I’ve talked to Tori Amos enough times now that I no longer blink when the conversation drifts to witches, demons, fairies or the slow-motion collapse of democracy — often within the same sentence. Her 18th album, “In Times of Dragons,” is no exception to how her mind meanders through her own particular cosmology: a record where menopause becomes a dragon, an alternate version of her life becomes a confession and a gay man from Brooklyn exists as a witch.
There’s a “lizard demon” on this album — Amos’s amalgamation of several real, powerful men, built from information offered to her by political journalists in her orbit. There are bears, from Provincetown, one of whom texted her a photo the night before we spoke. And there’s Amos doing what she’s always done better than almost anyone: taking in everything — letters given to her by strangers on a book tour, hot flashes, tyranny, queer history, her own near-misses with a different kind of life — and turning it into something only she could have written.
We got into all of it: the imagined version of Tori who might have chosen to be “yacht rock dangerous,” why Provincetown earned its own song, microdosing mushrooms with someone who “has her scales out,” and why she finally felt called to document this moment instead of escaping into it.
For Amos, the answer to the moment’s cruelty is surprisingly simple. It’s love. “Why would you even put your head above the parapet unless it’s for love?” she asks.
The album feels healing, and “23 Peaks” left me feeling very emotional.
This one was a tough one to wrangle. There were times when it was challenging on how to move forward. I knew we needed to get to “23 Peaks,” but how to get there? There were endless possibilities, so it was just drilling down on weaving it very tight.
Are you talking about the process, or are you talking about mentally?
Well, maybe both are involved, because the process was a lot of listening to the team around me. And I’d just come off the book tour, where I’d seen hundreds of people in March of 2025 that had so many concerns at the time and were voicing those concerns. They would leave letters with me, because, you know, you don’t have a lot of time in a book signing line, right? But what I was hearing about at the time was [everything from] DOGE, to the fires, to people just dealing with trauma. Their concern of tyranny, which was a valid concern, of course, at the time.
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Would you say that you’re like a sponge? You just seem to take everything that people give to you, and it comes out through a musical catharsis of sorts.
Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. The strongest thing a songwriter and musician can do is listen. Once you have the skill set, then it comes down to really listening intently to information and perspectives coming in, and I did have people who have their ear to the ground with different subjects. Some are very politically driven, some are more culturally driven and some of those cross certain issues of rights, for women, for the LGBTQ+ community, for immigrants.
Writing something that would document our time now and yet personalize it — to you, me, people who are still having to deal with their lives. How do we live through this? Create through this? And not completely freeze through this? And become debilitated? That was something I was seeing, that people didn’t necessarily know how to respond in their art. And, honestly, I believe people are called in different ways. Not everybody is called to address or document a traumatizing time. Sometimes they’re being called to give us levity.
You obviously seem to feel a responsibility to address it. Why?
Right now, yeah. Nobody really needed me during the Obama years. I created work that was more personal. I still stand by that work. “Night of Hunters” was, well, answering [music label] Deutsche Grammophon’s challenge for a modern song cycle, so that was a narrative as well but not based on documenting our time. Then, in 2014, when “Unrepentant Geraldines” came out, I had just turned 50. So, 50 is sort of a moniker. You’re past midlife, if you’re lucky to live enough to 100, or unlucky enough to live to 100. [Laughs.] That record was more of a personal record and then “Native Invader” was very much about taking that road trip down South. The gauge that people had in the spring of 2016 wasn’t far off from what we were seeing on bumper stickers going through the South. There was a whole other — oh, what do you call it? Perspective. One that those of us in some of the bigger cities were not seeing, and when I saw that, the wake-up call came, and I recognized, “Oh dear. There is a whole political tsunami coming in here.”
On this album, you imagine a version of your life where you made different choices. What did that alternate version of yourself allow you to explore that the real Tori Amos couldn’t?
Well, look, let’s be honest with each other: I did have options in the ’90s. I had all kinds of options, for whatever reason, but I did. Not all were rock ’n’ roll-based, whether it was roadies or artists. There were others. Whether I would have been an accessory to them and their Hamptons lifestyle and their yachts and all that, it’s possible. There can be a very trophy mentality and I did get a whiff of that in the mid-’90s, that sort of possession of an artist. I kind of considered it. I didn’t date; it’s not like that. You know, you meet people, they’re acquaintances, but there’s nothing to talk about because there’s nothing I can contribute to finance. [Laughs.] There’s nothing that I understand about that world. And very few really understood the creative process and muses and fairies. During a conversation [with me], the eyes would start to go a little bit darty; they’re looking around, and it’s like, “Oh my god, they need a safe word.” [Laughs.]
I can only imagine how many people think that you’ve actually had an edible, but no.
[Laughs.] I know. And no, no, no. I mean, I like to microdose mushrooms, but only with a mushroom aficionado who’s got their scales out and she knows what she’s doing. But it’s not like in the ’90s, where I would dream of dancing elephants and flying pigs, which ended up in “Girl.”
But there are witches on “In Times of Dragons,” including the “gay witch from Brooklyn,” which is HuffPost director Noah Michelson. He shows up on “Provincetown,” along with bears. Why did those characters become the people capable of seeing through this illusion when so many others couldn’t?
OK, so everything is based on truth. The only suspended question parallel to the Tori world is that I married an amalgamation of real men that I’m writing about. So, the lizard demon is based on an amalgamation of several men that are alive today, mostly all behind the scenes, pretty much, that people that are very informed about that world were making sure that I was getting information about well before this time last year. It was streams of information, and I am not denigrating this. I don’t mean a subreddit. I don’t mean they’re getting their info. Not that there isn’t information on a subreddit that isn’t valid. OK, I’m very careful, don’t worry about me going on Reddit. If you’re me, you really shouldn’t be going on a subreddit. [Laughs.] I know this, and I want the subreddits to know they’re safe. It’s like, “Subreddits, you better talk about me when my ass is gone! You better!” Or I’m not doing something right.
And I don’t want to digress down that rabbit hole. So, I was getting information from proper political journalists that these people were sending me. Not just notions, right? Not just opinion-spouting stuff. But well-researched and quotes, so the move that became clear for me to make was to base everybody on pretty much real people. It might be a variation on the theme, so the High Priestess is a variation on the theme of a different high priestess that I know.
How about the bears?
The bears are real. Oh, yeah, they’re real. I just got a picture from two of them from P-town last night.
Do you vacation there often?
I don’t. I would love to go.
If you don’t really have a relationship with Provincetown, how did that song come to you?
I know so many people who do have a relationship with it. And John Evans, the bass player I work with, grew up on the Cape and we’ve worked together for 28 years, and he’s talked to me in depth about Provincetown. He has a different perspective as a musician that plays there and is not queer. Identifies, I guess, as whatever you call them… hetero.
Whatever you call them!
[Laughs.] Cavemen. But he has a very deep tie to Provincetown and its long history. So I had been hearing about that, and again, the premise being, I had to stay as close to Tori, my reality, as I possibly could. Not all singer-songwriters that I know would make this kind of luxurious, salacious choice, but there is a side to me that’s a little bit… I don’t know. Yacht rock dangerous. You know, a pool boy serving me a really good rum neat with a side of ice, but it’s about the ice tong that I’m interested in. Like, what is it encrusted with? And is it a scallop with an emerald? I don’t know if this would have been like a study, where I would have lived this life and written two records about it and then broken up and had a divorce and then ended up where I ended up anyway, with a rock ’n’ roll somebody. I could have seen myself doing an investigation of this other type of man. Because, look, I adore men. I mean, some I find really terrifying and evil.
Me too, and we should.
Yeah, and we should. I feel a bit like a mad scientist who wants to put them under a microscope.
It could be dark and dangerous underneath.
Yeah, but you know I like dark and dangerous.
How has your understanding of what a song can do for someone changed over time?
Well, this record really pulled me out of some worrying stuff that I was going through — health issues — and that’s kind of the dragon metaphor. My truth was coming out of menopause and dealing with that and the physical challenges that come with that. And, look, as I’ve told the gals, lovingly, if you make it to this age, if you make it this far, you will experience the motherfucking load of menopause, which is a tough teacher. Harsh. So I guess I was recognizing what the songs were doing for me. How they were giving me, as Lugh [the Celtic god central to the album] says, a sharpened spear to go in there. But he would keep reminding me as well as dealing with documenting the issues of the time, “Why are you fighting if not for the love, the love, the love, the love?” Whoever those are that you love. Or have yet to love. The idea of: Why would you even put your head above the parapet unless it’s for love? Recognizing that woke me the fuck up out of my oom, ouch, my C4, L4, whatever we all deal with as we get older, and you twist like an octopus for 35 years at the piano in high heels. I mean, come on! Something’s gonna happen back there.
But when you ask about the songs, I experienced myself having to wake up. Them pushing me to see maybe past lives, choices, sides to myself that I needed to face. And then release. Because unless we face them, those shadow parts of self, they can begin to, even unknowingly, become self-destructive.