Tori Amos' Personal Best
Ahead of her new album In Times of Dragons, Tori Amos talks Alan Pedder through the psychological journeys of five of her best songs.
No one, and I do mean no one, builds a world quite like Tori Amos, the American piano prodigy who, across five decades of work, has returned time and again to the long form, crafting albums that function as whole epics, where myth bleeds into autobiography and characters speak across timelines and dimensions.
Depending on your tolerance for themes that resist easy decoding, these loftier, more conceptual works can often seem perplexing at first. Whether moving through the internal multiplicity of 2007’s American Doll Posse – an exercise in refusing to simplify a woman’s psyche in a world of competing desires and cultural pressures – or indulging in mytho-classical architecture on 2011’s Night of Hunters – a couple at war, an igniting force, and a shapeshifting fox/goose spirit that’s actually her daughter – Amos has a logic that’s at once both devastatingly personal and wildly out there, where the most surreal elements are often the most emotionally truthful.
Realism is all well and good, but sometimes it just doesn’t serve the Muses, Amos’s lifelong guides in song, and that same dense symbolism, mythological and otherwise, is threaded throughout her latest work, In Times of Dragons, her 18th studio album out next month. Amos has always trusted her fans, her faithful “ears with feet,” to follow her into whatever conceptual labyrinth she spins, and Dragons hits a few familiar beats: ancient archetypes colliding with modern anxieties; violence and care expressed as something elemental; a woman fleeing a monstrous power while discovering her own strength. It’s all there on the album's psychological and narrative journey, conceived as a metaphor for the very real mindfuck of the world's ongoing death by oligarch.
“I based every character on this album on variations of real people,” she says of the Dragons cast, which includes a version of Tori who married a “billionaire lizard demon” instead of Mark Hawley, her ‘90s roadie turned co-conspirator and creative sounding board, plus – *deep breath* – a healer, a witch, a motorbike girl gang, a Celtic god, vampires, a Daughter figure, and an ancient order of Dragon Queens. “I’m not making this stuff up,” she swears to me over video call from her home studio in Cornwall. “I’m just documenting what’s going on in America right now, but then transformed with myth.”
A critical thing to understand about In Times of Dragons is that the Tori character is not some Jane Eyre type of narrator, observing from the gallery. She’s more like Cersei behind the Iron Throne, complicit in the rise of something she grows to dread; a witness who helped to build her own prison. “Once I was Beauty, am I now the Beast?” Amos asks early on in the story, and it’s a question that resonates all the way through to the finale of “23 Peaks”, where her own transformation into a Dragon Queen becomes inevitable, opening a door to something older, more archetypal, and far more dangerous. Where she once brought “kisses for the Beast” on 2007’s “Dragon”, the Beast here is no longer an object of tender fascination, a male power, but a mirror of her culpability and, ultimately, her destiny.
“The inspiration for that transformation was the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, who was part woman, part lioness, so this isn’t just out of nowhere,” she explains, laughing. As the ancient stories go, Sekhmet was sent into the world by the sun god Ra as an instrument of righteous fury, an expression of his wrath against disobedient humans, but things didn’t quite go to plan thanks to one of mythology’s more curious acts of intervention (a lake of beer that was dyed to look like blood; no, really). Pacified by a deep, drunken sleep, the goddess’s bloodlust was transmuted into something that could coexist with life rather than annihilate it, becoming both protector and avenger. The same is implied of Amos’s Dragon Queen, for whom power becomes inseparable from responsibility, becoming a lens through which she can interrogate the sociopolitical carnage of modern-day America.
If that all sounds heavy going, Amos sprinkles the journey with some necessary whimsy, whether it’s the bouncy “Fanny Faudrey”, an ode to one of her own 19th century ancestors, or the cute studio chatter that leads into the swooning “Strawberry Moon”, one of three duets on the album with her daughter Tash, now in her twenties. And then there’s the love story – there’s always a love story – and, in true Amos fashion, this time it’s an interdimensional affair with the Irish deity Lugh of the Long Arm (more on him later), a pre-Christian god of the Tuatha Dé Danann tribe.
Even setting all this aside, In Times of Dragons returns us to a Tori Amos who feels very much in the trenches, less ironed out than some of her smoother productions. From the opening track “Shush”, with its audible pedal, more expressive breath work, and a smack of the piano’s fallboard, through to the blisteringly intimate “23 Peaks” – Amos as we have never heard her before, and that’s no exaggeration – there’s a fresh perception of complexity that’s both an invite and a challenge, not just in an immersive sense but in a provocative one too. Like her own character, the narrator, there’s a suggestion that we all might learn something from wrestling our own dragons, because, as American Doll Posse once taught us, we all contain multitudes, and those multitudes can be both destructive and redemptive, depending on the day.
Asked to pick out five of the songs that she’s most proud of at this current point in time – her Personal Best – Amos originally chose “Barons of Suburbia” among them before changing her mind. In the context of Dragons, it’s a choice that makes perfect sense, as it’s very much a part of the same lineage, examining the same predatory behaviours, the same ideologies and greed, only through a more localised, grounded framework. But the song she chose instead, “Silent All These Years” from her debut album Little Earthquakes, has just as much resonance. It’s even mentioned by name in a particularly moving moment of “Shush”, so let’s start just as In Times of Dragons does, right there in the moment of revelation and collapse.
"Silent All These Years" (1991) / "Shush" (2026)
TORI AMOS: I wanted to include “Silent All These Years” because of the cultural influence that song has had, and the timing of it when it came out. I don't expect you to remember, because you're far too young I believe, but in 1991, when Anita Hill was testifying at the US Senate during hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, she was looking up at all these men surrounding her – all this patriarchal, political power; I mean, talk about power imbalance! – and she said something like “I will be silenced no more.”
Now, this was happening, I believe, in September, and I knew that “Silent All These Years” was coming out around three weeks later, on the Me & A Gun EP, in the autumn of 1991. And it was one of those moments that can happen in a songwriter’s life where you suddenly realise that something you’ve written is going to cross a historical event. Watching Anita Hill up there talking about a horrifying experience that she alleged happened between her and Clarence Thomas – who became a Chief Justice anyway, and is still a Chief Justice in the United States today – while knowing that “Silent All These Years” was coming out was, for me, an incredibly humbling moment.
I felt humbleness towards the Muses, who – well, who knows what they knew – could maybe see that happening months and months and months prior, because I had recorded the song back in 1990. I’d say that “Silent All These Years” is a cornerstone of my canon. I just didn’t know, when I wrote it, the historical alignment that would happen a year later. I was thinking about the idea of finding my own voice, about so many things, including sexual assault and speaking out about that. Finding that was my personal mantra that I wanted to express, and I feel like “Silent All These Years” was one of those songs that did that.
When we look at “Shush”, where this woman is being threatened by her billionaire lizard demon husband, we see her being told that if she speaks out against his beliefs, she doesn’t even want to consider what the consequences will be and how he will destroy her. And at the end of the song, what gives her the propulsion to finally leave him, even though she’s going to have to run for her life – with the clothes on her back, and maybe a few diamonds and watches in her knapsack because he’ll track the credit cards – is when she realises, “I knew a girl who wrote ‘Silent All These Years’, where is she?”
There’s a moment of discovery that she’s there somewhere still, but she has to find that girl fast, and that gives her the courage to run – and without necessarily thinking it through, she’s just in “Go mode” at that point. That’s where the record takes off and she flees, but it’s that song, “Silent All These Years”, that gives her the power to do it.
BEST FIT: I found the callback to “Silent All These Years” so emotional, such a beautiful surprise. The first time I heard it, my mind went straight to a quote of yours from the last album cycle where you said that you’d felt like you weren't the artist you wanted to be, and now in this song you’re looking for the old Tori, in a way. There's just so many connections, as always with you.
Well, when that line came to me, I understood what was happening as a writer. I understood the gift the Muses were giving. I understood the full circle moment, and the vulnerability.
You know, my character in this narrative is flawed. She chose luxury over art. I'm only asking the listener to suspend one truth, and that is that rather than marrying a rock and roll roadie, instead I married somebody rich. And, you know, come one, let’s be honest Alan, I had options in the ‘90s. I still have options. But I had options in the ‘90s, let’s face it, that weren’t just part of the rock scene. So we’re following Tori’s story in this, but if she had chosen this billionaire cabal path, which I could have done. I didn’t, but I could have done it.
So that’s how I’m choosing to document what's happening in America, because it's a metaphor for the fact that a lot of Americans chose something, and I don't think they can believe what is happening as a consequence of that. I don’t think a lot of people believed, for instance, that we would be in a war with Iran right now. I don't think a lot of people saw this coming. Now, some political journalists did. Some were warning us. Some professors of history have been shouting at us to understand. But where we are today, I don't think a lot of Americans could see it, and I think a lot of Americans are traumatised.
In “Shush” you call on Greek mythology in the figure of the Trojan princess Cassandra, who was cursed to always be right but never believed, and that of course has so many painful connotations in the shadow of the Epstein files and women being silenced since forever. When the lizard demon husband in the song calls the narrator his Cassandra, what does that say about possession to you?
Well, that's exactly it. She may have a voice, but no one will believe her and through that you understand the brutality of this relationship and his cruelty. It's now become clear that, whoever he was when they married, he’s become something she cannot stand by anymore. But this does mean that there is a battle coming. There is a battle ahead. And let's remember that the only beings that can fight the lizard demons are the dragons, and she's turning into one, and she's having to come to terms with that.
As you said before, on In Times of Dragons, things unravel for this lady quite fast. She's not just an innocent observer. She helped to build the world that she's now afraid of, and I think that’s such an interesting angle to take. I wondered, with the line “There is hierarchy / You should be pleased to serve,” were you thinking about social class as well as gender?
Yes, and this billionaire cabal that I'm exposing in the story – and this is actually happening in America – they don't think you and I should vote. They don't think that we have the ability, and we shouldn't be allowed to make these decisions.
So, the hierarchy here is that there's a very small group of people that control everything and they're trying to build a serfdom situation again, which we thought would never happen. They want things to be like they were hundreds of years ago, and they see leaders like our congressmen, congresswomen, and senators as, you know, employees of theirs. I would even say they might possibly see the President and Vice President as CEOs that answer to them. That’s their philosophy. If you do your research, it's all out there. Political journalists have been screaming this from the rooftops for months and months and months now, and unfortunately they're right.
"i i e e e" (1998)
BEST FIT: This is one of my favourite songs of yours too. Based on what you’ve said before about “i i e e e” being inspired by a Native American boy who came to you in a dream, I feel like it ties in really beautifully with In Times of Dragons, where you have all these mentors and allies coming into the story. But the question is, what is it about “i i e e e” that earns it a place on this list for you?
TORI AMOS: Well, I think it's current, you know? “I know we're dying / And there's no sign of a parachute / In this chapel, little chapel of love / Can't we get a little grace and some elegance? / No, we scream in cathedrals / Why can't it be beautiful? / Why does there gotta be a sacrifice?”
I think the young lad in the dream shook me, metaphorically, into looking at that truth, into seeing things as they were, and – this was at a very different time, in 1997 – it's almost as if he had a vision of the future of the dystopian times that we’re living in now. So I feel that this song in my canon is important for me to remember and for me to lean into her in the now, because I think that she's very present with what's happening, emotionally.
It’s interesting, because the imagery that you talked about in that dream – of driving to these empty towns, arriving too late to stop catastrophe after catastrophe – is so apocalyptic. I guess that was framed as more of a personal vision at the time, but now you see it speaking to something larger about humanity and sacrifice, just as In Times of Dragons does.
Yeah, I think you nailed it. I mean, I think that's what can be somewhat rattling to me. When, as a songwriter, you don't realise at the time that you have the finger on the pulse for the future, because you can't imagine that that future could happen. I couldn't imagine that in 2026 we would be here. I couldn't – I wouldn't – have been able to believe that [recites lyrics from “Stronger Together”] “In menacing times / Stripped of rights / Diabolical crimes / You know all about it / We've been trapped in darkness / But you know all about it / I said purgatory / That's just the start of the story.”
I had no idea we'd be here.
I read somewhere that the boy in your vision was singing “i i e e e” kind of as a comfort thing. But looking back from where we are now, after almost 30 years, do you still see that chant as a comfort thing, or has it morphed into something else?
I would say it's more like a prayer. A grieving. A warning. A death rattle. It's all those many, many things. And yet, here we are, and he's still chanting it, so it's something I have to consider very much to take out on the road, because I think it's one of the songs in the back catalogue that is vital and part of the now, even though it was a warning back then, when I wrote it.
"Shattering Sea" (2011)
BEST FIT: I love that you’ve chosen this song because both this and “Shush” are openers for huge concept pieces that really set the scene. When I interviewed you for Night of Hunters, you talked about the importance of reflecting both personal upheaval and global crisis in a song cycle like these. How do you see those two perspectives in the context of “Shattering Sea”?
TORI AMOS: Well, as you know, Night of Hunters was a modern song cycle based on the work of male composers and variations on that theme. That was the brief from Deutsche Grammophon at the time, which I found absolutely terrifying.
I kind of thought, ‘Oh my god, you're really asking me to do this?” It was [musicologist and record exec] Dr. Alexander Buhr who was asking me to do it, and I just said, “This could be music suicide.” He said, “Yeah, it could be… or not.” So I spent a lot of time with the dead guys, with the dead composers, and I found all of them very helpful. And when I say helpful, they would point me in directions – to study, to be open, to think – and the one thing I had to get right was the narrative.
It was no different than with In Times of Dragons, which is really a narrative, a variation on a song cycle. In both albums, the threads had to be very tightly woven together, because, for instance – and I'll come back to “Shattering Sea” in a minute – with In Times of Dragons, certain information had to be imparted to the listener at certain times. Like, you cannot hear “Song of Sorrow” before I've planted Lugh of the Long Arm in “Strawberry Moon” or you might think, “Surely she’s not singing ‘Song of Sorrow’ for the lizard demon?” But because “Strawberry Moon” comes first, you begin to understand that this woman is having a love affair with this Celtic god in the fifth dimension, which kind of actually happened [laughs].
How so?
Well, the gay witch from Brooklyn [who first appears in the song “Provincetown”] is based on Noah Michelson, the journalist from HuffPost, who would cast and channel Lugh of the Long Arm. And Lugh had been sending me messages since August – August 1st being his feast day, Lughnasadh – so I reached out to him.
Going back to Night of Hunters, which was also having to tell a narrative, the big job was understanding what that narrative was. The difference between these two records is that, for Night of Hunters, I had to write a narrative from scratch and then tie in these male composers, whereas for In Times of Dragons, I'm documenting what's happening in America based on a lot of real people, so it's different in that way.
For Night of Hunters, I chose to tell the story of a couple that was coming over from the New World to the Old World, and that the story was going to take place in Ireland, and the very first thing that needed to happen – which is similar to In Times of Dragons – is that the male figure is threatening the woman. The difference is, on the new record, the man will not allow her to run. She knows too much. She cannot be allowed to escape, whereas on “Shattering Sea” they are combative and things get smashed. I start the song with, “That is not my blood on the bedroom floor,” but it's clearly somebody's blood.
The song I based the music on is Charles-Valentin Alkan’s “Prelude Op. 31, No. 8”, which is subtitled in translation from the original French as “Song of the Madwoman on the Sea-Shore”, and I felt that, in Night of Hunters, where you have this relationship that is falling apart, there is a madness to it. There is a madness that can happen between a couple who have been lovers. Love is such a fine line, and I think we’ve talked about this before. On either side of 12 o’clock there’s love and there’s hate, and it doesn’t take too many ticks on either side of that clock for either one to walk in.
It's not the same with liking someone rather than loving them. If I like somebody, for that relationship to move into hate is quite unusual, for me. I mean, liking someone but not liking their behaviour can happen, but I find that when there is passion, when there is love, it can move into just absolute detest, and it’s so wild how that can happen, you know?
I feel like “Shattering Sea” has a strong connection with In Times of Dragons, too, in terms of it being so elemental. You've got the man as the force of “tide and wave,” and you, the woman in the song, who represents the force of fire. And I mean, your relationship with fire goes so far back, way beyond even Boys of Pele, which was named after Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire. How would you describe your current state of flammability?
[diplomatically] Well, a Dragon Queen, she can breathe fire…
Fair enough, that speaks for itself! So, when you're building all these multi-layered albums –Night of Hunters, American Doll Posse, In Times of Dragons – with all these characters and storylines, what part of the process brings you the most joy?
When it's done [laughs]. Oh my god, it's torture! Writing an album or any kind of work is always torture, but at the same time it’s a shedding, it’s a humbling, because you find things about yourself. On the one hand, those things can give you strength and you can go, “Okay, alright, I can put that in my toolbox,” and then there are other things that I discover about myself where I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I could really have handled that better.”
So, you know, when you're peeling off those skin layers, I feel like there's such a vulnerability to recognising who you are, to recognising who I am and who I would like to be but am not. You know, when I think of some of the beautiful people I know, one of the most beautiful people I've ever met in my whole life, is a singer/songwriter called Paula Cole.
Oh, I've interviewed Paula. She's so lovely!
So lovely. She makes me absolutely look like a fire breathing fucking dragon, because she is just beauty and love. When I'm sitting there with a glass of wine and a fucking spear in my hand, going to fucking battle, next to the illuminating Paula Cole and her compassion and her love, sometimes I'm like, “I'm such a fucking rock and roll bitch.” But hey ho, it is what it is, Alan, you've got to claim what it is that you are.
"Reindeer King" (2017)
BEST FIT: Perhaps there’s some similarity with In Times of Dragons here, too. In “Reindeer King” there’s this idea of restoring someone to themselves – in this case another person, I assume – and that's kind of the same quest that the narrator of the new album goes on. What is it about this theme of returning to a sense of self that keeps you coming back as a songwriter?
TORI AMOS: Well, I personally find that I can lose my way, whether it's philosophically or in owning my strengths. Sometimes there's a side to me that hates confrontation. It just hates it. But in life, as you well know, sometimes we have to ask and answer the tough questions.
The whole “Gotta get you back to you” line in “Reindeer King” is very much about not being on the shadow side of the victim archetype but being more in the role of the enlightened victim. Victim is an archetype that we all can carry. But when we succumb to “This is being done to me” instead of “What is my part in this? What is my part to own?,” what we’re actually saying is that the other person or people involved are not capable of owning their part in it.
So, in a way, it's disrespectful, because it might be that that someone isn’t there yet, at that moment, and we potentially need to hold a space for them in our life. It could be somebody we're in relationship with, whether it’s a friend or a partner, or extended family, whether they're blood family or not. So, I think “Reindeer King” is very much about loving someone, but also about them having to claim their part in this moment that they're having, and I felt John Philip Shenale’s strings arrangement really reflected the deep emotion of that.
[pauses] I don't want to really analyse “Reindeer King” because I feel like it's a whole world. It's a very emotional state, that song, for me.
And it’s one that took quite a long time to come together, right? I think you’ve said before that you started writing it around 2006, for American Doll Posse.
If that's what I said, then that's true [laughs]. I forget things sometimes. But if I said it, then there were seeds for the song that were planted at that time. Similarly, there's a song on this new record, “Flood” that I started around 2009, maybe 2010, so I've been working on it for a long, long time. It was just an instrumental at first, and it’s taken many years and the newest story for me to find a lyric that’s interesting.
When talking about this song in the past, you’ve said the song is about losing things, both personal and environmental. How this sense of loss influence your compositional ideas?
Well, I believe my mother had suffered her stroke by then, so there was a questioning of everything, like, “Why does something so horrendous happen to someone so good?” I never heard Mary raise her voice to someone. I never knew Mary to say a bad thing about a person. I mean, it's amazing that I'm her daughter, because it's just like, how did that happen?
But I think “Reindeer King” has such a deep love in it, for the world and for a person. When I sing about skating all the way from Scandinavia to the moons of Jupiter, I see that really, again, as a moment that was gifted from the Muses, because that's just how I saw it. Skating all the way out to these icy moons out there in the galaxy. That's how deep the love was.
You’ve also said that “Reindeer King” has connections, or “bloodlines,” to earlier songs like “Winter”, and I wondered, what about later songs?
Well, I guess there's an epicness to “Reindeer King”, like there is in “Winter”, and there’s also the ice element. “Song of Sorrow” on the new album doesn’t necessarily have the ice element, but it does have the ancient element. There are references to runes all over “Reindeer King”. I had runes everywhere because I was reading about rune lore and the Vikings at the time. It was a no brainer that those things would make their way into the song.
On “Song of Sorrow”, the ancient element is very much about Lugh of the Long Arm, who sent me a message that said “My spear it is sharp, so your spirit may be soft.” In the song I then go on to talk about this ancient love we had. As my husband said to me, “As long as Lugh doesn’t show up at the kitchen door, I’m fine for you to take some bourbon out of my stash and leave it for him every night. But don’t take the Blanton’s, wife. Give him the Jack, alright? Not the fucking Blanton’s.”
You’ve got to have some boundaries.
Exactly, and I've got to respect those boundaries!
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