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In 1992, American singer-songwriter Tori Amos was applying a defibrillator to piano-led rock with her uncompromising debut album Little Earthquakes. Her catalogue has mixed sometimes harrowing personal experience with cultural commentary channelled through art-pop chops and progressive arrangements, ultimately making her one of the most imaginative and thought-provoking artists around.
Today, Amos is in her Cornwall studio rehearsing for a huge European tour, and reflecting on the making of In Times Of Dragons. The two-disc album is her second concept record, influenced by current political events.
“This was a task and a calling,” Amos says. “The writing was a mix of delight and torture. There’s so much stitching you have to do on the narrative side. I had to go back and rewrite verses, get the story in, but not lose the emotion.”
What is In Times Of Dragons about?
I’m documenting what’s going on in America at this time, through an allegory story. My character, Tori, is me, but in the story I’m married to a billionaire who’s changed over the years and is the power behind the presidency in the United States. He’s a Lizard Demon, based on an amalgamation of very powerful people. The record starts with Shush, where Tori’s under threat – if she doesn’t agree with his beliefs and where he stands, then she has no choice but to flee for her life. So that’s what she does, heading to the Deep South.
In doing so, Tori meets a cast of characters. Are these people real, or parts of you?
Sure. The Gay Witch from Brooklyn exists. He’s one of my dear friends, a journalist and a benevolent witch who’s been casting for years. I sent him a message at the end of July [last year] to reach out to Lugh of the Long Arm, the Celtic god. I felt like I needed Lugh’s protection if I were going up against these real forces that want to create a feudal system in our world, taking us back hundreds of years. My character, though, is turning into a dragon. She realises that she has to question all parts of her and go through changes.
Your daughter Tash features on the track Stronger Together. Is she following in mum’s footsteps?
She’s in law school, graduating this year and going into criminal law. She wants to get the bad guys. But she loves to sing, and she co-wrote three of the songs on the record with me: Stronger Together, Veins and Strawberry Moon. In the story she plays The Daughter. There’s been a breach in the relationship, but we reconnect as I’m making my way to New Orleans and to meet the High Priestess there.
A concept album is a good vehicle for social commentary. Are you nervous about piping up, given how sensitive Trump is?
Well, we’ll see what Gulag I get thrown in. The American democracy experiment is completely on the line; my daughter says they talk about it every day in school. We are in a constitutional crisis. I had to look that reality in the eye and then address it in the safest way.
Ode To Minnesota is a show of solidarity to oppressed people. When did you write that?
Near the very end, I was working on a song called Denmark, but this came ploughing through and just took over my every cell. What happened in Minnesota with ICE [the disastrous occupation of the state by agitable US immigration enforcement] is a sea change culturally. America needed to wake up – unfortunately it took this to do it, a tragedy. The people of Minnesota showed us a bravery that maybe we didn’t know we had in ourselves.
You performed Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ in the BBC Radio Two Piano Room in February. Has that always been an important song for you?
No, but Matt Chamberlain, who played drums on this record, toured with Dylan pre-pandemic. He spoke about Dylan’s dedication to the work. With Radio Two, you pick a song to cover that you’ve not performed before. I’ve done a lot of covers, so I started digging, and Dylan was on my mind. The line ‘Senators, congressmen, please heed the call/Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall’ felt as relevant and poignant now as it was in the sixties when he wrote it.
Your covers album of songs written by male artists, Strange Little Girls (2001), has just been reissued. It includes the most unusual, disturbing cover of Slayer’s Raining Blood. Why did you choose that?
Covering that was a message for the patriarchy, especially back in 2001. My concern for women then, and now, was having so few freedoms, so few rights, and being controlled by a type of poisonous state. When I heard Raining Blood I had a vision of this huge vagina in the sky that was dripping blood everywhere, like the elements were rising up to combat this force of malevolent patriarchal force. [Slayer] sent me a fabulous box of T-shirts for that. They were so lovely about it [laughs].
Is the music industry a better space for women now?
Because of social media, yes. Before, gatekeepers made it difficult to get to the public. Radio wasn’t necessarily my best friend, neither was MTV. I reached people through the press and through touring. But there were journalists that wanted to talk, and not about fluff. They wanted to talk about things like the inequalities that were happening to female artists being put out to pasture once they were thirty-five years old.
There’s a clip on social media of you playing live and you tell your audience: “I love you, but I don’t want to be twenty-five… When you’re fifty you’ll understand what fire is.”
With menopause you have to adapt or the suffering can be great. Men age and, especially if they have power, that can be an aphrodisiac. Women who have experience and hold the fire of that, that becomes an aphrodisiac. I’m finding being older, having that experience is pretty hot. Women who know their own mind are hot. But I had quite a journey to finding that out.
In Times Of Dragons is out now via Fontana.
