Tori Amos is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. She is a classically trained musician with a mezzo-soprano vocal range. Having already begun composing instrumental pieces on piano, Amos won a full scholarship to the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University at the age of five, the youngest person ever to have been admitted. She had to leave at the age of eleven when her scholarship was discontinued for what Rolling Stone described as "musical insubordination". Amos was the lead singer of the short-lived 1980s pop group Y Kant Tori Read before achieving her breakthrough as a solo artist in the early 1990s. Her songs focus on a broad range of topics, including sexuality, feminism, politics, and religion.

The Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University is a private music and dance conservatory and preparatory school in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1857 and affiliated with Johns Hopkins in 1977, Peabody is the oldest conservatory in the United States and one of the world's most highly-regarded performing arts schools.