There’s not just one Tori Amos.
There’s the mystical Tori. The one who whispers and stirs your soul with a single, dramatically drawn breathy sigh. Ethereal and enchanted. Imagine her as a church choir girl sun, faerie moon and a mermaid rising if you’re into astrology.
Then there’s the sensual Tori. The one who moves like honey, undulating on the piano bench, eyes half-closed, turning her microphone into a… lover. Desire and divinity inhabit the same body, and she always finishes on top. ;)
And then there’s the Tori who bares her teeth, growls, screams, and slams the keys. You have seen this tori in various forms. She’s the one who famously performed a song about her own assault while gripping a knife on stage.
This Halloween, as the veil between worlds grows thin, we’re calling on that Tori– the one who kicked out the lady in the white shirt (does she fucking mind?). Because Scary Tori isn’t a costume. She’s a force of nature- part witch, part warrior- and she’s on a mission. This Tori channels something ancient through her piano and what she finds might even surprise her at times.
So today, in honor of the season of shadows, we’re talking about Scary Tori: the power that makes you flinch… and then lean closer.
We are honored to have a producer, composer, arranger, multi-instrumentalist, musical visionary in our presence. He's worked alongside some of the biggest legends in music history, and he also happens to be Tori Amos' longtime write or die right-hand man across many decades and many projects. Most recently, this dynamic duo collaborated on the wildly whimsical soundtrack that accompanies the New York Times best-selling children's book Tori and the Muses, please welcome our friend, the maestro, John Philip Shenale.
We've heard you love our list making so we're coming at you with yet another list. This time it's the big one. It's our top 10 favorites list. NOT our best of, NOT our underrated. It's our favorites. So tonight you're in for real treat as we unveil our top tens alongside John Philip Shenale, who will be sharing his top 10 Tori Amos tracks that he did not work on. Maybe with a twist. We'll see.
Our favorite top 10 Tori Amos songs:
In this episode, we open the mailbag and dive into your burning questions. Will there be a 2026 tour? Is a new album on the horizon? We share our takes, speculate wildly, and cover the topics you most wanted to hear about.
We’re doing things a bit differently as we welcome our very first guest for a very special episode, where we’ll attempt to scratch the surface of Tori’s complicated relationship with the media over the past three decades. We’ll explore not only how she’s been represented (and misrepresented) by an often unforgiving and unflattering press, but also the ways in which Tori’s intuition and perceptiveness allowed her to have the upper hand, talking circles around and discomfiting her inquisitors, and making clear that she wouldn’t back down from her ideals or be silenced by patriarchal standards - way before it was cool or safe or, let’s be frank, not potentially career-ending to do so.
Helping us to tackle this red-hot topic is a written and literal voice many of our listeners will be familiar with, both from the at once provocative and positively silly podcast Pot Psychology and his writing in The New York Times, Pitchfork, The Washington Post, Spin, Jezebel, and Gawker, among other publications. He also co-authors Slate’s sex advice column How to Do It. A true raconteur and renaissance man - Rich Juzwiak!
Rich's latter day playlist made with love by Joey, Kristen, and Matt
Recent Pitchfork reassessment of Boys for Pele (2025)
Q Magazine “Hips. Lips. Tits. Power." (1994)
Rolling Stone review of Boys for Pele (1996)
Rolling Stone cover story (1998)
Tori on Roseanne’s talk show (1998)
Tori on Rosie O’Donnell (1999)
Tori on the Daily Show (1999)
Tori on The View (1999)
Rolling Stone Beekeeper review (2004)
Stylus review
THR Full Oscar Songwriters Roundtable featuring Tori Amos, Justin Timberlake, John Legend, Alicia Keys, Sting (2016)
Rick Beato interview (2024)
In this episode, we ponder what it means for a Tori Amos song to be “underrated.” Is “underrated” in this context even something definable? Or is it ultimately subjective and personal to the individual listener?
Is a song underrated because Tori rarely or never performs it? Or is it a song that’s been played so many times that we’ve taken it for granted and can no longer hear the genius and the grit that went into its creation? Or perhaps it lives on a latter-day Tori record that’s less celebrated, less heard by the general public?
In the spirit of our wildly successful – and a touch controversial – Best of Tori Amos episode, we bring to you The 20 Most Underrated Tori Songs. We repeated our very scientific method of each crafting individual lists of what we believe to be Tori’s most underrated tracks – from proper albums only; no bsides, no soundtracks, no covers, no seasonal music - tallying each song’s respective points and then ranking the ranking them in ascending order.
The result is a playlist that spans many - but not all - of Tori’s records, chock full of gags, goops, gogs, and go-figures. Given how underrated we likely all agree Tori is in the broader history of contemporary music, this very episode may be the definition of a fool’s errand. Regardless, in the spirit of the woman we call Tori once calling herself an “ant fucker,” we are Introverted but willing to discuss Tori Amos’ most underrated songs.
Playlists:
