American Doll Posse

Through the late ’90s into the 2000s, Tori Amos’s musical ambition seemed boundless, transforming everything she found — trip-hop, harpsichords, the idea of a covers album — idiosyncratic, stratospherically high-concept vision. This stalled with 2005’s The Beekeeper, a heady cottagecore-before-cottagecore album that, while not uncharming, was a retreat to a subdued, smaller place. So, to reboot, Tori went big. In fact, she went polymorphic, creating a titular “posse” of five Toris representing aspects of her personality and femininity in general. Online, they formed an Extended Tori Universe: character blogs and fictional tour diaries flung throughout the then-budding social media landscape for fans to track down.

All this wasn’t just promotional role-play. Amos channeled each of her new songs through one or two of her personae, even re-interpreting songs from her back catalogue through them on tour. And in doing so, cleverly, she brought together on one album all the genres she’d explored (or invented) in her nearly two-decade career. Via Clyde: sparkling pop tracks like “Bouncing Off Clouds” and more of the delicate ballads she’d mastered on Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink. Via Pip: brash rock tracks with an assist from partner and guitarist Mac Aladdin, like a mature reboot of her Y Kant Tori Read done days, as well as a few seething slow-burns like “Smokey Joe.” Via Isabel: the protest songs the mid-2000s called for, including Dubya callout “Yo George.” Via Tori-the-character: statements of identity like the album’s lead single, Southern-piano-rock stomper “Big Wheel.” And via Santa: her flirtiest, goofiest self, sexifying the church with blues bombast and lascivious wordplay on “Body and Soul” and likening herself to “Programmable Soda”: “Too much cherry? You can just add cola!”) All things to all people, in other words — and an energy that would power her next decade of theater, classical suites, even more genre-voracious albums, and so much personality it needed five women to contain.