Chart entered : 23 November 1991
Chart peak : 51 ( 26 on re-release in 1992 )
Tori was born Myra Ellen Amos in 1963. She was a piano prodigy from a very early age , winning a scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory of Music at five years old. She was eventually expelled at eleven due to reluctance to use sheet music instead of playing by ear. She started playing in bars chaperoned by her father. While still at school, she won a song contest in collaboration with her brother and the song "Baltimore" became her first single in 1980 under the name Ellen Amos. The song sounds like Olivia Newton-John doing an advertising jingle for the city and isn't exactly an audacious start to her career. After leaving school she performed in piano bars in Washington D.C. while looking for a record deal. A recording session with Narada Michael Walden came to nothing and Tori moved to Los Angles in 1984. Almost as soon as she got there she was raped after a performance when she naively gave a fan a ride home.
Tori was eventually signed by Atlantic and put together a band called Y Kant Tori Read, the name referring to her problems with sheet music. They released an eponymous album at the beginning of 1988. Tori consistently dismissed it as an embarrassment until earlier this year when she gave her blessing to a digital release. It's nowhere near as bad as she makes out. The late eighties production bombast doesn't do her songs any favours, linking the band to such peers as Stevie Nicks , Berlin and even T'Pau ( on a good day ) and lead single "The Big Picture" is a bit too close to Kate Bush's The Big Sky for comfort but there are still some good songs in there. "Fire On The Side " and "On The Boundary" are particularly good and the follow-up single "Cool On Your Island" is OK. Whatever its merits, the album was indisputably a commercial failure and the band split up.
Tori went away to compose new songs, finding it difficult to please Atlantic after the disaster of Y Kant Tori Read. At, last they were happy enough with the songs to send her to work in England with Tears For Fears sideman Ian Stanley believing Tori might find an audience more quickly here.
Their instincts proved correct. In October 1991 , her label in Europe East West released the "Me and A Gun" EP on CD and 12 inch. . As the title track was an a cappella account of the rape, it's not too surprising that radio picked another track for play and alighted on "Silent All These Years".It was released as a conventional 7 inch single the following month and she got to perform it on Jonathan Ross's chat show which is which where I first saw her.
"Silent All These Years" is sung from the perspective of a woman trapped in an unhealthy , possibly abusive relationship , where their own thoughts and feelings are ignored or ridiculed with the first verse given over to the detail of domestic servitude - "Been saved again by the garbage truck". The second verse tells of fearing a second pregnancy while the partner is entertaining thoughts of infidelity with "a girl who thinks really deep thoughts". The third refers to an unwelcome visit by the guy's mother. Musically, it's a piano ballad recorded without a rhythm section but with strings coming in when Tori's character finds moments for self-contemplation. With Tori's abiliy to suddenly leap an octave there is an undeniable resemblance to Kate Bush circa The Man With The Child In His Eyes and Tori's never denied that Bush has been an influence on her work.
The song was re-released some nine months later and did significantly better. It was belatedly a hit in her homeland when re-released to raise funds for the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network in 1997, reaching number 65.
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