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An Interview with Amanda Palmer
Posted: Sunday, January 25, 2009
By: Charity VanDeberg
Concert Editor

Amanda Palmer's had a big year. She released her first solo album, Who Killed Amanda Palmer, a critical success but sales failure, worked with world-renowned author Neil Gaiman, toured the world with a broken foot, battled rumors of a Dresden Dolls break-up, and endured harassment from her own label to lose her nearly non-existent belly and write some "marketable music." And yet, through all the ups and downs, she has never been happier. She shared with ReGen her life lessons and why sometimes it's better to be infamous than famous.

You make a very novel entrance to your shows as you enter quietly from the back, covered in a white veil, moving through the crowd like an apparition.

Palmer: That's my favorite part of the night, actually, because I love watching people's reactions as they go from being really pissed off to really excited. They're just like annoyed and pissed off. They're like, 'Who's the fucking bitch behind me who's trying to get by?' And then they turn around and see that it's me and go, 'Oh, this is awesome!' To me, it's always really funny surprising people and watching people's emotions turn on a dime.

It was pretty exciting to hear you being mentioned on 'The Howard Stern Show,' despite the fact that they didn't know who you were.

Palmer: Yeah, that was interesting. It's just one of those humbling reminders, to me, that the mainstream culture is still in the dark about Dresden Dolls and who I am. There are days when I'm excited about that, and days when it bums me out.

Did you end up doing an interview with them?

Palmer: I did. I don't know when it's going to air, but we'll see what happens.

That must have been interesting. 'So, you sing?'

Palmer: Yeah. 'Tells us about this music thing you do. How long have you been playing the ukulele? Great!'

Who Killed Amanda Palmer is number four on ReGen's Top 10 of 2008 list, which is kind of ironic; considering how much you try to avoid the 'gothic' label, now you're on a top ten list for a gothic and industrial magazine.

Palmer: I think there's a fine line to be treaded. I don't want to label myself anything, and I think 'goth' is definitely a very specific label, and I've seen what's happened to other bands who are much bigger than the goth label. I've watched them get trapped. I've had a conversation about this with Peter Murphy, I've talked with Edward Ka-Spel about it, and you can get caught in a gothic net, and so even though they're my people, and even though I relate to and am amongst a lot of the scene, it's certainly not the image I want to project to the rest of the world, because, generally speaking, I just don't really fit there. There's just so much of it that is just untrue. It doesn't make sense to define myself by this sort of preset list of standards. It just makes no sense to me at all when I see bands do that and say like, 'This is our decision. We're a goth band, so therefore this is going to be our audience and these are going to be our venues, these are going to the magazines we're in.' It definitely can work for them, and you can work that until the end of time and actually have a great career, but that's definitely not what I wanted to do.

Industrial can be the same way: very limiting.

Palmer: Totally. It's got a glass ceiling and, people who aren't into goth music or into industrial music just not going to check you out. They're not going to give you a chance.

Well, you're in good company on the list. It's got ohGr, Nick Cave, and Portishead, so it doesn't seem so limited anymore.

Palmer: Well, Nick Cave is another good example. Nick Cave is beloved by the goth scene, but he doesn't live there. You know what? Neil Gaiman and I have talked about the same thing. He said to me once, 'I'm a gothic icon, but I don't consider myself credible.' And I said, 'Ah, but Neil you wear black all the time.'

Isn't that just because he doesn't want to coordinate anything?

Palmer: I think that's probably true. I wear black on tour only because I don't want to wash anything.

You played the new song 'Trout Heart Replica' at the San Francisco show. Is that the only place you've played it?

Palmer: I also played it in L.A. the next night.

You seemed nervous to do it. You hesitated a couple of times.

Palmer: I was nervous. I wasn't nervous about what people's reaction was going to be; I was nervous that I wouldn't be able to remember the lyrics and the parts well enough to give a decent rendering of the song. I had just literally finished writing it. I hadn't even played the whole thing through once. I'm a pretty good improviser and, you know, the piano part was all improvised over chords that I had put together, but you know, what you don't want to do is get in front of your audience and say this a new song and then stop three times because you fuck things up. That can really ruin the mood. So I got a little stuck on the first lyric. I couldn't remember, and that's actually really common. I'll often totally blank the first lyric of a song sometimes, and I just couldn't remember it. That's why I stopped, because I said, 'God, what's that second line?' I was like, 'Fuck, if I can't remember the second line of the song, maybe I'm going to fuck up the rest of it. Maybe I just shouldn't play this.' I managed to only really fuck up two or three of the lyrics, so I give myself an A minus.

There probably wasn't anyone with a notebook, so you're probably OK.

Palmer: Well, you know what? People did transcribe the lyrics off of the YouTube clip and they got them wrong, but then I made abosolutely certain that I fixed those lyrics in L.A. so that the super fans who were out there transcribing would get the right version.

That seems a little obsessive.

Palmer: They are out there.

You make an interviewer's job very hard because you let people ask you questions during the show and you did a live Webcast of your dinner at Neil Gaiman's house. All the interesting questions are already asked, so we have to resort to simple conversation.

Palmer: Those are the best interviews, though. The worst interviews are when the journalists come with a list of questions and you don't actually end up having a conversation with them. When I was in Europe, I got an interview for a Web site or some kind of Brooklyn-based paper or magazine. I can't even remember what it was. It was definitely the worst interview of the year, the worst journalist of the year. The interview went like this: 'So Amanda, about your song "Astronaut," can you tell me about that?' and so I'd go, like, 'Oh good god! OK, I'll tell you a little bit about this,' and then there'd be a long pause. And then, she would say, “OK, cool. So about your song, "Runs in the Family," can you talk about that?' I was like, 'Oh my god, this whole interview is going to be her saying, "About your song" this and that, basically in order, and that was very sad. You can tell in about five seconds when you're going to get a journalist like that. 'Tell me about making your record. What was that like?'

You may be sick of this topic, but the little feud with Katy Perry, the very straight singer of 'I Kissed a Girl,' is intriguing. This is one of those things where, if you were Britney Spears, would be blown up into a big celebrity rivalry.

Palmer: Well, you know what? You know how I was saying earlier that I sometimes like that the mainstream is completely unaware? Sometimes their being unaware is really handy, specifically in situations like this, because we get to do anything we want, and we really just don't get any heat from anywhere, because there's no mainstream eyes on us. It's like we're at our own party and we get to do anything, say anything, try anything, fuck up anything, and the mainstream culture isn't going to jump on me for things I did, said, tried, experimented with. It's just like we're completely inured somehow to all of those judgments. And yet I'm able to go out and sell thousands of records and make a great living. I think I float in this magical place between being a struggling artist and being a celebrity trapped in a box, because I actually kind of get the best of both worlds. I felt that way about the Dolls. I would worry and fret, like, 'Why isn't the mainstream press paying attention to us? Why does no one care that we're doing this awesome thing? How come no one cares about this?' And then, finally, gradually over the years, especially when I started comparing us to the other artists that we were touring with, I realized how blessed we were because we actually had more fans than a lot of bands that were getting more attention, and our fans were really hardcore and really supportive. I would look at them literally come and go over the course of three years and, you know, shit that was on the cover of Spin Magazine because it was the flavor of the year in 2005, I would find myself thinking in 2007, 'Oh my god, they're completely gone.' And not only that, their fans don't care; they've moved onto the next thing, while the Dresden Dolls are still able to draw 2,000 people in this city and that city. And we've managed to do that without ever being exposed. I think those things kind of go hand in hand. I think if we ever were exposed and all of a sudden the Dresden Dolls got all sorts of attention, it would kind of ruin the party, because all of these other people would come in and start drinking our beer.

I think my biggest lesson, it was a large lesson in a lot of ways, was the Panic at the Disco tour. We did that tour because it was foisted upon us by our record label, who threatened to not promote Yes, Virginia if we didn't do the tour. I learned so much about that whole side of things, watching these kids at close range and remembering how I felt when I was 18 and 19 and how I was desperate to be recognized and famous, and any regrets that I had ever had about what things happened when they did, you know, the fact that the Dresden Dolls didn't even start touring until I was 26...I would often wonder, did we start too late? What if I had started when I was 18? Now I'd only be 27. But any doubts and misgivings that I ever had about that finally got flushed down the toilet for the final time because I just saw what instant pop stardom is like, and it's ugly. There is just nothing nice about it. And I looked around at them and their fans and their situation, and then I looked at us and our fans and our situation, and it was just like the sky opened up and the angels sang, and I just thought, we have what everybody wants. We make real music that real people love, and we make a living doing it, and it's never going to go away. Everyone else is running around like crazy trying to figure out what to do and how to keep it and we've already done it. That was a tough tour but worth its weight in gold for what I took away from it emotionally and what I learned, because it was just such a stark contrast to go from playing in the giant enormo-dome with Panic at the Disco and their fans and the very, very unconnected feeling in that room to the place across town where we would do an after-show with our 200 fans, all of whom we wanted to hang out with and talk to. It was like, 'Wow!' This is totally it! This is what it's about. This is what you can't buy. This is what labels and marketing meetings can't figure out. You can't buy this. You can't get this from MTV. You can't get it from the radio. You can't put a price tag on it and sell it at Hot Topic. You just can't do it and we're really fucking proud of that. I am. I mean, I feel like we did it the hard way for good, good reason.

Seeing you in a smaller venue is like sitting in someone's living room. It feels very connected. You are very relaxed and hanging out with your friends and it makes the audience also feel like they're hanging out with their friends.

Palmer: That's the magic. I'm starting to work on a book right now that probably won't come out for several years, but it's kind of about, I think it's going to be about a lot of things, but one of the things it's going to be about is the very, very simple question of why do people get on stage and why do people buy tickets? Philosophically, fundamentally, what are people looking for? That feeling, it's kind of unnameable and not definable, that an artist gets on stage when they feel connected with their audience, and the audience gets in the seats when they feel connected with the people on stage, is a really interesting topic, especially in times like these when people's brains are getting very skewed by performers and entertainment and the 'net and all sorts of things. It's something I've always been really fascinated by in my own life and others.

It seems like a very deep topic.

Palmer: Yeah, but it's going to be really fun, I think.

Is it? It sounds hard.

Palmer: Oh, well, if it's hard I won't do it.

What sorts of books did you end up buying people for Christmas?

Palmer: I have here four copies of The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, one of my favorite books that I've read in the last year. I've got some Bill Bryson. I've got some Michael Pollan who wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, fantastic stuff. I've got some stuff by the Dalai Lama. I've got a book about birds for my mother. I've got the John Lennon biography for a friend of mine. I've got a little assortment of Neil Gaiman books, and I've also got the Eminem memoirs and several copies of Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, another fucking awesome book that came out last year.

It seems that by knowing what books you buy, we will get an idea of how you will write.

Palmer: Yeah. Actually, Eat, Pray, Love is one of the books that I've been sort of dropping in meetings with agents and stuff, saying I don't want to write a memoir. I don't want to write a book about Amanda Palmer, but this book by Elizabeth Gilbert is her experiences, but used as a springboard for more interesting topics, and that is how I want my book to be. I want this book that I write to be interesting to people who don't give a shit about the Dresden Dolls and Amanda Palmer but are interested in the topic that I'm writing about.