#Amanda Palmer #ex-The Dresden Dolls #alternative rock #dark cabaret #dark folk #punk cabaret #singer-songwriter
According to Palmer, this song was inspired by a real-life incident. “I had been dating this guy from Leeds, Ricky Wilson from the Kaiser Chiefs, and we had a totally brief flash-in-the-pan fling. We had a really great time together. I really liked him, and I went up to his house in Leeds for a week. He gave me this great Leeds United jersey, which I prized. And then when I got back on tour a couple of days later I wore it on stage. I had a bra underneath, so I took off the jersey and finished the encore all sweaty and stuff. I went back to look for it, the stage was being cleaned, and it was like, ‘Fuck! Where’s my shirt!?’ I had that shirt for all of about 5 days. I’d already gotten all excited and sentimental about it, and then it vanished.” From: https://genius.com/Amanda-palmer-leeds-united-lyrics
Tone Deaf: You had your new album come out last year — how has the response been since it’s came out? You also had 15,000 supporters for it. It must have been amazing to have so many people put their faith, their money, and their trust in you for a record.
AP: It’s been amazing. It’s actually less hectic than having major label. You know, with your creativity and your soul and time and own vice-grip, I think it’s a lot easier, but then again I’ve played on both sides of that field and it’s a cost benefit in both departments. Being crowd funded by 15,000 people has its own set of tasks, responsibilities, drawbacks, but I would choose every single one of them one hundred times over the drawbacks of being at the mercy of profit driven major labels.
Tone Deaf: When you do release an album in that sense, is it hard to gauge how successful it’s been?
AP: That’s a really good and complicated question. What I have found is that it’s hard to gauge success, period. Even in the heyday of the Dresden Dolls, success was so slippery and impossible to define. The label defined it one way, we defined it a completely different way. If 20 years of releasing music and touring has taught me anything, it’s that I have to creatively manufacture my own definition of success. It’s definitely not streaming number. It’s definitely not money. It definitely isn’t whether or not magazine X gave me a five-star review, because all of those things have and haven’t been true in certain parts of my career, and have actually no bearing on whether or not a project was successful. I have to say that my ultimate definition of success has a lot more to do with the concrete emotional impact I can see the work having on people when I tour it and when I put it out than it does with whether or not the media weighs in or whether or not something is in the charts.
Tone Deaf: If you look at chart positions, there’s so many variations between so many artists. But then when you see you play live, your fans are so dedicated, and clearly that’s a good gauge of success if it resonates with the people, and you see that they’re enjoying it.
AP: Well that in itself is a slippery slope, because how many people need to be in that room for you to be able to call it successful? I mean, I have gotten to the point as an artist where I think I’ve fine-tuned my ability to the point to where I could bust out that ukulele, and I could play a song for you that would move you, and that’s the only thing I did this year, and I could still call it a successful endeavour, because I connected with, and affected somebody. I think we’ve just been fed the Kool-Aid for so long that scale is everything and blockbuster hits are everything, and success is upsized that we forget as artists that our role doesn’t have to do with size and scale. And we need to start flushing that Kool-Aid out of our system.
From: https://tonedeaf.thebrag.com/amanda-palmer-interview-2020/list/check-out-amanda-palmers-do-it-with-a-rockstar/
Amanda MacKinnon Gaiman Palmer (also known as Amanda Fucking Palmer, born April 30, 1976) is an American singer, songwriter, pianist, storyteller, writer and ukulele player. She's most famous for her work as part of the Brechtian punk cabaret duo The Dresden Dolls, along with drummer Brian Viglione. They released three studio albums and toured as openers for Panic! at the Disco, until they went on hiatus in 2008. Although Viglione and her have done shows together since then, the band has officially broken up, even though Palmer has announced plans for them to produce music again.
In 2012, Palmer famously released an album with her at-the-time band The Grand Theft Orchestra called Theatre is Evil, which was funded entirely over Kickstarter - a groundbreaking artistic decision at the time, which was worth it, as the Kickstarter far overpassed its goal. She released the album for free through her website, and then debuted on the Billboard top 100 Album list at number 10 due to the immense number of Kickstarter pre-orders.
Her songs vary wildly in style and topics, with many featuring dark humor and subject material. She's fond of recontextualizing children's songs in a more mature, adult way, and of making puns. Amanda's also known for performing covers of whatever she feels like, ranging from an entire EP of Radiohead covers on the ukulele, to classic musicals, to Black Sabbath, to Britney Spears, to a reimagining of Rebecca Black's song "Friday" from the perspective of a truck-stop prostitute.
In 2019, seven years after her last studio record, Palmer released There Will Be No Intermission, a far more serious, stripped-down album mostly just featuring her on a piano. It tackles subjects like abortion, death, depression, loss, and the climate crisis, and was released to massive critical acclaim. The world tour accompanying it featured only her at a piano, telling the most intimate and human stories of her life. Concerts often went for up to four hours. From: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Music/AmandaPalmer
