The performance feels sickeningly eerie on the heels of Houston’s death Saturday at 48. Both the song and her duet partner were links to the singer’s decorated past: Price featured on her Grammy-nominated 1999 single “Heartbreak Hotel” and a studio version of “Jesus Loves Me” appeared on the soundtrack of “The Bodyguard,” the 1992 album which made Houston a megastar. What’s more, she looked healthy and sounded strong; there were no warning signs that the brief appearance would be her last. (Though the photos of her returning to the Beverly Hills Hotel on Friday night tell a different story.) Houston, whose reputation was marred by a turbulent marriage to R&B star Bobby Brown (and a disastrous reality show about their lives together) and well-publicized struggles with addiction, finally seemed well enough to reboot her singing career.

Despite erratic public behavior and increasingly unsteady live performances, Houston always had fans who rooted for her recovery, who wanted her to recapture her powerhouse voice and magnetic personality. Born into music royalty — her mom was the gospel icon Cissy Houston, her cousin Dionne Warwick and her godmother soul great Aretha Franklin — the New Jersey native cut her teeth singing gospel in church, modeling and acting. By the time she earned a record deal, Whitney (like Madonna, Prince and Michael, one name was enough to identify her) was an enviable combination of glamorous and casual. On 1985’s “Whitney Houston” and 1987’s “Whitney,” her spin on contemporaneous soft rock, R&B, soul and gospel was mature but not stuffy or beholden to formality; on early hit singles, she struck a balance between playful longing (“How Will I Know,” “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” “So Emotional”) and serious balladry (“Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” “Saving All My Love For You”). To little girls growing up in the ‘80s, Whitney Houston and Madonna were the artists you emulated and sang along to (loudly); they were the powerful, confident women you heard on the radio all the time, the pair you strove to be like.

However, Houston was also more than likely the artist your mom (if not grandmother) liked, which helped her ease gracefully into an adult career. That period arguably started with her dual starring acting role/soundtrack appearances on 1992’s “The Bodyguard,” a movie in which Kevin Costner played her protector. If her ‘80s tunes made her a household name, her interpretation of the Dolly Parton-penned “I Will Always Love You” sent her into the stratosphere. To this day, Houston’s soft-rock re-do of the country hit endures as an awe-inspiring performance: octave-dancing vocal prowess, nuanced emotional longing and the kind of subtlety hard to find in today’s mainstream music, in the form of her dramatic pause near the end of the song before she launches into the climactic, “And I…will always love youuuuu… .”

Houston would never top “The Bodyguard” and its monstrous success. (Besides “I Will Always Love You,” the soundtrack spawned the torchy hit “I Have Nothing” and a disco-soul remake of Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman.”) And although she continued to evolve into a graceful R&B singer and rack up winning singles — throughout the 1990s, hits came from the soundtracks of “Waiting To Exhale,” “The Preacher’s Wife” and “The Prince Of Egypt” and her 1998 solo album, “My Love Is Your Love” — her problems with drugs and a chaotic marriage soon took a toll on her public persona. Rumors of substance abuse swirled around her — something not helped when marijuana was found in her and Brown’s luggage in 2000 — and in a 2002 interview with Diane Sawyer, a defensive Houston uttered these infamous sentences: “Crack is cheap; I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Let’s get that straight, okay? We don’t do crack, we don’t do that. Crack is wack.” The latter catchphrase caused an uproar and did irreparable damage to her reputation.

But Houston persevered — and eventually came clean about her private turmoil. In a 2009 Oprah Winfrey interview, a calmer Houston — her voice noticeably raspier and lower — was open about abusing cocaine and marijuana, and admitted the post-”Bodyguard” era was tough: “By ’The Preacher’s Wife,’ [doing drugs] was an everyday thing. … I would do my work, but after I did my work, for a whole year or two, it was everyday.” Her marriage to Brown was troubled, she told Oprah, including a time when he spit in her face in front of their daughter, Bobbi. The couple divorced in 2007.

In recent years, Houston’s fortunes ebbed and flowed. 2009’s “I Look to You” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and the song “Million Dollar Bill” also hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play charts, but lukewarm-to-critical reception marred her 2010 world tour and she entered outpatient rehab as recently as May 2011. Still, in her recent public appearances she seemed upbeat and healthy; it seemed plausible she could follow in the footsteps of Tina Turner, who rejuvenated her career after extricating herself from an abusive domestic situation.

But with her premature death, it’s hard not to compare Houston to Michael Jackson, another ‘80s megastar who died young, crippled by addiction and the burdens of fame. Like the King Of Pop, Houston was a pioneer, one who broke open racial barriers so that other soul/R&B artists could have a shot at mainstream success. “The Bodyguard” was Houston’s “Thriller,” the career albatross from which she could never escape. And just as MJ reinvented the concept of the male pop star, Houston did the same for women. She was vulnerable and girlish, but never let those qualities undermine her talent, something fellow huge-voiced diva Mariah Carey took to heart. And Houston exuded confidence in every aspect of her career — of course because of her voice, but also because of her expressive interpretations. She could have bludgeoned listeners over the head with just the sheer power of her voice — but instead, Houston approached her songs like an actress inhabiting a character, squeezing emotion from every lyric with sincerity, grace and elegance.

Echoes of Suzanne Vega’s bittersweet pop (“Empty Threat”), Victoria Williams’ quaint folk (“Chameleon/Comedian”) and Neko Case’s haunted antiquity (“Change the Sheets”) abound; however, “Voyageur” makes room for everything from lovely acoustic laments (the wrenching break-up sketch “House Full of Empty Rooms”) and fizzy power-pop (“Sidecar,” a dizzying ode to new love) to organ-burnished AM Gold (the seven-minute “For the Record”) and piano-driven solemnity (“A Soft Place to Land”). Most important, Edwards’ music has plenty of open space to breathe, which magnifies the small, biting truths of her observational lyrics. It’s her first album since 2008′s “Asking for Flowers,” and during that time, Edwards’ marriage to longtime collaborator Colin Cripps busted up. Now Vernon is helping her launch a new musical beginning as well.

In mid-December, Edwards chatted about “Voyageur” and her music evolution while staying at her parents’ tranquil farmhouse about four hours from Toronto.

You’ve had a busy year, so your relaxation is justified.

I came up here during the summer, after I‘d finished recording my record, and Justin was out on tour. It was really weird — as soon as the record was finished, and after working so closely with Justin and [after] everything stopped in my life a little bit, I kind of didn’t know what to do with myself. I went through a post-album and a post-content-of-album few months of really processing some pretty sad [things]. Maybe I had my midlife crisis this year, I don’t know. [Laughs.] I came up here and tried to find some good peace.

That’s interesting you had this time of processing after the record was done. Conventional wisdom would be that most people would do so as they’re creating and making. Why after the record?

I think because I was so focused on the quality of the record and making it where I had set out to make [it]. There’s a lot of logistical things in the record, like jumping from Toronto to Wisconsin [where Vernon lives] almost every two weeks. I was going back and forth a lot. I was really focused on the logistics of the players and booking studio time. And then just being really focused on delivering the music the way I wanted to. It did consume a lot of my time.

I think [it happened] after partly, too, because it was two or three years of my life wrapped up in this project. You spend so much time processing and living it, and for it to be over … And [the record] was done in May, and I spent six months with no one hearing my record and no one hearing what my whole life had been about for all these years. Not in a way where I don’t have anything else, or I’m so narcissistic I think my whole life revolves around the music I make. It was more because the content was pretty significant in terms of just a pretty big thing happening in my life. Once it was over, I felt really vulnerable. I felt like, “Wow, I wrote the history of my feelings and my emotions, and I put them down on record.” It was this weird, nebulous place where I actually felt really sad and alone for quite a few months. It’s weird — you feel vulnerable because you’ve put all of your truth and all of your fears and all of your resentments and everything into songs, and you send them out into the world. Whereas I think a lot of people get to deal with that stuff more privately.

Listening to the record’s lyrics, it veers from happy and jubilant to introspective, dark, searing breakup stuff. I imagine that would be exhausting to do, just veering back and forth like that.

And I think, too, other than that part, a lot of my focus was on the musical element being a step in a different direction. I was really concentrating on making sure I achieved that. Sometimes I had written these songs, over the course of a few years, in these really up-and-down times. And then I went and recorded [the album], and while I was recording it, I was thinking very consistently, “OK, I really want this to sound different than anything I’ve done before. How do I achieve that today?” Maybe the content — or the acknowledgment of what these songs are really about — kind of took a back seat for a little while for me. When it was done, I just went, “Holy shit. I feel very sad.”

Longtime fans will notice it’s very, very different musically. What made you decide to go in this different direction?

Part of it was that I really wanted to accomplish this thing where… I feel like a lot of my previous records didn’t necessarily best exemplify all of the influences I have and all the music I really feel lives inside of me. I’m a huge fan of a lot of different genres of music, and I really felt like somehow I had been pigeonholed a little bit — maybe of my own doing — and in a way where I felt like I was sort of falsely defined. What my music was being called wasn’t really the music I was always listening to. And I just really wanted to have different sounds accompany my record and [have it] still make sense — I really wanted to achieve that.

[My musical tastes encompass] everything from loving the Bell Orchestre and other classical compositions to loving the White Stripes and loving Annie Lennox. It’s not like you want to suck all their ideas and put it into your music. But I sort of felt like maybe I’d just not focused enough on the musicality of some of my records, in a way. I was being categorized as some kind of twangy songwriter. And that’s just not how I see myself.  I really love music that’s on the periphery of not fitting into a clear genre. I felt like I was constantly being described as something I didn’t really feel like I identified with.

That happens to so many artists. They start off their career doing things, and once you get that label, it’s hard to break out of that. People see you as one way, and they don’t want to see you another way.

It’s so true. If every person at [age 25] had to answer, in an interview-style, four very significant questions about how they feel and how they see themselves and what’s important to them — and then they’re asked 10 years later to live by those answers, or those answers are on record for everyone to see and they’re held to them — everyone would have a much better capacity for understanding how everyone should and need to change, and how being defined by something you do when you’re in the earlier parts of your adult life [is difficult]. People are always changing — and the idea that, “Oh, you’ve made a departure record” or “You’ve written a book that’s so different than your last book,” it’s like, “Yeah — that’s how it’s supposed to go, right?”

A big reason why “The Great Escape Artist” sounds so vibrant has to do with its creative team. Although produced by Rich Costey (Muse, Interpol), the album features writing, programming and bass contributions from TV on the Radio guitarist/keyboardist/programmer Dave Sitek. The latter’s work with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Foals and his own band is wildly creative, atmospheric and steeped in dynamics — in short, the perfect foil for Jane’s Addiction, whose sound is a patchwork amalgam of hard rock, funk, post-punk and psychedelia. Even when they saturated radio with the acoustic lament “Jane Says” or misfit jitterbug “Been Caught Stealing,” the band never quite sounded like anything — or anyone — else around.

For frontman Farrell, Jane’s Addiction is just one of his endeavors. He’s frequently involved in charity events and benefit concerts, he’s a staunch environmentalist and, most notably, he’s overseen the reactivation of Lollapalooza, which is now a multi-day music festival in Chicago (and, as of this year, also in Chile). But it’s all in keeping with Farrell’s forward-looking mindset, which he stressed during a recent phone interview with Salon about the state of Jane’s in 2011.

The new record sounds like Jane’s Addiction in 2011. But actually, it also reminded me of U2 in some places.

U2 is a great group. As far as inspiration goes, though, they were not really accounted for too much, I would be honest to tell you that. Pink Floyd or Joy Division or New Order — those were the heavy influences. But they were only influences to us in method — “method” meaning live players with a little studio magic. That was really the premise. And what we have today in the way of studio magic added into Jane’s Addiction, the band.

Those bands are very atmospheric and dynamic, and that’s what struck me about this record, too.

Absolutely. We want to create a mood; we had a theme, and the theme was escapism, ways to escape. I had to be autobiographical about that. And my time and my chances to escape sounds like the record. [Laughs.] The dark, dark times of the night, you know, when most people are asleep was basically when I did my living.

What drives Jane’s Addiction’s studio urges in 2011, as opposed to maybe what drove the band back in your earlier days?

Back in the early days, we didn’t have computers to even consider — computer software, synths, guitar synths, software. Now we’ve got all these things to consider while making music, and we want to make use of the best hardware and the best software that we have around us. Those modern tools generate new sounds, sounds you couldn’t get back in the ’80s. If you ignore them, then you’re ignoring 25 years’ worth of progress that the world is… I don’t want to say used to hearing, but they expect to hear new sounds. If you give them the same [sounds], it’s like opening up an expired bag of potato chips. It’s just stale. You need to have something fresh for them — and then something familiar too, because they like familiar.

But if it’s all familiar, it’s like… why is it that the blues are not so popular anymore? Because we’re just used to [them]. The world needs something to bite on, to nibble on, that is unfamiliar as they evolve. But it’s gotta be something that once [people] digest it, they like it enough that they feel like they’ve learned something or become smarter from it. It’s fortitude. It’s nutrition. That’s how you write today in a modern scenario, a modern band. We use this method in writing music, and we did not want to ignore that or bypass that method because we wanted to play it safe. We live dangerous lives, I would say. Our lifestyles are somewhat dangerous. And we wanted that to be represented in the music, so we [made] a dangerous record. [Laughs.]

In that sense, having Dave Sitek involved is perfect. He’s an amazing producer, and so good at getting modern sounds that do challenge the listener.

And he is dangerous.

In what way?

When I first met him, [he told me] that he and his brother grew up in New Jersey, and he liked to read and he liked to fight. [Laughs.]

Those are two dangerous things, in very different ways.

I like reading, and I do like fighting. But I could see where he was coming from, where maybe if kids would pick on him, he’d punch ‘em out. To be honest with you, I kind of like that in a man; he doesn’t let people get away with picking on him.

Musically, how did you guys click?

We got together and we listened to music. He came to my garage, where I had my studio, and I played him everything I was writing at that time; I was writing lots of electronic music. He listened to all of it and was really psyched. He went home and called me the next day and said, “Hey, man, I’m really excited.” He said there were two bands on this planet that could pull off what I want to do with music. And Jane’s Addiction’s one of them.

Wow.

Yeah. I just trusted him from there. He liked where I was going with my electronic music, but we both understood it wasn’t going to be an electronic record by any means. But it was going to be adventurous and not be [cowardly] in its approach. We were going to consider every possible method of making sound, and then just pick the best sounds. We went into hours and hours of jamming and then hours and hours of layering, and that’s how we came up with the sounds that eventually came to be recorded.

So many bands that have been around for so long, like you guys have, are afraid to take risks. They’ll write a variation on their most popular stuff, because it’s what people know. And it sounds like a copy.

I consider myself to be an artist first. And as an artist, my first obligation is to art. To sit there and draw the same thing over and over would be no fun. It’s the same thing with music; to record the same thing over and over is no fun. For me, you can count me out if you’re going to go about it that way. But if you want to get down and get adventurous and courageous and look to make fresh new music that will have all the elements that we want — which is, you want glory, you want power and you want sex, and you want curiosity and the unknown. You want all those things in your sound; you can put them in there. That’s your personality. You can put your personality into this music, but don’t turn your back on the evolution of music itself. You’re doing an injustice to your very own art, if you don’t consider the new palette, the new paints, the new ways of making music.

Especially in the last month or so, there has been so much nostalgia surrounding a lot of bands you were popular with in the early ’90s, with Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and Pearl Jam’s “10″ turning 20. It’s interesting that you’re still very forward-thinking.

I can afford to be. Look, maybe you think I’m slightly stupid, because I don’t stop to consider what others might think of the new record. But there is calculation involved, where you’re not going too far away so that people that loved you… The people that loved Jane’s Addiction were always forward-thinking people, so I calculate and figure they’re going to receive this record with the same open-mindedness they did back in the day. We were not a metal band, and anybody who thinks we were a metal band doesn’t know Jane’s Addiction. They were definitely not one of the first people to love Jane’s Addiction. [The band] were loved by the awkward, the outsider, the person that was disjointed from his family or society. Those are the people that first loved us and accepted us.

In a weird way, it’s really no different today — we’re taking a risk and we’re putting out a sound, our own sound. It’s what we came up with; we worked hard on it, it’s not a throwaway, we’re not just doing something without any kind of forethought. We’ve been thinking about this record and thinking about it for a year and a half. We took a lot of time to put it together, and it’s very deliberate what we’ve done. Those that were not around in the early days, I think will also be excited about the record, because it is the sound of today. They’re not getting a sound from the ’80s; they’re getting a sound that is representative of their generation and of their lifetime.

But more than anything, breaking up was a typically brave move for the Rock And Roll Hall of Famers. When you’re a successful band for over three decades, actively deciding to split up is the more difficult path. It’s far easier to rest on your laurels (and your back catalog) and let sluggish inertia (and reissues of said back catalog) propel you forward. After all, veteran successful bands don’t maintain the frenetic pace younger groups do; they can get away with years-long gaps between albums, occasional interviews and sporadic website updates. They have the luxury of doing their main project only whenever they feel like it. So to assert, as R.E.M. did, that they don’t want to do this anymore — well, that’s bold.

Taking a stand was something R.E.M. did very well during their career. In the early days, Stipe was firmly against lip-syncing; he famously sang live over pre-recorded music in the band’s “So. Central Rain” video. They were stridently political — whether they were supporting issues in their hometown of Athens, Ga., campaigning for Democratic presidential candidates or espousing causes such as voter registration and human rights. If you’d visited their website last week, lyrically, they touched on specific topics — U.S. presence in Central America (“Welcome to the Occupation”), the Vietnam War (“Orange Crush”) and environmental concerns (“Cuyahoga”) — alongside more general takes on revolution and oppression.

And musically, R.E.M. were very firmly aligned against the status quo: When disco leftovers, plastic synthpop and gooey soft-rock ruled the mainstream, they took inspiration from ‘60s pop (the Monkees, the Hollies), folksy rock (the Byrds, Creedence Clearwater Revival), anxious jangle-strum (the Feelies, Television) and New York icons (Velvet Underground; Patti Smith, Stipe’s longtime idol). It’s easy to see why R.E.M. quickly started to resonate with fans; there was something very real and relatable about the music they made. Their debut full-length album, 1983’s “Murmur,” was enigmatic and welcoming all at once, brimming with old-soul wisdom and electric energy. 1984’s warmer, more cohesive “Reckoning” focused on homesick, road-worn jangle-rock, while the pastoral-tinged murk of 1985’s American-South-steeped “Fables of the Reconstruction” brooded in all the right ways.

Even as the band’s popularity increased — Top 10 Billboard hits, MTV heavy rotation, arena tours, mainstream radio airplay — there was nothing overtly contemporary about their music. A cheesy saxophone in 1987’s “Fireplace” and 1991’s “Radio Song,” which featured rapper KRS-One, were about as close as the band got to trend-assimilating until 1994’s “Monster.” (And “Radio Song” came on the heels of their biggest hit, “Losing My Religion,” whose primary riff was played on mandolin.) 1991’s multi-platinum “Out of Time” was full of lush, orchestrated songs — “Love songs,” Stipe once said — which felt like delicate antiques. And at the height of grunge’s churning angst, R.E.M. released 1992’s gorgeous “Automatic for the People,” which featured introspective ruminations on mortality and majestic, melancholy strings.

But to many critics of the band, “Monster” signaled a turning point. Distorted and brash, the album went for the rock-radio jugular and succeeded mightily, although in hindsight it was R.E.M.’s first album that felt of its time. 1996’s “New Adventures in Hi-Fi,” despite being well-received and wildly creative — the piano-dazzled “Electrolite” remained a live staple — didn’t seem as talked-about or vital as the previous albums.

The R.E.M. mythology inexorably cracked after drummer Bill Berry left the band in 1997, several years after he suffered a brain aneurysm while onstage in Switzerland. Many almost seemed to resent the band for continuing on after Berry left; in fact, at least in America, R.E.M. has been out of fashion and unpopular for a long time. Although a fan favorite — and in hindsight, a touching collection on how to love even as you grieve and mourn — 1998’s dark, keyboard-burnished “Up” is often considered too forced. (Out of R.E.M.’s albums, “Up” is perhaps the one overdue for critical reappraisal; in particular, the buzzing, Leonard Cohen-inspired “Hope” and slow-burning “Walk Unafraid” are gems.) 2001’s Beach Boys-inspired “Reveal” again felt askew, its gauzy harmonies and soft-glow riffs too detached and emotionally inconsequential to linger. But perhaps most maligned is 2004’s “Around the Sun.” The band has admitted the album’s shortcomings; Buck once said it “wasn’t really listenable, because it sounds like what it is, a bunch of people that are so bored with the material that they can’t stand it anymore.” The indifference toward — if not abject hatred for — the album had a mortal effect on R.E.M.’s momentum.

Now, many artists make bad records — some artists have made many bad records — and they’re not shunned. Yet R.E.M.’s status as a pariah felt confirmed in the wake of yesterday’s breakup. Snark and vitriol poured forth from the Internet peanut gallery — variations on sentiments such as, “They haven’t made a good record in 15 years” and “They should’ve broken up years ago.” (More stinging, however, was this nugget: “I thought they broke up years ago.”) All of the goodwill R.E.M. built up in the ‘80s and ‘90s due to their activism, concerts and music seemed forgotten. That the group had released two solid, at times magical, records in the last three years — “Collapse Into Now” and its barnstorming sonic predecessor, 2008’s “Accelerate” — barely registered.

Still, for longtime fans, for those who took to Facebook yesterday with memories and old performance clips, yesterday’s breakup felt like a death in the family. R.E.M. were more than just a band; they represented an aesthetic preference. In contrast to U2, the kings of secular sincerity, R.E.M. made themselves vulnerable in a very human way. They were a smart band who stood for substantial things and weren’t afraid to be totally, delightfully weird. The group’s stubborn unorthodoxy resonated with the kids who didn’t fit in — the ones who were too smart, too unconventional, too geeky, too philosophical, too artsy. Hardcore fans naturally gravitated toward one another: If you saw someone wearing an R.E.M. shirt, you just knew on a subconscious level you’d probably be friends.

R.E.M.’s alchemy never felt more alive than it did onstage. Rail-thin Michael Stipe was all gawky elbows flailing around and Gumby-like fluidity. His bald head, sometimes augmented by bold makeup, only made him seen more alien-like. Mike Mills attacked the bass with stoic precision; his occasional propensity for sporting Nudie Suits only enhanced his cowboy-like demeanor. Drummer Bill Berry was a steady, calm presence, barely breaking a sweat as he kept time like a metronome. And Peter Buck always came off like a wild stallion as he slashed his guitar, grimaced as if he was in pain and contorted his body with constant jumps and spin-kicks.

In a way, R.E.M.’s breakup is fitting: The band were scrappy road dogs clawing for respect when they started 31 years ago, and they ended their career in a similar position. But it feels like a safe time for the band to end, because their legacy is in good hands: In 2011, everything upon which the band built a career — mystery, simplicity, substance, sincerity — live on in groups such as Arcade Fire, Wilco, Radiohead and the National. Despite their continued presence, R.E.M. long ago had ceded their position of influence to a new generation — and thankfully, they’ve chosen to bow out before they overstayed their welcome. “A wise man once said, ‘the skill in attending a party is knowing when it’s time to leave,’” Michael Stipe said on R.E.M.’s website. “We built something extraordinary together. We did this thing. And now we’re going to walk away from it.”

Amos’ 12th and latest solo album, “Night of Hunters,” might be her most ambitious project yet. Her first for the renowned classical music label Deutsche Grammophon, Amos calls it a “21st-century song cycle” steeped in the classical music tradition of variations on a theme. Using compositions by Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn and Claude Debussy as a foundation, Amos and collaborators — among them, the Apollon Musagète string quartet and the Berlin Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist, Andreas Ottensamer — mold the music into a vibrant, striking orchestral achievement.

“Night of Hunters’” lyrical ambition matches its music. Set in Ireland, the album focuses on a female protagonist whose relationship has dissolved. Using elements of ancient Irish mythology — including the psychological advantage wielded by poets in the face of violent enemies — and the knowledge of a shape-shifting creature named Anabelle (whose parts are sung on the album by Amos’ daughter, Natashya), the protagonist sifts through the wreckage of their union. In doing so, she gains enough knowledge to reclaim her personal power and remember the depth of the relationship.

Amos expounded on these ideas while calling from Los Angeles yesterday afternoon, where she said she had just spent time with former KCRW DJ Nic Harcourt. In the initial minutes of our conversation, Amos proclaims that she’s “very married” — although she laughs that “people have been asking me about that a lot.”

Have they been asking about your marriage because of your new record?

Yeah, they’ve been asking me. Nic just asked me: “It sounds like you’re speaking from experience, all the shattering and pain.” I said, “Well, I’ve been married a long time. A lot goes on.”

Relationships are work; things ebb and flow.

They are work. But I don’t mind work. It’s not a pejorative.

If the person is worth it and the relationship is worth it, the work is valuable.

Completely. Completely. With so much happening out in the world — all the demands and all the drama that seems to go on even just having the next generation of nieces and nephews and kids — there’s always something going on. Sometimes you think, “Is there any time for us to just be alone?” I think sometimes all the pressure comes from the outside — not necessarily from the two of you, but it works its way in unless you figure out how to communicate and how to carve out time for the two of you to have some romance.

As an artist, how do you make the decision what needs to be personal and private for you, and what you want to share with people?

If you don’t give complete and total details of something, then you’ve protected people. It’s a very fine line, exposing things that happen in your personal life. But what is your personal life? When we’re touring so much and we’re out there traveling, then life is happening while the music is going. I don’t separate, really, the art and the life. I can’t separate that. But what I can do is try and protect the circumstances sometimes, if you see what I’m saying. As far as husband [Mark Hawley] goes — he knows he’s a muse. He’d rather it be him than somebody else, I think! And he’s British, so they’re a strange fish. He’s amused by the fact that he’s a muse, I think. He finds it funny, in a very strange way. And he’s involved in his motorbikes and all of that stuff. If I’m exposing us, as long as we’re OK, he’s fine. As long as I come in with the skirt and the high heel, he’s fine. [laughs]

It’s almost surprising you haven’t done an album so steeped in the classical tradition before. Why now?

Well, Deutsche Grammophon approached me. What I’ve kind of learned is you really don’t approach them. It’s one of those strange things — tracking [former Universal Musical Group chairman/CEO-current Sony Music Entertainment chairman/CEO] Doug Morris down in the world is one of my favorite pastimes. [laughs] I run into him on the streets of New York or whatever. You can approach him, but you don’t sort of sit on the steps in Berlin of Deutsche Grammophon and say, “Hi, I have an idea. I’m from the pop world, will you let me in?” [laughs] They find you. Sort of like the Black Ops; they track you down. And they did.

I had left Universal — I had finished my contract — and within two weeks, [Deutsche Grammophon] tracked me down. They said, “We have this idea — and the idea is for you to do a 21st-century song cycle based on classical themes.” My head just started pounding, and I thought, “This is a very, very demanding work you’re talking about.” And honestly, if you get something like that wrong — you just want to go be a Hobbit and crawl under a rock and get hairy feet. You could never buy shoes in public again.

With a project like this, it’s not just the pop critics weighing in; you’d have the classical critics scrutinizing as well. And they speak their own language and have their own lexicon.

Well, yes, and you don’t want to do it in a cliché way. If you’re going to take it onboard, I think you really have to approach it like an architect, a sonic architect. You have to use your compositional skills. Variations on a theme are part of their tradition, but you can get it all wrong if the impression is you’re just messing with the masters, instead of having a tight concept. And my concept was, as the woman from the 21st-century, if I permeate — if we make a new being together, these dead guys and this live woman — then the woman has to be the one who permeates the seed. That’s how it’s got to work. That was kind of sexy, I thought. These dead guys started coming very much alive in my life. I walked with their ghosts and immersed myself in their work. And they would guide me and scream at me and all kinds of things. [laughs]

How did you feel pushed as a musician and a writer as you were creating the record?

Once you start studying the form, every single one of them — whether it’s [Franz] Schubert or [Erik] Satie or whomever we’re talking about — once you start studying it, listening to it, looking at the notes on the page, I almost would go into a trance with it. You take it to a spiritual place; you have to go immerse yourself in it. The idea isn’t to interpret it — that’s what classical pianists do, that’s their job. That’s not my gig, that’s not what I’m trying to do. What I’m trying to do is make a new form with their motif and tell a different story. It is about listening, and it is about building and narrative and all those things. Working on the musical ["The Light Princess"] for so long, over five years now, has sort of drummed into me certain key components: motivation for characters, arc of a story, that kind of thing.

The characters in the song “Battle of Trees” fought using words as a weapon, based on an idea in ancient Ireland that the poet had so much power. The idea that words have devastating power — that’s such a liberating and exuberant idea to explore. How does that resonate within you personally?

I was reading “The White Goddess” by Robert Graves, [a book] that really investigates the mythology from ancient Ireland. When I read about the power of the poets in those days, it took me a while to really comprehend that sort of world, because we don’t have a world like that. It’s almost going to an alien world where that exists. It excited me, but to get my head around the prose was tricky. That took quite some time, to deal with “Battle of Trees.” Probably the longest of everything — it was being worked on through this whole process, when I was building all the other works, this was constantly on the drawing board.

I love that your daughter sings the part of Anabelle on the record. What sort of guidance did you give her from a musical and personal perspective?

We were giving each other things. She had ideas about Anabelle as a character; she’s an actor first, music person second. She’s grown up with music — it’s in her blood, obviously. But she’s been acting for many years now, and I think she approached it in that way, who Anabelle should be. She had friends all over the world that were dealing with divorces, and she would say, “Why do grown-ups wait so late to fix their problems?” [laughs] I said, “Wow, I don’t know.” She said [Amos affects a British accent], “Mummy, quite frankly, it’s quite stupid.” [laughs] We were developing Anabelle together, and I think she said to me, “Who’s playing Anabelle? You know I am, right?” [laughs] I didn’t even want to have that argument. I thought that our relationship would come through, there would be an honesty. I knew I wanted my niece to be the Fire Muse, because she’s 19 and she’s been training for many years particularly on the vocal side, she’s on the legitimate music side. I liked the idea of having these two beings I know very well.

You’re going to have a string quartet along on your upcoming tour dates. What’s the most exciting part of having that extra instrumentation along?

The exciting thing is that they come from a different world; they really come from the classical world. When I’m saying to them, “OK, we need to learn ‘Precious Things,’ and they’re excited, but it’s a very different kind of structure and rhythm. It comes from a different place than what they’re accustomed to — although certain styles cross, because I have a lot of that in my blood, it seeps out in the music. But we are rearranging some songs in the catalog that were never string quartet- or string-based. That’s exciting, to shake it up and do things that were maybe drum ‘n’ bass, rhythm-driven. Not all things; just a couple. But I thought, “If we’re going to do this, we need to just not be predictable.”

Can you reveal any particular songs you are redoing?

I’ll tell you what we’re hoping to do, which is down the road. We’d love to do a version of “God,” I think that would be really fun, because that was very rhythmic. We have “Precious Things” planned — we won’t have it the first night, we just won’t. But we’re planning to do it. And we’re planning to do a version of “Spark,” that would be quite different.

Speaking of “Precious Things”: “Little Earthquakes” came out 20 years ago. What advice and insight would you give to the Tori Amos of that era now?

Oh … God. I would tell her to be in the moment and to dance with it. And find the humor. That girl needs to laugh more. [laughs]

Isn’t that true of all of us when we were younger? We were so serious.

I know! It’s true. But that’s what I would tell myself: “Please laugh more.”