Tory Tompkins

Tory Tompkins is a 21 year old singer, guitarist and songwriter born and raised in Houston, Texas. The only child of an oilman and actress Bond Gideon (The Young and the Restless, Gold of the Amazon Women) 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, and others.

In 2007 she moved to Austin, TX to attend the University of Texas. 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.

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.

Currently Tory is gigging in the Austin and Houston areas and working on her EP.