TORI Amos has a thing about launderettes. She loves them because they play her songs - in Chinese. During one visit to her neighbourhood Chinese laundry she heard her hit single Silent All These Years taken from her 1992 Little Earthquakes album, sungin Cantonese by Beijing-born artist Faye Wong Ching-man.
Wong went on to become one of the best-selling new names in Hong Kong and won the coveted Best New Artist of the Year for 1993. Sure enough, she admitted to being strongly influenced by Sweden's Bjork and Tori Amos, the classically-trained child prodigy from North Carolina.
Amos is currently riding high in the UK charts with Cornflake Girl, a cut from her latest album, Under The Pink, which recently hit the top of the album charts in Britain. Amos has been on warp speed since she debuted two years ago with Little Earthquakesfrom which came three top 20 singles: Winter, Cruelty and Silent All These Years.
Both Amos and Wong sing about women's unrequited emotions. Wong's most famous song laments women easily hurt by disloyalty and misfortune. Amos's Cornflake Girl is about betrayal among women, based on Alice Walker's novel Possessing The Secret Of Joy, andfeaturing a piano solo heavily influenced by jazzmeister Keith Jarrett.
Walker's novel is built on the premise that women fall into one of two categories, the cornflake girl or the raisin girl. 'I've set up two factions that are at war with each other,' Amos says. 'Of course, I would like to think I'm a raisin girl, because in my mind they are more open-minded. Cornflake girls are totally self-centred, don't care about anything or anybody.' Amos could certainly be classified as open-minded as she has long maintained that she is the reincarnation of Sven the Viking. She also genuinely believes in fairies and enjoys being in another world. Nevertheless, although closed to the outside world, she openly bares her personal anguishes in her songwriting, particularly Me And A Gun, a song about a sexual assault she suffered six years ago.
Patti Smith and John Lennon are her favourite influences, though Gershwin, Fats Domino and Led Zeppelin all get regular mentions. Her exquisite piano detail that introduces her tracks clearly reflects her classical upbringing. 'For me playing the piano was like a primitive instinct, it was like a friend. I remember crawling up to it and thinking 'I am safe here'. By the time I was four, I was playing the scores of whole musicals. Anything I heard that I liked, I'd play by ear,' says Amos.
When her father, a senior Methodist minister in Washington, discovered his daughter's talent on the piano, he sent her on weekends to the nearby Peabody Institute in Baltimore for a classical conservatory education. At Peabody she never really fit in.