Amanda Palmer Brings “…No Intermission” To Atlanta
Amanda Palmer spent years touring with her band The Dresden Dolls and has been releasing solo albums over the last decade.
Kahn and Selesnick
Amanda Palmer seems like she emerged from a fantasy cabaret act. She sings in a big, expressive voice and she plays the ukulele about as aggressively as one can play the instrument. In her lyrics and subject matter, she is unreserved and unapologetic.
Palmer spent years touring with her band The Dresden Dolls and has been releasing solo albums over the last decade. Her newest one is called “There Will Be No Intermission,” and on it she tackles a lot of difficult subjects, speaking frankly about abortion, miscarriage, and rape.
The album embodies a lot of contradictions—its sound is both cinematic in scope as well as spare and immediate, the lyrics are both raw and clearly labored over. And it is beautiful even as it tackles ugly topics. It’s an extraordinary album made more extraordinary when you learn that Palmer thought she might never record a full-length again.
The singer has been supported by thousands of fans through Patreon for several years, and through that found artistic freedom to create without concern for commercial appeal.
“I thought that that was going to spell the end of records and that I was going to be freed from the shackles of the album cycle,” she tells “City Lights” producer Myke Johns.
She says that her long-time engineer John Congleton balked at working with her until she was ready to make a full-length, and eventually she relented.
“Having made the decision to collect a bunch of songs that seemed to belong on an album together forced me to sit down and pen some of the more difficult songs on the album that seemed to be missing from the concept.
“In a strange way, deciding to make an album led me to finish the album, which produced some of the best songs.”
Also in the background was a few difficult years marked by media backlash over a successful crowdfunding campaign, controversy over a poem Palmer wrote expressing empathy with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers, as well as the death of a long-time mentor and friend and the birth of her child. At the beginning of the album-making process, Palmer says she thought she was making a personal, memoir-like folk record.
“It felt like the most personal offering I had ever made. But the Kavanaugh hearing happened while I was literally in the studio tracking a song about abortion,” she says. “It’s turned into my most political record, which wasn’t really the aim. But there’s a certain resonance right now where the sharpest political weapons that we wield, especially right now as women, as artists, is our ability to stand up and just tell the story, fearlessly.”
And so to take the album out on the road, Palmer’s “There Will Be No Intermission” Tour (jokingly named, as this will be her first tour to include an intermission) is structured as a piece of theatre, with storytelling and music.
“I know that this show in Atlanta is going to be unique because of what is happening, politically, in Georgia,” Palmer says. “The idea of being in Georgia right now and getting on stage and sharing my experiences about abortion—it’s going to have its own kind of power.”
Amanda Palmer plays the Cobb Energy Center Friday May 18 at 7:30 p.m.
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