Trivia / Tori Amos

• Approval of God: Slayer liked Tori's cover of "Raining Blood" so much they sent her a box of T-shirts, though the arrangement was so different Kerry King admitted that it took him a minute to figure out where she was in the song.
• Colbert Bump - "Icicle" had a small surge in popularity in the early 2010s when it was parodied in the Bob's Burgers episode "Food Truckin'".
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Media outlets nicknamed Amos "The Cornflake Girl" in reference to one of her most popular songs....completely missing the point of the song^note "Cornflake Girl" is a protest song about female genital mutilation, which was still occurring in the lesser developed parts of the world when the song was released in 1994 and that when Amos made her comments about there being "cornflake girls" and "raisin girls", Amos said she considered herself to be a "raisin girl". The opening line of the song is "Never was a Cornflake Girl".
• Creator Backlash: Amos fronted a synth-pop band called Y Kant Tori Read that released a single self-titled record in 1988. The record label stopped promoting it after two months, Tori had fired the entire band except for one member by the time the first video was shot, and Tori had, for a long time, acted like it never existed, with good reason. She seems to have reconciled herself with the album, to the extent that she occasionally plays songs from the album live (particularly "Etienne" and "Cool on Your Island") and the album was ultimately reissued with her blessing in 2017. This may be an example of an artist reconciling with Old Shame.
• Creator Breakdown - Boys for Pele was the result of a bad breakup, from the choirgirl hotel was the result of her miscarriage(s), and Ocean to Ocean was the result of both the death of her mother and the COVID-19 Pandemic. As for individual songs, "Me and a Gun" from Little Earthquakes is about her rape^note She was inspired to write it after seeing Thelma & Louise, "Toast" was the result of her brother's death, and "1000 Oceans" was written after her husband's father died.
• Creator Couple - The albums that then-boyfriend Eric Rosse co-produced are considered Tori's best by critics. Tori has produced her own albums since her breakup with Rosse, but her husband Mark Hawley serves as her recording engineer and guitarist.
• Dye Hard - She's actually a brunette, but her dyed red hair is one of her trademarks. She also combined this with Quirky Curls during the '90s and long wigs during the '10s. She started wearing wigs after the American Doll Posse - Abnormally Attracted to Sin eras.
• Executive Meddling
  • When she first submitted Little Earthquakes to her record company, they didn't like it and made her record more songs. Then they wanted to remove some songs from her soon-to-be debut. This is one of those cases where the executives unknowingly helped, since the second batch of songs Tori recorded were fan-favorites "Tear In Your Hand" and "Precious Things". They also wanted to replace the piano with guitars, since Grunge was popular at the time. Fortunately, Tori didn't let that happen.
  • They also rejected her first video for "Cornflake Girl" (which ended up being released overseas) and made her film a new video. The US version featured the defining visual of Tori on a merry-go-round, singing the chorus of the song.
• Fan Community Nicknames - Fans of Tori call themselves Toriphiles and/or Ears With Feet, since Tori herself doesn't like the term "fan". She even made up the "ears with feet" term in 1996.
• No-Hit Wonder - For all of her success, influence and popularity, Amos has never had a Top-40 hit (at least in the United States; in the UK she scored a number 1 hit in 1997 with a remix of "Professional Widow".) Her highest charting single, "Spark", only went to 49 on the Billboard Hot 100.
• She Also Did: Released Comic Book Tattoo, a book of comic interpretations of her songs in 2008. She later released Resistance: A Songwriter’s Story of Hope, Change, and Courage, a political work about how left-wing activists can oppose Donald Trump in 2020.
• What Could Have Been
  • Tori wanted to cover "Fear of a Black Planet" by Public Enemy, "Hoover Factory" by Elvis Costello, "Marlene Dietrich's Favorite Poem" by Peter Murphy, and a harpsichord version of "I'm Sick of You" by Iggy Pop for Strange Little Girls. She didn't cover "Black Planet" and "Hoover Factory" because she couldn't find a way to remake them in time. Tori didn't cover "Favorite Poem" because she felt that Peter Murphy had already taken the point of view she would've taken. Lastly, she didn't cover "I'm Sick of You" because the harpsichord wasn't ready in time, and she didn't feel like doing it when it was. Whether these would've been more interesting covers than the ones on the album is unknown.
  • Tori originally wanted to change her name to Sammy Jay. Thankfully, a friend's boyfriend at the time told her that "she looked like a Tori". The rest is history.
  • "Honey" was originally meant to be on Under the Pink, but Tori replaced it with "The Wrong Band" at the last minute. She has expressed regret for it ever since.
  • What would've happened if Y Kant Tori Read became successful?
  • To Venus And Back was always going to be a Distinct Double Album with one disc being live, but originally the studio disc would have been a B-Side collection with just a few new songs - the new songs Tori was working on were more electronic-based and didn't seem to mesh well with the b-sides, so disc one became all new songs.