10,000 Maniacs

On January 27, 2004, Elektra/Asylum/Rhino Records released Campfire Songs, subtitled "The Popular, Obscure and Unknown Recordings", a two CD set compilation, with 31 digitally remastered songs, four of them demos and one unreleased. Amos refers to her fans as 'ears with feet.'. In 2003, Gustafson, Drew and Augustyniak formed a new line-up by adding Erikson on guitar and Oskar Saville from Rubygrass on vocals, and played some gigs. Some are attracted to her unconventional musical style and her profound and emotional lyrics. On December 5, 2001, a 10,000 Maniacs line-up comprising Gustafson, Drew, Augustyniak, Lombardo and Ramsay played on a benefit concert in Toronto, with Erikson on guitar. Lombardo and Ramsay left 10,000 Maniacs in 2002. A number of factors contribute to Amos’s underground appeal: she is very popular amongst underground remixers, as well as the gay and lesbian community; in addition her songs have been covered by a number of artists including Faye Wong, Voltaire and Jay Bennett. Jerry joined a band called Only Human. She made her first character appearance in the 2004 film Mona Lisa Smile as a big-band singer.

Gustafson and Drew, with Jeff Erikson (guitar) started a band called Mighty Wallop. In 1998 she coordinated the soundtrack of the film version of Great Expectations, weaving breathy, ethereal vocals through the film's background. The band took a break. Most of her contributions to cinema have been musical. Their last concert with Buck had been on November 3, 2000, when the band played with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, in Buffalo. Also in the late 1980s she appeared in a television commercial for Kellogg's Just Right, a breakfast cereal. On December 19, 2000, Robert Buck died of liver failure at age 37. She appeared in the telesoap Trial by Jury in 1987 as a woman who was accused of killing her married lover.

In 1997 they released Love Among the Ruins and followed up in 1999 with The Earth Pressed Flat. She has long been asked to audition for roles, notably the female lead in The Crow: City of Angels. 10,000 Maniacs released two albums with Mary Ramsey on vocals. Amos’s acting has been limited to fringe performances. The remaining members of 10,000 Maniacs then absorbed John & Mary, with Ramsey on viola and vocals. After establishing a new deal with Epic Records, she achieved her most successful American radio single to date. On April 19, 1993, 10,000 Maniacs recorded MTV Unplugged and Merchant announced her leaving the band on MTV on August 5, 1993. (Her first solo album, Tigerlily, was released by Elektra on June 20, 1995.) The 10,000 Maniacs MTV Unplugged CD was released in October of 1993. If Amos’s reputation suffered for Atlantic's insults, it did not do so for long.

In 1991, during the recordings of a new album, Merchant revealed to the other members that she would be leaving for a solo career in two years time. In 1992, Our Time in Eden was released. Amos’s contractual obligations had simply been fullfilled and neither side was interested in renewing the contract. Lombardo and Mary Ramsey, who had formed a folk act called John & Mary, opened gigs for the Maniacs on the Hope Chest Tour in 1990. Among them were singer Poe and Amos; this was factually inaccurate. In 1990, with the help of Lombardo, they remastered their first two records (Human Conflict and I-Ching) and released them as a compilation called Hope Chest. Ultimately, and with questionable intent, Atlantic records released a widely distributed press release listing the acts that they were "dropping from the label" due to alleged poor album sales. The remaining five members started the recordings of a new album in Los Angeles, with Peter Asher as the producer. In My Tribe, a more pop-rock oriented record, was released on July 7, (1987), hit the charts and established a large US audience for the group, which was expanded by Blind Man's Zoo (1989). This and other tactics were employed in a vindictive attempt to ruin Amos’s career, and it seemed to work temporarily, as album sales steadily declined.

Lombardo left the band on July 14, 1986. Atlantic Records gave Amos’s tickets while requesting that other artists on the label be played as a return favor. They recorded their second full-length album, The Wishing Chair, in London with Joe Boyd as producer. For example: artists usually provide the label with a section of seats to each of their concerts that can be given to local radio honchos in exchange for the promise that the artist's new work would be heavily played. Peter Leak, an Englishman living in New York City, became interested in the band, made contact and was made their manager. With the help of Leak and Elektra Records A&R man Howard Thompson, 10,000 Maniacs signed to Elektra in 1985. The label fully followed through on their threat. During 1983 and 1984, touring was a way of life for the band and they also played some gigs in the UK. But because they felt their power had been challenged, they made it clear that they would intentionally do as little as they could do (legally speaking) to promote the works so that her career would be decimated by the time she had a chance to switch to a new label.

One song, "My Mother the War" turned out to be a minor hit in the United Kingdom, and it entered the independent singles chart. Instead they chose to exercise their option to keep Amos on board until she had released an additional four albums (as stipulated in her contract). The record was well-received by critics and it caught the attention of John Peel, a DJ at Radio BBC Radio 1 in London. Amos demanded to be freed from her contract, but the label refused. Between March and July they recorded songs for a second record, Secrets of the I Ching — their debut album — which was pressed by Mark Records for the band's own label, Christian Burial Music. Amos questioned why her work was not being promoted properly and it was revealed to her that the label preferred to spend their money trying to break newer artists who they felt would make them more money. The Maniacs met Augustyniak when they played in Buffalo, New York, where he was in a punk band called The Strains and he was invited to be part of the band. The people in positions of power there were changing and there was a serious confrontation.

At the beginning of 1983, drummer Jerry Augustyniak (26) joined the band. Then in 1996, while working on her "Boys For Pele" album, she had a meeting with the heads of the label. More gigs followed in 1982. She told them that it was not going to happen, and that if they brought it up again she would burn the masters. In February-March 1982, with Jim Foti on drums, the band recorded an EP called Human Conflict Number Five. Atlantic Records, her label in 1994, wanted her record "Under the Pink" to be changed significantly before its release. Tired of playing other people songs, they started to write their own, usually with Merchant writing lyrics and Lombardo the music. Conflict between Tori and the music industry has surfaced on various occasions.

Edborg left and Bob "Bob O Matic" Wachter was on drums for most of the 1981 gigs. It explores her songwriting process while telling the story of her progression into fame. They performed as 10,000 Maniacs for the first time on September 7, 1981 (Labor Day), with a line-up of Merchant, Lombardo, Buck, Gustafson, Drew, and Tim Edborg (drums). In conjunction with the album, Amos released an autobiography entitled Piece by Piece; co-authored by rock music journalist Ann Powers, it delves deeply into Amos’s obsession with mythology and religion. The band changed its name to Burn Victims and then to 10,000 Maniacs, after the low-budget horror movie Two Thousand Maniacs. "Sleeps with Butterflies" was the first single released from the album. Various drummers came and left. Early reviews described it as her most lyrically accessible, and reminiscent of her first album.

Newhouse and Cardinale left the band in July, and Merchant became the main singer. It was leaked to the Internet over a month before its release. John Lombardo (28; guitar) who was in a band called The Mills, used to play with Still Life occassionally and was invited to join permanently. The album deals with topics like death, adultery and romantic conflict. Gustafson invited Merchant, then aged 16, to do some vocals. In late February of 2005, Amos released The Beekeeper. The band was formed, as Still Life, in Jamestown, New York, by Steven Gustafson (then 23 years old and a bass player), Dennis Drew (23; keyboards) and Robert Buck (22; guitar), Terry Newhouse (Buck's ex-wife and a vocalist) and Chet Cardinale (drums). The DVD featured a full length live performance from her 2003 "On Scarlet's Walk" tour; the CD compiled several previously Internet-exclusive B-sides from Scarlet's Walk with some new tracks on a bonus disc entitled "Scarlet's Hidden Treasures".

Perhaps the most well-known member has been Natalie Merchant, who left the band in 1993 to pursue a solo career. In 2004 Amos released a DVD/CD set called Welcome to Sunny Florida. 10,000 Maniacs is a US rock band, formed in 1981 and active with various line-ups since that time. With the addition of two new songs and two re-recorded b-sides, the album featured what was effectively mostly new material even if the songs had been released previously in different versions. Following in the footsteps of artists such as Björk, rather than compiling hit singles and tossing them into a generic hits package, Amos chose instead to revisit the mixing of many of her own favourite songs from a career spanning over a decade, focusing on those that she thought were not fully realised in their original recordings. In 2003 Amos released a greatest hits album, Tales of a Librarian.

As an additional incentive to buy the album rather than download its contents illicitly, the CD also served as a key to access "Scarlet's Web", a web site which featured several songs ("Tombigbee", "Seaside", "Mountain") as well as various photographs and journal entries that were not available elsewhere. The success of this attempt was so great that the record industry began to follow suit. If an attempt was made to open the player, both it and the disc inside would shatter. These were then distributed to the press on the understanding that they would be returned within forty-eight hours.

In an attempt to prevent Internet trading of the album, Amos, in conjunction with her husband and crew, invented a special kind of glue to bind closed portable CD players containing the album. The third single, "Strange", was remixed with a country and western feel and became another radio staple. A contest was held online to create a music video for the song, and it reached the top 20 in the US. The second single, "Taxi Ride", was an homage to the late make-up artist Kevyn Aucoin, a gay friend of Amos'.

It was also released in the UK with a B-side entitled "Operation Peter Pan". The first single, "A Sorta Fairytale", was a top 10 hit in the US. Through the songs, Amos explores the history of America, the American people, Native American history, pornography, masochism, homophobia and misogyny. Thematically, the album explored Amos’s alter ego Scarlet and her cross-America trip post-September 11, 2001.

Stylistically, Amos put drums and bass guitar at the forefront, using her piano playing as an accent rather than a highlight. Described as a "sonic novel", the 18 track album proved to be a landmark for a variety of reasons. In 2002 Amos released her eighth major label release, Scarlet's Walk. The accompanying "StrangeLittleTour", Amos’s first solo tour since 1994, was acclaimed particularly for its solo renditions of Boys For Pele, From The Choirgirl Hotel and To Venus and Back material.

This time, the reviews were quite uniform: most critics saw the album as a mixed bag, praising the unlikely reworkings of Eminem's "97' Bonnie and Clyde" and Slayer's "Raining Blood", but panning the sprawling, messy version of John Lennon's cryptic "Happiness is a Warm Gun" and the rocky, fuzzy version of Neil Young's "Heart of Gold". Amos took a break from both touring and writing in 2000, and returned in 2001 with Strange Little Girls, an album of cover versions of songs written by men about women. Its closing track "1000 Oceans" was much closer in spirit to her early songs, and quickly became a fan favourite and a live fixture. This was sparser both in production and arrangement than From the Choirgirl Hotel, but like that album featured overt dance music influences and a relatively subdued piano sound.

The album included a live disc as well as a disc of new studio material. She decided to write a small amount of new material to be included as a bonus disc on some releases; ultimately, however, she produced a double album's worth of material which was released in 2000 under the title To Venus and Back. Next, Amos planned to release a live album. Another tour followed in 1999, the "Five and a Half Weeks" tour with Alanis Morissette.

The accompanying tour was known as the "Plugged '98" tour. Again reviews were mixed, but the album was generally feted by Amos’s fans. A departure from earlier records, it was much more lavishly produced and featured arrangements which expanded considerably on her core piano sound. Her fourth solo album, From the Choirgirl Hotel, was released in 1998.

The single "Caught A Lite Sneeze" was a hit in the UK, and the Armand Van Helden remix of "Professional Widow" became a massive club hit. The accompanying tour was known as the "Dew Drop Inn" tour; as on the album, Tori performed on harpsichord in addition to piano. The erratic lyrical content of its songs seemed unduly indecipherable to some fans. Mystical, experimental, and substantially longer than the first two albums, it garnered mixed reviews.

Soon after the "Under the Pink" tour, Amos released her third solo album, Boys for Pele. In 1995, Amos, duetting with Robert Plant, contributed the song "Down by the Seaside" to the Led Zeppelin tribute album Encomium. In June, 1994, Amos co-founded RAINN, The Rape Abuse and Incest National Network. RAINN is a toll-free help line in the US which connects callers with their local rape crisis center. The Australian edition of the album included "More Pink", a collection of B-Sides including a cover of the Joni Mitchell song "A Case of You".

Four tracks were released as singles: "God", "Cornflake Girl" (a #4 single in the UK), "Pretty Good Year" and "Past the Mission", which featured the vocal contribution of Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. In February, she began the "Under the Pink" tour. It disappointed some critics, however, who considered it a step sideways rather than forwards from Little Earthquakes. It debuted at #1 in the UK and #12 in the US charts on its release in January 1994.

After touring throughout 1992 in support of Little Earthquakes, Amos went to New Mexico to write her second solo record, Under the Pink. The accompanying singles were "Me and a Gun", "Silent All These Years", "China", "Winter" and "Crucify". A month later, it was released in America to breakthrough critical success. When the album was released in the UK, it went straight to #1.

It was trailed by a promotional single featuring the emotional, unaccompanied desolation of "Me and a Gun", which received considerable critical attention. The Atlantic executives changed their minds upon hearing the edited version, and relocated Tori to England to launch the "new" album, which was released under the title Little Earthquakes. Atlantic's European counterpart, East West, worked hard to promote the record. Extensively re-worked and expanded with the help of Steve Caton, Eric Rosse, Will MacGregor, Carlo Nuccio, and Dan Nebenzal, the record ended up full of raw, emotive songs recounting her religious upbringing, sexual awakening, struggle to establish her identity, and her rape. When she presented them with her initial recordings, they were rejected on the grounds that the "girl and a piano thing" wasn't going to sell.

Atlantic Records told Amos that she had to produce another record by March 1990. She also recorded a song called "Distant Storm" for the film China O'Brien; in the credits, the song is attributed to a band called "Tess Makes Good" with "additional vocals by Ellen Amos". Amos was devastated, and started working with other artists (including Stan Ridgway of Wall of Voodoo, Sandra Bernhard and Al Stewart) as a backup vocalist. In 1988, her debut album Y Kant Tori Read was released and was panned by critics.

A year later, Atlantic Records gave Amos a 6 record contract. In 1985, Amos formed Y Kant Tori Read – the name a reference to Amos’s facility with playing by ear at Peabody and her difficulty with playing from sheet music – with Caton, Matt Sorum (later of the Cult and Guns N' Roses), and Brad Cobb. She also met Steve Caton, who played guitars on her albums through To Venus and Back (1999). After playing a bar one night, she gave a ride home to a patron, who sexually assaulted her – an experience that would feed into her influential song "Me And A Gun".

While there she managed to get several acting jobs, including a Kellogg's Just Right cereal commercial (for which role she beat out a then-unknown Sarah Jessica Parker). At age 21, Tori Amos moved to Los Angeles to pursue her music career. At around this time she adopted the name "Tori.". This song became her first single, and was released as a 7" pressed for family and friends.

As a high school senior, Ellen Amos co-wrote Baltimore with her brother Mike for a competition involving the Baltimore Orioles. The song she sang was called More than Just a Friend. By the time she reached high school, she was well known in the DC area. During her years at Richard Montgomery High School, she was elected Homecoming Queen and became involved with the drama group. She first came to local notice by winning a county Teen Talent contest, and her picture was published in a local paper. Reverend Amos began sending tapes of the songs she'd written to record companies at this time.

Two years later, she began studying at Montgomery College and began playing at piano bars, many of them gay, chaperoned by her father. At age 11, her scholarship was discontinued due to the growing influence on her of popular music. In 1968, she was given a full scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory of Music, which she was the youngest person ever to attend. During these years, she spent formative time with her maternal grandfather, who was "part Eastern Cherokee" (an Eastern Cherokee with some European ancestry).

By age 5, she had written her first song. When Amos was 2½, her family moved to Baltimore, Maryland where she began to play the piano and attend her father's church every week. Edison & Mary Ellen Amos on August 22, 1963 during a trip from their home in Georgetown to North Carolina, at the Old Catawba Hospital in Newton, N.C. She was born Myra Ellen Amos (called Ellen) to Dr.

Classically trained, Amos’s voice and mostly piano-based music has frequently been compared to that of Kate Bush. She is probably best known to the wider public for a dance remix of "Professional Widow", her sole single to reach number one on the European Billboard charts. Tackling a wide range of subjects, including sexuality, religion, patriarchy and personal tragedy, she has built a devoted following. Tori Amos (born Myra Ellen Amos on August 22, 1963) is an American singer, pianist and songwriter.

In March of 2005, The Beekeeper became Amos's highest-charting album in Germany, at #8. Blige, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Janet Jackson, Madonna, Britney Spears, LeAnn Rimes, and Barbra Streisand. Following the #5 debut of The Beekeeper on the US album chart in 2005, Amos joined an elite club of female artists to have achieved five or more Top 10 debuts in the US - this club included Mary J. In November of 2004, Edison Michael Amos (Tori's brother) died in a car crash in North Carolina.

After the letter the owner miraculously surfaced. Despite many pleas for help the owner could not be located and Amos eventually wrote a letter to officials stating that "perhaps our local craftsmen could come cut it into parts". The hurricanes striking the state of Florida in 2004 tossed a boat onto Amos’s property there, destroying her pier. A b-side, entitled "Never Seen Blue", is also said to be about him.

Married to British sound engineer, Mark Hawley – the inspiration for her songs "Northern Lad" and "Goodbye Pisces". Gaiman also appears in many of Tori's songs. Since their meeting in 1991 Gaiman and Amos have collaborated on several projects. Neil Gaiman's comment on this is "Delirium was created before I met Tori, but they steal shamelessly from each other".

The character Delirium in Neil Gaiman's comic The Sandman bears a striking resemblance to Amos, all the more surprising since the character was created before Gaiman and Amos met and became close friends.