walking upstream…
Tori Amos
At two and a half, Tori Amos climbed onto the piano bench in her family's Baltimore living room and started playing by ear; by five she'd talked her way into the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, the youngest student ever admitted to its preparatory division. The prodigy didn't last — kicked out at eleven for playing pop over the classical curriculum ('I was playing the scores of Gershwin and Rodgers & Hart,' she said, 'and suddenly they're trying to teach me to read music by playing "Hot Cross Buns"'), she spent her teenage years in Washington, D.C.'s piano bars and gay clubs, working through hundreds of covers a night. That apprenticeship paid off in 1992's Little Earthquakes, which turned her fearless, often confrontational songwriting about trauma, sexuality, and anger into a mezzo-soprano-and-piano confessional style that helped open mainstream space for women's rawer emotional material.
the sound in question
1991
Silent All These YearsTori Amos
walk the tributaries ↓
Led Zeppelin1970s · Hard rock / Blues rock
At thirteen in 1976, Tori Amos was working through Led Zeppelin's catalogue and nursing a schoolgirl fixation on the band. 'I was listening to Led Zeppelin and plotting ways to give Robert Plant my virginity,' she told the magazine Details in 1992 — then added the twist: 'I loved Jimmy Page instead.' Two decades later the joke came full circle: Plant called her personally to record 'Down by the Seaside' for a 1995 tribute album, a session she'd 'waited all my life for.'
listen: upstream & heresource: Record Collector — Brooks & Evans, "Tori Amos" (April 1994) (Peabody expulsion quote; Led Zeppelin covers in her early club repertoire) ↗
1969
Thank YouLed Zeppelin
1992
Thank YouTori Amos
listen forPlay Zeppelin's 'Thank You' against the piano-and-voice reading Amos recorded as a B-side in 1992 and the bones are unmistakable: the same rising, hymn-like chord progression, the same unhurried verse-into-chorus swell. Stripped of the drums and guitar that power the original, Amos's version leaves only the melody and the devotional lyric — proof of how much of Zeppelin's force lived in the songwriting underneath the volume.
Joni Mitchell1970s · Folk / Folk rock / Jazz
Amos traces her devotion to one specific song and one specific room. 'When I think of Joni I always think of "A Case of You" wrapped up in a blanket in my room that I asked the church to paint lilac,' she wrote in her 1994 liner notes, 'I would play this song till the candle wouldn't drip anymore.' The devotion never faded: in a 1994 interview with Keyboards magazine she called it a song she'd 'given her right arm to write,' adding flatly, 'a better song hasn't been written... none has done anything in the league of it, me included.'
listen: upstream & heresource: Keyboards magazine / Cornflake Girl liner notes (1994), reproduced at yessaid.com (Joni Mitchell "A Case of You" quotes) ↗
1971
A Case of YouJoni Mitchell
1994
A Case of YouTori Amos
listen forPlay Mitchell's original next to Amos's 1994 B-side cover, recorded the way Amos performed it live 'almost every night in concert' for years, per her own account. Where Mitchell floats the melody over a dulcimer's open, ringing strum, Amos slows it down and leans into the low register of the piano, turning the song's mix of hunger and clear-eyed grace into something closer to a hymn — the same trade Amos made her own signature on Little Earthquakes.
Kate Bush1980s · Art pop / Progressive pop / Alternative rock
Amos spent her early career pushing back against the reflexive Kate Bush comparison, and says she deliberately kept her distance from Bush's catalogue so as not to copy her: 'I knew that I had to be careful, so I didn't voraciously learn her catalogue... I left the records with my boyfriend at the time.' But one Bush album got past that guard anyway. Freshly rejected by the industry and living in Los Angeles, she put Hounds of Love's second side on repeat until, in her words, 'this turned me inside out. It changed my life. I left the man I was living with because of this record.'
listen: upstream & heresource: Musikexpress & Q Magazine (1998), reproduced at katebushnews.com via Wayback Machine (Kate Bush's Hounds of Love as a personally transformative record; Amos's resistance to the critical comparison) ↗
1985
Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)Kate Bush
1994
Cornflake GirlTori Amos
listen forNo specific Bush song stands as Amos's stated model, so listen for the family resemblance instead: 'Running Up That Hill' builds around an insistent, driving synth pulse under Bush's leaping, theatrical vocal, and 'Cornflake Girl' does the same trick on piano — a hook that repeats and tightens until it becomes the whole architecture of the song. The kinship was strong enough that TV music supervisors have placed both songs in near-identical dramatic beats years apart (Running Up That Hill in Stranger Things, Cornflake Girl in Yellowjackets).