At age five, the singer and pianist Tori Amos was the youngest student ever accepted into the Peabody Institute, a music and dance conservatory at Johns Hopkins University. By eleven, she’d been dismissed, mostly for her disinclination to sight-read sheet music. Instead, she came of age performing show tunes and standards in the piano bars and hotel lounges of Washington, D.C. Her father, the Reverend Dr. Edison McKinley Amos, was her first manager. “With his clerical collar secure above the cross pinned to his lapel, we asked to play at every restaurant and bar on M Street,” she writes in her new memoir, “Resistance.”

In the nineteen-eighties, Amos moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in music, forming a short-lived synth-pop band, Y Kant Tori Read. Amos is featured on the cover of the band’s only album, wearing a bustier and elbow-length black gloves, holding a sword, with her red hair teased high and wild. After the band’s dissolution, Amos went to England to work on her solo début, “Little Earthquakes,” a dark, gripping record about the burdens and ecstasies of being a woman at the end of the twentieth century. It was a bold and personal reaction to the pressure she felt to behave in a way that might placate men. Fourteen more albums followed.

Amos has always been a fearless political writer; “Me and a Gun,” from “Little Earthquakes,” is a frank, harrowing, and autobiographical account of violent rape, one of the first songs directly addressing sexual assault to reach a wide audience. Her new book explores how she developed and nurtured that voice. On a Friday afternoon, during a slightly more normal time, Amos and I met at her sunny apartment in Tribeca. She had recently arrived in New York from the U.K., where she lives with her husband, the English sound engineer Mark Hawley, and their daughter, Tash. In conversation, Amos was kind, earnest, and deeply impassioned. The question of how musicians should react to political realities has been on Amos’s mind for a long time. Her vantage on the world—she has been travelling and performing for more than three decades—has left her worried about the future. “Something’s happening right before our eyes,” she said. “How do we make a living as artists and express what we feel we need to express?” We sat together in Tash’s bedroom and discussed Amos’s experiences performing in Russia, her childhood in Washington, her relationship to her creative muses—there are eleven of them—and what it was like to perform in New York shortly after 9/11. A few weeks later, just as the coronavirus had begun to shut down the country, we spoke again, on the phone. Those conversations have been combined, edited, and condensed.

Fifteen years ago, you released your first book, “Piece by Piece,” a memoir co-written with the music journalist Ann Powers. What made you feel as if it might be time for a second?

My editor said, “I think it’s time, and I think you’re ready to write by yourself.” Which is a very different thing than working with one of the great music journalists—it’s very different when you’re staring at a blank page alone. My editor was curious about my story, and particularly my time in Washington, D.C. When I first got a job there, I was thirteen, America didn’t want war, and Jimmy Carter was President. But a country can change. I watched it change, from the piano bars. That was where the lobbyists did their deals. In the book I call it “the liquid handshake.” I was watching legal corruption, and I was observing it from a very particular viewpoint. I couldn’t vote in 1980, but I had friends who could, and it amazed me how people would talk themselves into whatever they wanted to talk themselves into.

You began playing those piano bars along M Street, accompanied by your father, a Methodist reverend, when you were just a teen-ager. Thirteen is an intense and formative age, and you were in the citadel of American politics. Do you remember beginning to form a conception of “country,” and of how that idea might relate to art?

I was being taught history by a wonderful man—I think his name was Dr. Marlow—at Richard Montgomery High School. I was being taught the three branches of government, but I wasn’t being taught about the Federalist Society, I wasn’t being taught about legal criminality. I started to observe it as a teen-ager. Once I moved to L.A., and got caught up in hairspray and Aqua Net, I got away from it. After the 2016 election, other musicians would find me and say, “How are we here?” They were reading people like Masha Gessen, who are asking questions about authoritarianism. The question for me is: Does an artist have a responsibility when democracy is on the line? That’s my question for all artists, and the answer is different for each one.

I get e-mails from people talking to me about their experiences, and some of them are just exhausted by the doom and gloom of it all. And they’re considering, you know, just giving up. When you’re just overloaded on news, it can be demoralizing. This is where artists and writers have the ability to step in and really give people what they need. Sometimes the point is to make something that gives people joy, so that they have a break from the panic. I really think that even in the darkest of times, our ancestors got something from art, some kind of spiritual manna—or, as the British would say, the bloody bollocks to move forward and not get stuck. That’s something that I think we’ve all gone through—the feeling of “What’s the use?” I’m here to light that match and get you off your ass. I think all artists are being called at this time.

You talk a lot in the book about how failure has shaped you, beginning in 1974, when you were kicked out of the Peabody Conservatory. You were only eleven. Years later, in 1988, you had another failure, when your first record, “Y Kant Tori Read,” didn’t exactly work out the way you’d hoped.

God knows what would have happened if that had been a success. I left L.A.—I was sent by the record company to England—and I started writing “Little Earthquakes.” Doug Morris was running Atlantic Records at the time, and he believed that Max Hole, who was the head of East West Records, the U.K. side of the label, would understand “Little Earthquakes.” Doug’s idea about cross-continental collaboration was not a given template, but his instinct proved to be accurate. It took me four years to really write about my betrayal of my instrument.

My daughter, Tash, and her friends will come out to dinner with my husband and me, and they’ll sit around and ask me questions about music. They talk about the envy, and they talk about the depression. What I say to them is, “It took me a big failure.” Nobody cared. I was just a blip on Billboard, you know? It didn’t really stop anybody’s day. But it struck me down to the ground. It takes time. You might be looking at somebody your age who knows their writer’s voice, who has found it—and that can be very difficult. I wanted to talk about that difficulty in the book, because we lose a lot of artists in this vulnerable place. Somebody might have ability, or even a calling to the language of music, but if that isn’t nurtured, Amanda, then it can get stunted. Mozart comes around once every gazillion years. There are a lot of good musicians out there who need mentors—they need to be taught how to practice, and how to change “practice” from a pejorative into an adventure. Which is not an easy thing!