Tori Amos Drops Fierce Truths on Trump, Menopause, and a New Album That’s Fighting Back — Don’t Miss This Power Play!
Ever wonder what it’s like to dive deep into the mind of a music legend who effortlessly blends myth, politics, and personal hard truth into spellbinding art? Talking to Tori Amos isn’t just an interview; it’s like stepping through a portal where fairy tales crash headlong into fierce reality. From a child prodigy to the queen of “sad girl music,” Tori’s latest opus, In Times of Dragons, is no ordinary album—it’s a metamorphosis saga that tackles everything from the excruciating journey through menopause to the brutal fight for democracy in Trump’s America. And if you’re curious how a “Lizard Demon billionaire” fits into all this, buckle up. Because in Tori’s world, dragons aren’t just mythical creatures—they’re symbols of reinvention and raw power. Ready to explore how this artist turns personal pain and political rage into anthems that sting and soothe at once? Trust me, you won’t want to miss a second of this compelling conversation. LEARN MORE
6 min readTalking to Tori Amos is a hallucinatory experience. Her everyday language is as vivid and myth-laced as her songwriting vernacular, with casual glides into fairy-tale imagery and cameos from characters as varied as legendary record executive Ahmet Ertegun and ancient Celtic god Lugh of the Long Arm. She speaks slowly and thoughtfully, still with a hint of a Southern accent despite having lived in England for years, and it’s easy, listening to her, to imagine the songs pouring out—something they’ve been doing for decades now.
Famously a child piano prodigy, Amos has released 18 albums since introducing the world to her heightened emotional register with 1992’s Little Earthquakes. She’s a patron saint of sad girl music, but her work is just as often epic, narrative, furious, or funny, sometimes all at the same time. Her new album, In Times of Dragons, is an allegory-rich song cycle that takes on both the Trump administration and menopause, telling the story of an alternate version of Amos who is married to a “Lizard Demon billionaire” and has lost her way.
“I knew a girl who wrote Silent All These Years,” she sings in the opening track, referencing her shatteringly intimate 1992 single. “Where is she?” Over the course of the album’s 17 lush songs, Amos’s alternate-universe self must flee her husband and escape to the Deep South, aided by “a gay witch who hails from Brooklyn.” (He’s a real person, a friend of Amos’s who works for the Huffington Post.) Along the way, she reconnects with old friends and her daughter, and learns that she’s turning into a dragon queen.
When the album launched, Amos wrote on Instagram that it was “a metaphorical story about the fight for democracy over tyranny,” and it’s clearly about life in Trump’s America, from the invocation of malevolent billionaires to the protest song about Minnesota. But it’s also about feeling the ground shifting under your feet and learning to find agency in the changes.
Recently, Amos sat down with Bazaar to talk about writing music that is at once political and personal.
How did the idea for this epic story come about?
I [felt] that I was being called to document this time. And I had to tell myself, Well, you really need to think through how you’re going to do this. Because we don’t know how it’s going to turn out, number one. There’s a lot at stake. And once the record’s out, we won’t have the answer yet.
Tash, my daughter, who’s just graduated from law school at Catholic University and is in D.C. and studying for the bar, her viewpoint was an influence. She said, “Things are happening from a legal perspective, mom, that make it so that most law students can’t sleep at night.”
So how to tell the story was the big “mirror, mirror on the wall” question. And I was being inundated with information. I just needed to read well-researched pieces about people who have a lot of power right now, but are mostly behind the scenes. That was my interest. It was more the kingmakers than the kings that I was drawn to.
Once I recognized the level of cruelty involved against humanity, that’s when I thought, “Right, sharpen the pencil, let’s go.”
In the story of the album, you’re having a romantic relationship with the leader of the lizard demons. Why make that choice? Is it about implicating yourself?
There’s a side to me that could have made a very different choice in the ’90s. I mean, I did have options. I could have chosen a man with a particular power. I found that sexy at the time. I also understood that those [kind of] men collect things, whether it’s a famous piece of art or a walking piece of a sonic artist on their arm. I understood that I might’ve been an accessory at the time, but there was a side to me that contemplated that lifestyle. I didn’t make that choice in the end, but I had it in me. If people see that as a flaw, whatever.
I think we all have that in us.
Well, I did. So I decided that it was a way to investigate the power structure of a relationship between a man and a woman, and how people can change in a relationship, too. Perhaps he wasn’t tyrannical when she met him, but the power became such that no power is enough.
And I wanted to explore how she’d been cut off from her friends, which we talk about in the record. That can happen in a domestic union: You isolate your partner from everybody else who can give them the warning sign. So once she challenges him in “Shush,” [the opening song on the album,] and he lays the law down, then this is where she has to ask herself: What is she willing to give up?
What do you think is the role of political music?
There are different roles depending on the work. Through the years, there have been people calling out the policymakers and the people making decisions.
I was observing Americans being traumatized. And I felt that this work had to be personal. It became clear to me that I had to unzip my skin and explore my flaws. Tori in the story certainly has flaws, and does as a person here talking to you, but I needed to ratchet that up.
If you live long enough to get the gift of menopause, she is one of the most fascinating teachers and one of the toughest. And I felt that that was a true and real experience that I have been through. To be fair, I’m on the other side of it where I sit right now, at 59 plus three. But I had to really crawl to get out of it. And so that is the metaphor of becoming a dragon.
Amos with her daughter, Natasha “Tash” Hawley, who co-wrote three of the songs on the album
It seems like you’re talking about change in all of its forms on this album. You’re talking about physical change; you’re talking about political change. It’s a metamorphosis album. Is that fair to say?
I would think that’s fair to say. You’re talking about the change of America. Are we going from democracy to tyranny? Are we already there? It covers both. And one thing that I knew needed to happen was a romantic love interest.
One thing that can begin to happen—and can progress until you become the dragon queen and you go, “Okay, I’m a chill hottie and I’m going to get my legs out, because they’re kind of still hot”—is the time frame of feeling invisible, even to yourself. Walking down a street and feeling really invisible, because we worship youth and don’t necessarily worship the wise women that sit around the fire, that have the experience and the wisdom, the way we do with the men.
Think of the men in my industry, some my age, some a bit older. Their experience is an aphrodisiac, and there are a lot of young women and men that are attracted to them, whereas wisdom in women has not been an aphrodisiac yet. And then that becomes, oh, that becomes like a beautiful crystal. That becomes like a fine wine, where it’s desired in a different way that you might desire somebody in their 20s and 30s.
But if you look comparatively at the men in my industry, it’s very different than, say, the movie industry, because in the movie industry they need women of a certain age to be cast to play head of MI5. You can’t be 35 and do that. Whereas in my industry, they’re trying to put us out to pasture. They really are.
I think a lot of women right now are looking for public figures who are talking about the experience of menopause.
I recognize it might not be comfortable talking about it for everyone, but it seemed to be at the core of my challenges. At a certain point I just couldn’t get away from it.
And so some people write the divorce record, or the going-through-a-serious-illness record, but this needed to be what it became, which is transformational, as you say, with a sometimes brutal reckoning.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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