Tori Amos’s Resistance is a solid, insightful musical memoir

I am an unabashed fan of Tori Amos. I have been a fan of hers for over 20 years now, and although I don’t self-identify as an EWF—Ears With Feet, her term for her fans—I’ve seen her in concert ten times (which, to be clear, is nowhere near the amount of times that many of her superfans have seen her perform), have listened to enough live bootlegs to have phrases from certain songs burned into my brain, and went through a phase in my adolescence where her music was the only music I would listen to for weeks at a time. There are times when I struggle to talk about her work in a way that makes sense, especially with people who are not already fans of hers—not because her work is sad or depressing, but because it has meant so much to me that putting that meaning into words is like trying to describe to another human why clothing or shoes are essential.

Her music has been almost jarringly formative for me personally, as peculiar as that sounds. In the wider community of Tori fans, however—excuse me, ears with feet—my regard for her work looks kind of average. I don’t have a tattoo of any of her lyrics, or of her face, nor am I the type to scream in the middle of quieter songs (why would you do this?) when I have seen her perform live. I mention this not to say that I am “not like those other fans,” in an I’m not like the other girls sort of way, but to provide context for why I write about her work in the way that I do. I have been criticized by other fans in the past for writing a not-totally-fawning review of her 2014 album Unrepentant Geraldines—which is a lovely album, even if it’s not my favorite in her catalog–as if my choice to be humorous about some of Tori’s more oddball musical habits was a personal affront to her and/or my fellow fans.

When I started reading Amos’s new memoir, Resistance: A Songwriter’s Story of Hope, Change, and Courage—out May 5 from Atria Books—I was initially concerned that her insights would be overshadowed by some of her more idiosyncratic writerly tendencies, which comprised a huge chunk of her 2005 memoir Piece By Piece (co-written with music journalist and cultural critic Ann Powers). I enjoyed much of Piece By Piece, but I was also weirded out by some of the more woo-adjacent ideas present; at one point in Piece By Piece, Amos describes having had a sexual experience with Lucifer while on she was on ayahuasca, an incident that inspired the song “Father Lucifer” off of her 1996 album Boys For Pele. Other segments of Piece By Piece, particularly those that involved Amos discussing various goddess mythologies in relation to her work and personal life, read more like a confusing word salad than a memoir.

Fortunately, Resistance is quite a bit lighter on the mythology talk, although Amos does refer to “the muses” frequently; if you’re a fan of hers and have been for a long time, some of these references are inevitable. Amos is most engaging as memoir writer when she sets aside her more woo-ish tendencies for powerful political insights. While pontificating on the 2016 Presidential election and the work of Carl Sagan—trust me, it makes more sense in context!–she writes that “Collective trauma is its own energy,” which is a mic drop of a statement that summarizes not only the grossness of the Trump Administration’s treatment of America and its citizens, but brings to mind the botched federal response to the coronavirus pandemic.

As a work of memoir, Resistance tends to be strongest when Amos explicitly interweaves the personal and the political; her discussions of 9/11 (she and her team were in New York City when it happened) and the Iraq War, Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings in 2018, and the continued existence of right-wing women who support and prop up patriarchy for their own benefit are particular highlights. While there are bits and pieces of Resistance where Amos’s tangents about things like “sonic pathways” (in reference to her underrated 2002 concept album Scarlet’s Walk) grate a little, the book as a whole is a fairly straightforward look into her political consciousness and songwriting process. There is a section near the end of the book where Amos imagines a conversation with her deceased mother, and although that segment is gorgeously rendered, it is… an interesting choice, and probably not something that most other songwriters would choose to include in their memoirs. If some of Amos’s songs are weirdly (over)stuffed with metaphor—and many of them definitely are—this book stands as a beautifully written companion piece, and its mostly straightforward nature is a plus.

Those who are not familiar with Amos’s music, or those whose knowledge of her comes from some of the head-scratchingly odd statements that she has made in past interviews (especially those from the mid-1990s) might dismiss her as a kook. I admit that I have had those moments where, reading past interviews, I’ve suddenly realized that I have no idea what the hell she’s talking about and thought “yeah, this is way too out there for me.” However, Resistance proves that Amos is at her most formidable when she keeps her more metaphysical tendencies and goddess tangents balanced with a practical leftist outlook on the necessity of politically engaged art.

Image credit: V. Manninen