Tori Amos wrote her first song when she was just three years old.
Tori Amos wrote her first song at three
The ‘Cornflake Girl’ hitmaker began playing the piano when she was a toddler and insisted her musical abilities have always been as natural to her as breathing.
She said: “No one 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 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.”
The 58-year-old singer – whose real name is Myra Ellen Amos - had planned change her name to Sammy J in honour of Heather Locklear’s ‘Dynasty’ character when she first started looking for a record deal, but is glad she listened to different advice.
She told Reader’s Digest magazine: “I was around 17 and it was just before I began sending demos out to record companies.
“Then a friend of mine brought along some guy she was dating to see me perform and he said, ‘You’re a Tori’. I was like, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’
“Then someone in the bar said that it was either a pine tree or a political party in England and I went, ‘I’m going with the pine tree.’
“So I was no longer Myra Amos, I was Tori Amos.”
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