Tori Amos Is Channeling

There is a secret society that walks among us, hidden in plain sight, a cabal of sorts that spans generations and industries and may be pulling the spiritual strings of the world as we know it.

They are the Tori Amos fans, and we are legion.

To love Tori is to appreciate a catalog of sixteen solo studio albums spanning over three decades, each record rich with riddle, myth, and melodic off-roading that may frighten the uninitiated. One must summon a bit of bravery to receive the magic of this singular songcrafter– as one must with any kind of magic– and perhaps you’ll never get it. But if you do get it, it gets into you.

Often associated with the boom of willful women who soundtracked the nineties, Tori Amos directed the classical training of her childhood toward a distinctive virtuosic style, commanding the stage splayed between a piano on one side and a keyboard on the other. She has since cultivated not only a cult following of loyal showgoers, but also a wider circle of long-term listeners still crushing salves from the rocks and roiling of her work.

I’ve loved to Tori, grieved to Tori, and danced my tits off to Tori (remixed by Armand van Helden.) In an era of music wherein we are constantly told precisely what songs mean and how they should make us feel, I often seek refuge in the sonic dreamscapes of a Tori album. It was a pleasure to learn that a new album, In Times of Dragons, is arriving May 1st, and it was a treasure to speak directly with Tori Amos about “the hauntings and the whisperings” that went into it.

Read her full interview with PAPER below.

It's good to see you. I'm Ty Mitchell. I'm interviewing you for Paper Magazine.

And you have the best teeth ever. Did your parents give you dental work or your parents' dentists?

No, no. I got very lucky. And I think for that reason, I was very lazy about flossing as a kid, and so it's the back that's all messed up. But no, it's really great to talk with you. How are you doing?

I'm good. I'm having some good chats with people.

Yeah?

I wasn't into the Zoom thing because I'm analog, but I find that this helps. This helps the conversation to be able to see people's eyes. It's amazing.

I feel so honored I got to listen to the album, and a track that immediately delighted me was “Provincetown.” And in it, you describe the main character of the album visiting some old bear friends in P-Town, and you talk about a “gay witch who hails from Brooklyn.”

Now, Tori, I know a lot of gay witches from Brooklyn, so you don't have to name any names, but I want to know, can you help flesh out this gay witch?

It's going to be up. I've named his name a few interviews ago, so you should be privy to that. That's Noah Michaelson from the Huffington Post.

Oh, of course. Of course. And I know that Noah is a hardcore Tori fan. He's been going to the shows forever.

Yeah. But he's a benevolent witch. He's been in the practice for awhile now. And most of this story is actually true. The fork in the road is I'm not married to a roadie called Mark Hawley. I'm with a billionaire Lizard Demon. That's the suspension I'm asking you to walk down. Yeah, you got to walk down that road with me. But everything else, the bears, I can tell you who they are. But Noah, I reached out to him. He's been coming to the shows since he was a teenager, and we became colleagues and friends and all that. But I actually reached out to him at the end of July near Lugh of the Long Arm’s Festival, which is August 1st.

And I sent him a message, which was, "I'm going into battle here. He's one of the great warriors in mythology, and I need your help. I need your direction and your protection and guidance." And he would send through Noah, Noah would cast, do the whole altar at the moons, new and full. And I would get messages from Lugh and started this relationship with Lugh of the Long Arm. He's in the fifth dimension. He's not here, of course. And I wrote Song of Sorrow and Flood for him.

I loved “Song of Sorrow.” It is funny, you're so engaged with mythology of all types from Pele to Saint Cecilia to the Orphian kind of myth in Beekeeper. And I think it's fun you– I think through your songwriting– have your own kind of mythology, and there's all these old websites that are tracking every interview and everything you've said.

At the same time, I think you give so much space for me as the listener to interpret, to resonate, to apply, to build a relationship with these words on my own. And so I wondered if it ever frustrates you when people are asking the meaning of this or the origins of this, or if you like participating in that myth building.

I like participating in the myth building. I learn a lot from people's perceptions because come on, they know things I don't and they share it with me and it helps me grow. And then I can look up whatever.

I've been kind of obsessed with the Holly and the Oak King, that cycle, and that they're both in love with the goddess of the land. It's like a baton– they trade off when they're in power and one goes underground. And I've written songs about that. One on “Christmastide,” I think I refer to it on Ocean to Ocean once, but these different myths people will discuss with me and say, "Did you understand this part of the myth?" And invariably, they teach me something all the time. So I like this sharing, whether it's through letters, and they give me their lens, a different lens perspective.

I wanted to tell you, your memoir Resistance was something that really kept me warm during lockdown. And one of the things that stood out to me was how you describe your songwriting process as this visitation of angels and to think of the songs or music as entities unto themselves, that they invite you to give them form. And you've described them, I think, more recently as muses. Songs of other people are Strange Little Girls. And I'm curious about the shape or the visages of these songs on In Times of Dragons, did they appear to you as dragons? Did you give them the form of dragons? Is it not dragons at all?

I had a channeling with the Master Merlin who was channeled by Diana Summerlin. She's in her mid to late 70s now. And I went to him in the late 80s after Y Kan't Tori Read just died a horrible death. And I was pretty much on my knees and started writing these new songs like “Crucify” and “Silent All These Years.” And Merlin said to me at the time, 1990 maybe, "These songs will make a little earthquake around the world." And I didn't have the song “Little Earthquakes.” I didn't have the title “Little Earthquakes.” Merlin gave me that. So that's my relationship with the Master Merlin. Now, the Master Merlin has guided me on and off for over 35 years, and that's just fact.

I asked him about documenting this time and that I knew it was called In Times of Dragons. I don't want to go into detail about this, but I have an autoimmune disease, and it aligned with the dragons. And he said to me, "First of all, you need to understand that every scale on their body is a lifetime of service. And there is something called the Ancient Order of the Dragon–,” not plural. It's plural in the song “23 Peaks,” just because that's how it came. But he said — this was last year — “You need to sit quietly. They will come to you and give you the information you need to fight the lizard demons. They will come, but you must give it time and you have to respect that they're on their own time and they're on another dimension. So you have to trust that they will come, but you have to hold a space of humility to serve what they're going to give you.”

“And you might at first be afraid, but you have to understand two things are happening to you,” Merlin said to me. “You're getting hauntings from your past life of being a witch and burned at the stake,” which we explore in “Blue Lotus” in depth. And he said, "But then you're getting the whisperings from the dragons, so you must balance this out in the record and cover them both– the hauntings and the whisperings– and be willing to receive this.”

…I love you.

You get it!

It's so funny you say that. I told my editor I wouldn't talk about myself, but also in 2020, I was dealing with autoimmune stuff and I ended up getting a tattoo, one of my biggest tattoos, and it's a rattlesnake that goes all around. And I was listening to your cover of “Rattlesnakes” over and over and over again–

Beautiful. I love that one.

–And thinking about healing and sickness and ... We're channeling, Tori. We're channeling.

Yeah, we're right there.

I want to also go on more about the concept of this album. The first thing I thought of when I read the description of the narrative was American Doll Posse because I think both this and that album seemed to be, I think, rather directly responsive to a really violent political and cultural climate. Have you reflected that much on this current moment and where you were then, when you were feeling very confrontational and angry about what you were seeing? How do those two moments compare for you as a musician and as a channeler?

I've covered the anger with Boys for Pele with American Doll Posse. I covered the anger. This needed to be more of a very tightly threaded narrative where you can follow. I knew I had to be me, and the only thing I'm asking of the listener is, I married a different man. Because everything else is true. Tash sings on the record. Everything else is different. Everything else is true. There are bears. There is a gay witch from Brooklyn. I am having this emotional relationship with Lugh of the Long Arm, who's this Celtic god. This is all happening. And as my husband says, as long as Lugh doesn't show up at this fucking door, I'm fine.

My daughter's in her third year of law at Catholic University. She's going into criminal law, and we still like to make music together. We wrote three tunes on the record together, but she had said to me, “Mommy,” in her British accent, “Honestly, musicians, you guys don't have enough boundaries for me. I need a courtroom. I need something more structured because we have to make our structures in our world.”

You see? We're pulling from ether, Ty. They're not law books. It's not concretized. We're pulling from the ether to bring it in. So it's a very different process. But she did talk to me and has talked to me about, “Mom, you have no understanding of the laws that are not being respected, things that are happening in the United States.” She's in DC at Catholic U, and there are lecturers coming in all the time talking about the constitutional crisis that we're in and things that are happening that– if you're outside the beltway in DC, unless you're a political journalist or unless you're really tracking this– I certainly wasn't aware of the depth, the scope of what the lizard demons are up to. And the lizard demons are based on real men behind the scenes who see congressmen, senators, even the president as a CEO to them that answer to their billionaire cabal.

So I just happen to be married to him when we start the record. And the bottom line is I've been with him long enough, but his power has gotten greedier. He wants more power. It's not enough. No power is enough for my husband, my lizard king in this story who is based on real people. So nothing's made up.

Does that make sense?

No, it makes perfect sense. And I actually think you're getting on to something that is really important, which is I think there is this reflex among Americans especially to cope with injustice and to cope with this kind of feeling of political hopelessness with conspiracy. And I think you use fantasy, you use mythology to process it instead of just creating some kind of psychic wall for it. You're using this world, you're using creation and generation to process this and to seek out answers or to even just cope at all with it. And I think that's an important lesson to take from your album. I mean, am I wrong?

To document this time has been probably one of my greatest challenges. With Scarlet's Walk, there's similarities, but it wasn't a through-line narrative like this is. It's a little different. I didn't have the characters recurring whereby the Lizard Demon breaches the city walls with his henchmen in New Orleans. He comes very close and there's a visual story that will go along with this that Karen Benz, who I've worked with for 35 years, and we brought in Kasia [Wozniak], the great photographer, to shoot it. But I brought Karen down to hear it, and she just looked at me and said, Film Noir, you have to have the characters. And so we pulled in a casting director and I needed to choose the actor models that played all the parts because I had to resonate with them in some way. I had to resonate with the Lizard demon.

I'm so jazzed. So you did bring up working with Tash, your daughter. One of the most exciting elements of this album for me was the dialogue between Mother and Daughter. And The Daughter is a character in this narrative and Tash contributes just lovely vocals. And I found myself just weeping to the song “Veins” because I'm hearing something take place that so many of us, especially queer children, we long for this and many of us never get to experience it, of this dialogue in which a parent communicates to their adult child, "I have made mistakes with you” or “I have things to learn from you."

And so I wanted to just ask more about the extent to which Tash was a collaborator with you. And even outside of the music collaboration, I'd love to know what you've learned from your daughter.

So much. She and I wrote those three songs together, “Vein,” “Strawberry Moon,” and “Stronger Together.” And she's teaching me about a side of law and politics that I didn't understand because she is going to be a criminal lawyer and she graduates in May, hopefully. And I say that just because I don't want to tempt fate, it's not because she's not absolutely capable. And she makes me question, she's asking me ... It's not feet to the fire, but it is gender issues. How does my generation see the younger generation, and can we be more open to hearts not parts? Can we be more open to a fluidity? She said, "Mom, what if I don't want children? Are you okay not being a grandmother?" And I'm like, "Absolutely. You have a dachshund. I will bring that dog steak every night if you'll feed it to her." She's asking me questions about, can you be open to these ideas, these progressive ideas?

And I think Tash was shocked that some men in their early 20s, she's 25, are very, very, very, very right wing. It's been a real wake up for me to learn about that. The questions that come up, the dialogue we have has been huge. And “Minnesota,” as she said to me, "Mom, that's a sea change. That's not a distraction. ‘Minnesota is a sea change," which propelled me to write about it.

There's this really memorable 1984 interview that I keep coming back to where for some strange reason, this male interviewer is asking you about your sex life, and you kind of masterfully throw him off by talking about the elks mating in Yellowstone. And you talk about being a dry Dorito versus being a juicy mango. And at first glance, it seems like you're kind of just free associating. But no, you're saying something so profound that I'm carrying with me everywhere because I do feel like we're in times of dragons, but we're also in times of Doritos. And I too want to channel my mango.

So do you stand by that analogy? Are you still channeling your mango when you play?

[laughing] I stand by it!

I know you have a busy day, but this is just a wonderful, wonderful treat. And thank you for talking to me and also just thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the work you've made, for everything. Thank you for everything.

Great. And just keep smiling, Ty, because it lights up the room. No, you just brought sunshine to a very rainy day. Thank you. And how clever are you? Don't forget that. Just because you're a pretty face, you're smart as fuck.

We're publishing that part, definitely.

Rock on, baby.

Photography by Kasia Wozniak