A classically trained pianist who entered Baltimore's Peabody Institute at age five, Tori Amos spent her early twenties playing Washington, D.C. piano bars before reinventing herself as a confessional singer-songwriter with 1992's Little Earthquakes. Her fearless, often confrontational writing about trauma, sexuality, and anger, delivered through elaborate piano arrangements and a mezzo-soprano voice, helped open mainstream space for women's rawer emotional material in the 1990s.

the sound in question

1991

Silent All These YearsTori Amos