“You’re just like that Elizabeth Wurlitzer,” she exclaimed, blithely butchering the surname of Elizabeth L. Wurtzel ’89, precocious journalist and author of Prozac Nation. After she’d grilled me to her satisfaction, Amos grinned and said, “Okay, now I’m ready. I’ve got the whole wonderful picture. Ask away.”

I had carefully typed questions to fire at her, but a grueling train ride and a copious wait had permanently burned them in my mind, so I didn’t even take out my notebook. I began asking her about the album, about connections I thought I saw between her works, about becoming a mother, about her fans.

The popular media portrayal of Amos as a frivolous, hyper-feminine mystic with a proclivity for gleefully impenetrable sound bites had always made me suspicious: It smelled of media spin. As it turned out, the latter part of that stereotype wasn’t far from reality. Posed with the most straightforward of questions, Amos would deliver dreamy musings, rife with metaphor and personification of her songs.

“These women are serious traitors, they can play chess with the big boys,” she declared, referring not to actual people, but to her versions of the men’s songs. “They infiltrate. They’re tired. But are they mercenaries? I guess, in a way. But no blood is drawn.”

The 20 years that lay between us served more as a bridge than a gulf. Becoming a mother had soothed her and given her new perspective; much of the conversation lingered on ideas of aging and womanhood.

“[If] I wanted to be 18 again,” she said earnestly, “that would really scare me, if I were 18 and I was hearing a woman of 38 not wanting to be in [sic] 38. Because what do I have to look forward to? I mean, is it that bleak? Is that what it is?”

Patti, the publicist who had ushered me in, stuck her head in and begged a moment. When Amos reappeared, she settled on the couch and said, “Where were we? Because we were in a place where most interviews don’t arrive to.”

Women and aging, I reminded her. She nodded meditatively. “Wisdom is something that you just don’t have in your teens and your twenties,” she said. “That’s not what that’s about. You have things that we don’t have, that we carry somewhere maybe, as a memory. But you just have things that we don’t have, and we have to value that. And we have things you don’t have. And how great is that?”

After an hour, Patti discreetly slipped in and sat down nearby to nudge us into completion. I turned off my tape recorder. Amos turned to her and said,

“Patti, do you know about this girl? She’s only 18 and writing for the Village Voice, and she’s a freshman at Harvard. See to it, will you, that Irin comes backstage to see me after the Boston show.”

I blinked. How had my seventh-grade daydreams been catapulted into reality? Amos wasn’t finished.

“Bring your friends too. Oh, and if you can, please bring me books that have touched you, so that I can read them and, you know, see where you are.”

She stood up. “I want to read what you’re writing in 10 years. I want to read what you’re writing now! You must be so excited, just starting out and starting college at the same time.” She leaned in, daintily planting a kiss on each of my cheeks. “Good luck with everything. It’s going to be fantastic. They’ll be down days—believe me, I’ve had them—but they’re just—they’re just salt!”

The stage at the Wang Center on Oct. 15 was shrouded in black, hung with a curtain that was jaggedly pierced with holes and lit from behind. From offstage, Amos duskily murmured Eminem’s “’97 Bonnie and Clyde.” After frequently commenting in interviews that the drowned woman was invisible in the original version of the song, Amos’s implication was clear: She herself was nowhere to be found. Tension knotted the audience at each interval as they waited for her to appear, but the song ended without Amos’ presence.

The piano appeared amid flashing beams, and Amos, clad in shoulder-padded white, hurtled onstage, straddled the piano and laid her fingers on the keys. Recent tours had seen her experimenting with a full band, whose bluster was in sharp contrast to the fiery solo piano that had been Amos’ trademark. The “Strange Little Tour,” as it was called, marked a return to the girl-with-a-piano paradigm. In that vein, only three of the songs Amos played that night were from Strange Little Girls, opting instead to grant a grateful audience their early album favorites and several obscure, much-loved b-sides.