Backstage at Amsterdam’s grand Royal Theatre Carré, hands clasped, dress glam black, hair fire-orange, jewellery a-sparkle, Tori Amos is talking me through her survival routines.
Firstly, on flights. “Especially in the States”, the American singer-songwriter-pianist “really downplays” her 35-year career, 12 million album sales and witchy-seer-poetess charisma. She does that by disguising in “baseball cap and Lululemon. You’re in first-class, and some wealthy guy from the Hamptons is sitting next to me going, ‘So, what do you do?’ I say something like, ‘Well, I’m a very religious, well-looked-after housewife.’ No more chat!” she beams, clapping her hands together. “And then if they ask me my name, I’ll say Sally.”
Secondly, on tour. “My main meal is done [at this point in the day], and I won’t properly eat again until after the show. I’ll have a little broth and maybe a couple pieces of protein. I keep it light, because the show is so demanding,” she says as we talk 17 days and 10 concerts into a tour – her biggest in Europe in a decade – that stretches through America and most of summer.
This one-time child prodigy musician who “turned pro at 13” in the hotel piano bars of Washington DC, and who playfully prefers to couch her age as “59-plus-three”, admits that “it was easier to recover the muscles and everything 20 years ago. People ask me, ‘Do you do yoga?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, I lift my Bordeaux wine glass to my lips after a long show.’”
Mindfully?
“Mindfully!” she exclaims, laughing. “So, yeah, I carry a cellar on the road. But I’d like to think it’s civilised.”
As we speak on a sunny Saturday, the release of Amos’s new album, her 18th, is still a week away. At this point in the tour she’s only performing the two songs that have been trailed as singles from In Times of Dragons. That’s because “I want the record to be heard as it was done. And it’s a journey record. It’s a narrative.” And what a narrative. The menagerie of cute toy dragons – gifts from her typically adoring fans – clustered on a dressing table is as light as the world of In Times of Dragons gets.
Amos may have lived in the UK for more than half her life, the last quarter-century-plus in Cornwall with her British sound-engineer husband, but over this searing song-cycle she turns her withering, penetrative gaze on her homeland. This, though, is no route-one skewering of the America of Trump, broligarchs and Project 2025.
Her takedown is allegorical and phantasmagorical, the songs’ interconnected lyrics telling the fable of a fictionalised Amos fleeing a billionaire husband. He’s the spouse she calls Lizard Demon King, and he’s a member of a shadowy cabal of tyrannical puppeteers out to replace democracy with dictatorship. This “Tori” must battle across the United States, meeting characters such as the lesbian biker gang portrayed in “Gasoline Girls”, gradually transforming herself into the scaly, fire-breathing creature demanded by this fight for the soul of America. Got all that?
As the North Carolina-born Amos announces, in that singular voice, in the first lines on the album’s Southern Gothic opener “Shush”: “Southern Girls know what it means / when the patriarchy menacingly says / ‘You shush yourself down now’ / ‘You put a finger to those beautiful lips’ / ‘We both know what they’re good for, don’t we?’”
Here be dragons, then. And here be a thrilling, bold and bonkers concept album that will delight her ardent fanbase and that doesn’t stint on the fierce, charged melodies that helped make Amos’s name with 1992’s landmark album Little Earthquakes.
The realisation that she needed to grasp the thistle of what she believes is an existential threat to the fabric of America in this, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, came early last year. Amos was at her other home, in Florida, watching the presidential swearing-in of the state’s most (in)famous resident.
“I tried to get my head around: how am I going to document this time? I’m not a political journalist. And nobody likes a musician-preacher, unless you have a particular skillset for that, unless you’re a real protest singer-songwriter. That isn’t my style. Usually, mine is to tell a story with character and to get you emotionally involved, more than just politically involved.”
Her 25-year-old daughter, too, was in her ear. Tash, who’s co-written three songs on the album, is finishing her legal studies in DC and about to join a “progressive” District Attorney’s office (“I’d rather not say the city”). She’s “smitten”, says her mum, with criminal law. “She was shaking me awake and saying, ‘You cannot sleep through this. And you can’t stand on the sidelines, Mom, not on this one. Let’s be honest’ – and we agreed on this! – ‘nobody needed you during the Obama years. You still made records. Nobody needed ’em. Now, we need it.’”
Duly fired-up, Amos decided she had to make her lyrical response personal.
“I had to be as close to my real life as I could,” says this Methodist preacher’s daughter, admitting that “there is a side to me that, in the 90s, could have veered a different path after the success of some of the records, and married one of those [rich] guys. Some of them are charming – on the outside. It’s not like I had to go down the rock ‘n’ roll roadie route. That wasn’t, Craig,” she adds, fixing me with a leading look, “the only avenue open to me at the time.”
Equally, she insists that the characters she’s created are “all real. They’re based on different people. The Lizard Demon King is an amalgamation of a few very powerful men behind the scenes.”
One of those appears to be PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. In “Shush” she quotes a line he wrote in a 2009 essay: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
“He and several others, yeah,” Amos replies. “I don’t name ’em. You did. OK? I never name them.”
Still, there is a rare moment of ripped-from-the-headlines directness in charged piano ballad “Ode to Minnesota”, in which she calls out the activities of the federal agents who shot and killed two protestors in Minneapolis earlier this year (“ICE breathes in fire’s wind”).
“Yes,” she agrees. “It was a sea change. At the time, I was working on a song called ‘Denmark’. And I got a message, a picture from the muses,” she says of the figures she sincerely believes shadow and inspire her. “They’re going, ‘You’re being distracted. Look at ICE. Look at Minnesota. This is what you need to look at.’ And that turned out to be true.”
More broadly, she views the actions of those federally mandated boot-boys as symptomatic of Trump’s America. “Seeing this cruelty – that’s the thing that stays with me. It’s not just the authoritarianism, but the tyrannical side that seems to have an appetite for cruelty and pain. There’s a sadistic element. That’s what started to drive the writing, that I put all in his character, the man that I chose to be with.”
The man real-life Tori Amos actually chose to be with, Mark Hawley, is chill about all this dark fantasising. He has to be, not least as her “rock ‘n’ roll roadie” is her live sound engineer, so he’s experiencing these new songs every night on tour.
A few hours later in the 1,600-capacity Royal Theater Carré, Hawley’s berth at the mixing desk is right beneath my seat. I watch him artfully slide the sliders and twiddle the knobs as Amos – seated, side-saddle, between her trusty Bösendorfer piano and a Yamaha Montage keyboard, and backed by three sister-siren backing singers, a drummer and a multi-instrumentalist bassist – conjures 110 magical minutes of jazz-pop melodrama. The sell-out crowd inhale this in hushed reverence. Then, the minute the main set ends, hordes of the hitherto scrupulously seated Amsterdammers rush to the lip of the stage to bend the knee before their queen’s encore.
Before seeing that, though, I’d wondered: outside of performing for her ticket-buying people, how much shame or embarrassment does Tori Amos currently feel as a liberal American out in the world?
“It depends on the room I’m in,” she replies. “The one thing that the Brits are great at is self-deprecation. And having been here [so long], I’ve watched you all and learned that sometimes that alleviates a tone. Sometimes I just look and say, ‘I have to apologise before you hear my accent…’”
Amos lowers her eyes, as if in embarrassed confessional. “I’m like, ‘I got nothing to do with it…’” Luckily, as devastating, fire-breathing correctives go, In Times of Dragons does all the talking.
‘In Times of Dragons’ is out now