By the time Tori Amos released her ground-breaking 1992 debut album Little Earthquakes, she was practically a veteran.
Amos, the daughter of a Methodist minister father and music obsessed mother, was a child prodigy.
"I've been playing the piano since two and a half," she says in the forthcoming episode of Take 5 with Zan Rowe.
"There were members of the church who said to my parents, 'You need to get her proper training. It needs to be channelled, or it won't really go anywhere'.
"So, I auditioned for the Peabody Conservatory and was accepted at five years old."
Amos, the youngest person ever admitted to the school, stayed at the Peabody until she was expelled at 11.
"I started challenging [them] when I was about eight or nine," she says.
"By the time I was 11, it was just insubordinate.
"My dad was mortified. He was so broken-hearted. Absolutely gutted. Because his idea for me was not my idea for me."
After catching Tori smoking in his church steeple, Edison Amos grabbed his youngest daughter and hit the streets.
"My dad was like, 'Get dressed. You're destroying your life' and he took me down to [Washington DC neighbourhood] Georgetown and tried to get me a job.
"He said, 'You need to work. You need to do something'. And finally, somebody gave us a chance."
That chance came from Mr Henry's, a neighbourhood gay bar that hired the prodigious 13-year-old to entertain customers.
This gave her vital experience as a performer, but it would take some time before she truly developed her voice.
"I wasn't unique," she said. "I hadn't found that yet. I was developing my voice and trying on styles like you try on clothes."
She would soon find that voice, but not without a fight.
Someone else's vision
Tori Amos moved to Los Angeles the day after her 21st birthday for the same reasons most people make that move. She wanted to see how far her talent could take her.
She played in hotel bars of an evening and hung out at rock clubs late at night, eventually forming the band Y Kant Tori Read, who released one album in 1988.
"My record had bombed in 1988," she says.
"Billboard called me a bimbo. How do you go from child prodigy to bimbo? I was chasing somebody else's vision of an artist, hanging out on Sunset [Strip] with the big hair bands in my leathers.
"I know what it is to capitulate. I did that in the '80s, chasing somebody else's idea of what a successful female artist should be."
While hurtful at the time, it was this failure that inspired Amos to confront external influence and find her true voice.
"I had to accept I sound like a fairy on crack, and I had to write songs that fit this instrument," she said. "Not that fit something I don't have."
"The songwriter had to go: 'Okay, what are you doing? Because you don't sing like [Heart frontwoman] Ann Wilson. You don't sing like Janis [Joplin].
"So, you need to think about this. But you don't just have to listen to the label and write little pop songs that they can get played on the radio. What are you doing? Be a musician, be an artist.'"
Ironically, she came to find her true voice through writing for someone else.
"I started writing a song for another artist and [producer] Eric Rosse, the guy I was seeing at the time, said 'you're not giving that to Al Stewart'.
"That was the beginning of Silent All These Years, the song that [kickstarted] Little Earthquakes. That was a breakthrough."
Tori Amos felt like she had found Tori Amos again.
"I'd had her at five, but I lost her by 21 and a half," she says.
That dirty fight
The now 28-year-old just had to convince the powerful men of the music business that her vision was worthy.
"I'd had seven years of rejection of my music," she says.
"Every record company had rejected me many times because it was alternative singer-songwriter stuff.
"They just said, 'What is this crap? Nobody's gonna want to play this on the radio'."
In 1991, the popularity of hair metal bands hadn't yet faded, and grunge was emerging as the next dominant musical force.
To be a woman at a piano, singing songs that didn't sound anything like Elton John or Billy Joel, was a difficult position.
Little Earthquakes, a record that retains every bit of its power over 30 years from its release, was a tough sell.
"To come in in '91 and be like, 'No, the acoustic piano is cool'… this was not seen to be cool," she recalls.
"It got rejected when I turned it in. I had to challenge the boys club, they wanted to take all the pianos off and put guitars on."
Tori Amos doubled down.
She tapped into her decades of experience as a pianist and performer and made it her duty to prove that 'boys club' wrong.
"The one thing I can do is play live," she says. "There's a lot I can't do, but I can do that.
"It was, 'I'm going to change how people see not just a woman at a piano, but a force at a piano. Because I'm sick of this disrespect for this amazing instrument'.
"That was a drive and a goal, and that was the intention. But I had to fight that fight. It wasn't given to me."
Me And A Gun
Amos wasn't just fighting for her style of music to be heard, she wanted her story – and that of so many women like her – heard as well.
The first single from Little Earthquakes was the confronting Me And A Gun, which recounts the night a 21-year-old Amos was raped after playing a show in Los Angeles.
"I had to write that song," she says. "Sometimes describing how you end up in that place … you can really allow yourself to open those wounds and experience it as your scribe as well.
"But at the same time, as a woman, I'm trying to deal with the emotions that are coming up as the song is coming. Because it's overwhelming.
"Then, to perform it, I have to put myself in a place in order to perform it. To tell that story without getting personally involved."
Amos, a founding member of America's Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), soon learnt that she could help others by confronting and writing about her experience.
"Once I realised that sexual assault is endemic – it is beneath the skin, it is something that occurs more than we can even wrap our heads around – that is what drives me to continue talking about it," she said.
Tori Amos broke down the door for so many in the 90s. Women at pianos singing powerful songs about confronting topics were soon everywhere, thanks largely to the foundations Amos laid.
"There are many great ones that came later on," she says. "But that was a dirty fight.
"When people talk about the piano in alternative music through the 90s, everybody has their story. My story was fighting that fight."
Catch Tori Amos on Take 5 with Zan Rowe on Tuesday at 8pm on ABC iview and ABC TV. And hear the extended conversation on the Take 5 podcast in ABC listen.
