Bittersweet symphony
Amanda Palmer on the Dolls, the Pops, and embracing the artistic paradox
INTERVIEW. With her virtuoso piano playing, Amanda Palmer usually has her hands full. But with a two-night stint playing her material with the Boston Pops, a solo record she recently finished recording with Ben Folds, and a new Dresden Dolls album —“No Virginia,” the follow-up to 2006’s breakthrough “Yes, Virginia”— the local singer is pushing herself more than ever.
It’s interesting that the title is “No, Virginia,” when the songs sound more positive overall...
Which is really funny, because the context of “Yes, Virginia” was in the song, “Mrs. O,” which is really f—ing bleak, but that’s also very Dresden Dolls to embrace the paradox.
What I’ve heard from the stuff you’ve been working on with Ben Folds, it sounds like there’s a lot of paradox in there, too. That song, “Have You Seen My Sister Evelyn?” sounds old-timey, but with current slang like “ho-bag.”
I’m a fan of the paradox, I have to say. I mean, God knows why exactly. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, as I look at art and expand my appreciation of different kinds of art with different feelings. I’ve been trying to figure out why it is I’m always so drawn to the art that contains the emotional paradox Things that are very very beautiful and ugly smashed together to me have always been really alluring, and God knows why that is, but it could be because when they happen in life they’re very frightening, and when they happen in art they’re not threatening. You get to explore those ideas in art, whereas if you do them in life you can do a lot of harm, and so you get to do those experiments and exorcise those demons or those ideas that are so much more extreme through the medium of art, which I think is what ultimately keeps us sane in this very very crazy world we live in.
It seems that as your career has progressed, your music has a happier energy. Is it a matter of running out of bitterness?
I think in the world we live in, it's not too hard to find things to be bitter about. You don't have to look very far if you're searching for it, but you know, once again, it's sort of about that balance to me. Some of the most beautiful art and some of the most beautiful songwriting is about finding that balance between explosive joy and total sorrow, kind of in the same breath, and being able to look out your window at hunger and collapse and war and throw up your hands in some kind ofecstatic gesture that can inspire the people around you instead of just looking at it and saying, “Oh doesn't it suck?” Because yes, you don't need to write a song to say that. Of course it sucks. It's terrible! It's war and pain and hunger, but if you can take that, and you can transmute it into something, that's when art starts to serve this wonderful spiritual purpose for people.
That reminds me of how on your site for the “Who Killed Amanda Palmer” album, where it says “about Amanda Palmer” you list a treatise on art by Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa.
Yeah, that’s a lot of what I’m talking about. A lot of it has to do with, “Who is the art serving?” “Are you doing it for yourself?” “Are you doing it to make the world a better place?” and not in the corny hippie sense, but by manifesting your own feelings honestly, are you then having a positive effect on the people around you? Because instead of bringing them down, you’re inspiring them to make their own creations and look deeper into themselves and to see the world with different eyes, and that’s the highest purpose of art that you can aspire to.
You have another grand aspiration coming up…
I’m really looking forward to the Boston Pops! I’m still reeling just from the idea of playing with those people. I feel so unworthy, but they’re really fun bunch. They’re a lot more lighthearted and ridiculous than I expected. I sort of walked into the Pops office expecting all of these stuffy suits, and instead they’re all fantastic, really artistically-minded people, and coming from the rock ‘n’ roll world I’m always telling everyone to shake their expectations, and I had to give myself a slap on the wrist
How has it been going?
We’ve started on the arrangements, and those are going really well, and I’m all aflutter about it because it’s such a huge deal. It’s such a grand stage to be on. I don’t get nervous very often, and I don’t really get that excited about things because we play so many shows with so many people and I’m definitely I’ve got butterflies about this one. I think it’s gonna be incredible.
With all the sounds at your disposal, is it tempting to be a control freak?
On the contrary! I’m completely letting go of control and putting all of the arrangement decisions in the hands of the experts over there, Pat Hollenbeck, who’s the arranger, because if I’ve learned anything from the record I’ve just made with Ben is that what you think will sound fantastic in your head has nothing to do with reality half the time, especially if you don’t know f— all about orchestral arrangements…The power of a symphony isn’t in its volume, it’s in its subtlety. Really it’s the opposite of a rock show where you can just crank the PA, so for that reason I’m really putting my faith in Pat to arrange for the players … It’s sort of like taking your kid to a specialist because I really really trust him to know the people, to know the space. And it’s a huge leap of faith, because I’m literally blindly giving my babies to this guy saying, “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks, I hope you don’t kill them!” But we’ve had initial meetings and we’ve had great talks and I think he really gets it. And it’s a wonderful experiment and an exciting leap of faith to say, “I’m not gonna hear this stuff until I’m on stage the day of the show and if I hate it then that’s just gonna be too bad.” But it’s really exciting, and I think if I hadn’t just gone through this process with Ben and this last record where I was doing a lot of the same sort of stuff, like Ben saying, “Give me four days and I’m gonna arrange the strings,” and “I need to do the percussion, leave me alone,” and being able to walk away from that and say, “I’m putting my trust in this guy. I think he’s gonna do the right thing,” and you know what? There’s something just really wonderful about that feeling. Being able to give up control is, especially after years and years of being such a control freak, feels fantastic. Although those who know me are giving me huge props for being able to relinquish control
You talk about it being rare that you get nervous, but I seem to recall reading somewhere about Morrissey going to your show having a strange effect on you.
Very very few things make me nervous. Having Morrissey there didn’t make me nervous so much as insecure, because I don’t really get nervous anymore. You know, you’ve done enough shows, you’ve played huge venues. You know, we’ve played in front of 20,000 people, and once you do those things enough times, you know that no show is ever really that bad. It’s kind of hard to get too nervous because you’ve got lots and lots and lots of tools to fall back on, and you’re also armed with the knowledge that even if you totally blow a show, nothing is ever that bad. Because no moment is ever gonna make or break your career, and if you blow one show out of 600, so what? So it’s never that bad, and going out on stage is never as intense as that first six months, when you’re just starting your band and every single show is so important because you’re either gonna convince these people that you’re good or they’re gonna hate you, and I’m glad that part’s over. I hated that part, but having someone like Morrissey show up, it’s like I’m such a fan of songwriting and there are so few people that I really look up to and whose music I know inside and out and who I think are just leagues above the general musician and general songwriter. And he’s up there! And he was a huge role model for me. The kind of stuff he wrote about, and the way he wrote about it, I paid really close attention to that stuff, and the things he would reveal in songs and the way he would twist up lyrics and the subject matters that he would tackle that no one else would ever tackle and you would sit there listening to his records going like, “he is NOT talking about this! No, he is! Oh my God!” And he was one of my greatest teachers, and to have him sitting there in the audience and also since I didn’t meet him, it was weird because I didn’t get a personal connection with him. I felt like it was this giant exam and it was really hard to be in the moment because I found myself listening to my own songs as if I were there sitting in the audience as Morrissey passing judgment on whether I actually had done it right. It was like being in a recital and knowing that your parents are out there, and are they really gonna be proud of you?
You guys have covered Sabbath, and there’s a Psychedelic Furs cover on “No, Virginia,” but have you guys covered any Smiths or Morrissey?
We’ve covered “I Know It’s Over,” we covered that in Manchester as an homage to the Moz and we’ve covered “Bigmouth Strikes Again” in the privacy of our own rehearsal space. We’ve never actually done that live and we’ve done a cover of “Cosmic Dancer” that was sort of more of a cover of the Morrissey version than it was of the T Rex song.
Now that we’re gushing about other famous people, how about David Lynch? Has he reached out to you about you co-opting of the “Twin Peaks” reference of “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” for your album?
No. I’m sort of hoping he creeps out of the shadows when the record comes out. Did you see the amazing YouTube clip of David Lynch with the iPhone?
No!
You need to watch it. [she goes on to describe the video]
OK. So speaking of weird-ass videos, I remember one you did where you’re aggressively lip-synching Avril Lavigne songs as a tribute to her. Whatever came about with that?
That got me banned from being backstage at the next Avril Lavigne show I went to. For real! She banned me.
Well, she must have been terrified of that video!
I don’t know, she’s a weirdo.
Have you ever met her?
I met her when she was very very drunk in a bar in LA once but I don’t think she’d remember that.
Was that before your obsession?
That was definitely before I made that video, but I was definitely into the record, and the thing is, is that her last record I didn’t care for at all, and the first record I thought was totally cheesy, but I loved her second record. I loved it! The middle one was dark Avril, and I just loved it. In fact, I think as soon as I’m done talking to you I’m gonna go put it on my stereo.
Great. And I’ll watch the David Lynch video. So, you are probably the easiest person to interview, Amanda, because you blog so much that there is no short supply of material. Does writing all your thoughts down help free you as an artist, or does it prevent you from writing songs about some of the stuff you’re blogging about? For instance, I recently read an entry where you talk about watching salmon swim upstream. Now that your blog is the outlet for that, does that mean there will never be an Amanda Palmer song about salmon swimming upstream?
I worry, or rather I wonder, but I worry too, if keeping the blogs has prevented me from writing music, because they’re kind of the same thing and the thing about the blogs is that they’re so direct and there’s such instant gratification because you can just get an idea or a metaphor or a thought right out there and get instant feedback from people, that I wonder if I hadn’t had that outlet, if some of those ideas wouldn’t have fermented into musical ideas. And I think I can say that I think that probably is true to a certain extent, but then again, I don’t feel like my purpose on this earth is to sit at the piano and write songs to me. That’s an old feeling of mine. I don’t know what my f—ing ultimate purpose is. I don’t think anyone does, but in this Brian [Viglione, Dresden Dolls drummer] and I are very different. Brian really identifies as a drummer. His role on earth would involve the drums. He speaks through them. He communicates with them he communes with them in the privacy of his own bedroom in a way that I do not do with my piano, and to me the piano is just a tool to do that thing which I wanna do and that thing which I wanna do is much more about just connecting with people artistically and you could’ve given me a guitar and I would’ve been just as happy, or a ukelele or a triangle, or whatever it was that I needed, whatever tool it was that would gather people around me so that we could talk. And I just happened to pick the piano because the piano was in the house. I really saw the piano as kind of the means to an end.
Speaking of piano, in the song “The Point of it All” on “No, Virginia,” you sound like you’re being Billy Joel. Am I way off base?
I think I knew that! I think either I pointed that out to somebody before or someone pointed that out to me. [singing and playing piano to tune of “Always a Woman”] You can say what you want, but I guess that’s the point of it all.
[Laughs] Wow. Never thought I’d ever hear that. In your formative years did you ever have to learn Billy Joel songs?
Oh no, but Billy Joel was in the air, and you pick up whatever’s in the air, so I definitely picked up the Billy Joel, because, I mean you couldn’t not, if you were a kid in the ’80s.
Amanda Palmer
Friday, 8 p.m.
Boston Symphony Hall
301 Mass Ave., Boston
MBTA: Green E Line to Symphony
$10-$55, 617-266-1492
www.bso.org