On this episode we are leaping headfirst into Pandora's Aquarium and having it out over the absolute embarrassment of riches that are Tori's opening and closing album tracks, which are routinely considered some of the strongest and most significant work on their respective records.

Tori, when asked about sequencing albums in a 2012 interview with The Quietus:

"I'm always looking at things as albums, not as something that people pull a track off of. I'm looking at the complete work. The fluidity of moving from one to the other—I've always thought that was really essential. Being able to sit there and put the album on and have an experience." (2012)

Every Tori album begins with a promise. Sometimes an invitation. Sometimes a warning. Sometimes a slap across the face. And by the time the record ends, she's left us either inspired, devastated, enlightened, beguiled, catatonic... or perhaps all of the above.

Tonight we're putting those bookends to the test.

Now that In Times of Dragons has given us opening and closing songs I think we're pretty comfortable calling instant classics, we've decided to rank every opening track and every closing track from Tori's full-length studio albums of original, non-seasonal material.

This isn't necessarily about the best songs. It's about the art of opening the door to another world and knowing exactly how and when to leave it.

Can an explosive opener beat a slow-burning masterpiece? Is the perfect closer the one that offers resolution and ties a bow on the preceding 60–85 minutes? Or should a closer be one serpentine, provocative question mark that leaves us wanting more, needing desperately to start the album over again to discover new clues and figure out how what started out as a pretty good year ended in a little earthquake?

As always, we've brought our lists, our arguments, and our deeply held opinions that are all pretty much guaranteed to change again next week....

So, get out your parasol because you'll need to protect yourself from all the gold dust we'll be slinging.

Too much? Hmm. Oh well.

You’ll soon find it’s not a democracy on this pod, HONEY.

Opening tracks ranked: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0uVBgx1CPqfV4hBDccklr7?si=9Q-4Av0TTEiaPzesdvGv7w&utm_source=copy-link&pi=W7sc52dkQZO3Q

Closing tracks ranked: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6BMKhpQBb33FkfIV7lrivq?si=uCOGLHiEQKCQ4X2Y5n5RMg&utm_source=copy-link&pi=VY8P5A-LQt6wP

Sometimes the longest journeys can begin with the performance of a single live song. Over the course of a few unforgettable days, we traced the song lines through New Orleans, Austin, Dallas, and Nashville. We crossed state lines and time zones. We traded highways for own ways and back again, following a trail of songs that have been traveling beside us some for decades.

All of this unfolds nightly across cities and theater aisles and airport terminals and hotel lobbies, over late night meals and early morning departures, and spans Michelin star restaurants to hot dogs on the streets before bed. It's where familiar songs reveal new emotional landscapes, where strangers become friends, where old friends find each other again, and where the music quietly reminds us that we're part of something much larger than ourselves. Each city carried its own atmosphere, its own heartbeat, its own conversation with the music that filled the room.

Somewhere in between the anticipation, the reunions, the laughter, the long drives, and the delayed flights that stitched this past week together, we found something that we treasure every time we're lucky enough to do this. The chance for us to be together. So by the end of days like these, you stop remembering which city held what song. What you remember is the feeling of choosing some chasing something beautiful from one horizon to the next. So tonight we're looking back on

The first four shows that we attended of the In Times of Dragons US tour. And we're not here to rank the performances or settle on definitive favorites, but we're here to just trace the threads that connected everything, the surprises that stayed with us, the listeners we finally met, and old friends that we embraced and the quiet realization that this music continues to bring us back to each other and through that back to Tori. So please join us as we retrace the song lines as they sing.

It's happening!! 🤩 With Tori's 2026 U.S. tour kicking off in less than 48 hours, we're in full pre-tour geek mode. In this special tour-eve episode, we're answering your listener questions —mostly about the tour— plus a handful of fun surprises. Come join the frenzied excitement, the wild speculation, and the joyful anticipation.

Let's GO! ❤️🎹

We are gay gasping in excitement as we celebrate Pride month by having a much needed - and much requested - dialogue about Tori’s passionate, lifelong relationship with and connection to the queer community. As if that weren’t SINsual enough, we have the absolute delight and privilege of doing so by welcoming true Renaissance Man, Very Famous Homosexual, and most importantly, staunch Toriphile, John Arthur Hill to the podcast.

Chances are you already know John - either from his wickedly funny social media presence, or from his Sirius Radio shows The John Hill Show and Andy Cohen Live, or perhaps you’ve been fortunate enough to catch his iconic standup musical Wellness Check, which traces his journey from being a teenage country singer at Six Flags in San Antonio Texas, to Broadway, and, of course, to SiriusXM. Along the way, he performs original songs at the piano and shares stories from every chapter of his life. Some of his most celebrated compositions include The Same Five Gays; Careful With The Mics; CrossBody Gay; and an X-rated country song that got him banned from TikTok and must be seen live to be fully appreciated.

Broadway fans will know him from roles in The Boy From Oz, where he also understudied Hugh Jackman, as well as part of the original Broadway cast of Hairspray. Behind the scenes, John has built an impressive television career as a writer and producer on shows including Watch What Happens Live, Project Runway, Top Chef, and, in case you missed the 32 other times I mentioned he was gay, Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List.

Later this July you can find John in Provincetown - we hear he’s gonna see some Bears there! - debuting his brand new show Silk and Loose - which we cannot wait to hear ALL about. So, please join us in conversation with John Arthur Hill!

In this savory and sweet episode of Introverted but Willing to Discuss Tori Amos, we are joined by Timothy Pakron, cookbook author, photographer, food stylist, recipe architect, gardener, and the creative force behind Mississippi Vegan.

Timothy’s acclaimed cookbook Mississippi Vegan reimagines Southern, Cajun, and Creole cuisine through a plant-based lens, with recipes rooted in the food, land, traditions, and family stories of his Mississippi Gulf Coast childhood. His work celebrates place, memory, beauty, queerness, ritual, and the ever-evolving idea of comfort.

But behind all that lush, edible magic is something else we obviously needed to discuss: Timothy is a huge Tori Amos fan. In this conversation, we talk about his personal Tori origin story, the songs and performances that shaped him, and the creative world he has built through food, gardening, music, and self-making.

We also get into the full-circle magic of Timothy’s forthcoming book Garden Variety being endorsed by none other than Tori herself — a moment that feels less like “famous person liked my book” and more like an artist who helped shape Timothy’s inner world finding her way into something he created from that very world.

Using Timothy’s special Garden Variety-inspired YouTube playlist as our guide, we wander through gardens, kitchens, songs, sensuality, Southernness, memory, and the strange little portals that open when music, food, and creative devotion meet.

Join us as we show you the things you’ve been missing, show you the ways you forgot to be speaking, and show you the ways to get back to the garden.

Mississippi Vegan instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mississippivegan/

Timothy's Garden Variety playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwpcDMwM6mqjq9stvIPBa5c25kYUglMDg&si=wxNxzAbIdjzn1u8q

Tori Amos offers quarantine comfort with a recipe for vegan mushroom stew: https://www.npr.org/2020/05/04/849110966/tori-amos-offers-quarantine-comfort-with-a-recipe-for-vegan-mushroom-stew

Welcome to all of our sonic librarians and album archivists! In this episode we are doing something extremely dangerous to our reputations in the Tori fandom, and maybe even with Tori herself… We are ranking the albums.

AAHHHHHHhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Before anyone lights a candle circle around their #1 album and starts sending nasty messages, this is not definitive, objective, or scientific Tori scholarship. This is just three longtime fans having fun and seeing where our hearts land right now, in this particular moment, because honestly In Times of Dragons has scrambled our brains a little bit. The new album has us realizing some albums have quietly climbed the ranks while others maybe hit us differently than they used to. And this new one came crashing in.

To be clear: this isn’t about declaring “the best” Tori Amos album. It’s about where these records live for us right now, what’s grown with us.

Will we contradict ourselves? Absolutely. Will we offend somebody by ranking their favorite at the bottom? Completely. But that’s part of the fun. As a wise woman once said, “if it’s too loud turn it up” and we’re going to do just that.

So unzip your religion, lower your expectations for objectivity, and let’s rank some Tori Amos albums!

RANKED LIST ***SPOILER***
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16 Midwinter Graces
15 The Beekeeper
14 Ocean to Ocean
13 Unrepentant Geraldines
12 Abnormally Attracted to Sin
11 Night of Hunters
10 Little Earthquakes
9 American Doll Posse
8 Strange Little Girls
7 In Times of Dragons
6 To Venus and Back
5 Boys for Pele
4 Under the Pink
3 Scarlet’s Walk

2 Native Invader

1 From the Choirgirl Hotel

We’re joined today by John Philip Shenale. AGAIN! What a compliment. JPS is a producer, composer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist, and one of Tori Amos’ most essential longtime creative collaborators. He’s been behind some of the most defining sonic worlds in her catalog for decades.

In this episode, we go deep into 23 Peaks, the closing track from In Times of Dragons. And while we don’t seek to be completist or archivist with this look at 23 Peaks, we know that people want more. This song is not really just a song. It feels more like crossing a threshold into an entirely new world. Ethereal, devastating, cinematic, cathartic, hopeful. And already one of the most talked-about, deeply felt moments in the Tori Amos catalog, even though we’ve only held this song in our hands for merely 2 official weeks.

Listen to our Q&A with John Philip Shenale on 23 Peaks.

This is a truly momentous occasion as we bring you an exclusive track by track review of Tori’s long awaited new album - her first in 5 years - In Times of Dragons, which imagines another woman we’ll call Tori escaping the clutches of her Peter Thiel-quoting, billionaire “Lizard Demon” husband and going on a literal and metaphysical journey to both reconnect with her estranged daughter and seek help from a circle of Dragon Queens to remove the blade-like scales growing from her spine before ultimately realizing her destiny is indeed to give herself over to the Ancient Order and accept her transformation into a dragon herself.

I know. But trust us. It’s really fucking good.

Allegory aside, this is one of the most revealing, insightful, and probing records of Tori’s career, each track asking unflinching questions of The Self, like how we did we get ourselves into this nightmarish political quicksand and how we will collectively join forces to pull ourselves out? It also finds Tori confronting her own mortality, her evolving vocal prowess, and what it means to compose in decomposing times.

So, snap the throttle, light a candle for St Teresa, and gaze out at the Strawberry Moon while we dive deep into a bold new chapter of The Tori Amos Songbook, In Times of Dragons.