Tori Amos doesn’t think happiness ends with a cap and gown.

If anything, the singer/songwriter feels that her freedom didn’t fully develop until she was well into adulthood.

“I don’t know a lot of women who have a real healthy sexuality and spirituality and that’s something that once I became a mom — sort of came together,” Amos says. “I think turning 40 — I’m 41 now — was really liberating.”

Raised in Maryland and trained at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, the singer-songwriter shows no signs of lethargy on The Beekeeper, a 19-track powerhouse attacking difficult issues of spirituality, femininity and politics, just as Amos has done for more than a decade. Even as a conversationalist she never fails to startle, all the while boasting a deftly sexy, soothing speaking voice.

“There are times in the music industry when … being a female composer and writing about women’s issues … [can happen] on more of a level than what you’re going to wear tonight or how many times you’re going to cum and in what position,” Amos says.

Ahem.

Amos’ dialogue, like her music, can easily draw a gasp but is sparingly profane and often based in the abstract. At first, her long-winded excursions into progressive Biblical interpretations and their relationships to beekeeping feel uncomfortably like the ramblings of a trendy New Age fanatic. But her desire to restore a healthy sense of feminine sexuality to Christianity unintentionally stems from her childhood as a Methodist preacher’s daughter.

“There is such a profanity in sexuality in so many women that have been brought up in the Christian church,” Amos says. “You either walk into the vault being vulgar or puritanical, that was my experience, anyway, of being a minister’s daughter.”

She goes on, “It’s just fascinating to me right now, that Christianity has become something that I don’t think Jesus would recognize, and having read The Gospel of Mary Magdalene and seeing that she was a prophet — and she was a sexual being but a spiritual being.”

And so begins the story of The Beekeeper, an album divided into six gardens (a correlation to the beehive’s hexagon shape and “Naturally, because sacred sexuality … is explored through the worker bees themselves.”) Each one represents different contemporary topics Amos is forced to dissect after God’s mother, Sophia, forced her to eat the forbidden fruit. All of this takes place, obviously, in “not the garden of original sin, but the garden of original sin-suality.”

Stay with me here.

“I was really inspired by the idea of creating a virtual garden for people to step into, but not the garden where a woman was blamed for the fall, but a different garden where we’re encouraged to find knowledge, and we’re encouraged to look inside ourselves,” Amos says.

The Beekeeper is religious musically as well as lyrically, with gospel music granting Amos a newfound funkiness. Amos also credits these sounds to composing on an instrument used more by jazz virtuosos than confessional singer-songwriters — the Hammond B-3 organ.

“This [is the] style of writing and the kind of songs that can hold a gospel choir,” Amos says. “This kind of songwriting that maybe I had let lie dormant for all these years when I listen to that Stevie Wonder Innervisions album, but it was there inside me somewhere I think the Hammond might have awakened.”

More of Amos’ “creative process” can be picked in Tori Amos: Piece by Piece, a new book co-written with journalist Ann Powers that attempts to locate just where Amos’ often spellbinding compositions come from.

“I thought that while I can still remember my [creative] process, I wanted to give people the backstage pass,” Amos says.

Sly joking about aging aside, Amos seems incapable of losing her youthful edge. When discussing artistic conviction, she makes an analogy that probably hits way too close to home for many of the college students reading her story.

“I think that you have to stay true to who you are, knowing that you will regret in the morning, no different than if you sleep with somebody that you don’t like,” she says. “You’re not going to feel good about yourself the next day. I think that if you make music that you don’t respect you just can’t take enough showers to wash that man out of your hair.”