Early on her 18th album, Tori Amos sings of being silenced. “Shush yourself, down now,” her narrator’s cigar-smoking captor-slash-husband orders, as drums keep a steady pace and Amos attacks her Bösendorfer piano with a growing fury. Finally, she calls upon someone familiar for inspiration: “I know a girl who wrote ‘Silent All These Years,’” Amos sings, drawing out her vowels to their limits as she calls back to her debut solo single. “Where is she?”
Since finding her voice as a solo artist with that gently blooming 1991 cut, Amos has walked a singular path through pop music. Her piano-led songs tackled the constraints and contradictions of womanhood head-on, leavened with acerbic humor, Southern wisdom, and fantastical elements. The dense, poetic In Times of Dragons, which Amos recorded at her home base in Cornwall, England, continues that legacy, chronicling its protagonist’s escape from her Lizard Demon husband with help from characters like the Gay Witch From Brooklyn and the High Priestess.
Amos’ world-weary mezzo-soprano and precisely calibrated piano parts unfurl in a heady tale of salvation whose timeliness is underscored by the Bob Dylan-nodding “Ode To Minnesota.” “Gasoline Girls” is sprightly despite lyrics that long for safety and liberation; the gently funky “Pyrite” gets down with healing crystals as Amos’ heroine looks for revenge. “St. Teresa” has a spectral languor appropriate to its titular saint’s mix of mysticism and devotion; the churning “Tempest” calls on the martyred Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians and singers, to assist in the resurrection of a long-stilled voice.
Throughout, Amos grapples with her legacy through the relationship her heroine has with her long-lost daughter, who’s portrayed on cuts like the conflicted “Veins,” the mournful “Strawberry Moon,” and the gently buoyant “Stronger Together” by Amos’ actual daughter, Natashya Hawley. (Hawley, 25, also co-wrote these tracks.) The two voices braid together tentatively at first, with Amos offering apologia on “Veins” while Hawley replies with love and compassion; on “Stronger Together,” which is near the album’s close, they realize their collective strength.
At the album’s outset, Amos’ heroine is anxious about her circumstances turning her into “this half-dragon, half-woman thing,” as she puts it on the hymnlike closer “23 Peaks.” By the end, she’s learned to live with her scars, using them as a power source even though it might cause pain. It’s an apt metaphor for Amos’ career, and the ways she’s blended the confessional and the mystical to often stunning effect.
