Tori Amos’ creative path has never been linear. A child piano prodigy, she was the youngest student ever admitted to Baltimore’s prestigious Peabody Academy, but her parents’ dreams of raising a concert pianist were soon shattered by young Tori’s preference for Beatles over Bach.
A stint playing showtunes and standards in Beltway bars turned into a big-gamble move to Los Angeles, where Amos joined a hair-metal band called Y Kant Tori Read that also included future Guns’n’Roses drummer Matt Sorum. The band’s one and only album now has a devoted cult following, but at the time, it was a flop. In the depths of despair over the band’s failure, Amos dug deep to write 1992’s Little Earthquakes. Largely out of step with everything else that was on the radio at the time, the album and its follow-ups were a surprise success and by the late 1990s Amos was selling out stadiums.
Undoubtedly best-known for her music, Amos has nonetheless always had a strong and multi-layered approach to media, whether that means the careful and elaborate lighting design for each of her tours or the eye-catching album art, which has seen the artist breast-feeding a pig and laid out on a giant photocopier. In 1998 she was one of the first artists to offer an exclusive digital-only track (“Merman,” which she would later dedicate to the memory of Matthew Shepard in live performances). 2003’s Scarlet’s Walk came with a video “visual” for each track, another pioneering move. Amos has also written two books (2005’s Piece by Piece, co-authored with Ann Powers and 2020’s Resistance). She has also branched out into musicals composing music and and lyrics for 2013’s The Light Princess, which ran in London.
In 1997, Amos played a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden in support of a young organization called RAINN, the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network, then the nation’s first 24-hour sexual assault support hotline. A few years ago, she stepped back from her duties as a spokesperson for the org and from her role on the National Leadership Council. Nonetheless, I asked her about RAINN’s recent decision to remove trans and nonbinary-specific information from their website. “My art is for everyone,” she told me. “And I hope that the world I try to create can act as a safe haven for anyone who needs it.”
Now she’s back with another surprising twist: a children’s book. Written by Amos and illustrated by Demelsa Haughton, Tori and the Muses was published on March 4 by Penguin Random House. The book came with a second surprise — a nine-track album written and produced by Amos as an accompaniment to the album. To tell this story, Amos taps into an ancient literary tradition, one stretching all the way back to the Greek poet Hesiod, who wrote that the Muses themselves revealed to him the names, genealogies and offices of the gods on the slopes of Mount Helicon.
On a sunny but very busy Monday that had started at 4 AM, Amos — patient and generous in her responses — got on the phone for an afternoon chat that covered not only the new book and album but also shoes, archetypes, the modality of the visual and a shared appreciation for Susan Cooper’s young adult novel series The Dark is Rising.
First things first, tell our audience what shoes you’re wearing today.
Well. I’ve [worn three pairs] already. I’ve been up since 4 AM. So I started off … hold on, I’m back in the hotel room, give me a second. [Calls to her assistant for confirmation] I was in Alaia, the Alaia PVC slingback hard cap toe, in white. Then I went to Aquazura in yellow satin. And then I moved on to these great PVC Stella McCartney because I’ve been doing interviews, television and filming since early, early morning.
Oh wow, busy day.
Very busy.
Your busy day is because you have a new children’s book coming out tomorrow, illustrated by Demelsa Haughton. Tell me how this new project came about. How did you find yourself writing a children’s book?
Francesco Sedita [the book’s editor], over at Penguin Workshop, reached out. He had read the liner notes to one of my projects, and I just didn’t know that really, anybody read my liner notes all these years. So he said “Hey, you thank the Muses and the fairies. Can we talk about it? You want to write a children’s book about it?” And that’s really how it began, two years ago.
What attracted you to Demelsa’s art? What was it you saw and thought, “Yes, that’s my artist?”
Everything. Everything she drew, and I had looked at many illustrators, and when someone on my team showed me her work I just said “She’s the one.” There were notes back and forth from story to art, and she was completely open even to what shoes some of the Muses were wearing. And I was taking pictures of shoes from my shoe collection and saying, no, she has to be in this one.
Were you writing as she was drawing or did you write the text first?
We wrote the text first.
This is your first children’s book, but your work has always had a very strong visual component, whether it’s album art, videos, lighting for your shows. As a primarily sonic artist, what does the visual realm add for you creatively? What can the eyes do that the ears can’t do?
Oh, that’s a good question. In my opinion, you’re missing an opportunity if they aren’t collaborating. It’s a huge opportunity to expand the story that you’re telling into a multi-dimensional perspective, as opposed to just sonically.
A couple of days ago you also released a surprise collection of songs to accompany the book. Were you planning a soundtrack from the beginning or did it sneak up on you while you were writing?
It snuck up on me over a year ago, so I’d say halfway into the book. Mark Hawley, who I’ve worked with since ’94 and who I later married, just looked at me one night and said, “You’re writing a book about music, and your music, and you’re not gonna have music with this. Explain that to me, please.” And I went, “OK, there’s gonna be some music [Laughs]. Thank you for the suggestion.” I don’t care where a good idea comes from. If somebody says “Hey have you thought of this?” And I’m like, “You’re absolutely right, thank you, yeah that makes sense.”
In your mind how are these new songs categorized? Is it a new Tori album, an EP, a soundtrack?
Well, it’s an album, isn’t it? It’s an album that’s just collaborating with a book and story that go together.
Looking back at your catalog, are there songs where you did not heed the Muses’ advice and regretted it after?
Yes. And I don’t think I should go into detail. There are some things I left off records and didn’t explore. There’s some songs that I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote till I lost the magic, and they didn’t make it on the record because I didn’t think it was good enough. But that’s when we can over-tweak. That’s what we say in the control room when we replay things and replay things and rework things, till that spark that was there, we’ve just turned it into goulash. And not even good goulash.
I was at your [bookstore Q&A] yesterday and you mentioned Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series, which made me really happy because I love those books. Is fantasy a go-to genre for you?
Not so much as loving Tolkein [the other book Amos mentioned at the event was Lord of the Rings] and Susan Cooper. You’d think I’ve read hundreds of fantasy books, which I have not. But I do adore the Dark is Rising Series.
It would be great if kids discover that series, because I think Harry Potter drew some influences from it.
Clearly it has. My daughter Tash grew up in that generation of Harry Potter, so of course as parents we saw all the films and she had all the books, and I hadn’t read The Dark is Rising yet. When I did read it it did strike me that there were some bits of stories here that came first. As you said, she is the OG here, Susan Cooper.
Speaking of parenting, are there picture books for kids that were your favorites, or favorites to read to your daughter?
Madeline. She loved that series dearly.
I had a random question yesterday at the Q&A: Do you name your pianos? Did you name your piano as a child?
No, they’re always just “she.” She knows her pronouns.
Would you like to write more children’s books, or is that something you got out of your system?
Well, I’ve loved this process so overwhelmingly that it would be a privilege to write another one.
Do you feel that publishing is a less hostile world than the music industry, which I know you’ve had struggles with in the past?
Well, I had struggles with it in the past, until I had been in it enough years where a shift happened, and I’m able to work with people I connect with. So I go record to record. I make a deal for each album with who I feel is open to the type of project I’m about to create. So that’s shifted in the music world, I’d say over the last 10 years, maybe a little bit more. There was a shift that happened once I began with Deutsche Grammophon and moved over to that side of Universal. The team changed and we’ve been more on the same page.
You’re often discussed as a confessional songwriter, and yes, a lot of your lyrics are very personal, but you also quite often tackle political and social issues in your work. Do you have any advice for kids or even for other artists about how the Muses help you come to terms not just with stuff going on inside but also things going on in the world outside?
Over the years I’ve made choices at different times how to document what’s going on in the macrocosm as well as the microcosm, sometimes jointly. Sometimes it’s through story, world-building, or, like American Doll Posse, I chose to work with some of the Greek pantheon and personify them in five characters to look at what was going on in our time. And we were at war, as you know, in 2006 when I wrote it, it came out in 2007. That record, from the first song, is a direct comment on what was going on. It wasn’t metaphorical. Sometimes the work chooses to be built in story, as opposed to actual documentation of what we’re seeing before our eyes. So an artist has the opportunity to choose how they’re going to talk about what they feel called to talk about. And that’s a very important freedom, because there’s not a lot of things we can control right now. But we can choose that. That is one freedom.
We can choose how to express ourselves?
Yes, and how to respond.
Do you have any projects on the horizon that you can share with us?
Well, we’ll see what happens. It looks like there may be a tour in 2026.
That’s exciting!
That is exciting.
Photography: Kavita Kauljj