Tori Amos has been the most convincing singer in the pop industry for almost three decades. She combines musical composition knowledge with skillful poetry, sharp wit, and southern Gothic overtones. For a significant part of her solo music career, Tori has traversed various political and personal themes. Ranked below are the sixteen albums she has released to the market. Enjoy!
16. Midwinter Graces
According to Popmatters, Tori Amos took time to release a Christmas album and took her fans by surprise. This album works on the disparities that had engulfed the previous albums like a mixture of low-quality production, unbalanced song quality, and long tracks. Midwinter Graces has twelve tracks with perfect quality and perfect auto tunes. ‘Jesus Freak’ poses a lingering question concerning Tori’s long-time beef with Christianity. After a refresh, she did away with Jesus’s reference on the album’s basic carols. “What Child, Nowell,” the album’s opener, uses harpsichord in some parts. It is a combination of ‘The First Noel’ and ‘What Child Is This’ to bring about a catchy chorus. ‘We Three Kings’ comes with a rising chorus. ‘Star of the Wonder’ has a Middle-eastern flavor. Her daughter jumped on ‘Holly, Ivy, and Rose.
15. Gold Dust
Tori Amos released her thirteenth album in 2012 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of Little Earthquakes, her debut album. It had an autobiographical view of Amos’ musical journey. Gold Dust included some of her previous rock songs in a new orchestral tune and featured songs from Midwinter Graces to Little earthquakes. Amos drew her motivation from the Metropole Orchestra in Amsterdam. This was her first orchestral performance and set the tone for the tracks. In the album, she makes skillful drifts in tempo and dynamics and her captivating piano skills. The first tracks, ‘Silent All These Years ‘and ‘Yes, Anastasia’, had a tremendous orchestral event that made the works different from contemporary pop.
14. Ocean to Ocean
Tori Amos drew her inspiration from Cornwall mythology and natural landscapes where she was a resident since 1999. She released this album when England was in its third nationwide lockdown. They know Amos for her melodious lyrics; ocean to ocean is not exceptional. According to Amos, “Metal Walter Wood” was one of the first tracks she included in this album. It stamps in pure lamentation on the state of the country. Under the beats of guitars and pianos, she stares at the stormy clouds to lament about the fore-shadowed mass extinction. On the ”Birthday baby,” she makes an effortful cry to the people who celebrate birthday after surviving lockdowns and chaos of a country.
13. Night of Hunters
Tori Amos uses this concept album to describe the discrimination of the hunted and the hunter and their relationship in a story of a woman. This is her twelfth album, and she released it in 2011. Tori also pays tribute to great composers like Debussy, Schubert, Alkan, Chopin, and Bach. This was her first album that she used acoustic instruments only. She combined string variation, piano, and woodwind instruments. For the first time in 15 years, she chose a different team of band members, and it worked in Amos’ favor. “Battle of Trees” expounds on Amos’ lover elaborating love as a battle-ready weapon. More of the songs on the album are awesome and contribute to the album’s rigidity. Classical lovers appreciate the album. It curved the instruments to bring out Amos’ exceptional piano skills and voice.
12. Abnormally Attracted to Sin
Tori Amos released her tenth album in 2009 in a limited DVD/CD format. Unlike other albums, which focused on politics, religion, and feminism, this album was more of a personal story. The tracks explore her career and life experiences. Amos describes it as a red-headed lady singing songs, not a concept album. Amos intended this album to be audio-visual from the beginning. Visualities had become part of the album development. She released video clips for all the 16 songs except “Mary Jane,” which came out as ”The Road Chronicles” on the added deluxe album. In an interview without Magazine, she describes ‘Maybe California’. She describes the song as a push from internal forces. She talks about a woman contemplating leaving her husband and kids to attempt suicide. This track addressed the troubles older and mature women like her face in society.” Ophelia,” her other track on the album, tackled Amos’s moments of self-loathing and insecurity as a mature woman.
11. Native Invader
After success in her two previous albums, Tori Amos added the third to speak about the world’s chaos. Native invader has 15 tracks that channel human horrors and frustrations. The spacious album has ”wings” using sparse electronics to combine with Tori Amos’ soprano voice. On ” Chocolate Song” she traverses between organ lines for chorus and brittle instrumentals on the verses. She depicts the virtual nature of creation, shooting stars and women to harden the maternal and celestial connection to the album. Amos uses her lyrical skills to release more political tracks on the ” Up the Creek” track. On this track, she introduced her daughter Tash to the vocals. She dedicated the last track on this album to her mother, Mary. Mary could not speak after a bout of stroke in that year. In all the tracks, she shows her pain towards climate changes in the world.
10. The Beekeeper
On her eighth album, Amos encrypted Celtic choirs, B-3 Hammond, and African drums. The high rates of romantic conflicts, adultery, and death alarmed her with Gnostic myth from the Apocryphon of John as a reference. After the resignation of Polly Anthony in 2013, Tori Amos followed her out and formed the Bridge entertainment group. According to Playlouder, the label catered for musicians in times of different music industry changes. Three songs from The Beekeeper got featured on the radio release. All these singles were promo-only. “Sleeps with Butterflies” got on the radio in January 2005 before becoming an adult substitute radio staple in America. It was successful in the U.S. and stood at number two on the U. S Triple-A Radio chart by mid-2005. The other singles “Cars and Guitars” and “Sweet the Sting” couldn’t match the previous single; they sustained lesser sales. The songs came with heavy packaging and a DVD package with a seed parcel of a unique blend and the albums released on the B-side.
9. Strange Little Girls
After releasing six albums, Tori Amos released Strange Little Girls. This album is a collection of covers to address men’s perspectives on females in the pop industry. According to All Music, the album came to be after Amos had done numerous interviews trying to fight for the woman’s place at the pop culture’s high table. She takes a rather bizarre but enjoyable theme in other tracks like ‘Enjoy The Silence’, ‘New Age’. She effortlessly brings up the sexual politics theme as the tracks rise to meet the demands. On ’97 Bonnie and Clyde ‘she increases the friction on her vocal skills, but this time out of context. ‘The Stranglers’ is the other track that also advocates for a more female-oriented pop space. In “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” her father’s anti-gun rendition inspired her. Amos solely released this album to raise awareness and protect women’s rights. Amos brings out a new topic to the silent pop industry.
8. Unrepentant Geraldines
While on her tour in 2009, she felt that she needed a new way of making music away from her regular pop genre. She then recorded classical music like The Light Princess before making her way back to pop. This gave birth to Unrepentant Geraldines, which marked her return to rock and pop music. According to IOL, Amos wrote the songs in secret away from the large musician groups. She did so to write her different versions of life. The album reflects an unapologetic woman that does not relent. She covers different topics, including “Giant’s Rolling Pin”, NSA surveillance scandals of 2013, denting memories in ‘Oysters,’ the perils in ‘Trouble’s Lament, and growing in ‘ 16 shades of Blue’. Her daughter comes up in ‘Promise’ to make a duet talking about mother-daughter support. The little daughter influenced, expounding Amos’ other view.
7. American Doll Posse
Tori Amos released her ninth album in 2007 and was recorded by Epic Records. She used this album to bring about five unique characters based on Greek mythology. Each character portrays a different perspective of Amos’ personality, like the warrior woman. The album uses them to speak about stories of life in recent America. She touches on sexuality, disillusion, misogyny, and female empowerment. This album has more drums and guitars than the previous albums. The first radio single, “Big Wheel,” got released before the album’s official release in the U.S. However, some radio stations refused to play it, citing ”MILF”, which is sung on the bridge. That made the record label replace it with “MI-MI.” “Bouncing off Clouds” became the first single in Europe, while they only released the third through MySpace. Amos adopted blogs as a marketing campaign strategy. The blogs spoke about the dolls found online; the audience had to trace the hidden blogs. During the album’s world tour, she updated the blogs before shelving them at the end of 2007.
6. To Venus and Back
Tori Amos released her fifth album in a two-disc set containing a live album and a studio album. She titled the first disc Venus: Orbiting and has eleven tracks. These showed Amos’ electronic experiments and contained; “Concertina,” “Glory of the 80s,” and “1000 Oceans”. The other disc, titled Venus Live, Still Orbiting, contained thirteen tracks from her live Plugged 1998 tour. This album was the pioneer official live album by Tori Amos. This album began as a B-side album with scarcer arrangement and production compared to From The Choirgirl Hotel. It comes with the same subtle piano and overt electronica as its predecessors. Tori Amos’ voice subdued the sound effects and electronic washes in tracks like “Dātura” and “Juarez.” The album majored in on recurrent female workers murder in Ciudad Juarez. This album is renowned for being one of Amos’s melodic and experimental works. It received mixed feedback, with many applauding its unpredictability, innovation, and originality. Haters claimed that Amos over-use the electronic instruments and lacked her famous sound that is found in other albums like Under the Pink and Little Earthquakes.
5. Scarlet’s Walk
Towards the end of the century, Tori had a tussle with her pioneer recording studio, Atlantic Records. However, she raised the debris unhurt. She then set the ball rolling for another banger album, Scarlet’s Walk. This album was her first piece at Epic Records and seventh overall in her docket. Amos drew her inspiration from tragedies like the 11th September 2001. This tragedy shaped the house that Scarlet’s Walk lives in. Scarlet, the lead actor, comes from Tori herself. Scarlet takes through the streets of America after the tragedy… “I Can’t See New York” track encloses emotions, native American Tradition, and the 9/11 tragedy on the victim’s eye. Although Amos opined she recorded the song before 9/11, the brilliance of the composition makes it subject to interpretation. Tracks like (“Don’t Make Me Come to Vegas” and “Carbon”) talk about love for sisterhood, while (“A Sorta Fairytale” and “Your Cloud”) talk about love lost and gained. She talks about American history and changes to the patriotic profiling of residents referred to as” Scarlet’s Walk’ “Taxi Ride,” and ‘Pancake.”
4. From the Choirgirl Hotel
In the early nineties, Nirvana was the talk of the town. To the surprise of many, little-known Tori Amos showed her claws. On the From the Choirgirl Hotel album, Tori Amos went with rock & roll that had always inspired her since she dropped out of Peabody Conservatory. She replaces her keyboards with rock interaction and performs with a live-band recording. Despite the new setup and genre, she remained the little girl with huge melodic and spiritual vistas and a European piano background. Amos begins this album with memories of JFK’s assassination and the entire generational sidelining of women. In this rendition, Tori walks back memory lane to remember her friend’s lunch box in the song. She takes a tougher stand on ”Playboy Mommy”. On this track, the mother swears never to ask for forgiveness from her dead daughter for being dirty.
3. Tori Amos: ‘Boys for Pele’
Whenever Tori Amos hits the stage, she thrives on the piano bench. On this album, she throws all her weight behind the religious wars. Pele is a volcano goddess in Hawaii–deduced as approval to men calling for human sacrifice and worshiping female spirits. A majority of the songs in this 18-track album are centered around bonds with ungrateful men. She showed her independence by producing this whole track on her own. Her relationship with her boyfriend-cum-producer, Eric Rosse, crumbled. As a recuperating Singer, Tori has an accurate reflection of being swayed between holly rolling and hard rock. On the ”God” track, she pokes loopholes on the perception of sin, and its determining powers. “God” threw in the first blow on the religion jibes. Tori Amos not only poked at her Christian religion but all popular religions in the world. Voodoo priests, Jupiter, Lucifer, and Mohamed were all subjects in her songs. The attacks formed the basis of her struggle on oft-intimate options. She borrowed a leaf from New Age feminists to channel her inner goddess.
2. Under the Pink
Under The Pink is her second album. She talks about her life experiences, from being caged in a stern religious childhood to her artistic freedom. She has a melodious backing of mezzo-soprano and on-point lyrics that squeeze on every phase of her life. It still bothered Tori Amos with judgments about herself, girlfriends, boyfriends, parents, and even God. Like her last piece, she uses guitar, bass, drums, and piano for a back that is occasioned with synth; to add the subtle effect. Amos makes a narration in the twelve-track album, changing from third person to first person and vice versa. The piano comes out as her voice fills the room with paranoid self-awareness and strikes in the opener of ” Pretty Good year” In all the tracks, Tori Amos registers her life frustrations engulfed in disappointment and turmoil. Through spiky lyrics, eccentric melodies and emotional sing-along lines.
1. Little Earthquakes
Tori Amos released the Little Earthquakes album in 1991 and it quickly shot to the pole position on the pop-culture standing. It also trounced Nirvana’s Nevermind album from the Billboard standing. Despite taking an unknown song theme, it became accessible. Little Earthquakes talk about violence and the exploration of women, which resonated with the majority audience. According to Sonic youth, it proved to be critical and commercial in a shorter time. It became an album with honor; it is now available in a deluxe edition with eighteen choice cuts in the twelve-track album. Little Earthquakes had a variety of songs with Acappella like A Gun and Me that spoke on rape and assaults in the country. In the 90s, pop culture was all about honesty; thus Little Earthquakes followed suit. On all the tracks, the unique Crucify opener combines with Winter to bring about emotional truth. Torus never relents on the subject. The album has been exhilarating and fresh like the 90s.
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