in the early 1990s and has marched to the beat of her own drum ever since. She reflects on her early days performing in bars, the lessons she's learned along the way and building a life in Cornwall

-  Simon Button

MY POPPA WOULD SMOKE A PIPE WHILE HE SANG. He was a Methodist minister and I remember him singing on the porch in North Carolina. I was born and lived there until I was ten, and we relocated to Maryland when his ministry moved. My mother was sunshine. She was the warmest sunshine ever-never raised her voice, always encouraging, always looking for the good things in people. She used to say: "It's too easy to find the negative, look for the good. There's good in everybody."

NOBODY TAUGHT ME HOW TO PLAY THE PIANO. It's just something I was able to do from a young age. Somehow I sat at the keyboard and I was playing it, without knowing why or how. People would act surprised, like, “What's happening?" but when you're a child and you can do something you don't think, How did that happen? I must have been I two-and-a-half when I started and I never questioned it. I wrote my first song when I was three. I can't recall what it was called or what it was about but writing and playing were like breathing to me.

I ATTENDED THE PEABODY INSTITUTE FROM AGE FIVE. I was studying classical piano at the institute, which was part of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and I really liked my piano teacher. A lot of the other students were teenagers and they were really affected by the music coming out of the radio more than the music we were being taught. They were obsessed with and energised by the music of the late 1960s, they were protesting the Vietnam war, there were all kinds of things going on, but I was just a little girl.