Recommendations of the Editorial team
Early on her 18th album, Tori Amos sings about being silenced. “Shush yourself, down now,” the cigar-smoking kidnapper and husband orders her narrator, while the drums keep a steady beat and Amos hits her Bösendorfer piano with growing anger. Finally, she calls upon a familiar figure for inspiration: “I know a girl who wrote ‘Silent All These Years,'” Amos sings, stretching her vowels to the limit as she references her first solo single. “Where is she?”
Since she found her voice as a solo artist with this delicately blossoming piece from 1991, Amos has taken an idiosyncratic path through pop music. Her piano-driven songs took direct aim at the constraints and contradictions of being a woman – seasoned with biting humor, southern wisdom and fantastical elements. The dense, poetic In Times of Dragons, which Amos recorded in her adopted home of Cornwall, continues this legacy, chronicling her protagonist’s escape from her Lizard Demon husband – with support from characters such as the Gay Witch From Brooklyn and the High Priestess.
Amos’ world-weary mezzo-soprano and her precisely calibrated piano parts unfold in an exhilarating tale of redemption, the topicality of which is underlined by the Bob Dylan-esque track “Ode To Minnesota”. “Gasoline Girls” feels upbeat despite lyrics that long for security and liberation; The gently funky “Pyrite” uses healing crystals to delve deep into the world of revenge that Amos’ heroine longs for. “St. Teresa” has a ghostly gravity that matches the titular saint’s mix of mysticism and devotion; the troubled “Tempest” calls on the martyred Saint Cecilia, patron saint of musicians and singers, to bring a long-silent voice back to life.
mother and daughter
Throughout, Amos wrestles with her own legacy – conveyed through her heroine’s relationship with her long-lost daughter, embodied by Amos’ real-life daughter Natashya Hawley on tracks like the torn “Veins,” the elegiac “Strawberry Moon” and the gently swinging “Stronger Together.” (Hawley, 25, also co-wrote these pieces.) The two voices intertwine hesitantly at first: Amos begs for forgiveness on “Veins,” while Hawley responds with love and compassion; On “Stronger Together,” shortly before the end of the album, they recognize their strength together.
At the start of the album, Amos’ heroine fears that her circumstances will turn her into “this half-dragon, half-woman thing,” as she puts it on the anthemic closing track “23 Peaks.” In the end, she learned to live with her scars and use them as a source of strength – even if it hurts. An apt metaphor for Amos’s career and the way she interwoven the confessional with the mystical to often startling effect.
