“I seem extroverted but I’m incredibly introverted,” Tori Amos says in an articulate whisper. She’s sitting in a light-filled Tribeca apartment explaining why, after a life spent performing, it was a thoroughly nerve-racking experience recording her new album, Gold Dust (due October 2nd). The album – Amos’ second foray into classical music, following 2011’s Night of Hunters – reads like a scrapbook of her career, comprising old favorites reworked with orchestration from the Metropole Orchestra.

It wasn’t revisiting her discography so much as the orchestra itself that intimidated Amos during the album’s recording, which saw her tracking her vocals in front of the nearly 60-piece Dutch orchestra (whom Amos first performed live with in 2010) and personnel from her label (Deutsche Grammophon). “I sing about some of these very intimate moments in my life, and a lot of them written before I got married to Mark [Hawley, also her sound engineer], and he’s there and everyone knows,” she says. “It was walking into a room full of people and baring your most intimate thoughts to after barely saying hello.”