So it’s the eve of the release of local sensation and Dresden Dolls vocalist/pianist Amanda Palmer’s solo debut album (produced by Ben Folds), and I’m sitting in her bric-a-brac-filled South End apartment drinking herbal tea. We’ve just taken a moment to notice a remarkable spider web forming in the open window of her kitchen; closer inspection reveals a spider in the center packaging up a helpless victim for a later lunch. I interrupt the moment to ask the obvious question:
Okay, so let’s get the biz out of the way first: your new album is Who Killed Amanda Palmer?, and now it’s like “Ooh, are the Dresden Dolls finished, what does this mean?” What do you think people will read from this?
I don’t know what people want my answer to be. I think the fans probably want to hear that the band is going to go on forever and ever. And I think in some incarnation, it will. But Brian and I are also really happy doing our own projects right now, and we haven’t nailed down what’s going to come out after this.
Was this solo album intentional, or did it just sort of happen?
It all sort of happened, it started out as a much smaller thing, and originally this was going to take a matter of months.
When was this?
This was two years ago. I was going to record it in my apartment with a local engineer, and record it, master it, put it out, no press, no fanfare. And the collection of songs was different back then, it was this collection of piano ballads. And so that changed. Once Ben Folds got involved, it kind of morphed into this large project. Also, while that was happening, the band was evolving. Evolving and de-volving.
What do you mean “evolving”?
Well, I think that Brian and I were getting fundamentally burned on touring. We had been touring for I think pretty much five years non-stop. We were just getting burned on everything: the routine, each other. It’s really, really hard to maintain a relationship like that when it’s just two people.
Was there ever a turning point or an event where you thought “How can I keep doing this?”
There were a lot of those events. I mean, that’s the sort of thing, when you’re touring together, and you’re constantly — I mean, Brian and I are very different, and —
How so?
Oh god, where do I start? We have so much in common, and so many differences, it was a constant roller coaster. We had incredible musical chemistry, wonderful personal bonds, but when our differences would appear and the emotional turmoil would get high, it would get really really high. And one of the fundamental things, for me, that was hardest, is that I wasn’t used to dealing with relationships like that. Because usually if I was in a relationship like that with a boyfriend or a friend, and the kitchen got really hot, I would just take off and go “Oh, this relationship is too intense, there’s too much conflict, it’s not worth all this fighting, I’m just gonna go”. But being in a band like this is like being married: you have to commit and work through your problems, but it was a lot of work. And I think Brian and I, as much as we love each other, got really exhausted by the constant work that the relationship took to maintain. And that’s the thing that’s so hard to understand is that we love playing music with each other, we love each other, we’re great friends, but we’re so relieved to be doing our own things.
It’s like if you went to a marriage counselor, they’d tell you “You need to find new things to do…”
“You need a hobby now that the kids are out of the house!” My feeling is that Brian and I have such intense chemistry with each and we literally just love playing with each other so much that the chances of the band not playing again together are very slim. But I think it’s going to take us a while to figure out what incarnation that might take.
How did the whole Ben Folds thing happen?
Ben Folds e-mailed me, out of the blue — he sent a message to the band, a fan mail basically, saying “Hey, I’m Ben Folds, I’m in Japan touring, I picked up both of your records, they’re really incredible, I just want to wave and say I’m here.” After I got over the initial shock of how flattering that was —
You were of course a fan of the album he did with William Shatner a few years ago, I take it.
Well, no! I didn’t even know about that record. I was familiar with Ben in passing — I think I owned one of his records. I knew some of his other hits. But I was by no means a die-hard fan. And I think that was lucky, because if I had been a die-hard fan —
It would have been weird?
It would have been weird. But instead he came to me, like “Oh, I really respect you, I really like your music.” I sort of went back and revisited his music, I bought more of his music, I got more familiar with his stuff, I got the William Shatner record — that blew me away, that really tipped me over the edge. When I heard that he produced that, I thought, “He obviously can produce a great record.”
Did he have any Shatner stories?
His stories about William Shatner were all wonderful, he did a great imitation of Shatner. Ben was just incredible to work with, he was really really easy to work with, he was totally professional, there was no drama. And it was really nice to go into that work environment and — I also put a lot of faith in him. I went down there with a big pile of songs, plunked them on the table and said “I trust you”. He took a lot of my songs that I really didn’t have arrangements for, and he completely arranged them from top to bottom. I had faith that he would do the right thing. I would leave Nashville, come up to Boston, and sit behind my computer waiting for a mix, and he would send something up and just blow my mind. And for that I feel really lucky, I’ve had other creative projects where I naively walked in saying, “Oh, this is going to be great, no problems, it’s all going to be awesome,” and things would really not necessarily work out. But with Ben, he totally got me, he got it, he nailed all the songs.
It’s interesting for me hearing you say that working with him had no drama; it would seem that for Dresden Dolls fans, the “drama” is part of what they want to imagine goes on during a recording. Do you think “going solo” has led you to pursue a more drama-free situation, artistically?
I’ve got to read you something! Hold on. [Gets up and rummages through other room] I was just reading this yesterday and, um — oh, here it is, [heads back into room holding book] it’s David Lynch’s new book —
Oh yeah, his book on TM [Transcendental Meditation]…
Yeah, but’s not just about that, it’s also about art, and . . . [thumbing through book] ummm . . . where’d it go . . . let’s see . . . [continues thumbing] . . . umm . . . I’m going to have to start dog-earing these things . . . [still thumbing] . . . oh, I think it’s here . . . Yes! Page eight, it says, “Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story but they are like poison to the filmmaker or the artist. They are like a vice grip on creativity. If you’re in that grip you can hardly get out of bed, much less experience the flow of creativity and ideas. You must have clarity to create, you must be able to catch ideas.” And you know what, I was just in the UK doing a bunch of press, and a bunch of the journalists who came to me just assumed that I was this crazy person, like this psychotic fucked-up bitch. But they were really interested in that, and that was sort of their angle, like, “What’s it like to be such a fucked-up person, Amanda Palmer?” And obviously, I was like, “Well, this is great that they listened to the record,” and I guess I can see that, in the record you could pick up on lots of anger, lots of drama, lots of psychosis, whatever — but I always work on the assumption that if you’re able to exorcise all that stuff through your art, that allows you to lived a balanced life as a person. And if you actually are really fucked-up and psychotic, then yes, you can make art, but it doesn’t make it easier, and it doesn’t necessarily make your art better. It’s more about access. And one thing that’s really frustrating, as a songwriter, is that, unlike maybe a filmmaker or a sculptor or a painter, people will immediately assume that your songs are you and that if your songs are, you know, depressed or angry or psychotic, that you must be angry or depressed or psychotic. And definitely in certain cases that’s true with certain people. But I’ve always looked at it as the opposite: it’s like, I’m actually able not to be fucked up and angry and psychotic because I get to write all the time.
I feel like people, in general, don’t want to know that about artists.
They want the romance.
Right, it’s like when I was a kid and I read some thing where Ozzy Osbourne was talking about how his favorite band was the Beatles, and I was like “What? He’s not supposed to be listening to that!”
Like, he’s supposed to be listening to nothing but satanic chants!
Yeah, well, it seems like it’s especially true of artists that develop a defined aesthetic.
Yeah, and that aesthetic can trap you. It can trap you as an artist and as a person. One of the things that is really scary is that you harbor this concern that if there is no drama in your life, you’re not going to have a resource to pull from, because you start noticing that the best songs you write are when you’re heartbroken, and you’re frustrated, and you’re pissed off. And so you are a little more willing to live closer to the edge of drama because it’s seems more interesting. But I think that, at least as I go along, I realize that there’s always going to be drama that you can just pull out and grab. You don’t have to live it, you don’t have to suffer for your art — you have to suffer anyway! Life is full of suffering no matter which way you cut it, you don’t have to go and create it. I think a lot of teenagers do that, I think that’s also — when I was a teenager, writing a lot of stuff on the early Dolls records, I think that’s why it connected with so many teenagers, because you definitely do that. Especially as an artistic teenager, you’re convinced that you’ve got to be this tortured soul, and you’ve got to be full of drama and angst, and everyone will think you’re this interesting person. And if you don’t have drama going on in your life, that everyone will think that you’re this uninteresting person sitting in the corner that no one will take an interest in. And some people never grow out of it, and some people are so, like — it’s doesn’t matter if they are artistic or not. People who are filled with drama are just filled with drama, they’re just attached to that for whatever reason. And I think a lot of the time it is because they think that if they’re not doing that whole “Aaiiggh my life is so fucked up” thing, talking to their co-workers and their families, then maybe they won’t be interesting and and people won’t want to listen to then and they need to skew that way in order to be heard. A lot of that has to do with where they came from, maybe not being heard as a kid. It’s interesting.
Do you feel like, on the cusp of this solo album, you can kind of look back on the Dresden Dolls as something you did as a teenager onward for all these years, and just go “Huh, look at that”?
Yeah, like “That’s what that was!” You know what’s interesting is that I think there are two — no wait, three stories to the Dresden Dolls: there is what happened with our fans and our community and our life; there’s the story of me and Brian and our relationship, which is a different story; and then there’s an entirely separate story apart from that with the public’s perception of what the Dresden Dolls is as an idea. And those three stories are really different — I mean, they’re intertwined but they followed separate trajectories. And one thing that is constantly challenging for me is trying to, umm, what’s the word I’m looking for, sort of negotiate the difference between the Dresden Dolls as it’s own entity and how the fans and the bands interacted, and what we did, and what happened with how the outside mainstream media considers the story to be, which is really uninformed and weird. So, I’m constantly getting feedback from the inside going, “Oh, obviously we did this and this and this,” and I’ll read press like some random magazine from London and it’s like, “Oh, that’s what people thought we did. That’s not right, that’s so strange!” So negotiating those things is really weird. And especially with my new record coming out, a lot of those things are getting dredged up, everyone’s obviously comparing what I’m doing to the Dolls.
Well, I think with the Dresden Dolls if you consider your self-created categorization as “Brechtian cabaret punk,” the Brechtian part implies a breaking down of the wall between artist and audience.
Yeah.
So now that you’re putting out a solo album, there’s this audience that was a part of The Thing, and they are probably wondering if that’s still true, or what their role is now that things have changed.
One of the wonderful things about having such a loyal fan base and a really intelligent one at that, who want to stay involved, is that they just come along. Most of them are really interested to see what i’m doing and they’re really willing to give it a shot.
So you don’t feel a need to give a big fuck you to an audience defining you or whatever?
Oh, no. I don’t really get much of that, so I don’t really need to feel defensive. One of the things that I’ve been really trying to pay attention to, apropos this last thing we’re talking about, is how real and fundamental my relationship with my fans with, and how direct. The internet has made that possible. It used to be totally fucking impossible. With my blog, with the way music is distributed, the way everything happens, our fan’s ability to get the word out instead of relying on marketing and promoting. I mean, it really has fundamentally changed in the last eight years. And for that, I feel insanely grateful, and all I need to do is, if things aren’t doing well with the label, or with some publicity thing, or some sort of detached amorphous promotional something from above, all I have to do is remember that I have a mainline to all of these people, and that that is so much more valuable than getting press in Rolling Stone or being on MTV or, you know — those things, they’re so meaningful. But they’re becoming more and more antiquated. Like I’ll talk to bands at my level, and we’ll have this discussion where I’ll say, “Oh, you get so much more press than the Dresden Dolls, you’re always in Spin magazine,” and they’ll turn to me and go, “Oh, but you’re selling twice as many tickets as we are.” And we’ll sit there looking at each other and go, “Hmm.” Well, who’s actually the lucky one, right? And it’s hard to wrap your head around because you just need to look at the solid numbers and the actual dialogue going on with the fans and remember that what’s being dictated, that we’re so used to the charts telling us what’s going on, and MTV telling us what’s going on back when I was a kid, the radio telling us what’s going on has less and less and less to do with reality. And I said as a child of the ’80s where there were megastars and a very defined pyramid of success and fame and popular bands, that’s all gone out the window, and I just get to sit here and cherish the thing that we’ve built and appreciate it, and that’s been blowing my mind lately, you know?
Yeah, it’s kind of like the recent brouhaha over Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead leaking their own albums, it’s like if you have a certain cult thing going on, you’re relationship to The Biz doesn’t mean anything —
— What it means is profound! What it means is “You can do it!” It doesn’t “mean,” in quotes, anything! Except that this is possible, and musicians no longer have to rely on the system and the machine to reach out to their fans. But with that also comes this responsibility of, “You have to run your own business, you have to take care of your fans, you have to create your own entity.” And that whole fantasy of being on a record label and getting in a limo and going to a show, that just doesn’t exist, you have to banish that from your list.
Do you think that this change has affected the general work ethic that it takes to “make it”?
Well, I’ve obviously met tons of bands and lots of musicians of all kinds, and —
You can feel free to trash talk.
Well, there’s no one that I really want to trash, but I — especially musicians that I really, uh, you know, admire. I’ll get into conversations with them about what they’re doing, press-wise, how they’re running their business, and how they’re running their MySpace, and how they’re taking care of their merch, how they’re running the show, and they will sometimes be so clueless, that I’ll feel this sense of desperation for them, because other people can only maintain for you for so long. I’ve definitely hung out with musicians who really weren’t taking responsibility for keeping their show together, and you definitely watch it screw them.
Yeah, it’s like when you watch Behind The Music, all these ’70s acts, “Our manager screwed us,” over and over again.
Yeah, you let your manager screw you! And when you look back at the ’60s and the ’70s, with people literally getting screwed to the wall, making millions of records and not seeing a penny, even from their touring, just nothing nothing nothing, you have to remember that the information didn’t exist. The cards had been stacked against people and there was no world wide information network and there weren’t shelves of books on the music business.
And let’s be honest, no one really felt bad for rock stars who weren’t making the millions they deserved or whatever.
I’m sure their mothers did. But it was, you know, musicians were just not as informed. But nowadays, if you don’t know what’s going on with your business, you really just look stupid. Because you can know, and if you don’t take precautions, have a good lawyer, make sure your manager’s not screwing you, all of thsoe little steps — if you don’t take responsibility for that, you just lose. And it’s so hard, I mean, that’s the thing that’s so ironic, it’s that — well, maybe not ironic, but unfair, is that is why is a musician expected to negotiate all of that? Whoever wrote into the rulebook that, “Oh, if you write songs, you also need to be able to like, negotiate lawyers, managers, booking agents, publicists, and labels”?
Well, I guess if you want to write songs, you can write songs. But if you want people to hear them, and you want to get paid for it, and want to get credit for it . . .
Yeah, that’s really — that’s a question that, umm, I think about all the time, because I spend the vast majority of my time not working on music, I spend it behind the Mac [holding her laptop]. We have a much closer relationship than I have with my piano. It can also be very tempting to e-mail instead of write music, because e-mail is very instantly gratifying, and there’s a lot of wonderful feedback and connection and blogging can also give you that wonderful jolt of connection with people, and I think, “Wow, I remember when I used to be a songwriter.” Now, I seek connections between things in the world and I take those images and put them into my blog. I don’t put them into songs — “Songs take so long, no one’s going to hear this shit for ten months, if I do this blog thing now, someone will write back to me on their reflection of it in ten minutes.” And that’s very dangerous, because it can strip you of the private internal intimate relationship you might have with your music-making. And that’s something I have yet to figure out, how to balance these two machines.
Yeah, but that’s kind of the sophomore thing, right? Once you’ve done The Thing, and you have to do The Next Thing —
Yeah, but there’s this wonderful thing I’ve noticed happening, which is that there is a hump that you do get over where you can kind of let things run by themselves, and also —
Songwriting-wise or business-wise?
Business-wise. Which allows you to step back and breathe a little bit and read books and maybe write more music that you would because you start trusting — not only that things will sort of happen because you set up a team, but you also care a little less. Because when you make your first record, it has to be perfect. And when you make your second record, that pretty much has to be perfect too. But by the time you’re on your third record, you just don’t care as much.
Because you know there’ll be another one?
Because you’ll have another one, but also because you’ve proven yourself to the world and to your fans and you can let up a little bit and experiment a little bit more. This is not to say that I was not a complete anal perfectionist with this record, but I was willing to stretch a little bit more and say, “You know, I’m not sure about this, Ben, but sure, let’s do it.”
Do you think that you were in a different musical head space when you did this solo album?
Oh yeah, totally. First of all, it was a different collection of songs, and it was all about finding a new voice, literally. I was having vocal problems. I think one thing I noticed was that I didn’t feel the need to be as loud.
Yeah, I can hear that. The vocals are different, lots of double-tracked parts.
Yeah, and it’s not as screamy and poundy. It’s a little more, for lack of a better term, more grown-up. When you realize that you don’t need to be scream to be heard and you just back up and speak quietly and go “I have something to say, if you feel like listening, then that’s great,” instead of “Fuck! I’ve got this problem!” you know? That’s the evolution that hopefully— one of the things that I always fear is that i’m going to wind up one of those terribly boring adult contemporary artists where they music gets really bland and your life is suburban and it’s not fucking interesting and you don’t have anything to talk about and this doesn’t relate to me, and I listen to artists who get into their ’40s and ’50s, and i’m terrified of that. But then you hear other artists, like Tom Waits, or David Bowie, or Björk, people who just don’t go down that road at all, that just keep creating. And I think that gets back to that idea of access: as long as you can access power and drama and sadness and depression and anger, even if you’re living in your little cottage in Ibiza with your nine servants and your boat — fucking right on! That’s actually all that it’s about, that you can say something interesting to me.
Okay, so earlier you referred to yourself as an ’80s girl. But! Here’s the deal: so I saw you at the Harborlights show a few months ago —
The Death Cab show?
Yeah, and you opened with Radiohead’s “Creep,” and you did Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Two-Headed Boy,” and you named your new album Who Killed Amanda Palmer? which is a Twin Peaks reference, and you worked with Ben Folds, and you have Radiohead’s The Bends sitting over there on that table, and I was just wondering what is the significance of the early/mid-’90s to you and your aesthetic?
Okay, I have to embarrassingly admit that I missed most of the 90’s [holds up The Bends CD]. I didn’t buy this record until two years ago. My shameful secret is that I didn’t know who Kurt Cobain was when he died. I was out of the loop because I was locked up in my own little bubble of music that my strange circle of friends and my older boyfriend was turning me on to. My favorite bands back then were the Legendary Pink Dots, and Coil, and Current 93, and the Swans, and Nick Cave. And when I went into a record store, that’s all I looked at. I didn’t listen to the radio. Ever. I just wasn’t a radio listener. I didn’t watch TV. I wasn’t hanging out in public places, I was always wearing my Walkman, so my mixtapes and my record collection were my only input. And so, you know, I remember seeing people’s t-shirts, and I’d be like, “Oh, Nirvana, I wonder what that is. Pearl Jam, what a stupid band name.” Sort of absorbing it vaguely. When I started sort of slowing down and letting other music seep in, someone played me OK Computer when I was 20 years old and I thought, “Wow, there’s music like this, this is incredible!” and I listened to that record, but just that record, for like six months. And it didn’t even occur to me to go out and buy other Radiohead records, I was just like, “I’m just happy with this one.” And then gradually, like I picked up Nevermind and I was like “Oh, this is a really good record,” and I bought a Pearl Jam CD and I was like, “Oh I hate this, this is terrible.” And I bought a Hole record and I was like, “Uh, I kind of like this song, kind of hate these songs.” And I got into it way after the fact. But that’s also kind of nice because the things that stood the test of time that I hear people talking about now, those are the ones that I cherry pick. Brian was really instrumental in turning me on to a lot of ’90s bands that I had no knowledge of. You know, the music that I’m sentimental about and romantic about is the ’80s, and I’ll never be able to feel nostalgic about ’90s music because I just wasn’t there when it was happening, it wasn’t the soundtrack of my life like it was to other people. But if you throw on a Depeche Mode CD from 1987, or a Cure album from 1985, I get all weepy.
Okay, so you were into Nick Cave and the Legendary Pink Dots and the Swans and the Cure; and yet when the Dresden Dolls came out, you had a pretty certain aesthetic but at the same time you defined yourself as “Brechtian punk cabaret,” in part to avoid being labeled the “g” word; so tell me, what is it about “goth” that is so divisive?
You know what’s really interesting about that question is the bands that you just mentioned: The Legendary Pink Dots, the Swans, Nick Cave, they all would have cringed at being called “goth.”
Wouldn’t they? But there’s a code there, and we all know! We can read the code!
Yeah, but even Bauhaus: I did an interview with Peter Murphy and we bonded over our hatred of being called goth: and this is the dude who opened up Coachella by swinging onstage as a vampire bat, and he was like, “Hmph! It’s not goth, it’s art!” Because there really are bands who want to be goth, and especially nowadays: there’s like, I dunno, Marilyn Manson, Switchblade Symphony—
I’m going to guess that Marilyn Manson wouldn’t want to be called goth either. I could see him not self-identifying.
He might not. But it’s sort of like — nowadays, it’s like calling a band “emo.” It’s actually is a genre, but no one wants to be in it.
Did you think, before you did music, but you were in that whole world, did you think even then, “I’m not goth”?
You know, I have never delved into this in an interview, but I had a really heartbreaking experience when I was in my late teens, and I was just coming out of my hole — you know, I was really sort of an antisocial and isolated teenager. And I never had a social group, but in the distance I’d see groups of punks and groups of goths and I’d think, “Oh, they all look really cool and they must be really happy to all be with each other.” And I assumed, because of the music I listened to, because I liked the Smiths and loved the Cure and x y and z, I assumed that if I met those people, and infiltrated their clan, we would like each other, and we would be friends, and they would be smart and intelligent and because they loved the Cure and I loved the Cure we would have this deep fucking bond. And I was sorely disappointed becuase I did that for a while and I sort of wore gothy clothes and tried to go to Man Ray and I never met a single person that I liked. And I sort of sat there feeling really fucking ripped off, because, to me, it looked like this sort of pre-packaged thing where you could find a set of friends because you have music in common, but all the people I met were kind of jerks and into the fashion of wearing these clothes, and it was just, it just didn’t feel friendly, it didn’t feel smart, it didn’t feel artistic, it just felt lame. And so I didn’t try that for very long, I sort of looked around, brushed myself off, went to take a shower, and said, “Obviously those aren’t the people I want to be connected with or want to be associated with.” Even though there would be individual people here and there who would be friendly or who I would like — as a whole, I looked at that set and I said, “No, that’s definitely not me, I’m not one of them.” And I felt sort of the same way about punks: I spent my obligatory summer hanging out in the pit [in Harvard Square] when I was sixteen with my fucking mohawk and my many earrings and my fucked up clothes and my middle finger out to everyone all day, chain smoking and pretending to be punk. And those people really weren’t for me either: they were so negative and so bitchy and so whiny. A few of them were artistic and friendly, but I just found myself wandering through those years going, “Where are they? Where are the people like me? It’s not these people — where are they?” And Brian and I used to talk about that all the time — he really felt the same way, and I think one of our main objectives in starting a band was, like, “Let’s just gather us all up and get us all in one club, for fuck’s sake. Like, we can’t find us, so let’s bring us together.”
See, this is the lesson of ’80s John Hughes movies: that there are those people, and that kids aren’t really the stereotypes that outsiders think they are.
It really is true! And the people that buy into their own stereotypes just suck. People who really are hipsters, they’re terrible!
You always just sort of think that they’ll grow out of it.
You assume that. People who identify so strongly, like “I am goth, I listen to goth music, da da da, this is what I am,” I’m always really suspicious of them, because sometimes there’s something behind that, but often they’re just really insecure. And especially the modern goth culture, like if I pick up a copy of Propaganda magazine or something, or I see some modern goth band, it feels very joyless, and that feels very antithetical to who I am, the music I make, the fans I have, and how I want to live my life, that I never want to touch it. And when someone calls me goth, I cringe, because I just don’t want them to stick me in that pile, it just feels like it’s such a bad fit. I think that it’s upsetting to see — like these great bands like the Legendary Pink Dots, or Dead Can Dance, they just got literally picked up and plunked into this category, and seriously, that market is such a niche with such a low glass ceiling, that if you get stuck there, you’re screwed.
Yeah, I’m usually shocked if a band that is described as “goth” is actually good. You know, like, someone will say, “Hey, Christian Death is this really great band,” and you’ll think “Really? But they’re supposed to be goth!”
Death in June, for example, the music does not sound goth to me. There’s definitely darkness in it, but you’ve got a guy playing an acoustic guitar singing in a major key!
Or the dude from Dead Can Dance, who sounds like Neil Diamond half the time.
Yeah! But it’s also a lot like “punk”— that term has just been bandied about, and it’s much more about fashion than about a genre. And the bands and the artists that are literally saying, “I’m going to tap into that crowd,” like Voltaire or Switchblade Symphony, or, what’s that fucking band, oh yeah, the Cruxshadows! The goth band, they are willing to go up there and say, “We are a goth band, you are goth fans!”
It’s like, I dunno, the metal equivalent would be like Manowar I suppose.
Absolutely. They know who they are, they know who their fans are, and that’s the job. But one thing that’s really important to me, though, is that I not alienate the goth fans. Because I love that they love the Dresden Dolls—And they’ll grow out of those other bands, but not you guys!
I would hope so! I would hope they’d stick around, and that as I evolve and they evolve, we’ll all hang out together.