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***
*
*
*
*
*
*
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. 

Calling all of our fellow setlist scholars and lounge lizards 🦎 👩‍🏫 🎹 

We hear and feel your palpable excitement about Tori on tour right now, and honestly, we are still geeking out in real time as the setlists roll in each night too. So we thought we’d keep capturing that magic and excitement.

Tonight, each of us has picked five songs that we desperately want to see Tori perform on the In Times of Dragons tour. As of now, a few shows in, none of these have appeared in the setlist yet—and we haven’t shared our picks with each other, so we’ll all unzip our religion down together.

We’re going to loudly -perhaps delusionally- campaign for these songs, and maybe you can help us shout em from the rooftops in Tori’s direction along the way. Let’s close our eyes and imagine together what these fifteen songs could become—especially now that we have three insanely talented background vocalists adding layers and dimension in a way we’ve never really heard before.

So buckle up, girls and boys, ’cause we’re driving the setlist tonight. If Jon Evans ever needs a night off as Musical Director, give us a ring…we’re cheap, cute and ready to go!

Welcome to Introverted but Willing to Discuss Tori Amos — the podcast for quiet thinkers, deep listeners, and anyone who has ever had a life moment soundtracked by a Tori Amos song.

On Episode 3, Kristen, Matt and Joey discuss something that lives somewhere between ritual and road trip: Tori Amos on tour. 

Because a Tori tour isn’t just a series of concerts — it’s a living, breathing, moving cultural conversation. Songs shift, setlists breathe, old tracks reappear in new emotional colors, and every night becomes its own little universe.

Whether you’ve followed Tori across cities and continents, caught a single unforgettable show, or watched the magic unfold from afar, touring is where the songs evolve — and where the stories begin.

So in true introvert fashion, we’ll ease into it: the anticipation, the travel, the setlist surprises, the quiet community that forms in theater seats around the world, and what it feels like when those first piano notes hit the room and everything starts to vibrate. 

Tonight, on the eve of the In Times of Dragons world tour launch, we pre-game our version of the Super Bowl: Tori Amos on tour!

On our 2nd episode of season 3, we have the pleasure and privilege of being joined by the one and only Rod Thomas, better known as the iconique Bright Light, Bright Light, an artist, songwriter, producer, and DJ who has released five studio albums since 2012, his most recent being the UK top 10 selling Enjoy Youth from 2024. 

While being a fully independent artist, he has recorded with some of the music's biggest names, including Sir Elton John, Scissor Sisters, Justin Vivian Bond, Erasure, Madonna's backing singers, Nikki and Donna, and Ultra Naté. 

He has also toured the world as the opening act for Elton, Erasure, Ellie Goulding, and queen icon legend Cher. His love of 80s and 90s pop culture shines in his cinematic, colorful dance pop music, his remixes, and his DJ sets ranging from his weekly tea dance in New York City to Prides around the world and prestigious US institutions, MoMA and the Smithsonian. 

Most importantly, he is a self professed and very public Toriphile! And there's truly no one better than to deep dive Tori's fascinating and seemingly contradictory, but perhaps ultimately fitting relationship to electronica, synth pop and the strange boundless world of the remix. Welcome, welcome, Bright Light Bright Light.

For our Season 3 premiere we are going to zoom in on Tori’s relationship to cinema. I (Matt) have always been inspired by the movies, movies are my earliest memories. They were my first love, my longest relationship and for a long time, my bread and butter. 

On our season 2 episode featuring JPS JV asked him how he would describe Tori’s music. We see Tori as a great auteur, someone who creates worlds that are cinematic and immersive. In that respect, she is like the Martin Scorsese of singer-songwriters: a director who can handle any genre thrown at him, but still retains a certain quality that is unmistakably his and his alone. 

To be this kind of artist, at minimum, you have to at least know yourself inside and out and Tori proved with Little Earthquakes that she could articulate everything that was inside of her mind, her heart, her bones. She did this so early in life that she allowed herself the creative freedoms to blend those worlds for the rest of her career, and  explore narrative and character in a way very few singer-songwriters have. She became a sonic character actress sure, because she played all of the roles in her songs herself, but, in our view, she truly became a sonic auteur. The listener can see these stories visually as they experience the music sonically. 

Today we are cataloguing and contextualizing Tori Amos many dalliances with cinema, so no please join us as we launch Season THRAY.

A wise man (not really, it was just Matt Mazur) once said "Tori Amos invented sex," and in this season finale, we’re proving it. Whether she's falling in love in the snow or commanding the piano bench, Tori knows how to turn it up a notch. We’ve got a "DTF" playlist ready for you to enjoy the winter chill that bends. We’re introverted, we’re obsessed, and we’re ready to discuss the steamier side of Tori Amos.

One Night Stand: TA DTF playlist