Second Cup Café: Tori Amos

Talented musicians are able to bring an audience into their world with mere words and a little music. Tori Amos is no different - she tells a story with every song.

Amos visited The Saturday Early Show's Second Cup Café with some new stories to tell from her album "Scarlet's Walk."

Before Amos was known as "Tori," she was Myra Ellen Amos from North Carolina. She was born in 1963 to a Methodist minister and a homemaker. Her musical talent was evident from a young age.

She began playing piano at age 2, and at 4, she was singing and performing in the church choir. Amos received an invitation to study piano at the prestigious Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore when she was 5, only to be expelled at the age of 11 because her calling, she says, was free-form rock music.

As a teen-ager, Amos wrote and performed her own material in local clubs. In 1980, she released her first single under her real name, Ellen Amos. It was "Baltimore"/"Walking With You" on the MEA label, named after her own initials. She later moved to Los Angeles to pursue her dreams.

Atlantic Records liked what they heard and in 1987, signed the then 24-year-old singer. Her first album was released with her hard-rock band, "Y Kan't Tori Read." The album did not do well.

Amos was disappointed, but she wasn't through. She recorded her first solo album, "Little Earthquakes," in 1992. The album was an international success. It sold more than two million copies worldwide, becoming the first of several successful albums.

In 1994, Amos released her second full-length album, "Under the Pink," and in 1996, her third, "Boys for Pele." Amos contributed a couple tracks to the "Great Expectations" soundtrack in 1998 . Her fourth full-length album, "Songs From the Choirgirl Hotel," was released in 1998. Many of the songs on the album were inspired by Amos's miscarriage .

The next year, Amos released "To Venus And Back," pairing a disc of studio tracks with a disc of live concert recordings . "Strange Little Girls," in which she performed material exclusively written by men, was released in 2001 and delivers songs from a female point of view.