Catching Up With... The Dresden Dolls

A Dresden Dolls performance is a unique experience for any concert goer used to the choreographed, light show spectacle that is an arena rock tour. Duo Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione’s cabaret-inspired costumes, white pancake make-up and punk-rock inspired Vaudevillian tunes are more reminiscent of the blood-spattered Broadway musical Sweeney Todd than a rock concert. But the Dolls are of that rare breed of bands whose theatricality is actually backed up by solid musicianship and innovative music (we’re calling you out, Fall Out Boy!)

After a year-long hiatus, during which Palmer cut a solo album and Viglione guested with Nine Inch Nails, the Dresden Dolls are back on tour in support of their latest album No, Virginia. Viglione chatted with Paste last month about the album, touring, working with Trent Reznor and the hiatus that may have saved the Dresden Dolls.

Paste: The Dresden Dolls’ new album No, Virginia comes out tomorrow. The record is a collection of unreleased tracks, demos and B-sides from over the past five years. Why did these songs never make it onto your past albums, and why did you decide to release them now?
Viglione: Well, there’s a two part answer. For the first record, there were some songs that back then, as a new band really having only been playing together for a year, I don’t think we really performed the songs up to par. They maybe fell by the wayside in terms of priority when we were making the first album, which for a large part was guided by which songs meant the most to Amanda emotionally. And those songs were “Half Jack” and “Slide” and so forth, and “Bad Habit,” and a lot of songs that had been very near and dear to her over the years. And then with Yes, Virginia we recorded a total of 17 songs, but didn’t want to release a double album or a 17-song CD. We picked the songs we felt worked best as a collection and had kind of a theme to them, and Amanda was fairly adamant about having songs like “Me & the Minibar” and “First Orgasm” and so forth because she felt she wanted to represent the kind of slower, more intimate side of her song writing. Those songs were picked to be on Yes, Virginia and then we said, ‘Okay. We still like all of these other songs. We’ll just wait until we find the right form for them to come out.’ The scheduling worked out this year that we realized that we would still be on this kind of partial hiatus and that this would be a good chance to clean the cache of songs in our repertoire, but not feel like ‘The pressure’s on! This has got to be our next record.’ So we were kind of able to gather this material and give it a good home.

Paste: The titles of both of those albums, I thought, were so interesting. Is it true that they were inspired by The New York Sun’s famous 1897 editorial which answered a little girl’s query concerning the existence of Santa Claus? Was it kind of a play on that to call the new album No, Virginia?
Viglione: Absolutely. [The letter] is kind of this unending message of optimism, hope and belief, and to counter that with No, Virginia was, like, hysterically funny.

Paste: The album cover is a little bit creepy, but I like it.
Viglione: (Laughs.) That, again, is classic Dresden Dolls black humor for you there. The Santa Claus gnome keeled over on its back with No, Virginia as the title.

Paste: Do you personally have any favorite songs on the album - any that you were just waiting to release and you finally got to see it happen?
Viglione: “Lonesome Organist Rapes Page Turner” is one that I’m really happy about. I think it’s a fantastic song - musically and lyrically. I really like “Night Reconnaissance” a great deal. “Dear Jenny” is one from way back. That one and “The Gardener” were both originally written and performed back in 2001 for the band’s first concerts. But again, I guess we never really took the time to arrange and make official recordings of them because there’s only like 35 or 40 songs over the course of the three years that we made those albums, and you just kind of pick the ones that you’re feeling closest to at the moment. But again - they’re great songs. And “The Gardener” is a wonderful song to play live. Amanda gets to walk through the crowd, and I get to play drums and guitar kind of simultaneously. Onstage it’s just very fun. A lot of these songs are just a fun way to break up the set.

Paste: You mentioned earlier that the Dolls were taking a hiatus, and that you and Amanda were working on some solo projects. Did you put this album together and while you were working on those independent projects?
Viglione: This record basically came together as an idea over this past winter - this past December. In January, we thought to ourselves, ‘Oh, cool. We’re going to take basically most of 2008 off. This is a good opportunity to get some new music out and the rest of these songs that we want to release, and it just seemed like it would be a simple, no-brainer way to keep contact with the fans and get some new music out. And then, when we got all of the material together, we all looked at each other and went ‘Damn! This is a pretty good record.’ The songs work really well together. It doesn’t just sound like throw-away songs. We were really proud of it, so we were like ‘Shoot - let’s book a few dates around it, and do a little touring while we still can.’ And here we are now, just beginning our tour of the West Coast and Southwest, which is great. And then we’ll be doing some festival stuff in Europe. We have about four dates in Europe, and the Rothbury Festival up in Wisconsin this summer.

Paste: Are you pretty excited to be playing together again after taking some time to tour on your own and to do other things?

Viglione: Oh yeah! Absolutely. In fact, it makes it a lot more enjoyable for everybody because we were averaging somewhere around 135 shows every year solid, and everyone just got totally burnt out. I think to get together and make it kind of a special event… it definitely helps morale on a lot of levels. When we were doing Yes, Virginia it was like a grueling album promotion tour with endless press during the days and 2-hour+ shows at night. Everyone just wound up being exhausted. We wanted to branch out, do some other stuff, meet other folks, gain some new experiences - it gives you a deeper appreciation for what you have, and that’s important to do.

Paste: That hiatus came at a good time. Had you both been exploring other projects for a while and 2008 seemed like the time to do it, or was that kind of a coincidence, like ‘Hey, I have this opportunity…’
Viglione: It was kind of initiated at the end of 2006. Things had gotten to a fairly low point in terms of morale, I guess, by the fall of 2006. And I was like ‘I think some time off would definitely benefit the band.’ So we did this performance at the American Repertory Theatre in December 2006 or January 2007, and then when that was done it was like ‘Okay. Take a giant step away from Dresden Dolls.’ We had to just come up for air and just start doing some other stuff. You just lose perspective and all of the fun starts getting taken out of it when everyone starts bickering all of the time and everyone’s totally frazzled from touring and so forth. For me, it was a great chance to play with other East coast area musicians, and Amanda got involved in the solo record. And then we did the True Colors Tour last July, which was like the most beautiful way to come back together and do some shows again because that tour was just the most amazing combination of people. Just everyone from the bands, the road crews… and the whole experience was so positive. It was one of my favorite tours that we had ever done. And then to, you know, say ‘Cool. Let’s make amends. Let love… Water under the bridge.’ And now we can kind of go back with some peace of mind and do some other things for a while. And again this year, Amanda said ‘I’m basically getting ready to do the solo record, so I don’t have a whole ton of time to do another whole album cycle.’ I said ‘Cool. Let’s just make this simple and easy.’ And here’s No, Virginia.

Paste: Tell me a little bit about all of the side projects you’ve been working on. I understand you’ve been playing with four or five bands. I guess you’ve stayed pretty busy, huh?
Viglione: Yeah, it’s been great. I mean, two of the high points were doing the Nine Inch Nails album in December - that was really fun… Ghosts… I was a huge Nine Inch Nails fan for years, and to be asked to come out and collaborate on that was tremendous. And I basically got to make a drum kit out of found objects, which was really fun. I basically just kind of improvised my part for the record, which was really, really fun. It was really wide open. That was really cool, and Trent [Reznor] was great to work with. And then I’m really excited to - this coming summer, I’m playing with a band from New York called the World/Inferno Friendship Society. They’re incredible! They’re like a punk rock swing band, and just amazing. I’ve never seen an audience like theirs who can swing dance, slam dance and waltz - all in the same show. It’s amazing. They have an incredible crowd. It’s sort of like if you crossed the Count Basie Orchestra with Wilson Pickett and the Ramones. We’ll be doing a five-week tour in Europe in July, and then coming out West, I think, in the fall.

Paste: Speaking of live shows, the Dresden Dolls have some pretty hardcore fans - many of them even dress up in cabaret costumes and wear the pancake makeup. What is like to have your fans so involved in the show, and what effect does their participation have on the evening?
Viglione: It brings us, as the band, tremendous joy. That was something that we initiated. I think there might be a slight misconception - people who think that fans who we call The Brigade are just these whacked-out superfans - but we actually put forth the invitation in 2003 to our fan base saying ‘If you want to participate on a deeper creative level, here’s your opportunity.’ The band came from, sort of germinated in these house parties where there was always some kind of art installation, and all of these multimedia artists, so we figured, why let it stop there? Let’s bring it into the rock clubs and open it up. The best thing about rock ‘n’ roll and music and going to see a show is that it can really light you up and inspire you, so that’s really taken a step further to when you actually creatively share with other people, so doesn’t that just magnify the whole glory of the thing a hundred fold? So that’s what happened all over the world, and it’s essentially created a community for our fans to connect and work together and meet each other. I mean, the number of friendships and creative opportunities that have come out of this is fantastic. Kids work together, they share rides, they do projects together, they do outings… We see a lot of the results of their work, and kids will just mail us the most phenomenal paintings and drawings, or bake food for us, or come to the shows with really beautiful, elaborate costumes they’ve designed. For us, that makes it at the end of the day - seeing what we do inspire other people to take what they do further.

Paste: I read in an interview you did with NPR that a couple of your songs - “Coin-Operated Boy” and “Girl Anachronism” - have been used in commercials, but that you had also turned down a lot of projects, including the soundtrack to a horror movie. Is it hard to choose which projects to license your music to? This is your baby - something you’ve put a lot of time and blood, sweat and tears into. Is giving someone else any kind of creative license with it a hard decision?
Viglione: It depends on what the situation is. The kind of situations that we are most frequently presented with are independent film directors - I mean very, very homespun film people who are making films and they want to use our music in their picture. Or occasionally, rarely, people want to do like techno remixes of the Dresden Dolls (laughs), which is really funny. The jelly commercial from Austria, I mean, is like Austrian fruit spread and they wanted to use “Coin-Operated Boy.” We were just rolling on the floor laughing at the idea.

Paste: Wow! I wonder how they came to that decision…
Viglione: Yeah! To use “Coin-Operated Boy” in a jelly commercial. It was worth it just to crack up over the idea. So that was basically the only to happen there. But yeah, we get offered a whole lot of commercial work in that sense, say for a jeans commercial or something like that, I just don’t think we’re typically understood or maybe accepted by that mainstream kind of media, even though what we do is just sort of like fun pop-rock. I mean, not pop-rock. There’s definitely a sort of dark sting to it, but it’s not like really unacceptable stuff. But again, it’s not really about that. If things come up that seem fun, we’re happy to engage if it seems fun. But most of all, I think it’s cool to see the band in a bunch of different contexts. We just try to participate when we can.

Paste: Changing gears a bit, Amanda has cited musical influences from the Weimar Republic to the DaDa movement. Do you think the Dolls may have introduced a new generation of young fans these artistic periods?
Viglione: You know what? It’s not even as important to have people know and understand all of the things we maybe are inspired by or are referencing, or know about the Dadaists or the Situationists, or whatever kind of crazy underground movement that was happening at the time. The point is that people are being proactive today. Maybe they don’t even necessarily have to know the background, but the fact that they are creating and sharing with each other is really important for us.

Paste: During your upcoming tour, do you have anything special planned? A Halloween show you guys did a few years ago involving a lot of cover songs and costumes still sticks out in my mind…
Viglione: The Britney and Madonna get-ups?

Paste: Yeah! Definitely not what I was expecting, but I enjoyed it immensely.
Viglione: (Laughs.) Yeah, that was really fun. I don’t know. Things come up on tour all of the time. Last night we played with East Bay Ray from the Dead Kennedys, which was phenomenal. We covered “Moon Over Marin” - an old Dead Kennedys song. To me, Dead Kennedys were incredibly influential. You know, that was a lot of the hard-core punk stuff I listened to growing up. It was a dream come true to play with one of them onstage. Zoe Keating - a phenomenal cellist - came and played with us on a few songs. She played on “Half Jack” and a couple of other songs, and our friend Meredith Yayanos - amazing violinist - joined us on the song “Boston.” Meredith composed a beautiful violin part to it and she joined us on that last night. I think Zoe’s going to come to L.A… and we have a really special, wonderful opening band called Smoosh, which are these two girls - 13 and 15 years old - from Seattle. They’re a piano duo, and they’re going to be opening for us on the whole tour. We’re definitely going to try to get in on something with them, maybe do a song with them.

Paste: It sounds like you choose to keep some flexibility in your tour schedule so that you can do collaborations like that. When you hear that a certain band is going to be in town the same week as you, do you give them a call and say, ‘Hey, do you want to do a couple of songs with us?’
Viglione: Yes! That is the general M.O. of the Dresden Dolls. It’s like, ‘Who’s going to be where and how can we play with them?’ We’re that little band that’s like constantly standing outside of the kitchen window going like ‘Can so-and-so come out to play? Are they in? Can they come out?’ We’re running around like the motherless child that’s constantly getting into all things dirty and mischievous.

Paste: What’s up next for the Dresden Dolls?
Viglione: We have what’s called The Virginia Companion, which is a huge 384-page songbook with all of the sheet music from Yes, Virginia and No, Virginia, and stories from both of us about the whole time recording and touring. It’s got kind of a touring history in it, a lot of great photos and just general tales from the past couple of years. So that’s coming out really soon. Then we’ll probably resume work, maybe like fall of 2009? We’re just kind of playing it by ear.