Talking to Tori Amos is a hallucinatory experience. Her everyday speech is as vivid and myth-laced as her lyrics, gliding into fairy-tale imagery and summoning figures as varied as record executives and ancient Celtic gods — all in a voice still touched by a Southern accent despite years living in England.
A former child piano prodigy, Amos has released 18 albums since she introduced her heightened emotional register with 1992’s Little Earthquakes. Long anointed a patron saint of “sad girl” music, her work is just as often epic, furious and funny, sometimes all at once.
Her latest record is a deliberately allegorical one, and in conversation she moves freely between the political and the personal — from the state of the country under Trump to the frank realities of menopause.
Decades into a career built on refusing to be simplified, Amos remains exactly what she has always been: a songwriter who treats candor as craft, and who has never mistaken vulnerability for weakness.