Amanda Palmer Plays Dead

10/06/08 10:12am

by Stephanie Joudrey (CHARTattack)

As the singer, pianist and one half of the punk cabaret duo The Dresden Dolls, Amanda Palmer is loved by fans for being a strong rock frontwoman who wears frilly frocks and costume makeup. This fall, the singer is stripping away the band facade for a solo album titled Who Killed Amanda Palmer.

Keeping true to her artsy reputation, this isn't just an album for fans to pick up in record stores, but an entire event. Palmer also created a series of interconnected music videos and will release a related book written by Neil Gaiman, the author of the Mirrormask and Stardust flicks, and The Sandman comics. It may seem like Palmer's actively trying to be some all-encompassing, multi-disciplinary art world conduit, but she swears these things just happen around her.

ChartAttack: Do you make it a point to involve other art forms in whatever you're doing?
Amanda Palmer: I wish the answer was yes, because it would make me seem more clever. The way things have always happened in my life and the way things happened on this solo project is that I think I randomly wander through my life and random ideas occur to me. I just follow those impulses. It's not like I sat down at a table a year ago and said, "Alright, this is going to be a multimedia project. There is going to be a series of connected videos, and a book, and a game and a CD." It's more like as I was working on the record and thinking about the artwork.

The book that I am doing with Neil Gaiman is funnily enough an outgrowth of the fact that the music business is collapsing and my record label didn't want to pay for a full 26 page, digi-pack, ultra-super-deluxe packaging booklet. I said, "OK, I understand that, but I have got all of this artwork that I have been collecting over the years and I've got all of these great photographers that I am working with. I don't want to just put that stuff up on the web. It has to do with the record so I will just do it myself and put a book out." I happened to be emailing back and forth with Neil Gaiman at the time and said, "Hey, do you want to write something for this?" and he said, "Absolutely." Like everything else, that just sort of came together and sounded like a good idea.

So what's the book about?
It's sort of a book of conceptual photography. They are beautiful photographs. All full colour photographs, most of them taken recently, but some taken over the course of the past years. One of them is almost 12 years old. And they're all photographs of me dead in different situations. Neil is sort of writing stories around every photograph. It's a really cool looking book.

Were the ideas collaborative on the stories?
Yeah. One thing would lead to another. The photographer, Kyle Cassidy, is a fantastic brain, too. The three of us would sit around and say, "What if we did this? What if we did a photograph where two Amandas were sitting at a tea party one of them with a plastic bag over her head and the other looking very suspiciously out the window?" The story could be sort of like this and Neil would say, "Oh, that's great. What if we added this to the photograph." Kyle would set them up. We would run around buying props. It was a lot of fun. It was like glorified dress-up. It felt a lot like one of those ninth grade weekends where you're like, "Let's do a project!"

Is it good that you aren't quite mainstream enough that you have the freedom to do these types of things?
Not having done things any other way, I couldn't tell you. I do really like the direct path of communication I have with the fans via the internet. It's really nice that it doesn't feel like there has to be a giant machine between me communicating stuff to people. I think until the advent of the internet you were either a teeny, weenie little underground band with a very small cult of followers or you were a megastar. There wasn't a whole lot of middle ground. I am very happy being in the middle ground. I have everything I need in my life to be comfortable and happy, but I never have to worry about going to the grocery store and getting mobbed.