Maura Johnston
View all posts by Maura Johnston April 30, 2026
Kasia Wozniak* 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.
