DESCRIPTION:
Tory Tompkins is a 21 year old singer, songwriter, musician (piano/keyboards) and actress born and raised in Houston, Texas. The only child of a geologist and an actress, she began playing piano at the age of five, but by age 11 began rebelling against her piano teacher by improvising while playing classical music pieces. She grew up listening to classic rock, loving the likes of Foreigner, the Who, and Led Zeppelin, which would later come to influence her music. Her all time favorite was the 70s rock group Heart, which inspired her to begin singing.

In the eighth grade she picked up the electric guitar, a late 70s Japanese Ibanez Studio Electric, which she cherishes and still plays today. At 15 she became lead singer and guitarist in a pop/jazz band called Quid Pro Quo, which played the Houston ice house scene. Unfortunately, the group was short-lived and her junior year in high school her former band mates graduated and went off to college. She became heavily involved in musical theater, and considered skipping college and going to Broadway.

In her late teens she was introduced to the music of Yes and Andrew Bird, which inspired her to pick up the acoustic guitar. She began hitting up the open mike scene, and this eventually led to solo, mostly cover gigs at Big John's Ice House, Café Europe, Dan Electros, Patty's Bar and Grill, Mucky Ducks, Fitzgerald's and others.

In 2007 she moved to Austin, TX to attend the University of Texas, where she began studying business and film. With musical theater no longer as an outlet, she delved deeper into writing and composing her own original music. She had always enjoyed performing, but for the first time she began to fall in love with the composition process itself. She began inundating herself with music, ears constantly alert for a melody, a notebook always in hand for whenever a song walked past (sometimes literally). Often she can be seen with her guitar



composing on the outside patio of Austin's favorite funky
tea house, Spider House Café, or playing in Momos.

Unwilling to forget her rock roots, Tory's music could be
described as "acoustic folk that somehow morphs into rock and
then sometimes back again." A lover of atypical chord schemes
and surprising, hard-hitting bridges, she strives to tell a story
not only with words but the music behind it. Her enthusiasm
for exploring moods and musical styles is evident by the
variety of her songs played on both guitar and her Korg SV-1.

Currently Tory is gigging in the Austin and Houston areas and
has also played in Branson, Nashville, San Antonio, and LA.
She is accumulating and recording her songs written over
the past 3 years and writing new material for her first
album, which she plans to release by February 2011