Amanda Palmer, piano hero

Amanda Palmer: death be not proud (Credit: Beth Hommel)

Usually, when an artist does a solo album, it’s her chance to strip things down and get more personal, more intimate. Not Amanda Palmer, the singer-pianist of goth-punk cabaret duo the Dresden Dolls. Her solo debut, “Who Killed Amanda Palmer” (get the “Twin Peaks” reference, David Lynch fans?), is jam-packed with elaborately orchestrated piano-rock, heavy on the strings and vocal harmonies, courtesy of Palmer’s producer and new BFF, Ben Folds. “Everyone who has heard it has been floored by the sheer beauty of Ben’s arrangements,” she effuses. “He really nailed it.”

For her solo tour, Palmer is going large-scale in a different way, indulging her “dorky theatre” side with an elaborately choreographed stage show featuring Australian performance art troupe the Danger Ensemble. Palmer can hardly contain her excitement as she describes how the Danger performers will bring her songs to life with a mix of “tongue-in-cheek, Britney Spears–style lip-syncing and backup dancing routines” and more “badass stuff” like Butoh and Suzuki performance techniques (look ‘em up).

“Some of the stuff gets set up in the balcony, some of it happens in secret in the crowd,” Palmer explains. “As usual, I kind of want to take over the whole space and give people surprises.”

Before taking her theatrical show on the road, Palmer called us from her home in Boston to chat about the new album and explain why there’s not likely to be a videogame called “Piano Hero” anytime soon.

How was it working with Ben Folds on this album?
It was incredible. Ben is a fantastic producer and human being and musician and, you know, walk-taker/talker-with-er. He’s an all-around superb entity. I’m so, so, so glad he stumbled into my life when he did.

One of my favorite things about this album is that there’s a lot of studio chatter. I love hearing the sounds and conversations of the studio between songs—not enough records do that anymore.
Yeah, I really love album segue-ways. Even if they make no sense and you have no idea what it is…there’s just something about it that cushions the record in a little bit more of an atmosphere, in a world. I like anything that does that. I think that’s also why I’ve become prone to leave in my “Amanda grunts” and groans as I’m playing that I used to edit out. I just leave them on now.

Really? You used to edit that stuff out?
Yeah. And I would also self-censor at the piano. I noticed that live, I make a lot of noise—and then in the studio I would be very careful not to make any noise unless I was delivering a lyric. And I got to a certain point where I just said, “Ah, fuck it.”

There’s a song on the album called “Guitar Hero.” Were you hoping they might license it for the game?
God, no. It would be the ultimate irony if they did. We already had almost the ultimate irony—I thought that East Bay Ray [of the Dead Kennedys] was the perfect candidate to be the guest guitar player on a song called “Guitar Hero.” I had a good laugh about, here’s East Bay Ray, a true guitar hero, a great personality, great innovator—not a stupid cock-rocker. He’s just this fantastic guitar player. So we got him to play on the track. And then two or three weeks later, I got almost simultaneous phone calls from the [Dead Kennedys’] engineer and Ray, both saying, “Amanda, you’ll never believe what happened. We’re in the studio remixing a bunch of Dead Kennedys songs for Guitar Hero III!” [Laughs] And I said, “Ah, that’s wonderful. The cycle is complete.”

Have you taken any stabs at playing guitar yourself?
Oh, go check out the “Guitar Hero” video online.

Why hasn’t anyone invented a videogame yet called “Piano Hero”? That’s what I want to know.
‘Cause it’s not as much fun. And it doesn’t look like a penis. That’s why.

Speaking of instruments: the arrangements on this album are pretty elaborate, with lots of strings and horns. How are you going to re-create songs like “Leeds United” on tour? Are you taking a huge band out with you?
No, I’m doing something thoroughly off-the-wall. Instead of bringing a backup band, which I did consider for a while, I’m going to bring a backup theatre [group] called the Danger Ensemble. They’re a bunch of performance artists and physical theatre folks from Australia. And together we’ve created bizarre visual vignettes that go along with pretty much every song on the record. So it’s sort of like a bizarre live music video.

This kind of sounds like taking the Dresden Dolls’ idea of “punk cabaret” to the next level.
It sort of is. And I think I probably would have done stuff like this with the Dresden Dolls had Brian [Viglione, the Dresden Dolls’ drummer] been into it. But he—I think probably wisely—suggested that we stick to this piano and drums thing that we had going on. But now that I’m free-floating, I’m getting all my dorky theatre rocks off.

What’s Brian doing while you’re off doing this solo stuff? Is he sitting on the couch at home?
Hell, no. You could not ever keep Brian Viglione on the couch. He would drum it to shreds. He is on tour currently with a fantastic New York-based band called the World/Inferno Friendship Society. They are a fantastic, sort of punk/anarchy swing band that have a fantastic cult punk-rock following. Their live show is absolutely out of hand—I highly, highly, highly recommend seeing them live.

If you listen all the way to the end of this album, is there a hidden bonus track that reveals who really did kill Amanda Palmer?
No, but there’s an interesting vortex on the Internet that does. And that’s all I can say.

Not even a hint?
If you go to Whokilledamandapalmer.com, or the Shadowbox, which is the discussion forum, or the MySpace page, you can somehow figure it out. It’s, uh…it’s out there. [Laughs] The answer is out there.