When you hear how she places her careful fingers on the piano keys, you might wonder if there's a bomb under one of them.
Tori Amos is a lion. Imagine Sylvia Plath at the piano.She grew up in North Carolina, the daughter of a Methodist preacher, played the piano before she could talk, composed before 3, and by the age of 5 she had won a scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.
"I failed badly in the child prodigy stakes," she says. "It became deadly serious. I just didn't want to do what was expected of me." She was booted out of the conservatory. "At 11, it seemed like my life was over."
Amos played in bars and hotels across Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, doing Gershwin and the standards, accompanied by her father. Her father stopped acting as chaperone when she was 15.
"I found myself working with women who were in their late-20s, and chatting to gay men all night . . . then I'd go to junior high the next morning . . . . I learned to create these different sides to deal with it all."
Those different sides are revealed in her songs, which she will perform Saturday, Sept. 17, at 7:30 p.m. at Cottonwood High School. Bill Miller is the opening act. The concert is sold out.
Her music is classical at heart and yet unpredictable. She uses a clear, versatile voice to enunciate each word but never clarifies meanings fully. Her lyrics stun.
"Me and a Gun," an a cappella number, is about rape. "The Wrong Band" sounds like a depressed Scott Joplin rag. Then a tinkling-fairy piano plays "Bells for Her." She blasts the sound in "God," almost shrieking, inhaling. And "Icicle" twists together prayers with self-abuse. Then you hear "The Waitress": "So I want to kill this waitress . . . . Is her power all in her club sandwich?"
Her fierce compositions are both confessions and confrontations. In "Leather" she laments, "Look I'm standing naked before you/don't you want more than my sex?"
"Some people are afraid of what they might find if they try to analyze themselves too much," she says, "but you have to crawl into the wound to discover what your fears are. Once the bleeding starts the cleansing can begin."