Tori Amos’ muses always brought mystical spark to her music, but now they’ve become realists

It’s been 33 years since her breakthrough album, “Little Earthquakes,” catapulted Tori Amos to stardom. Back then, Amos was unlike anyone else on MTV — beautiful, yes, delicate, clearly, but unquestionably defiant as well. Now, at 61, she’s still one of a kind, but with new challenges. 

Amos is frank about maturing in the music industry, specifically when it comes to the rigors and shrinking opportunities for women that come with age. When we met, Amos recalled a recent conversation she had with a music executive about touring that sums it up well. He said to her, “If we’re not getting demand for postmenopausal women, but we are for men, we meet the demand and supply it.” She paused and looked at me straight on. “I just thought, OK, this is a battle worth fighting.” 

The eight-time Grammy Award nominee doesn’t take the opinions of record executives as the last word. When she needs counsel, after all, she’s got the muses – a collective of feminine voices who’ve been talking to her and guiding her since before she can remember. And the muses are eternal. 

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The muses are also pragmatic, Amos pointed out. “I’m a realist. Who says realists can’t have an entourage of fairies?” They’re with Amos as she plans for her future tours — “designing the show, designing the ranges.” And, Amos added, “maybe bringing in background singers to give that support.”

On her last tour, Amos broke a toe and a leg and cracked a rib. “It’s not necessarily the playing that does it,” she explained. “It’s the walking in heels, and something unravels and I trip and smash an ankle. I play pretty full-on.” 

Tori Amos performs at Teatro Arcimboldi on April 13, 2023 in Milan, Italy. (Sergione Infuso/Corbis via Getty Images)

That’s an understatement to anyone who’s ever watched Amos live. She toggles adeptly between her Bösendorfer grand piano — which she lovingly refers to as “Bosey” — and other keyboard instruments like the harpsichord, clavichord, Hammond organ and Fender Rhodes, singing intense vocals in her unmistakable mezzo-soprano voice, and all while mystically connecting with the emotional energy of the crowd. So when she considered what touring and playing live will look like going forward, Amos drew in a thoughtful breath. 

“This is the big question,” she said. “The big one.”

She’s an artist now grappling with the challenges of playing “full on” in a way that accommodates the vicissitudes of aging and the demands of critics and fans who seem to take offense when a female artist is no longer 25, the ones complaining on Reddit fan forums that she’s “changed” from who she was 30 years ago.

Despite her recent history of broken bones, Amos was nevertheless gamely sporting bright yellow stilettos in the Salon studio the day we chatted, as she navigated our obstacle course of cords and rugs. She was on a different — and one hopes less strenuous — kind of tour. Amos, who lives with her husband in Cornwall, was in New York to kick off a series of readings stateside for her first children’s book. 

“Tori and the Muses” is a tale of a piano-playing little girl named Tori who finds inspiration and magic from her spirit world friends. It’s a tender narrative that feels particularly apt during these grim days. She also recently released a surprise album inspired by it. “It’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever been a part of,” her editor Francesco Sedita told me. 

“Tori and the Muses” book interior art. (Tori Amos/Pengiun Workshop)

Like the Tori of the book, Amos has been listening to her muses her whole life. “They’ve been there for me since before I can remember,” she said, “guiding with inspiration.” The muses helped lead her to the prestigious Peabody Institute in Baltimore, where she became its youngest pupil at the age of five. Then, with the help of her Methodist minister father, the muses steered her to playing in nightclubs by the time she was a young teenager. 

But the path to success wasn’t straightforward. 

Her 1988 studio debut “Y Kant Tori Read,” featuring an unrecognizably dolled-up and big-haired Amos, was a critical and commercial flop. “I stopped listening to the muses,” she said, reflecting back. “I kind of ditched them. I started listening to what A&R or the record labels felt they had slots for. I was called a third-rate Pat Benatar. I was probably a fifth-rate Pat Benatar.” 

So she went back to the muses. “The failure became a gift,” Amos said. She washed the Aqua Net from her crimson locks, took off the bustier and returned to her piano. “I began to realize, it’s OK to look in the mirror and say, ‘I want my self-respect as a musician more than anything else, and I will be true to the music,’” she said. Four years later, Amos unleashed “Little Earthquakes,” a masterwork crammed with some of her most arresting songs, including “Crucify” and “Winter.”

Singer and composer Tori Amos shot in Los Angeles, California for her “Y Kant Tori Read” album in 1988. (Aaron Rapoport/Corbis via Getty Images)That revamped Tori was entirely unbothered about catering to the male gaze. I can’t tell you how radical that was at the time. “You look at her and know immediately, oh, this girl is different,” music journalist and author Rob Tannenbaum told me. “She lets her freak flag fly. She’s not like most people, and she hasn’t tried to fit in. In the 18th century, she would have been burned at the stake,” he observed.

Here was a woman talking about self-doubt, about suffering, about the thoughts running through her head during her rape, a woman covering Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and turning a grunge anthem into a chills-inducing feminine power ballad. She was an artist not just adept at expressing her own vulnerabilities, but attuning to those of her listeners. She makes the prettiest music about the hardest things. 

It’s not that her music and shows aren’t fun now and weren’t then, but they’ve always been heavy. 

As Sedita put it, “Her complex and beautiful career has lifted so many people through really hard times.” Even now, to declare yourself an Amos fan is to efficiently telegraph a great deal about the person you are and the things you’ve experienced.

And while Amos’ musicianship and persona have always been distinctive, she also stands within a powerhouse collective of female artists of her generation. Along with her stunning trio of “Little Earthquakes,” “Under the Pink” and “Boys for Pele,” the brief, extraordinary period between 1992 and 1996 featured a collection of brilliant female artists.

These include Björk’s “Debut” and “Post,” PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me” and “To Bring You My Love,” L7’s “Bricks Are Heavy,” Alanis Morisette’s “Jagged Little Pill,” The Breeders’ “The Last Splash,” Hole’s “Live Through This,” Liz Phair’s “Exile in Guyville,” Bikini Kill’s “Pussy Whipped,” Sleater-Kinney’s “Sleater-Kinney” and Fiona Apple’s “Tidal.” If your thing ever happened to be strong, slightly weird singer-songwriters to howl along with, the mid-1990s offered an embarrassment of riches. 

It was an era unlike any before or until, well, now, with artists like Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish and Charli XCX forming a fresh deluge of women dominating the charts while letting their own freak flags fly. Like Amos, they all tread the artistic lines of sweet, complicated and pissed off. If they happen to make you fall in love with them, it’s going to be on their terms. It stands to reason that Rodrigo is an Amos fan, as is Taylor Swift. And that new crop of distinctive female artists is helping build a younger generation of Amos fans.

For Amos to still be out there, releasing new music and selling concert tickets, is a testament not just to her persistence but that of her fans. That unique relationship is nowhere more evident than in her famously improvisational live shows. Giving the people what they like, Amos recently released her sixth live album, “Diving Deep Live.” 

Tori Amos at Salon’s New York studio (Salon)”I don’t want to just play the same show every night,” she said. To that end, she prepares for her concerts by reading messages from fans intending to see that night’s performance; “they have input and collaboration” on how the evening will evolve. Several years ago, for example, Amos received a note not to play “Winter” in a country recovering from  “a terrible tragedy [where] children had died horrendously” (possibly the 2011 Norway school shooting) and she revamped the entire show to accommodate the audience’s grief.

For Amos, it’s an essential part of the process. “That’s just what this community’s about. To not read those letters and to not apply some of these suggestions,” she said, “is a missed opportunity.”

Speaking to me from his home on Cape Cod, Amos’ longtime bass player Jon Evans concurred. “Improvisation and spontaneous creation has been a part of what she’s done ever since she was a little kid,” he said. “It’s brave to step out in a pop context and hold space for these instantaneous creations. She has such an intense connection with people through her songs and it can, for a lot of fans, be like a religious experience.” 

That connection Amos has with her audience seems particularly and at times painfully felt of late, at a moment of catastrophic setbacks for women and for sexual assault survivors like her. The evening prior to our conversation, Amos did a reading at Barnes and Noble in Union Square, where she says the audience had a lot to say about the political climate and how it’s affecting them personally. “It’s big,” she said.

“It seems as if we’re hurtling back in time,” she told me. “Any strides we’ve made of holding men accountable and women accountable, there seems to be a pushback on that right now. It’s almost as if it’s more difficult for women to get justice. That’s really worrying.”

The question of holding men accountable has hit Amos especially close to home over the past several months in the wake of explosive allegations of sexual abuse against her longtime close friend, writer Neil Gaiman. In December, she told The Guardian,  “I’ve never received a letter – of the thousands of letters I’ve gotten in 33 years – that was about Neil, except praise for his work and how much his work meant to people. That’s all I ever knew.” She added, “That’s not the friend that I knew, nor a friend that I ever want to know.” It’s difficult of late to know who to trust, even among our loved ones, a reality that is as exhausting as it is, as Amos says, “heartbreaking.”

But though the anxiety and fatigue from the current era are real, Amos said, “Those of us by the fire who have been here for decades and decades, this is not a time to run away from the tough questions and the brutality that’s going on, the scary things out there.” She insisted that “we can’t disappear, whatever’s going on. We have to hold on with both hands to our sanity.” 

Meanwhile, Amos keeps holding on, too. She endures in the company of her lifelong companions, the muses. And though she doesn’t know exactly what they have in store for her next, she noted, “I’m choosing to stay open to them.” 

“It’s OK to be in the unknown as a creator. I have faith in them. They always come through – except when I desert them.” For Amos, the muses have served her long and wisely, from her days as a feisty child prodigy through her latest incarnation of “postmenopausal” pop stardom. Her whole career is proof of their power. 

“The mystical world doesn’t have to be woo-woo,” she told me. “It can be very present. Even though I have fairies and muses in my life, don’t think that they can’t be pragmatic with me,” she said firmly. “They can.”