Tori Amos Brilliantly Soundtracks the ‘Times of Dragons’

A confession that will shock exactly no one: I have been a card-carrying Toriphile since 1994. Intellectually, I know the catalogue and career of Tori Amos with the encyclopedic recall of a savant; emotionally, I know the music of Tori Amos with the rapturous heart of my 14-year-old self, closely examining the light-soaked, soft-font lyric insert of my Under the Pink cassette tape under a magnifying glass. 

Yet, somehow, In Times of Dragons, her first full-length album of original material in five years, has made me realize that perhaps I don’t really know Tori Amos at all. I’m in fine company, though: not even “the woman we call Tori,” as she often refers to her musical avatar, seems quite sure of who she is or who – or what – she’ll become when this current, grim American chapter comes to a close. 

“I know a girl who wrote ‘Silent All These Years’ / Where is she?” she gasps in the final moments of the propulsive, grungy opener “Shush”. It’s a somber nod to her stentorian, unabashed younger self, who straddled the piano bench with a lip-licking smirk. Amos is a fearless keyboard virtuoso whose first single was actually an acapella account of her own sexual assault. Her biggest radio hits mocked Christian patriarchy (“God sometimes you just don’t come through / Do you need a woman to look after you?”) and took the technically unvulgar lyrics “Honey bring it close to my lips / it’s gotta be big” to new in-the-gutter heights on a shrewdly produced club remix.

When even Tori Amos – reliably bold, confrontational, disarming – has found her voice dampened by the ceaseless shock and awe that is our daily reality, we’re in deep shit. 

To reconcile her past, present, and future selves, Amos, the unrivaled queen of musical autofiction, turns to allegory. In Times of Dragons, in many ways, runs parallel to her post-9/11 opus Scarlet’s Walk (2002). However, it’s a decidedly darker and more vulnerable work, underscored by a pained, near-obsessive interrogation and scrutiny of the self, Amos questioning how we collectively got here and how we might avoid descending further into the belly of the beast.

One of Amos’ great, enduring strengths as a songwriter is her ability to filter experience through a lens at once abstract and astute. Still, on Dragons, she makes no bones about just how daunting it is to bear witness as an artist when the horrors around us are amassing at dizzying speed. 

Dragons is rarely didactic; rather, Amos leans hard into the fantastic, imagining herself as another Tori, unhappily married to a Peter Thiel-quoting billionaire “Lizard Demon” husband who reminds her in “Shush” to “put a finger on those beautiful lips” because “we both know what they’re good for”. She fears she’s “just a resentful observer / Slinking from one penthouse to another”, her growing discomfort with her privilege pushing her to escape her oppressor and reckon with her own complicity in the systems that have protected and enriched her. So, in classic Tori Amos fashion, she embarks on a road trip across the US, encountering along the way a cast of strange, otherworldly characters who guide her geographically and spiritually through uncertain terrain.

Amos finds herself embroiled in a celestial love affair with the ancient Celtic God Lugh of the Long Arm, explored through “Strawberry Moon”, “Song of Sorrow”, and “Flood”, a gorgeous, string-soaked three-song arc at the centre of the record. She channels the ghosts of Salem witches and burned heretics on “Blue Lotus”, a moody, multi-keyboard puzzle that builds to one of the most satisfying climaxes Amos has ever put to record. She communes with the spirit of St Teresa of Avila on the almost unbearably sensual “St Teresa”; think Peter Gabriel‘s “Mercy Street” covered by Sade at the height of her powers.

Amos seeks shelter from the “Gasoline Girls”, a feminist biker chick gang on (a showtune by way of the Bangles). She also heeds the call of a gay witch from Brooklyn vacationing in “Provincetown”. It’s a percussion-happy burst of energy reminiscent of Boys for Pele’s “Talula”, due in part to the triumphant return of Amos’ harpsichord) who advises her to seek guidance from her “Dragon Kin” because she’s “turning into one of them”.

The record concludes with the breathtaking “23 Peaks”, in which Tori makes her way to the mountains of Montana, where she encounters a tribunal of Dragon Queens, to whom she achingly appeals, “to change me back / Into the Woman I want to be.” Exhausted and terrified by “this half-Dragon / Half-woman thing” she’s been slowly transforming into: “These blades / shooting through my back / are killing me”. Her instinct is to default to the past, to the familiar.

Over glacial, cinematic synths, an ominous hissing of the wind, and distant cracks of thunder that we can only imagine are enormous dragon wings flapping against surrounding sediment, Tori is told that, while they can momentarily unburden her, she will ultimately continue to evolve (“The truth is Darling One / You will suffer / They will grow back every time / You just need to accept that this will be / And you’ll become a Dragon Queen”). There is no outrunning this transformation, only feeble attempts at delay.

“23 Peaks” is a towering achievement, truly unlike anything Tori Amos has ever put to record (and much like Boys for Pele masterpiece “Marianne”, the rare occasion a song has been written, performed and documented on the spot). In the hands of a less nuanced artist, its pieces might amount to a schmaltzy gimmick, but through Amos’ particular genius, it’s the most distinctly human moment on the record.

“23 Peaks” isn’t so much the ending of the Dragons as it is the beginning of a new iteration of Tori Amos. It’s here that we realize the record’s allegory of the lost self, the changes that cannot be avoided, the need to adapt and embrace becoming someone and something else directly parallel to Amos’ undeniably evolving vocal prowess. Rather than hiding behind in-studio manipulations, she embraces and even highlights the changes to her voice brought on by age and time. Every crack, every swallow, every gasp and grunt is made available to us, undergirding Dragons’ surrealist travelogue conceit with unflinching honesty.

In the grueling journey to reawaken a suppressed voice, she’s found another, one that will sustain her into the next season of her life as a musician, as a storyteller, as a woman. The narrative that frames In Times of Dragons is complex and intentional, to be sure, but it isn’t the whole story, not by a mile. So, who and what is Tori Amos at the end of this record? Why, someone and something new, of course – which is exactly, somehow, who she’s always been.