Tori Amos by Desmond Murray
I can just imagine Tori Amos, all flaming windblown hair, gazing out from the wild cliffs of the Cornish coast — as she does on her latest album cover — and fixing on South Florida, where she lives part-time and will begin the next stage of her Ocean to Ocean Tour.
Riding out the pandemic with her family at their converted farmhouse in Cornwall, England, deprived of “the spiritual ceremony of the collaboration with a live audience,” as she wrote in an essay for The Guardian, singer-songwriter Amos made the 2021 same-named album this ongoing tour supports. She returned to the road in 2022, the riveting, redheaded figure at the piano renewing her intense bond with fans.
A longing to reconnect suffuses “Swim to New York State,” one of this album’s standouts. “I’d swim to New York State/from the Cornish coast of England,” Amos sings. “For even just a day/We’ll meet at that café.” The U.S. is essentially a second home now for the American-born preacher’s daughter turned pagan pop mystic, who keeps a residence one county up from the opening-night host venue, Kravis Center for the Performing Arts.
Tori Amos by Desmond Murray
Amos has attributed some of her kinship to different lands to her mixed, Cherokee-Scottish roots. A play she wrote the music for, “The Light Princess,“ is based on a Scottish fairy tale whose heroine literally and figuratively floats, unable to alight until she learns to love.
Finding balance between the physical and the astral, and finding strength and a voice, are themes winding through her discography, from the wrenchingly beautiful “Silent All These Years,” on 1992’s Little Earthquakes, onward. 1996’s Boys for Pele called down the mythology of mortal sacrifice to an oceanic goddess of fire. 2005’s The Beekeeper contemplated women empowered through environmental stewardship. 2017’s Native Invader “looks to Nature and how, through resilience, she heals herself,” in Amos’ own words.
Ocean to Ocean reaffirms her reverence for the natural and cosmic influences she unhesitatingly calls “Muses,” and for life in a beautiful, ecologically fragile world.
Tori Amos plays 8pm Saturday, June 17 at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach. toriamos.com ~ Carly Cassano
