Tori Amos - In the Guise of a Redhead

Tori the redhead, the sinner on the cross, the cornflake girl, the goddess of fire (and of rock), the choir girl, the Venusian, the restless traveler, the beekeeper, the American doll. So many masks and trajectories for a career that, for at least a decade, blazed across the firmament of female songwriting. Her impudent freshness, that of an eternal child, her tender and wounded rapture, and her immense talent as a musician stolen away from Classical music all came together in a sequence of magical piano-and-voice ballads that harked straight back to the golden age of Laura Nyro, Carole King and Kate Bush.

In a case of rape, the most painful thing is feeling betrayed. By a friendship, but also by yourself.

(Tori Amos)

What has always left people amazed about Tori Amos is her ability to enchant with the barest of means. It can be a sudden melodic opening – or even just a whisper – that illuminates textures that otherwise seem forbidding and monotone. An explosive emotional force, the result of a personality as instinctive as it is complex and contradictory. Indeed, the redheaded maiden from North Carolina belongs to that breed of defenseless singer-songwriters who cannot separate life from art, and who pour all their anguish into music seeking, depending on the case, release, atonement, consolation, catharsis. So even a rape can become a song: “Erano le cinque del mattino…/ Ero io e una pistola/ e un uomo alle mie spalle…/ E io cantavo ‘Santo Santo’, mentre lui si sbottonava i pantaloni”, she would reveal in "Me And A Gun". The episode really happened in Los Angeles, one evening in 1985: one of her concerts had just ended, and Tori gave a lift in her car to an audience member. A few miles down the road, the man held a gun to her head. He raped her in the back of the car. "In a case of rape," she would later recount, "the most painful thing is feeling betrayed. By a friendship, but also by yourself. I still can't accept that I gave my attacker the chance to vent his hatred for me, for all women." From then on, she would always have difficult relationships with men, until her marriage to her sound engineer, Mark Hawley.

The image of the “sullen girl” – to borrow a phrase from another songwriter (Fiona Apple) who has made fragility her trademark allure – of a girl deeply marked by childhood trauma, undoubtedly helped create a character of great impact, seasoned too with that pinch of sexy brazenness that never hurts, in her videos and live performances. This is how, alongside well-deserved recognition as a musician, a small myth was born, fueled by the fans' obsessive devotion, which even earned her the extravagant title of “Goddess of Rock”.

Playing Beethoven, Dreaming of Led Zeppelin

It's a story of lacerating contrasts, that of the restless Myra Ellen Amos: between religious oppression and sex, morality and transgression, loves and resentments, but also between classical studies and her craving for rock. She was born in Newton, North Carolina on August 22, 1963. At three she could already play piano, at four she was composing her first pieces. "I was a freak kid with a good sense of rhythm," she recalls. At five she became the youngest student ever admitted to the prestigious Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland, where she'd moved with her family. But she would soon abandon it to chase her idols: Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors. "She'd play Beethoven sonatas flawlessly, but then she'd get bored and launch into her own rock songs; I'd call my kids in to listen to her: we were all spellbound," recalls Pat Springer, her piano teacher after the conservatory.

I used to masturbate in my room while my father held prayer meetings downstairs.

(Tori Amos in "Icicle")

The step from child prodigy to rebellious teenager is a short one for little "Tori" (the nickname — meaning "baby bird" in Japanese — was given to her by a friend). Her family breathed a deep, oppressive strain of America: her mother was a prudish half-Cherokee, her father an ultra-conservative Methodist minister, her grandmother a Calvinist and fierce preacher of female virginity. "I used to masturbate in my room while my father held prayer meetings downstairs," she would later recount in "Icicle." Yet no one could have imagined that one day the Reverend Amos would accompany his daughter to sing in Georgetown's gay bars. He would even go so far as to declare, in a fit of paternal pride: "My daughter is a genius, she's the female Mozart of our time." "Yes, because my father has basically turned into a kind of liberal these days," she'd later quip.

The conflict between freedom and religion recurs obsessively throughout the Newton-born songwriter's lyrics. As in "God," where her relationship with the divine takes on a provocatively physical dimension. Or as in "Crucify," where the sense of childhood constraint erupts into a violent j'accuse. And yet Amos has never lost faith in a kind of universal religion: "I believe in a Great Spirit, in a divinity of which Muhammad, Buddha and the Christian God are all a part." It's a quest that also runs through ancient myth: among her favorite readings is "Women in Greek Myth," and she dedicated an entire album to the Hawaiian goddess of fire.

Spirits and ghosts. They are, ultimately, the real protagonists of her ballads. Perhaps they're nothing more than the shadows of her childhood nightmares, of the grim tales by Edgar Allan Poe that her mother read to her at bedtime, when she was just five years old.

Musically, Tori Amos's work is born out of a feverish dialogue between voice and piano, crisscrossing flights that chase and collide with one another until they merge in a kind of magic. Her piano runs are always original, inventive. And her vocal flights, forever soaring an octave higher, swing between whispers and screams, pitched in a childlike register that echoes the legendary voice of Kate Bush. Her relationship with her instrument of choice is intimate, almost physical: "When I touch the keys of the piano I feel the same energy as when I'm in love. It comes from somewhere deep inside me, something stronger than sex." And her signature posture — legs spread, pelvis thrust back — has caused quite a stir, even drawing criticism from the more prudish corners of feminism.

Little Earthquakes

With her extremely long hair, heavy makeup and faux snakeskin boots, Tori Amos made a name for herself playing the clubs of Los Angeles. Paying her dues eventually earned her a deal with Atlantic, for whom she released Y Kant Tori Read (1988) alongside a band featuring Steve Farris (ex-Mr Mister), Matt Sorum (future drummer for Cult and Guns N'Roses), Vinnie Colaiuta (Frank Zappa), Peter White (co-writer for Al Stewart) and Kim Bullard (ex-Poco).

But confusion reigns supreme throughout this messy stylistic bricolage, with Tori sporting a Pat Benatar-style look (not coincidentally, they shared the same producer, Joe Chiccarelli), flailing through brash power-pop ("The Big Picture," "Pirates," "You Go To My Head"), dance-leaning winks ("Cool On Your Island" and "Floating City" echo Madonna's "True Blue" era), and unlikely forays into rap ("Fayth"). Ultimately, only "Fire On The Side," bland as it is, offers the faintest glimmer of what was to come.

A colossal flop, in short, one that Amos herself later disowned, describing it as "Kate Bush and Madonna colliding head-on after eating bad mushrooms" (even though today her fans pay a fortune to get their hands on one of its extremely rare copies).

Burned by the experience, Atlantic temporarily "exiled" Amos to Britain for minor collaborations. To pay the rent back in Los Angeles, she was reduced to shooting a commercial for Kellogg's cereal and taking bit parts in a few TV shows.

Tori, however, wouldn't give up. Together with her producer and boyfriend Eric Rosse, she holed up in the studio and began sketching out a series of songs, played with just her trusty piano, later overdubbed and fleshed out with other instruments.

I crucify myself and nothing I do is good enough for you

I crucify myself every day

I crucify myself and my heart is sick of being

I said my heart is sick of being in chains

("Crucify")

Her real debut comes four years later with Little Earthquakes (1992). The music changes, and it's an instant shock. Despite the stripped-back, spartan dress of the sound, Tori Amos hits straight at the heart, with a handful of intimate, aching ballads that lift the lid on a seething cauldron of feelings, passions and resentments.

It's astonishing how composed the Newton-born songwriter remains as she lays out these wide-open confessions, condensing into a sigh, a melody, a single piano phrase what others couldn't convey with a whole suitcase of stage tricks. This dramatic pulse smoldering under the skin, almost always unexploded, combined with her peculiar sensitivity in recounting small and large female traumas, brings Amos close to the lyrical heights of the great Lisa Germano and the tangled psychological introspection of Joni Mitchell. But the album is also proof of an acrobatic, versatile vocal range, in which Kate Bush's sublime falsetto often resurfaces, though cloaked in an extra veil of sensuality and tenderness.

Myra Ellen's diary of confessions opens on page 1 with the single "Crucify", the song that would introduce her to the world. A bomb planted beneath the piano keys, where what detonates isn't the usual anticlerical streak that fills rock's graveyards, but an almost physical dimension of religiosity, oppressive and yet impossible to give up, which brings to the surface all the constraints and ghosts of a childhood spent in the shadow of her pastor father: “Ogni giorno mi crocefiggo…/ ma niente che io faccia è abbastanza per te/ E il mio cuore è stufo di stare in catene”. Musically, it's a spiritual of intense drama, swept along by the piano's whirling figures and left to rock on almost Oriental melismas (vowels drawn out freely, like Chinese opera). The other shock-confession is "Me And A Gun", a merciless a cappella account of the rape that happened in Los Angeles, which Amos has said she found the strength to write after watching the film "Thelma & Louise".

Then, though, there's Tori the classically trained musician, who chisels out the austere piece "Silent All These Years" and the enchanting "Winter", one of her most memorable ballads: a piano music box, elegant swirls of strings, a siren's song, at once cutting and sweet, building toward a melodic opening so poignant it catches the breath in your throat. In "Girl" and "China" Amos's more straightforwardly pop streak surfaces, one that would find fuller expression in later work, while the driving "The Happy Phantom" lets off unexpected jazzy fizz.

While "Leather" and "Mother" lean, respectively, on bluesy sensuality and Mitchell-style psychological digging, tracks like "Precious Things" — the most "rock" of the bunch, with piano, drums, bass and distorted guitar — and "Tear In Your Hand", with its catchy piano riff, open up new territory for a songwriting approach that, while still being refined, already shows off its full eclecticism. The title track, finally, openly pays tribute to her muse Kate Bush in its vocal parts, even drawing on her ethno-tribal imagery ("The Dreaming"?), amid African percussion, buzzing guitars and voodoo-ritual choruses.

An innovative, bold album brimming with ambition and talent, Little Earthquakes sells a million copies and launches Tori Amos into the pantheon of female songwriting, also putting her at the head of the Lilith Fair caravan that would become the decade's most popular expression of it, at least in the United States. And to think the record had initially been turned down by Atlantic…

That same year, riding the wave of success, the Crucify EP was released, containing four tracks: a "remix" version of Crucify, another track taken from the previous album ("Winter"), and three covers: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana, "Thank You" by Led Zeppelin, and a ravishingly sensual "Angie" by the Rolling Stones.

Tori is by now well aware of her DNA as a refined, mature songwriter. When a TV host asks her to define her music in a few words, she comes up with a singular description: "It's a lot like a mix of hot chili peppers and vanilla yogurt."

God, sometimes you just don't come through

Do you need a woman to look after you

("God")

Pink underneath

So it is that huge anticipation precedes the release of Under The Pink (1994), the album that would definitively establish her on the world stage. The title springs from a joking idea — "Under our clothes we're all pink" — but its content is anything but rosy and carefree.

Tori is now both songwriter and persona at once: her sexy brazenness and her image as a fragile, passionate girl have forged a (post)romantic rock heroine who's impossible to ignore, especially in a musical era desperately in search of icons.

This is how the legend of the "Goddess of rock" is born, a deity with flame-red hair, sensually wrapped around her piano and ready to satisfy the hunger of her ever-growing army of fans. Her most down-to-earth incarnation is the "Cornflake Girl" who gives her name to the album's successful lead single (and video): a pop ballad driven by an overexcited, lopsided, unstoppable piano that counterpoints the chanteuse's daring vocal runs. But even here the advances in production and arrangement are clear: richer, fuller sounds run through the slender patterns traced by the grand Bosendorfer (from now on Amos's true fetish object), in a constant stream of ideas and sonic effects. The skeletal sound of the debut, in other words, doesn't lose its primal charm, but grows richer and takes flight into full-fledged anthems, like "God", a new, delirious invective on religion experienced in a carnal dimension ("God, sometimes you just don't come through/ Do you need a woman to look after you"), amid distorted guitars and syncopated rhythms, or like "Past The Mission", where a sinister piano figure and an almost gospel organ create a tense, solemn mood (in the chorus's refrain, a cameo from friend Trent Reznor).

Amos handles these compositions with the class of a seasoned performer: having emancipated herself from the Bush deity, she renews his fervent eclecticism astride her piano, ranging from pieces of solemn classicism ("Pretty Good Year", "Icicle", "Baker Baker") to disorienting rock narratives ("Space Dog", battered by tribal rhythms), from exercises in refined folk-pop ("Cloud On My Tongue") to the orchestral apotheosis of the closing "Yes Anastasia", a long epic ballad dedicated to the Russian Grand Duchess killed by the Bolsheviks along with her father, mother and sisters.

But while all these songs show Amos's growth as a musician, anyone who fell under the spell of her debut's enchanting siren song will inevitably be captivated by two simple gems hidden at the bottom of this treasure chest: the nursery-rhyme lilt of "Bells For Her", half-whispered over a modified toy piano (her first experiment of this kind, which she would refine further on later albums), and the aching ode of "The Wrong Band", a cabaret number that dissolves into a humble, poignant melodic opening. Less sharply focused, however, is the experiment of "The Waitress", in which Tori tries to inject a few doses of electronics into her sound.

Helping drive the album's success, which would sell over three million copies worldwide, are also its lyrics: deeply personal, direct and vibrant, awash in every shade of the female psyche, once again exorcizing the traumas of her past and the ghosts of a morbid, suffocating religiosity.

If the piano would go on to reclaim a substantial role in much of her songwriting to come, these twelve pink-hued ballads deserve no small share of the credit.

⟦Q1⟧

(Tori Amos)

Two intense, painful years ferry Tori Amos toward the fateful third album.

Boys For Pele (1996), recorded in Ireland, in the Delgany cathedral, bears the scars of her breakup with boyfriend-producer Eric Rosse: "I crossed the river Styx with that album," the American singer-songwriter explains, "it led me to improve my relationship with men." In truth, legend has it that this period also saw the end of her alleged affair with Trent Reznor and her rivalry with Courtney Love, to whom "Professional Widow" is supposedly "affectionately" dedicated. The fact remains that the once-tender cornflake girl had bared her claws, taking aim at every "Judas" in this world, in a mix of vitriolic invective and bitterness veiled by disenchantment.

An unsettling, mysterious atmosphere pervades the record from the very photos accompanying the CD: the cover depicts Tori as a cowgirl, mud-streaked and seated in front of a wooden cabin holding a rifle, with game hanging from the ceiling (an image that would stir the outrage of American animal-rights groups); the booklet is filled with shadows, ghosts and figures of children behind the cabin windows, Amos herself nursing a piglet (!), and an old grand piano in flames, reflected in a puddle.

Named after the Hawaiian goddess of fire, Boys For Pele is her most hermetic work, full of stark, dark songs of forbidding, impenetrable beauty. Across its 70 minutes, though, there also emerges for the first time a flaw that would mar many future productions: a tendency toward a prolixity that often borders on self-indulgence. In short, filler is not in short supply this time, even if it remains minimal compared to what would follow later on.

"Caught A Lite Sneeze" is the single meant to renew the electro-pop appeal of "Cornflake Girl", but it immediately reveals far more complex structures: tumultuous drumming, disjointed harpsichord harmonies (the record's revelation instrument, played almost like an electric guitar) and a thread of melody held together by Amos's daring vocal performance. "Professional Widow" dares even more, unleashing a wild boogie for piano and harpsichord, driven at a gallop by the percussion and sent into glory by the closing gospel section, where only the piano remains to support an increasingly distorted vocal. Even an interlude like "Mr. Zebra" becomes the occasion for a spectacular music-hall number full of trumpets and trombones.

The former classical child prodigy resurfaces behind the Renaissance harpsichord of "Blood Roses", but the connective thread with her earlier records lies once again in the piano ballads, always intense and poignant. The opening "Horses" is a dream locked inside a crystal music box; the wonderful "Hey Jupiter" takes flight on another of her breathtaking melodies, in a slow drip of melancholy and resentment triggered by her lover's indifference in the face of their breakup's trauma; the madrigal "Father Lucifer" conjures a three-voice choir layered on top of itself, with the child Myra Ellen providing counterpoint to herself, amid distorted piano chimes and light touches of trumpet and guitar; "Doughnut Song" repeats the triple-voice experiment, veering toward soul languor; the tender "Muhammed My Friend" unveils a striking piano intro and another provocative lyric on religious themes ("Muhammed, it's time to tell the world that it was a girl back there in Bethlehem"); the suicide-story of "Marianne" is an abyss of sorrow carved out of sparse piano phrases.

In the full grip of a delusion of omnipotence, Amos lets herself get carried away by the urge to overreach, even mixing techno-rock cadences with baroque fugues ("Talula"), gospel-blues flavors, classical-style harpsichords and Celtic bagpipes ("In The Springtime Of His Voodoo"). Until she finds herself alone with her Bösendorfer, murmuring the litany of "Twinkle", which closes the album on a note of (perhaps) rediscovered serenity.

⟦Q2⟧

(Tori Amos)

The Choirgirl

The "Pele tour" that follows is another success, but life has a fresh wound in store for Tori: the loss of the baby she was expecting, in the third month of pregnancy. "You can't go back to being the person you were before you carried life inside you. I swung between rage and grief. It was the seed of my music — it filled me with pain, but, paradoxically, it also gave me the courage to speak about life and its strength," she would later recall while presenting From The Choirgirl Hotel, the album that in 1998 would seal her magical decade. But the trauma would leave its mark, and two songs on the record would bring guilt feelings back to the surface: "She moves like a glacier/ but can't make a baby live" ("Spark"), "Don't judge me so harsh, little one, you've got a playboy mommy" ("Playboy Mommy").

Perhaps precisely to shake herself out of grief and self-pity, the former "girl at the piano" gives her music a new direction, leaning hard on the pedal of rhythm: "I didn't want to be isolated anymore, I wanted to play with other musicians, with guitar, bass, drums. I wanted to use rhythm in a way I never had before." To that end, the album was recorded using a curious technique: Tori at the piano in one room, drummer Matt Chamberlain in another. The two communicated via a monitor but worked in separate spaces. The rest of the instrumentation was added afterward.

An approach like this carried two risks: drowning Tori's sound in a chaotic, disorienting jumble, or giving her musical talent free rein, favoring versatility (and wordiness) over refined songwriting. Fortunately, both dangers were averted thanks to a miraculous balance that would never be replicated on her subsequent records.

Hence the hammering pulse of "Spark" opening a ruthless self-portrait lit up by her usual melodic radiance, the whirling techno of "Raspberry Swirl" for one of the most exhilarating tracks in her entire catalogue, the distorted tribal dance of "Iieee," and then the trip-hop cadences of the sophisticated "Cruel" and the sensual "Liquid Diamonds." These are songs updated to the most cutting-edge, cool sound of the decade's end, yet still charged with that ancestral pathos, that tender childlike defiance that had sparked "Little Earthquakes."

The comforting shadow of Kate Bush still caresses the falsetto of "Black Dove," albeit behind layers of electronics and walls of percussion. The refined piano-cabaret numbers return ("Playboy Mommy"). And her ability to enchant without any tricks is still very much alive: a few piano chimes, the magical breath of violins, a voice that is pure wonder, and a melodic gift with few equals in contemporary female songwriting — that's "Jackie's Strength," dedicated to the legend of Jacqueline Kennedy, and the no less moving "Northern Lad," two of her finest ballads ever.

Tori Amos confirms herself as a musician of the highest caliber even before being a singer-songwriter, and wins hands down the riskiest bet of her career: revolutionizing her sound without in the slightest betraying it. Unfortunately, though, this would also be the last triumph of a career that from here on would grow increasingly tangled, taking a sharp downward turn.

The first signs of confusion arrive a year later with the double album To Venus And Back, a collage of new tracks, b-sides and live performances, recorded at Martian Studio in Cornwall and in various places around the world during the "Plugged '98" tour. The miraculous balance struck at the Choirgirl hotel is now just a memory, and that risk of Tori's "dissociation" from her own music, averted on the previous album, here becomes a sad reality: the sounds, the arrangements, the session musicians take over. Little remains that's personal and original in the work of an Amos who still doesn't shy away from exploring her torments (the self-portrait of "Bliss" and the harrowing "Juarez," a chronicle of a gang rape in the Mexican desert), but she now seems disoriented and, for the first time, uncertain in her songwriting. When she finds herself again, at her piano ("1000 Oceans"), or wrestling with her beloved harpsichord ("Glory Of The 80's"), her talent as a balladeer still shines ("1000 Oceans"), and on the live disc she confirms herself as a performer of real substance, but Tori truly seems to have lost her magic formula.

Paradoxically, the hesitations on the artistic front are counterbalanced by a newfound serenity in her private life: married since 1998 to her sound engineer, Mark Hawley, Tori seems to have overcome the trauma of her miscarriage and is heading toward a happy family life.

"I thought about how some men really hate women, and I wanted to build a kind of bridge between these two universes.

(Tori Amos)

In 2001 Tori Amos returns with Strange Little Girls, a covers album in which she reinterprets, in her own inimitable way, songs by Tom Waits, the Beatles, Eminem, Neil Young, Lou Reed and others. "In Florida," the American singer-songwriter recalled, "I was listening to a lot of male artists on so-called alternative radio, and some of them were singing about really hating women. I thought about what men say about women, and I wanted to build a kind of bridge between these two universes, thinking it was the only way to get inside these men's heads."

Thus twelve female stories were born, which Tori brings to life with passion and sensuality. It is not, however, an entirely successful record, and the predominant feeling it leaves is a longing for new original compositions (not exactly ideal for a covers album).

The new flop prompts Atlantic to give Amos her walking papers, and she moves to Sony/Epic. The final act of a stormy but, all things considered, fortunate partnership with Atlantic will be Tales Of A Librarian (2003), a (not entirely exhaustive) collection of her hits.

The album's protagonist encounters various characters along her way, figures who embody America itself and offer food for thought in a world that has lost its ethical compass.

(Tori Amos)

Journeys in Color

Having closed a crucial chapter of her career, Tori retreats to the studio to record Scarlet's Walk, a concept album conceived while she was pregnant with her daughter Natashya and right after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Partly inspired by her mother's stories about her Cherokee family history and partly by the identity crisis of today's America, it's a novel set to music, an epic and symbolic journey. The protagonist, Scarlet, encounters various characters along her way, figures who "embody America itself and change from stop to stop," Tori Amos explains, "offering food for thought and self-discovery in a world that has lost its ethical compass." From Los Angeles to Alaska, all the way to Little Big Horn (the last outpost of Native civilization) and the Badlands, a gallery of figures takes shape: from the prostitute Amber to the depressive maniac "Carbon," all the way to the fascinating and dangerous "Crazy."

What strikes you immediately is how little room is given to the protagonist of her previous albums: the piano. From the opening tracks, "Amber Waves" and "A Sorta Fairytale," her signature instrument is kept in check so as not to weigh down the limpid melodic line and to let the choruses stand out — never so prominent in an Amos record before. It's a journey, and so musically it has to be "accompanied." From the initial joy of the opening tracks, with the winking swing of "Wednesday," the tone already turns dark in "Strange" and even more so in "Carbon" and "Crazy." As the record proceeds, various cultures and influences come into play. Hence the percussion and rhythms of "Don't Make Me Come To Las Vegas" and "Sweet Sangria." Then come the relaxing pauses of "Your Cloud" and "Pancake," before the dramatic "I Can't See New York," which inevitably bears the mark of the post-9/11 climate. The mood is made all the more painful by the swelling piano that accompanies her voice. A stop in the city that must carry on is necessary. But it is Scarlet's own journey that must carry on too, rather than come to a halt at tragedy.

The journey ends with the birthday of Tori's daughter, and the message of hope that comes with it. A hope also conveyed by the vocal technique, which never indulges in virtuosity but stays direct, almost whispered and melancholic. Attentive to every nuance. And also by the choice of artistic direction. Since 1995's Boys For Pele, very dark colors had characterized all her work. The dark cover of To Venus and Back is a prime example. The cover of Scarlet's Walk, by contrast, is a beautiful, joyful riot of color.

A verbose on the road slog, the album still offers a few worthwhile moments and shows, at the very least, that Amos's ambitions remain intact, eager as she is to break out of the cul de sac she's found herself trapped in. But her quiver is starting to run short of arrows: songs.

A happy wife and finally a mother, Tori Amos looks in splendid form in the photo reportage dedicated to her by a true legend of music photography, Mick Rock. On the artistic side, though, ideas remain scarce and muddled. And the new album, The Beekeeper (2005), is also a disappointment. Yet there was no shortage of reasons to be curious about the former cornflake girl's new project. Starting with the Irish fascination that had taken hold of her, prompting her to buy a Georgian villa in County Cork (her current home, however, is in Cornwall, England) and to collaborate with singer-songwriter Damien Rice, the rising star of the Emerald Isle, fresh off the success of "O". There was also the curiosity of seeing Amos tackle her own personal nostalgia trip, amid gospel choirs, Afro-Cuban percussion and vintage keyboards. And the album's narrative premise itself was intriguing: the story of the atrocities of war filtered through Tori's maternal bond with little Natashya.

The Beekeeper (2005) offers up 19 tracks that run flat, without the slightest spark, drowned in bloated, saccharine arrangements. Tori sings with the brakes on, far from the acrobatic trills that made her famous. Piano and organ weave the basic framework, with sporadic contributions from other instruments, percussion chief among them. Warm hues and hazy timbres dominate, with scattered funky and jazzy flourishes and a vaguely soul-gospel aftertaste. Tori's voice is often double-tracked, though with dubious results, as on the opener "Parasol", which tries in vain to recapture the balance between rhythm and melody that made From The Choirgirl Hotel such a success. On the voodoo-boogaloo of "Hoochie Woman", the former soprano even risks a deep, Chrissie Hynde-style register that doesn't suit her.

The most anticipated moment, the duet with Damien Rice on "The Power Of Orange Knickers", also disappoints, flat and monotone as it is. Amos briefly bares her claws again when she slips into the role of the sensual cat on "Sweet The Sting", with Southern gospel choirs framing an alluring funky-soul groove: it's the only track that might deserve a spot on an ideal "Best Of" of hers. Sony's strategists, however, chose as the single one of the dullest ballads on the record, "Sleep With Butterflies", which clumsily eyes Coldplay. "Jamaica Inn" takes its name from Daphne Du Maurier's novel of the same name, while the ode "Ireland" bears no relation whatsoever to Celtic folk, veering instead toward the most banal easy listening, getting bogged down in a mumbled dirge with "sha-la-la" backing vocals for good measure.

Five American Dolls

Stubbornly determined to carry on with this ill-fated program of self-destructive megalomania, Tori Amos churns out no fewer than twenty-three new songs for a new, hugely ambitious concept album: American Doll Posse (2007). For the occasion, she multiplies herself into five, inventing as many female figures/deities (Isabel/Artemis, Clyde/Persephone, Pip/Athena, Santa/Aphrodite and Tori/Demeter) to set against the grim macho universe embodied by George Bush's theo-con America, which is also served the explicit invective that opens the record ("Yo George").

Needless to say, she bites off more than she can chew: the thread of the "political" discourse soon tangles up, even more so than the wobbly musical structure. But ultimately it's the latter that matters most, and despite the exhausting pile-up of filler, not everything here deserves to be thrown away. Credit must first go to the combative spirit with which Tori assembles this torrential "musical", juggling piano, electric piano, Wurlitzer and harpsichord, and singing all the backing vocals herself. To try to shore up a sound that had by then been on its deathbed, she also chooses to surround herself with a solid band — guitar, bass, drums — lending a more distinctly rock-oriented stamp. Mac Aladdin's guitars, in particular, give energy to the more aggressive tracks, even if the results aren't always happy ones.

Sharp, aggressive tracks like "Bouncing Off Clouds", "Fat Slut" and "Smokey Joe" try to recapture the verve lost since the choirgirl's hotel days. "Code Red" attempts to warm up the mood by leaning on the voice's warmer tones. Elsewhere, though, Tori seems visibly ill at ease, as when she plays at being a rocker, putting on a gruff voice on "Teenage Hustling" (built on an electric wall of guitars) and aping PJ Harvey on "Body And Soul". And the pre-war folkster lost among the arpeggios of "Devils And Gods" also comes across as an actress miscast.

Better, if anything, are the more "theatrical" numbers like "Programmable Soda", a brief pantomime that apes the Beatles complete with tuba and euphonium, "Velvet Revolution", an unpredictable Balkan mazurka with mandolins and ukuleles, and "Mr. Bad Man", which plays the (admittedly rather overused) card of hammy music-hall.

On the ballad front too, Tori marks time ("Roosterspur Bridge", "Almost Rosie"), shining again only in the lyrical sweep of "Digital Ghost" (perhaps the record's true high point) and in the equally airy "Girl Disappearing", carried along by the atmospheric strings arranged and conducted by John Philip Shenale.

Damnably long-winded and pretentious, American Doll Posse comes across as a desperate attempt to break out of an artistic impasse that has by now lasted almost ten years. An attempt as generous as it is messy, but at least a sign of renewed vitality after the flatlined pulse of The Beekeeper.

There is, however, no way to rein in Amos's out-of-control prolificacy in the 2000s. So, after the eighteen tracks of Scarlet's Walk, the nineteen of The Beekeeper and the twenty (plus three) of American Doll Posse, here come another seventeen, plus as many visualettes (accompanying short films directed by Christian Lamb and included on the DVD of the deluxe edition), for Abnormally Attracted To Sin (2009), her tenth full-length album and also her debut for Universal.

This time the "concept" is the definition of "power and success in interpersonal relationships", in a world "turned upside down by the economic crisis", layered onto her usual sexual and religious obsessions. It's a connecting thread that's thin to begin with and inevitably frays over the course of a seventy-three-minute record that still delivers a few lyrical moments worth noting, especially in its female character sketches. Musically, meanwhile, we're once again faced with a grab-bag of styles, punctuated by downtempo electronic beats and Chamberlain's drumming. The arrangements, too, are as cluttered as ever — strings, piano, guitars, electronics — with the voice sometimes emerging muffled, almost held back compared to the epic flights of her golden years.

The opening salvo, though, is truly one of the most convincing since the days of From The Choirgirl Hotel: the Portishead-à-la trip-hop of "Give" is an electric jolt that shakes off years of torpor, with its powerful drumbeat and Amos's vocal acrobatics gliding over a sturdy bed of piano, synths and guitars. The single "Welcome To England" also holds up well, caught between synth-piano interplay and an easily catchy refrain. But already by "Strong Black Vine" things slide into over-the-top aggression, heightened by the strings and drums. And from there on, the listening experience only gets more of a slog...

What pulls these tracks out of anonymity's limbo are the moments when Tori goes searching for new solutions: the musichall of "That Guy," the cabaret of "Mary Jane," and above all the hypnotic soft-jazz of "Lady In Blue," with its gripping final crescendo of piano and electric guitar. Even Tori the balladeer struggles to pull from her hat those melodic wonders that made her famous: the exceptions are the aching "Maybe California," which builds around strings and the drama of a suicidal Californian mother to produce the album's best track, and the title track, buoyed by a lovely Hammond riff and a velvety vocal performance.

Unfortunately, beyond the many filler tracks, there are also some glaring lapses into kitsch: songs like "Not Dying Today," "Police Me" and "500 Miles" probably wouldn't even have made the tracklist of the infamous Y Kant Tori Read.

In the end, simply halving the number of tracks would have been enough to produce an album that, if not memorable, would at least have been decent.

That same year, Amos also plays the "winter album" card, a format that's been particularly in vogue in recent years as a more dignified substitute for the classic disposable Christmas record, as shown too by the recent experiments of Sting and Enya.

Midwinter Graces (ugliest cover of the year, according to Pitchfork) is a well-calibrated product, with its elaborate, baroque arrangements (piano, horns, strings, harpsichord, bells...), its digging up of traditional pieces dating mostly from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, often merging them together to create new compositions to sit alongside songs written specifically for the occasion. Amos does her homework with elegance, whispering and caressing, but ends up sounding more like a grown-up folk singer-songwriter in the mold of Loreena McKennitt than the rebellious rock pianist who once duetted with Trent Reznor and set private confessions to music. In short, Amos is far from reaching the expressive heights of her past, and inevitably the album sounds a bit dull and at times mawkish (complete with a duet with her daughter).

What's salvaged are a few more classical arrangements that don't clumsily chase the chart hit and that occasionally bring back certain "cold" atmospheres, certain lullabies from her early days ("Winter's Carol"). Sure, her sharper, more biting voice is still missing, along with the dramatic tension that used to spring from it and the piano outbursts she once had us accustomed to - but perhaps this simply wasn't the right project to unsheathe those weapons. And yet, alas, after years of disappointments, just one truly bad moment is enough - namely the treatment given to "Harps Of Gold," frighteningly kitsch - to plunge us back into despair and fear that "that" Tori Amos is never coming back.

Ever more polished, sanded down of every rough edge, Tori Amos's music seems to be following, ominously, the same trajectory as her physical appearance - that hair which was once fiery red and unruly curls now turned unnaturally auburn or silk-smooth wigs, that pretty, sexy, impish face now buffed to a shine like a porcelain doll. But beneath the ashes a unique talent's fire still smolders, and if she can find her way back with the right conviction (and restraint), it may yet burn again.

Our language of love

The Battle of Trees

We fought side by side

No one had more

(“Battle Of Trees”)

Having abandoned every chart-pop temptation, on Night Of Hunters, released in 2011 on the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon, Amos builds her songs on a classical framework, with her Bösendorfer finally, once again, front and center - airy and enveloping - and a string quartet, plus assorted woodwinds, as a rich backdrop.

The pieces all consist of variations on well-known classical melodies (Schubert, Chopin, Bach, Satie and Debussy among the many composers selected), and the musical side is the most successful aspect, with elegant, finely chiseled arrangements that create almost one long continuum - a pleasant, if at times numbing, sonic flow in which, however, Amos's new melodies, too slow and shifting this time, almost ungraspable on first listen, end up getting a little lost, diluting their emotional tension (as happens in the nonetheless engaging "Battle Of Trees" and "Star Whisperer," or in the vibrant opening of "Shattering Sea"). That's not the case, though, with the emotional outbursts of "Fearlessness," rightfully among her finest compositions, or other tracks that hold up against her past work, such as the swaying "Nautical Twilight," "The Edge Of The Moon" and the bittersweet "Your Ghost."

Completely out of place, on the other hand, is the decision to let her not-even-teenage daughter sing on no fewer than four tracks: her voice is still too green and childish to suit such a serious-minded project. And yet one of those very songs, the catchy "Job's Coffin" (incidentally the only entirely original one), in which Natashya strikes the pose of a new Adele, boasts one of the album's most graceful melodies.

Night Of Hunters is an album more important than it is beautiful, because behind it there's more craft than instinct, because it perhaps needed a few more jolts, because at times it tips into self-importance and doesn't always deliver truly memorable songs - yet it gives us back an artist who had seemed to have vanished, and whom we now find again, yes, more mature and tamed, but still able, fortunately, to deliver the occasional shiver.

2012 brings Gold Dust, a collection comprising 14 old compositions re-recorded in the studio with the ever-present piano and the help of the Metropole Orchestra. "These songs have changed my life, and I have changed theirs," Tori said, "this is a chance to re-sing some of them from a modern perspective, and to see how they've grown over the years." The selection of tracks is excellent and anything but predictable: an almost complete overview of her career (ranging from 1992's Little Earthquakes all the way to 2009's Midwinter Graces, her penultimate album) that gathers well-known songs (not just ones released as singles) as well as several rarities and b-sides.

One thing, however, is immediately apparent: the vast majority of the tracks here already appeared in an "orchestral" version in their original form. What stands out is just a more mature, more polished vocal delivery (still effective), but however much good will we bring to it, the new arrangements add precisely nothing to what we already know: "Jackie's Strength," "Cloud On My Tongue," "Winter," "Girl Disappearing," the little interlude of "Programmable Soda," that "Silent All These Years" which still sends shivers down the spine, the almost Bollywood-esque "Star Of Wonder," "Marianne" (saved only by a refreshed interlude that makes you jump out of your seat), or "Gold Dust" itself - they all sound practically identical to before. A couple of extra violins and one less drum kit don't make a difference, and let's not even mention the fact that the horn section - right there at hand, and perhaps able to add something new - is kept so firmly in check that it's audible on barely a handful of tracks. In short, whatever new maturity these songs may have achieved in Tori's mind doesn't come across to our ears. They're still beautiful, pure, but beyond the author herself, who can truly grasp their new "meaning"? And above all, who feels the need to?

The reworking therefore works a little better on a track like "Precious Thing", curiously left hanging without the rhythmic outbursts of the original, and on the suite "Yes, Anastasia" which, although cut down to half its length, retains an orchestral texture still traced from the original scores but considerably denser and more dramatic. The most successful piece is probably the new single "Flavor" (from Abnormally Attracted To Sin) which, stripped of the original's pretentious pseudo-electronic rhythm, threads in a string section launched into a spectacular, Bond-ish cinematic flight, over which Tori's voice rises toward the glories of the past. On the other hand, though, there are also fairly disappointing episodes, like "Snow Cherries From France" and "Flying Dutchman", which with all those string carpets in the background end up losing their appeal.

Gold Dust remains a wasted opportunity. It's a record that will be useful at best to her, letting her keep an eye on her creations as they take their first steps toward adulthood, and it might please the tight-knit circle of her most devoted fans, but the doubt over its very reason for existing is a boulder that weighs heavy and at times feels almost like a tease.

With her experience with Deutsche Grammophon concluded, Tori Amos prepares in 2014 to face a make-or-break test after the lukewarm comeback of Night Of Hunters: going back to producing convincing work a full five years after her last album of new material.

Unrepentant Geraldines (2014) is a welcome step in this direction, offering a successful mix of catchy melodies, broken up by inspired flashes of insight and finally free of the bloated arrangements of the previous decade. All of this comes with a renewed naturalness and restraint that had seemed lost for good. Tori is now a woman in her fifties who, perhaps aware of past mistakes, decides to turn back and return to her own origins. But the return is inward even before it is stylistic, aimed more at restoring her personal dialogue with her Bösendorfer than at chasing easy self-indulgence. There's also room for electronic experimentation ("16 Shades Of Blue") and a surprising nod to early Police ("Unrepentant Geraldines"). Either way, the best moments come precisely when Tori is left alone with her Bösendorfer, like the "girl with the piano" of old: "Weatherman", "Selkie" and above all "Oysters" stand out, proving that the red-haired singer-songwriter can still enchant with apparent simplicity, with a bare minimum of ornamentation.

Unrepentant Geraldines, however, is marred by naivety and easily avoidable mistakes that more careful production and editing could have fixed. On a tracklist that is finally kept in check and with a stylistic coherence faithfully pursued, a composition like "Promise" is hard to justify: the banality of the exchange between Tori and her daughter Tash (a guest this time on just one track) is made worse by a genuinely sloppy production job, with plasticky percussion and effects bordering on amateurish. Another clumsy misstep is placing the flimsy, wobbly "Rose Dover" between "Oysters" and the touching closer "Invisible Boy", badly breaking up what could have been an emotional continuum that would have put a perfect seal on the record.

Still, after albums in which it was the tracks worth saving that ended up sidelined, these missteps don't undermine the overall sense of a work that finally has something to say, and above all of a positive trend that is by now unmistakable.

After the musical-theatre detour of "The Light Princess", Tori Amos returns with an album that at first glance seems to fall within the politically and socially engaged vogue that these days animates many artists across the board. Native Invader (2017), the fifteenth album of her career, is indeed driven by that same polemical, protest-fuelled spirit that already ran through American Doll Posse in 2007, at the height of the Bush era. But there's more to it. It's true that Trump's election partly contributed to the birth of an album that wasn't exactly planned but arose spontaneously after a trip to the Smoky Mountains, part of the Appalachian range in the southeastern US, where her family's Cherokee roots also lie, but personal matters played their part too: Tori's mother suffered serious health problems that left her paralyzed. It's a record that is also a form of therapy, then, a way to find relief and escape the storm these hard times have thrown us into.

Fears of a step backward were partly borne out by a rather confusing press release and by the lead single, "Cloud Riders", which opens with a bluesy attack that sounds like a nod to "Strange", and indeed continues like a ballad plucked from the era running from Scarlet's Walk to The Beekeeper, with flashes of guitar counterpoint and a somewhat sluggish rhythmic pace.

The deeper meaning of Native Invader, as Amos herself has admitted, is one of reclaiming her own creative space, by now polluted by the anger unleashed by the world we live in, with a strong thread tied to nature, to the untouched world, as shown by one of the album's emblematic songs, "Up The Creek" (which mentions a "militia of the mind", a phrase that has become a running joke among fans), a track with an unprecedented electropop sound punctuated by the line "Good lord willing and the creek don't rise", a phrase Tori Amos's grandfather often repeated - yes, the one of Native American descent. Opened by a surprising riff and marked by an off-beat electronic pulse equally unexpected by Tori's standards, turning the clock back to the 1998-1999 of From The Choirgirl Hotel and To Venus And Back, with her faithful piano slotting in like a solo in the bridge, "Up The Creek" is an environmentalist manifesto featuring backing vocals from her daughter Natasha.

As in the rest of her catalogue, the lyrics are populated by dark imagery, references to myths and archetypes that have always marked her writing, as she revealed in her autobiography "Piece By Piece". A symbolism that is already evident in the perfect opener "Reindeer King", 7 bewitching minutes of piano, voice and vibrating drone textures, at times restless and unsettling, as minimal as it needs to be and harmonically seductive. The piano also dominates tracks like "Breakaway", "Climb", with a folk flavour and delicate touches of acoustic guitar, and the closing "Mary's Eyes", which we'll come back to later. And while "Up The Creek" is the album's most rhythmically driven episode, elsewhere on the record Amos favours ballads, such as the trio "Wings" (which sounds like it could have come from her output in the Nineties, with hints of calypso), "Broken Arrow" (which brings back the wah wah riff and features some interesting rhythmic flashes in the arrangement of the final coda) and the aforementioned "Cloud Riders", tracks placed between the more minimal opener and "Breakaway". When she isn't favouring just piano and voice, in fact, Tori and the trusted oversight of producer and husband Mark Hawley build up layered soundscapes, adding rather than stripping away. "Wildwood" is another example, awash in reverbed guitars. And then there's "Bang", also heavily layered and highly political.

Native Invader, in essence, gives the impression of offering a summa of her output, musically split between the Nineties (the j'accuse of "Benjamin") and the 2000s (the environmentalist "Bats"). And then comes the closer "Mary's Eyes", which confronts the illness that struck her mother, another kind of native invader, one that comes from within rather than without and that imprisons her: extraordinarily delicate, and the female counterpart to "Winter", an early track dedicated to her father, whose crystalline beauty touches deep chords, complete with nods to the work of her close friend Neil Gaiman. It's an album that is personal and political at once, very direct, as in the bonus track "Russia", which beneath the apparent lightness of piano and voice casts heavy suspicion on the relationship between the White House and Moscow. A record that doesn't revolutionize the compositional style or arrangements Amos has accustomed us to, but bears witness to the courage of an artist who makes no compromises and stays true to her own style.

Tori Amos is Tori Amos and can never be anyone else, nor can anyone else ever be like her: no small achievement for an artist.

After the Christmas EP Christmastide at the end of 2020, a solid effort containing at least a couple of genuinely good tracks, likely proof that at this stage of her career Tori Amos can benefit from such a tightly focused format, Ocean to Ocean was released in 2021

Written during the lockdown caused by the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, it's an album that deals with the theme of detachment and relative survival of it. Compared to "Native Invader", the work feels slightly more inspired, probably also thanks to the return, after 12 years, of longtime collaborators Chamberlain and Evans on drums and bass. The result is a better produced and more carefully crafted work, even if still working with relatively modest means and contained ambition.

The impression at this point is that Tori Amos no longer has the urgency or the courage to fully put herself on the line, for instance by entrusting herself to an outside production that could support her in sifting through the good ideas she can still come up with. Tracks like "Metal Water Wood", "Spies", "Birthday Baby" and the title track are still more than worth noting, but weakened by the filler that still plagues her records. The renewed restraint of recent years has led her to turn out relatively solid albums free of the missteps of the past, even if from an artist like the redhead from Newton one would always hope for some memorable, if risky, spark.

In this scenario, the announcement of In Times Of Dragons in 2026, a titanic seventeen-track concept album weaving together fantasy allegory and socio-political critique, could hardly fail to raise more than a few concerns. The narrative follows the journey of a woman oppressed by a reptilian husband (a figure inspired by the personalities of turbo-capitalism), passing through rebel communities, sacred figures and mythological symbolism in a reflection on authoritarianism, repression and female identity.

The thematic core of the album, however, explores female physical, emotional and spiritual transformation, also taking on a deeply autobiographical quality. Through figures such as Saint Cecilia and Saint Teresa of Ávila, Amos confronts the trauma of menopause and the resulting loss of her vocal range, a subject that also surfaced publicly when she announced her world tour, for which she brought in backing vocalists to support her new vocal limits.

Beyond the initial concerns, the impression one comes away with is unmistakable: this is finally a work of the depth her name deserves. The strength of "In Times Of Dragons" lies above all in the renewed coherence between its themes and its music. Tracks like "Shush", "St Teresa" and "Gasoline Girls" build a theatrical, physical sonic universe, while pieces such as "Song For Sorrow", "Tempest", "Blue Lotus" and the closing "23 Peaks" reach emotional heights unheard of in her output for decades. Far from weakening the record, Tori's new timbre seems to have paradoxically spurred her to push beyond her limits, lending her singing a lower, rougher and more expressive register than usual.

The terrible toll exacted by time could have destroyed any artist; Tori Amos has instead turned it into the driving force behind the most compelling, urgent and important work of her last twenty-five years.

Contributions from Francesco Serini ("Scarlet's Walk") Stefano Fiori ("Midwinter Graces", "Night Of Hunters"), Damiano Pandolfini ("Gold Dust"), Luca Santoro ("Native Invader") and Michele Bordi ("Unrepentant Geraldines", "Christmastide", "Ocean to Ocean" and "In Times Of Dragons")

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