Tori Amos just released her 18th studio album, In Times of Dragons, a dark, allegorical work that stands as her most politically charged record to date. At its center is a character called the Lizard Demon, an amalgamation of powerful, predatory men. Amos is evasive about the specifics: “I’m not saying that’s in Washington, D.C. We’re not mentioning names,” she says when we ask. Instead, she constructs a narrative in which her protagonist is trapped in a life of luxury, married to this mysterious bad guy, before ultimately escaping.
Though Amos typically writes on her own, In Times of Dragons marks a rare shift: The album includes contributions from her 25-year-old daughter, Natasha “Tash” Hawley, who will graduate from law school this year. The collaboration emerged almost by accident. After she’d mapped out the album’s narrative, Amos found herself stuck on the music. The breakthrough came when Tash resurfaced months-old recordings of the two casually improvising at the piano. It’s just one way that this album stands out in a career full of surprising choices.
Rolling Stone caught up with Amos ahead of her European tour to talk about the new album’s urgency, her life lessons in the music industry, why she skipped Lilith Fair in the Nineties, and the creative path that has defined her career from early rejection to reinvention and beyond.
Your daughter has three co-writing credits on this album, which is rare for you. How did that happen?
I was struggling with this record, and I told her and she said, “Mom, six months ago, we were hanging out and I recorded us just jamming at the piano in Florida.” And I said, in my menopausal mind, “We were jamming?” And she sent me “Strawberry Moon” and “Stronger Together.” That gave me the launch.
You’ve made political albums before, but this one feels so much more raw and urgent. What made it different from your other political albums?
Come on, nobody really needed me in the Obama years. [On this album,] the Lizard Demon [character] is based on real people. It’s an amalgamation of men. We’re not mentioning names. So now we’re walking down the fork in the road that goes way back. What if I would’ve chosen a different man in my life? I had to allow myself to make that choice to write this record because this had to be a narrative. If you’re going to document our times, the only way is through allegory, I think, to allow other people in so they can join the story.
How did you find your voice as a singer at the start of your career?
It took me a while. I imitated everybody. I’ve been called a third-rate Pat Benatar. I played piano bars, so I did the covers. That was my big teaching. You listen to other singers, Stevie Nicks, the whole gamut, and you’d find the ones you can do. I’d stand in front of the mirror and try to do “Magic Man.” So you try and emulate these women and find your voice vocally.
What advice would you give to your younger self when you first released your debut, Little Earthquakes?
Don’t piss off the suits. Open champagne instead of thinking you can piss on their desk. Just open the champagne and drink it and tell them how great they are, instead of telling them the truth. That would’ve served me so well.
What do you wish someone had told you about performing live?
Study Prince. Study Robert Plant. Study Jim Morrison. The muses told me that, and I did. So I got that right. I studied them. I watched them plug into a voltage. If you go out there as yourself, that’s where you get it all wrong. You need to leave yourself in the fucking dressing room. Be a channel. Let the muses and the songs come through you. The thing about performing is it is not about you. If you get that, you get it right. Ego at the door. You must serve. You surrender. The piano must play you.
When did your muses start appearing?
When I was really young, but then I lost sight of them when I started chasing to make it in the music industry. After seven and a half years of being rejected and me going, “I can’t do this piano-bar thing for too much longer …” Luckily, the piano found its way back to me, but it was that crash and burn before I made Little Earthquakes [in 1992]. I’m so grateful for that because in the dark times during Boys for Pele [in 1996] — that was such a controversial record, it was such a tough time. If I hadn’t had that experience in 1988 where [my early band] Y Kant Tori Read went scorched-earth, I wouldn’t have been able to withstand the heat in 1996. Because of that, I made a commitment to stay true to the muses.
You never performed at Lilith Fair. In your 1998 Rolling Stone cover story, you said, “This isn’t just about eating some chicken and hearing your favorite female singers. You walk into my show, you walk into my world. It’s a film every night. I can’t impose that on Lilith and vice versa.” What are your feelings looking back?
I’d send that to Sarah [McLachlan] — she’d find it funny. She’d laugh her ass off. She’s got a good sense of humor. [Lilith] was a great business model. She did a great thing. I’ll be honest with you, I’ve got to give it up to her. She asked me to headline. I have a lot of respect for Sarah. At the time, I was trying to find my sovereignty. Being a part of a festival like that didn’t feel like my path to find it.
What is your favorite city in the world?
London. Hands down. I first came to London in 1991. I didn’t know anybody. So I would go to the Tower of London with my sandwich and talk to the dead queens. I would imagine Anne Boleyn coming through Traitors’ Gate. I would sit there on a bench and wait for her to come. And she came every time. And she and I would have these conversations. They were usually very mundane.
What did you guys talk about?
She would say things to me like, “Tori, don’t try too hard to make friends. Keep coming back to Traitors’ Gate. I come every day. So you can come talk to me. Just take a step back, and don’t be too eager, and you’ll be fine.”
Courtesy of Martin Garrix
Louis Van Baar*
Liam Payne (left) and Harry Styles of One Direction onstage during the 2013 American Music Awards at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on Nov. 24, 2013
Harry Styles Finds the Right Words on Liam Payne Tribute Song
For the past seven weeks, Harry Styles has reserved two minutes at each of his Madison Square Garden shows to reflect on the last time he gathered this many people in this room. Four years have passed since he performed 15 record-breaking nights at the venue during his Love on Tour. Now, every night at the new Together, Together shows, which span 30 nights at MSG, he acknowledges that “a lot of life happened to me and landed on me in ways that maybe it hadn’t before.”
Styles doesn’t usually go into much more detail; he typically just describes those in-between years as “a great reminder for me of just how wonderful and beautiful, difficult and inspiring, and also how fragile a life can be.” He encourages the audience to look around at each other and celebrate the community they’ve built together. Then he dives into “Sign of the Times.” It happens every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday like clockwork. But when he delivered this speech on Friday, Oct. 16, there was a shift. It didn’t conclude in its usual way.
Instead, Styles turned his attention to the banner commemorating his 15 consecutive nights at the Garden in 2022. “It means a lot to be able to look up there at my name up there from the last tour,” he said. “There are so many people, friends and people that I’ve worked with, that I would’ve never been able to do this without.” Two years ago, he continued, he lost one of those pillars. Friday’s show fell on the same day as the second anniversary of the death of Liam Payne, a loss that time has not made it easier to acknowledge. “I’m sure a lot of you have been through something similar,” Styles said. “I hope you haven’t.”
A frequent assessment of Styles, both among his fans and those who’ve only encountered him at a distance, is that he often talks at length before getting to the point. He recognizes it himself on the Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally song “Coming Up Roses,” where he sings about fumbling his words. But recently, comments about his long-winded way of speaking have started to feel like purposeful misreadings. There are clear and carefully considered thoughts present between his starts and stops. Anyone truly listening will pick up on those threads.
Styles cut himself off a few times during his speech on Friday. He tried to talk for a second about looking after each other, and repeated his point about the banner and the people who’ve supported him. He never mentions Payne by name, instead referring to him as a friend, which somehow became a point of criticism from some fans. The context is clear enough. Still, he seems to know it’s a gamble to expect understanding, especially when the conversation grows more complex and personal.
After about a minute and a half, Styles figured it best to show us what he means rather than tell us. “I’m gonna sing a song I wrote two years ago for my friend,” he said before premiering “Wise Enough.” The sullen tribute to Payne settled the room into a cool near-silence, punctured by quiet gasps and muffled crying. It was beautiful, devastating, and deeply exposing to watch Styles share his grief with 20,000 people in the best, and maybe only, way he knows how.
Earlier this year, Styles told Zane Lowe about the acute dread surrounding the expected performance of his mourning. “Full transparency, even the idea of talking about it, I struggle with that a little bit. There was a period when he passed away where I really struggled with acknowledging how strange it is to have people own part of your grief, in a way,” he said. “I have such strong feelings around my friend passing away. And then suddenly being aware there’s maybe a desire from other people of you to convey that in some way, or it means you’re not feeling what you’re feeling.”
Artists often describe the act of sharing new music as a change in ownership, something that is no longer their own once it has been handed over to an audience. “Wise Enough” feels protected from this. It would be confounding to see Styles ever record and release it in any official capacity. The song is openhearted in a way that exposes deep scars, anxious in a way that worries and fidgets about time and how it passes, and inconsolable in a way that doesn’t make the futile attempt to fight through anger, regret, or sadness.
“I can tell you what it’s like to bury friends on Wednesday nights/Gather in a garden around the fire,” Styles sings in a particularly cutting verse on the song, which concludes with an honest admission: “I’m not wise enough to call for a conversation/And then back it up, right?/Like you’re in the sky.”
Celebrity doesn’t obscure grief. It doesn’t come with a script for what to say when someone is sorry for your loss, or when they recollect their own version of the person you knew. No one really has the right words for these moments. Over the weekend, fans debated whether “Wise Enough” is actually titled “What Is Enough?” Styles introduced the record so briskly it was hard to decipher. The question of adequacy feels similarly impossible to answer.
Grief is so plain in how universal it is, but so complex in how and when it chooses to present itself. It can be policed only as much as it can be predicted, which is to say barely at all. That Styles let us into his now yearslong search for some semblance of understanding — knowing how his words have been picked apart before for far lesser things — shouldn’t be taken for granted.
Styles never acknowledges that banner at MSG. It’s not for lack of gratitude — he cried when it was unveiled. But the point he has reiterated every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday since the end of August is that the achievement is something that must be shared because he couldn’t have done it alone. He talks about being on stage as if what happens in that room exists far beyond and outside of himself, something that endures even in his absence.
It’s true in a way. There’s muscle memory tied to the music. It’s in the spinning, dizzying way fans dance to “Satellite,” or the way they wildly kick their feet and make the building shake during “Kiwi,” a song he brought back to the set just for New York. It’s just like before, but still so different.
Friday night continued as usual after “Wise Enough.” Styles belted out “Sign of the Times” in the sobering way he always does, then “Aperture” let in a cathartic flood of strobing lights and pulsating beats. The emotional whiplash took physical form as fans consoled one another, holding out their hands to help up friends and strangers who crumbled to the floor at the conclusion of the tribute. Some were crushed by their memories of loving One Direction, and the care they hold in their hearts for Styles. Some were just as wrecked by their own personal losses.
A lot of life and loss can happen in four years, as Styles says each night. For some people who were at MSG on Friday, there are friends present in their memories from the last tour who are missing from the new ones they’re making. The lyric “You dance until you’re tired/No, you don’t, and now you never will/Will you?” surfaces their own devastation completely separate from what inspired Styles to sprawl those words on a page. How do you dance to “Aperture” — the beating heart of this show in its declaration that “we belong together” — after hearing something like that?
You take the hand of the friend or the stranger who pulled you from the ground and use it to lead each other back to the dance floor. When Styles talks about community and stresses the importance of caring for one another each night, he reminds everyone of the fragility of a moment, and urges them to cherish every second they get. To dance wildly and sing loudly and wrap their arms around each other. To hold tight to what’s here right now.
It’s all any of us have, so it has to be enough.