Tori Amos brings visual art, theater into her music

If you want Tori Amos - an artist renowned for her smart, passionate lyrics and melodic abandon - to talk about how she does her art, she'll chat your ear off.

"I can talk process all day," she says.

Good.

Amos is someone who's been willing to risk her long-held position in the charts with classically inspired song cycles (Night of Hunters), orchestral deconstructions of her best-loved songs (Gold Dust), sumptuous, twinkly musical theater pieces (The Light Princess), and an amalgamation of all of the above in a dissonant pop context (her new Unrepentant Geraldines). It's worth it to talk shop with her.

Start with the inspiration for Unrepentant Geraldines - the color palettes of Paul Cézanne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the black-and-white world of marginalized subject matter in Diane Arbus - and how it affects Amos. "Their images weren't with me since childhood - maybe Rossetti - but rather the last few years," she says. "Cézanne just clicked for me by reading about his process through the poet Rilke, talking about him having 16 shades of blue in his palette."

Did Amos feel these influences taking hold? Not necessarily, she says, but she immersed herself in Arbus - "her work, her story" - and Rossetti, "because you have to be a sleuth in order to get to the meat of their process. Which is everything. You have to be a hunter, in my case, a sonic hunter." If the visual arts seem pretty remote from music, she says, "once you're hunting, you start finding loose threads, and like a good spider, you weave together these threads."

Amos believes in the power of muses to guide her way in "decoding and downloading information from the ether." After all, quite often, inspiration is not immediately apparent. "Plus, whether artists are aware of it or not, they're protecting their process even if they aren't flagrantly lying to your face."

Amos mentions here that her 13-year-old daughter Tash (who appears on Geraldines in a rousing duet, "Promise") has absorbed much of her mom's approach. "You're planting sonic seeds. Then you have to figure how you'll build that structure. It's not always spoken, but she just knows what the inspiration is, and the lightbulb goes on."

Amos' own bulb brightened when it came to taking on 2013's The Light Princess, based on George MacDonald's Scottish fairy tale. Playwright Samuel Adamson adapted the story for the stage, and Amos wrote the music. Directed by Marianne Elliott, the show played an extended run for the Royal National Theatre in London. The threesome had to develop their own language because musicians and theater practitioners have differing disciplines and lexicons, but ultimately they gelled. Elliott and Adamson, Amos says, "taught me the benefit of the through-line - Elliott in particular, who was magical, but ruthless - to follow the patterns of the music. I haven't spent seven years on this to fail," she says. (She starts recording her own version of Light Princess this autumn, before the musical goes to Broadway.)

Amos' work with Light Princess (to say nothing of her recent classical endeavors) enlivens her approach to past material in concert, as well as the towering tones of Geraldines. "The other processes definitely informed this one," she says: The discipline of theatrical storytelling - that through-line again - infused Geraldines with a clarity and directness new in Amos' work.

"I was rigorous with it," Amos says. "I wrote its songs within the last five years, keeping it alive and thriving and separate from everything else I was doing. That was my world apart from Princess, that and my private family life. The new record is doing its job. She is who she is. It speaks for itself, it's so clear. And me, I play its songs. I go rock."