Tori Amos discusses her latest labyrinthine concept album, which delves into sociopolitical myths, Celtic deities, systemic power, and the decline of American democracy. She critiques figures like Donald Trump as symptoms of deeper issues, embodied by her mythological 'Lizard Demons' representing billionaires, congressmen, and CEOs. The album weaves a high-concept narrative featuring witches, deities, and multiversal love affairs, reflecting on power dynamics and societal decay.
, her labyrinthine concept album about sociopolitical myths , Celtic deities, Wiccan intervention, interdimensional love affairs, and the end of American democracy. Nobody needed me when the Obamas were around.
Let’s not kid each other. ” She’s convinced Americans had little interest in her artistry when democracy still felt immutable. A lot has changed in the past ten years. While Donald Trump may be the most visible pilot of our ongoing constitutional tailspin, Amos frames him as exactly that: a symptom, not the source.
She’s more interested in what’s not so obvious—the “Lizard Demons,” her mythological shorthand for systemic power and its human stewards.
“Congressmen, senators,” she says, pointing to the real-life institutions propping up this grotesque era of sociopolitical annihilation, mass surveillance, and post-truth. To quote her 1994 song “Cornflake Girl”: “This is not really happening? You bet your life it is. ”bogeymen, “based on real people affecting our world right now.
” Eventually, Amos grounds them: billionaires, congressmen, CEOs. She knew that, to build this record’s psychological allegory, she needed to first construct a world with unmistakable antagonists.
Then, she filledwith a staggering, high-concept narrative about healers, witches, daughters, Celtic gods, motorcycle gangs, drag queens, fairy-tale bears, and multiversal love affairs with Irish deities. Surrounded by dense symbolism, and labyrinthine phrasing, Amos plays a version of herself who ended up with a tech billionaire instead of her real-life husband Mark Hawley, a rock-and-roll roadie type, choosing luxury because, to document our times, “we have to understand the power behind the throne.
” Similarly, her character’s “daughter” is not her real daughter, Tash, but a fictional estranged child from a previous tryst. the bears in Provincetown, the gasoline girls, Fanny Faudrey, a High Priestess in a New Orleans vampire revue, and “the gays I haven’t been allowed to talk to” —are promised in opener “Shush” and, when Amos finds the bravery to flee, we meet each of them one by one across seventeen songs. Naturally, the album culminates with fictional Tori Amos turning part-dragon and duking it out with her Lizard Demon husband.
On closer “23 Peaks,” she asks the Order of the Dragon to remove her wings. But they tell her that the wings will grow back again and again, each time more painful than the last, until she accepts her transformation.
Amos, ever the detailed and dauntless chronicler of women’s lives, uses pageantry as a prompt for listeners, hoping that audiences will consider their ownAfter reading about archetypes for God, as she has for forty years, Amos had a pull to reach out to Lugh of the Long Arm, an ancient Celtic god from the fifth dimension. She asked Noah Michelson, a writer for theand “gay benevolent witch from Brooklyn,” to help her channel Lugh, who has been sending her messages during every new and full moon.
“‘When you’re making an allegory, this comes with high risks and high rewards,’” she recalls Lugh saying. “‘However, please do not forget about the emotional story and the pain and the betrayal of being human and the love. Never forget about the love, even if it’s love that you don’t understand. Even if it’s love that’s forbidden.
Don’t forget about the love, because that’s your power. That’s the power of humanity. ” She wrote “Song of Sorrow,” “Flood,” and “Pyrite” in his honor, as he became her protector when she “turned into a dragon”“Whether that’s a person questioning their gender, a person deciding they want to have children, me going through menopause, whatever it is. It’s metaphorical for deep, deep change.
”was hard to find, and she’d been warned about the challenge by Diana Summerland, an elderly interpreter of the Divine and of powerful wizards. Amos communicated with Merlin himself through Summerland in July 2025. He said to the singer, “You must humble yourself and ask them to visit you. And they’re not just going to come give you pennies from Heaven.
It’s not going to start raining down on you. You must serve them and see if they are willing to tell you their story, because only the dragons can fight the Lizard Demons. ” The “them” in question is the ancient Order of the Dragon, singular, in a mythical world with multi-dimensional energies.
Amos was calling forth energies from other planes, like Lugh of the Long Arm in the fifth dimension, to deal with what we’re facing in the third dimension. This wasn’t the first time Amos had spoken to Merlin through Summerland, though: “She said to me, in 1990, ‘With these songs you’re writing now, you will create a little earthquake around the world. ’” Amos didn’t have the song “Little Earthquakes” yet, nor had she ever heard the phrase before.
“But I knew, at that moment, I had to call the recordIn 1988, the work Amos did failed commercially. She was a child prodigy caught in the teeth of Eighties synth-pop materialism, and minimized her into a “C-rate Pat Benatar,” though she thinks of herself now as an F-rate Pat Benatar.
“ The more I tell that story, the letters keep going down more and more. I couldn’t be Pat Benatar because I’m Tori. ”in a six-year span.
“What can be really difficult,” she admits, “is discovering the artist that you are. What was happening was, I wanted to have a life as an artist and I thought that I had to fill a certain slot. If you can do rock, pop, jazzAmos’ career began when piano was out of vogue in rock music.
But the piano, which she learned to play by ear at age two before she learned to talk, has always been an atom within her—half partner, half muse—and it’s fantastically played on. The trick, she believes, is you have to surrender to your instrument.
“You have to let it play you,” she shares. “ If you haven’t done the work, then you don’t have the facility in your hands. You surrender to it and just say, ‘Take over. You know, you know better than I do.
’ Hopefully you’ve got a good sound engineer that knows how to fucking mic the fucker. ” Amos’ biggest “hit songs” are about domestic abuse, rape, and female genital mutilation. But, largely, her records have always questioned broader Western catastrophes: patriarchy, war, greed. She calls upon her past self in, but doesn’t reprise her: “I knew a girl who wrote ‘Silent All These Years,’” she sings in “Shush,” recalling thesingle, an anchor of her catalogue.
When Anita Hill accused the U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in 1991, a country of men looked down upon her. Hill said, “I felt that I had to tell the truth. I could not keep silent. ” Amos’ “Silent All These Years” came out three weeks later, on theEP.
“I’d written that months and months and months and months and months before, but I didn’t know that I would be crossing history andstory with that song at that time. I had no idea. This is where the muses align. And he’s still a chief justice.
” The song, in its wicked timeliness, has kept its relevancy—and finds a followup in “Shush,” where Amos’ conjuring of the Trojan princess Cassandra and her curse reads like an allusion to Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. Amos speaks to a “he” throughout “Shush. ” “He” is not simply her Lizard Demon husband but an amalgamation of many menthough she’s reluctant to name names.
“I had to have a propulsion . There had to be something that shakes out of being frozen in my luxurious state of being in a penthouse, or many, and the Hamptonsthat life of luxury that I could have got trapped in.
But it’s seductive: What’s going to shake me out of it? ” Amos adds.
“‘He’ is silencing me, because I know where the bodies are buried. I’m being threatened. Life in a gilded cage, as they say. ” ’s mythology returns to the dark energies in our own dimension on “Ode to Minnesota,” a late inclusion on the album.
Amos had been writing a dance song called “Denmark” about Trump wanting to annex Greenland but, when Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed within seventeen days of each other by Minneapolis ICE agents, she diverted course, invoking the protest songs of Bob Dylan and Sam Cooke .
“Denmark, Greenland… it’s serious, but we were being distracted with that,” she says. “The Minnesotans taught us about bravery, in a way that’s a sea change. What happened in Minnesota could happen anywhere. It wasn’t aa lot of verbiage and verbal threats.
Whereas, in Minnesota, people were dying and that became clear to me. It’s a part of our history, and I needed to place it front and center. ”: the “thrash harpsichord” revenge fantasies, the songs about Mary Magdalene and giving head, her poisoning ratatouille with strychnine. The album, as Emma Madden, is rage delivered “with a barnyard stench.
” But the music, for me, holds an ecstatic reminder: there’s power inside my own mythology, and that alone can vanquish my grief. Onthirty years ago. Now, she is “sitting in a different place at the fire. ” She’s “fifty-nine plus three” now, on a quest to “hold up a mirror to our times,” including taking a beat to chide the “stupid, ass-backwards word-poetry” that is “menopause”: “Men even have to own menopause.
What the fuck? They can still have kids butAmos spins quite the yarn but always recenters her own thoughts in our back and forth. Age plays a central role in her dissection of patriarchy: young women becoming attracted to the society’s older men, for instance. This is where thetitle track comes from, the “scale of dismantling” that’s “raw and written on my body.
” “To keep the population going, power becomes an aphrodisiac,” she claims in a non-sequitur about Sparta. All the young men in this story are dead, so the city’s young women are forced to couple up with its lecherous elders. I ask, “What do you do then? ” Amos waits a hair.
“Turning into a dragon is an option,” she smirks, genuinely. It’s not a bad option, I gesture. She nods.
“I think it’s youronto this planet, admitting that “this is one of the hardest records I’ve ever made. ” Amos pauses.
“I’m going to say something, and it will be controversial and I understand that, but I couldn’t write this until my father died. ” Her father Reverend Dr. Edison McKinley Amos, who died in August 2025 at age ninety-six, was her first manager. He was, as she calls it, “very much a part of the patriarchy. ” Their complicated relationship is well-documented.
He chaperoned her gay bar performances, despite his strict Methodist faith, and eventually became tolerant of gay people. Despite his pragmatism, they saw life very differently.
“Until my father left this plane, this record was not coming. I can’t tell you why, but a shift happened in me. ” She said her goodbyes in a respectful way: making sure he had good end-of-life care as he lost awareness.
“I don’t believe in people suffering,” she airs, quietly. “He passed quietly, so I’m grateful that he didn’t suffer in that way. But until I could say goodbye, have some time to do that, I couldn’t write this record that goes up against the patriarchy until that happened. ”pursuing ideas of injustice fully, even thirty years ago?
” I ask Amos.
“It’s the way the world orbited,” she tells me. “If you think about the last two presidents of the United States and their age and their generation and their culture, how they were brought up… my father was brought up in a similar culture, out of that World War II sort of zeitgeist. ” She’s not saying thatmen that age thought the same way, but they grew up with certain mores and folkways. She’s always been vocal about him.
Thetrack “Professional Widow,” the one everybody thinks is about everybody else, was actually about him, she reminds me. There were rumors that “Professional Widow” was about Courtney Love in particular—it wasn’t, but part of “Shush” is: “Am I just meat? Can I live through this? Can I live through this?
Courtney, thank you. ” Amos says it’s a nod to the Hole frontwoman, though she acknowledges that the two have never known each other.
“But I’m not confused of intelligence,” she confirms. “She was, and is, an intelligent woman. ‘Can I live through this? ’ felt like a personal thing to her, and I’m trying to bring this to the political.
As you said, every day it’s a different world we wake up to. I don’t know the answer to it.
‘Can I live through this? ’ But I had to acknowledge that she said it first, and I wanted to thank her for that thought. ” remark in her 1996 song “Caught a Lite Sneeze”—yet another blatant reference to an artistic peer . Most artists I interview play coy about their sources of inspiration.
They’re too precious about where the muses come from. History has conditioned me to believe that that is the norm. When I ask Amos if these references initially arise from somewhere subconscious, she rejects the notion completely.
“You think I don’t know what I’m doing? I’m 59 plus three. I don’t have time to play these games, Matt. ” Amos, staring down the barrel of her webcam and raising her voice to a holler, offers a word of advice to young artists everywhere: “Be pointed about it!
And don’t be shameful about it. Be shameless. As Lil Kim said, ‘Bitches putting bombs in your Benz, baby. ’ Who are we playing with?
Ourselves? Who are we lying to? My pen is fucking sharp, and I’m sharpening it every day. I didn’t say.
I said my pen. The ink in the ink fucking jar. Let’s not be ashamed about it. Not the ‘Ohhhh, I didn’t know.
’ I said that. Fuck that shit. ” It’s at this point in our conversation that Amos comes fully unglued. Her answers are more off the cuff, more vulgar.
She leans back in her desk chair, thinking, presumably, about Trent Reznor.
“You think I didn’t know what I was doing when I said ‘pretty hate machine’? I was nailing his ass to the ground. Give me a fucking break. He knows it too.
He probably laughed his head off. We were good friends. , and taking song requests at bars taught her a lot about writing music. Eighteen albums in, she’s not doing piano covers anymore.
Instead, she and her husband own “the smallest pub in Britain” called The Cottage Arms.
“We’ll have a drink from time to time,” Amos recalls. “Mark will say, ‘What do you want to listen to tonight? ’” They have a huge library of records. Amos will answer his prompt with “1968,” or “1972,” or “1984” —never a specific artist, though she may have someone like James Taylor or Ricky Lee Jones in mind.
“I will learn something every time. That’s before people were repeating too much. I’m not saying new music doesn’t have something to offer, but I’m saying you get the building blocks when you go back to before there were twelve writers on a fucking song. ”—served as influences too.
In their company, especially on “Gasoline Girls,” she sounds like the Led Zeppelin-obsessed child prodigy she was at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. She sounds like a rock star.
“ If you don’t have a great drummer, man, they’re going to play all over that piano. They’re just going to cover it up. leaves holes. And the bass player better not get all over my left hand or I’m gonna kick his fucking ass. ” When Evans and Amos were tracking “Song of Sorrow” live, he said to her, “That’s one of the best top lines you’ve ever written in your life.
” But it needed a satisfying, epic drum part. As Amos’ piano continued to hammer, Chamberlain stood up from the studio couch and declared, “I have to bring the Celts over the hill. They’re coming, hundreds of them. ” He looked at Amos.
“Are you okay with that? ” he asked her.
“The song can hold it. ” Amos responded, “Bring all the Celts you want, mate. ” So Chamberlain brought a few thousand Celtic warriors over the hill for battle. ’s earliest stages, Tash said to her mother, “Honestly, you’ve got to give some hope.
Come on. As dark as things might seem, we have to. ” She reminded the singer of a quote she’s echoed in press interviews for some ten years now: “Outcreate the destruction. ” But, Amos reveals, those three words have been a mantra shared between them for Tash’s entire life.
“That had a real impact on me,” Amos says. “I thought, okay, I can acknowledge the menacing times. Like Lugh of the Long Arm said, ‘Don’t forget about the love. ’ Sometimes humanity treats love like it’s a flimsy power.
It’s our greatest power, along with procreating and making life. Love is more power than war, but sometimes we don’t see it that way. I think we belittle love, the power of it. ” Love, she argues, is the thing that will have a mother run into the street and risk her life in order to save a child.control is how she reacts.
“Before you even think about it, you have a reaction,” she elaborates. “I react before I think about the consequences of my reaction. ” Age isn’t a prerequisite for this, only patience.
“I can’t control what they’re doing in New York, in London, in Paris, in D.C. , but Icontrol how I respond to it. I can control whether I allow that to bury my heart, whether I allow that to suffocate my heart and my love. ” Losing that is what the Lizard Demons are counting on.
They’re counting on us, Amos agrees, to not have the heart to embrace another human being and say,“Don’t let them smother your dragon fire,” she smiles. , an administrative problem acts as a surrogate for the tragedies and traumas that separate us from optimism. From my twenty-something slant, Tori Amos’ music is a reminder to think about what’s worthwhile, even when a genocide, deportations, international blockades, and ecological crises are asking us to forget.
Maybe Amos’ conceits are dense and erudite, but her “lady pirate ship” pop aberrations blur the line between reality and fable. These fictions are a call to action. In each of them, our dragon fire rises.
Tori Amos Concept Album Sociopolitical Myths Systemic Power American Democracy
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Euphoria Explores Sugar Dating and Arms Dealing in Latest EpisodeThis week's episode of Euphoria delves into Jules's sugar baby career and Rue's unconventional arms dealing business, highlighting themes of wealth, power, and morality.
Read more »
Valley Of Heart’s Delight Explores Emotional Depth Amidst Biting SatireThe latest episode of Valley Of Heart’s Delight features moments of rare vulnerability from its characters, hinting at deeper emotional layers beneath the show’s sharp satire. Anushka expresses genuine belief in her husband’s project, while JoAnne receives a distressing call about Orson’s health. However, the show quickly reverts to its caustic tone, with Martin recalling Anushka’s past insults and JoAnne’s emotional moment being undercut by a comedic twist involving a misplaced stool sample.
Read more »
Apple Explores 20-Inch Foldable iPad, Future UncertainApple is reportedly developing a large foldable iPad with a 20-inch display, but its commercial viability is questionable. The project, a priority for incoming CEO John Ternus, faces challenges in scalability, durability, software optimization, and cost, drawing comparisons to Microsoft's failed Surface Neo.
Read more »
Supreme Court seems inclined to allow police to use geofence warrants to identify criminal suspectsThe case explores how the Fourth Amendment, ratified in 1791, applies in the digital age.
Read more »
Lifestyle contributor David Osmond explores how Balance of Nature focuses on nutritionLifestyle contributor David Osmond returns with Balance of Nature to talk about the foundations of health and nutrition in America. As more people look for ways
Read more »
Tori Amos Is Channeling: PAPER Magazine Interview'To document this time has been probably one of my greatest challenges.'
Read more »