It's a chance to hear one of the world's most interesting and innovative musicians.
Front-woman of Brechtian punk rock cabaret band The Dresden Dolls and and the lead singer and songwriter of Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra, Amanda Palmer is reflecting on a surprise two-year period waylaid in New Zealand during the pandemic, in a show coming to Hamer Hall this month.
Palmer, most famous for her music’s elements of punk cabaret, alternative rock, and dark cabaret, has a reputation for incredibly insightful and deeply personal themes throughout her songwriting. This reputation is upheld in her latest EP, New Zealand Survival Songs, which was funded by the 10,000 patrons who support her unusual, fully crowd-funded career as a touring songwriter and recording artist. Palmer was one of the first musicians to popularize the use of crowdfunding, and has drawn significant attention for her passionate advocacy for artists.
Amanda Palmer
- Hamer Hall | 3 February 2024
- Sydney Recital Hall | 1 February 2024
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While Palmer acknowledges the fear and disorientation in raising her young son in a foreign country during a pandemic, she says the Australian shows will be a ‘good old catch-up’, revealing the stories behind the songs, yarn about her time in lockdown, and a selection of old Dresden Dolls and solo favourites.
“It is still shocking to me that I wound up living in Aoteroa New Zealand – unexpectedly – for over two years of my life, and that my young child was raised in a foreign country while Covid raged around the planet,” Palmer says of the last two years. “I came to New Zealand at the end of a world tour and was supposed to be in the country for four show dates and eight days total. I wound up living within the borders for two and a half years.
“Sometimes I wake up in New York and find myself short of breath, and cannot believe that this all happened. I wanted to come back for a short tour – not only because I’m homesick for my Kiwi friends, but because I’d like to share the music – the handful of songs – that emerged from this unbelievably strange period of my life.”
Incredibly excitingly, she’ll also be sharing a selection of brand-new unreleased works from The Dresden Dolls forthcoming album – their first in 15 years (release date TBD) – arranged for solo piano, in anticipation of the Dolls’ return to the southern hemisphere.
It’ll be the first new material we’ve heard from the unique group since No, Virginia back in 2008, with that powerful combination of Palmer’s vocals and Brian Viglione’s drumming – that’s seen them collaborate with the likes of Nine Inch Nails – certain to be a treat for long-term fans.
For now though, we’re excited to hear her stories of New Zealand in person.
“I was a solo mother for much of the stay, and most of my days were spent simply scared and disoriented, figuring out how to navigate normal Kiwi life, and trying to figure out my – and my son’s – place in the world.
“I spent much of the day, every day, wondering when we would go home. It took a very long time to accept what was happening, and there was almost no time for reflection or music-making. I did, in the end, wind up writing about four songs in total over those few years, and they were mostly songs of catharsis and abject survival.
“One of these, The Man Who Ate Too Much, was written right after the first lockdown and inspired by the kindness of Kiwi strangers, my horror at Donald Trump, my collapsed marriage, and the local landscape. I’d been gazing at the outline Te Mata peak in Hawke’s Bay, and the lyrics draw on the Maori Myth of the Tanifa who tried to eat through the mountain and choked to death.
“The Ballad of The New York Times was written on Waiheke to try to describe my desperate relationship with the isolation of motherhood and doom-scrolling. Whakenewha is a howl of emotion inspired by the beautiful and haunting preserve of the same name on Waiheke, and Little Island is my complicated and heartfelt love letter to New Zealand and to the people who held and took care of me, as well as pondering about our collectively difficult relationships with the past, and what home really means.”
For more information visit Amanda Palmer’s website here.
This article was made in partnership with Amanda Palmer.
