Finding Herself Tori Amos Took A Tortured Road To Success And Self-Understanding

‘Since I was a little girl, I’ve been a musician first,” says Tori Amos, who releases her most musically adventurous album yet on Tuesday. “I wasn’t just an extension of the piano; I was the piano. That’s how people looked at me.”

A former child prodigy who spent her teens playing in piano lounges and ran off to Los Angeles at 21 to join a rock ‘n’ roll band, Amos has occupied virtually every artistic incarnation her instrument offers.

The 32-year-old singer-songwriter has worked hard to become the pop star she is today. Her former band, Y Kant Tori Read, failed after one ill-conceived album, and she retreated to England, where she reacquainted herself with her alter ego, the piano, before emerging with “Little Earthquakes,” an album full of lush fantasies and confessions, in 1991.

Fans and detractors alike have found plenty of ways to look at Amos since then. She has been called a twisted mystic and a sexual healer, lauded as a champion of female independence and condemned as a pretentious New Age babbler.

But Amos, who entered the Peabody Institute in Baltimore at age 5, says she is only now beginning to see how all the pieces of herself fit together.

“The musician was excelling, and the woman really needed to catch up,” she says.

She may have only recently reached a plateau in self-understanding, but Amos has certainly made an impression getting there. An innovative and masterly musician whose style blends Bach with show tunes, Debussy and Led Zeppelin, Amos has come to embody a thoroughly modern brand of female bravado.

Her first hit from “Little Earthquakes,” “Silent All These Years,” was a delicate yet acerbic coming-of-age song. “Me and a Gun” described Amos’s own rape with an immediacy that proved so inspirational she won a Visionary Award from the D.C. Rape Crisis Center in Washington.

In “God,” from her second album, “Under the Pink,” this Methodist minister’s daughter took on the Man Upstairs, suggesting he might need “a woman to look after you.”

Amos has been compared to singers like Stevie Nicks and Kate Bush, and she owes a debt to all of them, as well as to Led Zeppelin and Nirvana. But she has created a style of her own by setting her stories within a mythic landscape marked by signposts from the ancient world, theology, popular culture and her own imagination.

Big ideas require big music, and Amos creates expansive suites that begin with infectious melodies but grow to accommodate whatever influence captures her fancy.

She belongs to a new category in rock, which includes Bjork, P.J. Harvey, Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails. These artists form a mainstream underground, one equally inspired by punk’s defiance of convention and the old-fashioned idea that rock can be an epic form, liberating in its force and unbridled in its scope of expression.

Amos brings to rock’s vanguard an uncommon ability to translate the most intimate emotional matters - sexuality, spirituality - into music.

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who collaborated with Amos on “Under the Pink,” admires her vulnerability and honesty as much as her musicality. “Her music gives me goose bumps whenever I listen to it,” he says. “It’s very rare for music to affect me that way.”

Amos is now releasing her third album, “Boys for Pele,” and it’s hard to imagine how fans who have taken her songs to heart will react, many of them young women who hear their own inner struggles expressed in Amos’s open-ended songs. “I’m going to send them a bottle of wine with this one,” she says.

Not only are her stories increasingly wrathful, the music has grown even more dense, the songs longer and more intricate. “It’s my boy record,” Amos says. Her romantic relationship of seven years with Eric Rosse, co-producer of much of her first two albums, dissolved during the recording of “Under the Pink.”

After that, she had a few encounters that left her thinking about her relationships with particular men and masculinity in general.

“It’s multileveled,” she says. “There’s the personal, but also there are patterns and myths, like the story of Mary Magdalene, that started to make me see. Why did I always look to these men? I was always reading where I stood by what they saw.”