Last night, I watched Tori Amos make love to a piano.

She is still a goddess. She is still commanding, still entirely sexy, still an absolute genius. But something was fundamentally different. Her youthful, feral passion has settled into something older, wiser, quieter. At certain moments, she seemed to be negotiating with her own body. She has backup singers now to help support the high notes. A few times, I saw a flicker of frustration cross her face when her voice wouldn’t entirely cooperate the way it used to. And I’m pretty sure I caught a moment when her bass player encouraged her with two fingers up that she only had two songs left to end the set.

On the drive home, Jen and I sat with the quiet weight of what we had just witnessed. What does it feel like to possess that much power, to hold a room entirely in your hands, only to find yourself meeting the physical boundaries of an instrument you have fiercely commanded for decades?

This wasn’t an isolated experience. A few years ago, we saw Bob Dylan. He was mostly a silhouette on the stage, hidden in the shadows behind his piano, heavily supported by his band. He came out exactly twice just to wave his hat, his face almost unidentifiable. We saw James Taylor, his iconic voice carefully navigating a modified range, masterfully redesigning his melodies to fit the reality of his current instrument. I saw the Indigo Girls, and noticed Emily reshaping the high harmonies that used to soar effortlessly.

It reminded me of my dad. He wasn’t a famous musician, but he sank into a deep, quiet sadness when his hand tremors eventually forced him to lay down his guitar, a physical boundary separating him from something that had always brought him so much confidence and joy.

I am not a music critic. I am not any less amazed by these people. But as we drove through the dark, a pattern I can no longer ignore started to crystallize, and it brought a specific, heavy kind of sadness with it.

It isn’t sadness for Tori, or Dylan, or James. They are bosses. They are icons. The sadness comes from realizing that they are still up there carrying the weight of the world for us.

I heard an interview Tori did right before this tour. She mentioned feeling a distinct call to give hope to the millions of us living through the current “time of dragons.”

In her album’s mythology, the forces of greed and political chaos trying to crush us are the “Lizard Demons.”

The Dragons, however, are something else entirely: fierce, transformative spirits we have to become if we want to survive.

To live in a time of dragons means we are living in a climate that feels like total upheaval, a space where the old rules don’t seem to work anymore, and the environment is demanding that we ALL change, regardless of what lines are drawn in the sand to divide us.

Tori felt that collective anxiety, looked at her life, and asked the question so many of us are whispering right now: What can I do to help?

So she put out an album and got on a tour bus. It’s the same impulse that drove Dolly Parton to show up for kids’ libraries and parade appearances, even after she lost the love of her life. It’s why Rosie O’Donnell just emerged to guest host Jimmy Kimmel, even though she moved to Ireland to take space from things she felt were misaligned with her having peace at home. These women built massive platforms decades ago, and instead of retreating into the comfortable quiet of their legacies, they are still showing up. They are staring down the “lizard demons” of our era using the only weapons they have left: their presence, their art, and their hard-won influence. They held us through our adolescence, our first heartbreaks, our political awakenings, and our personal upheavals. Their voices are literally embedded into the fabric of our memories.

But we are looking to the exact same people who carried us as teenagers to carry us through middle age, too.

With all the recent passings of our cultural heroes, we are facing a reality we have been deeply reluctant to accept. Our icons are aging. They are dying. They are fading out. And watching them still show up, pushing through the physical realities of time to hold space for us, forces a very uncomfortable question to the surface: When are we going to help carry them?

We have spent our lives being saved, inspired, and emboldened by their creativity. We have sat comfortably in the audience, consuming their genius, using it to heal ourselves. But admiration alone isn’t enough anymore.

Maybe we keep looking for the next Tori Amos or the next Dolly Parton to emerge and take over, but they aren’t coming. Our culture is too fractured now. The giant, universally recognized monoculture that created those singular titans has splintered into a million pieces. The torch isn’t going to be handed over intact to one dazzling successor. I’m sorry, Taylor Swift is rad and all, but even she cannot do it alone, fam…none of us can do it alone anymore .

Instead, the fire is multiplying. It is breaking into thousands of smaller, quieter flames.

The inheritance our icons are leaving us isn’t a crown; it’s a responsibility. The torch is being passed to anyone willing to grab a piece of it. We don’t survive this era by waiting for a single, perfect knight to save us from the monsters. We survive by shedding our old skin. It looks like one person choosing to teach. One person writing a raw truth. One person making art in a basement. One person organizing a community. One person standing up in a room where everyone else is terrified to speak. It’s just making something beautiful during an ugly messy time, or helping a neighbor remember who they are.

They weren’t just entertaining us all these years. They were teaching us how to grow our own scales. They were teaching us how to spit our own fire.

Tori’s voice did not always go where she asked it to go last night. But her hands still knew exactly what to do. The fire was entirely there. Maybe it was never her job to keep it burning forever. She was just showing us, one more time, how to make something incandescent from whatever we have left inside us…and waiting for the rest of us to realize that the next flame belongs to us.