Tori Amos doesn’t just write records—she negotiates with unseen forces. On her lockdown album Ocean to Ocean, the muses apparently told her, “Stop wallowing. You’re drowning in a foot of water. Pull it together or we’re out of here.” Amos laughs: “They don’t suffer fools. They’ll just go to Björk instead.”
That mix of humor and mysticism has carried Amos through the pandemic, politics, grief, and Cornwall storms. “I was writing a very different record,” she says of the scrapped political songs. “But it wasn’t getting me out of the chair. I didn’t want to play them. Resistance had done its job. I needed something that made me want to live in it.” The muse’s solution: write from the mud. That became “Metal Water Wood.”
Cornwall itself became her co-writer. “They said, you need to come outside every day, little lady, and listen. Don’t say anything, just sit. The coast here is ferocious beauty—it’ll humble you.” From there, Ocean to Ocean swirled into what she calls a “sonic potion,” one she hoped would remind people “magic exists for all of us, even in these crazy times.”
The process wasn’t exactly solitary. Her husband Mark, a sound engineer, set up every keyboard in the house. “I’d run between the Bösendorfer, the B3, the Rhodes, the Wurlitzer—then send it to Matt Chamberlain in LA. It literally went ocean to ocean.” She admits she pushed the deadline: “I was still writing while we were mixing. Poor Mark. He’d beg me, ‘You and these muses need to hurry up.’”
Still, politics seeped in. “Devil’s Bane” with its talk of corruption and conspiracies doesn’t exactly whisper. “Sure, those words reflect our time. But I needed the poetry, I needed nature involved. Literal just wasn’t cutting it.”
She also found herself in dialogue with her past. The song “29 Years” circles back to Little Earthquakes, not as nostalgia but as an exorcism. “I realized I’d been reacting from my wounded self instead of the healing side. The song is about breaking that pattern.”
Her daughter’s jazz-student boyfriend, Oliver, helped steer her there. “Every night he’d play us music we’d never heard of. It influenced the record unconsciously. Sometimes the youth wake you up to your own possibilities.”
And the environment never left the conversation. Coming off Native Invader’s warnings about humans as the real virus, Amos just shrugs: “The muses know things I don’t. They might time travel for all I know. But clearly they were onto something.”
So what do we do now as fires, floods, and apathy keep stacking up? Amos doesn’t pretend to have an answer. “When are we going to hit bottom? That’s what the environmentalists keep asking. But the muses told me: if you’re going to change your frequency, start by admitting where you are. Then go to the music.”
Leave it to Tori Amos to make the apocalypse sound like homework from the trees.
Listen to the interview above and then check out Spies below.
