The Dresden Dolls

For cabaret punk duo The Dresden Dolls, this Halloween holds a special significance. It's the band's fifth anniversary, and what other time of the year besides autumn and All Hallow's Eve could create an act as conceptually creepy and visually stimulating as The Dresden Dolls. The band began after vocalist/pianist Amanda Palmer performed at one of the many parties she threw at her Boston loft/art space and met drummer Brian Viglione. Palmer had long written and performed material on the piano, and Viglione had rather unhappily played in several Boston-based bands, so when they finally met and all their musical frustrations ceased, they described it as "rock love" at first sight. For a time they tried out larger lineups and additional instrumentation before deciding on doing things as a duo of just piano, drums and vocals. And, of course, makeup and costumes. Becoming known for their live shows – which incorporated elements of Brechtian musical theatre, performance art and burlesque shows, among many other art forms forgotten by popular music – The Dresden Dolls were named the Best Band in Boston in 2003 by Boston Magazine. They also released their self-titled debut and shot an impressive independent video for the lead single, "Girl Anachronism," thanks to the help of many of their artistic friends before being signed to Roadrunner Records. Most recently they spent the summer opening up the long-awaited return tour of Nine Inch Nails, following in the footsteps of such out of the ordinary performers as the Jim Rose Sideshow Circus. Just days before heading into the studio to record the as-yet untitled follow-up to their debut, Brian Viglione explained how The Dresden Dolls continue to daringly defy musical conventions and how Grand Rapids will get a unique opportunity to celebrate Halloween and the band's anniversary a little early when they come to The Intersection Oct. 18.

Recoil: You're going to be heading into the studio in a couple of days to start recording your second album. How do you plan to try to capture your live sound on record this time around?
Brian Viglione: I think there's a lot less worry and concentration on how to play or how to deliver the songs, and a lot more of a relaxed attitude in knowing that our producer will capture what we want and all we need to do is what we do onstage. Just have a good time.

R: Do you plan to continue to include additional instruments on record?
BV: Hmm. I won't fully commit to an answer on that right now. [Laughs.] That might be taking all the fun out of it. But the overall conception is really just to hone in on the drums and the piano and the vocals and maybe add some subtle augmentation here and there. There's going to be some bass parts, some organ, some little percussion effects, but really nothing extreme. No sound effects or no samples or loops that are planned, but like I said you can never tell until you actually get into the studio. This is a different batch of material. The first stuff had a lot of theatrical elements to it and a lot of these songs [are] a little bit more straight forward, kind of narrative, and just straight-out rock songs, so I think we're going to try to just focus on the playing element between Amanda and myself.

R: Overall, was there a different approach to the songwriting this time?
BV: No, there's always a gradual shift that occurs over the course of a songwriter's career, and there's just a different tinge or light shed on this kind of material compared to some of the songs that Amanda wrote on the first album, which were culled from when she was eighteen to twenty-three years old. This stuff just reflects a different side of her writing. It's a little more straight-ahead and a little bit more distant. There was a lot more very personal writing on the first record and there's some different perspectives, I think, on this album.

R: One of the things I like best about your songs is how the music perfectly matches the intensity and emotional rollercoaster of Amanda's very personal lyrics. How much of that musical intensity comes from the fact that the two of you work together so closely as a duo?
BV: Yeah, I think Amanda and I have a very deep intuitive sense of one another and where we're coming from musically and just a shared experience, both before we met and also having worked together in the band for five years. You come to speak the same language and become sensitive to each other and that I think is reflected in the band.

R: Now that she's taking on different narrative perspectives with some of the new songs, how does that change that direct dynamic between you two?
BV: It doesn't because it all really comes down to, for me, listening and learning how to respond appropriately for what the song calls for or what the lyrics call for in terms of a response or a dynamic shift or a rhythm or just playing, those inherent factors of music, most of which are subconscious during the writing process. It's funny because I've sat down before and analyzed why I'm playing certain things the way I do and I've found that oftentimes it's a direct mirror rhythmically of what the lyrics are doing, so a lot of that stuff is just happening on a very subconscious level.

R: How well would you say your upcoming DVD (Paradise, due out Oct. 11) captures the relationship the two of you have with the behind the scenes documentary that's on there?
BV: It captures just fleeting moments. I think it's really difficult to say a documentary captures an entire relationship and all the subtleties of that. You get little snippets into our daily interaction and into one day out of an extremely hectic tour schedule that we were sort of thrust into filming this DVD project and all the troubles that unfold in the course of a day and all the wonderful people that work hard to pull you through and the magic of getting together with all the fans and the kids and just having a good time on stage. So yeah, you never get the full picture, but there's little glimmers of what it's like that's for sure.

R: I understand the live show on the DVD was a hometown show in Boston that was delayed for hours due to a massive power failure in the city.
BV: [Laughs] Yes, it figures. It gives us that little factor that you have overcome. The current you just have to fight upstream against in order to come out truly victorious and [laughs] typical bullshit that you live in the city of Boston and have to go with. It was really funny because here were all these people who had worked so hard with a fairly slender budget and all of a sudden the power goes off and everyone goes, 'Great, thanks a lot.' Like, of course this is the only thing that could have happened. Life is just cruel like that. But it managed to work out okay and we are very thankful to the crowd who waited the extra few hours out there while the power was off, for sticking around and being so great because everyone was definitely tired. We expected to get out of there at about ten at night and it wasn't until one or one-thirty in the morning that it finally cleared out.

R: I guess that sort of leads me into talking more about the visual element of the band as far as the inclusion of performance artists, mimes, contortionists, etc. Was that something you and Amanda have always wanted to incorporate into your shows and who did you want to include in that part of your live show?
BV: Outside of Amanda, who is like the overall conceptualizer of visually what the band has been doing, there's Michael Pope, our director, [who] is certainly the strongest influence. We've always felt a very kindred soul in him and for his flair for the freaky and the flamboyant. And obviously a lot of the kids that come up to the shows. That all started with our CD release party back in 2003 when we basically invited everyone to come dressed up as if it were a celebration ball, just to have fun. From there, people said, 'We had such a great time, I want to keep doing it.' We noticed consistently, city after city, that kids were doing this, and we've always loved that kind of circus atmosphere, so to now discover all these other performance troupes out of Chicago and Montreal and Oakland, California – it's become this really beautiful network of people, both professional and amateur, that just come together to have a good time depending on what city we're in.

R: Now the visual elements that you've added, were they more things that just happened spontaneously or were they things you had planned or planned with other people?
BV: Both. We've had professional groups that have come to us, such as a VauDeVire, a wonderful performance troupe from southern California, that we actually gave a CD to and they rehearsed two vignettes complete with acrobatics and costumes and all sorts of craziness, to 'Miss Me' and 'Girl Anachronism.' To young kids who are fifteen or sixteen years old or younger, who come dressed up in Alice In Wonderland-type costumes, or come and play their accordion, or parents who bring their little kids. You name it and they've been to a Dresden Dolls show. It's pretty wonderful.

R: You got to spend a good amount of your summer on the road with Nine Inch Nails, who have had people like the Jim Rose Sideshow Circus open up for them in the past. What was it like facing those crowds and how receptive do you think people were to what you're doing?
BV: It was great. The Nine Inch Nails tour was a very consistent and very steady exercise for us in an area that we have gotten kind of lazy about, which is being a support band and delivering a very succinct show. Whereas when you headline every night you kind of get very loose because you get used to playing to your crowds, to having an hour and a half to stretch out over the set, to sort of pace yourself, and it was a really nice challenge to go out and sort of compete against ourselves to see how tight we could make the performance and really try to win these people over. People who had been waiting five years to see Nine Inch Nails. It wasn't a Peter, Paul and Mary concert. We knew we had a real job ahead of us in terms of trying to impress these people and that was really good for us too. The Nine Inch Nails band and crew were really, really friendly and they're great folks to tour with.

R: Your upcoming tour is ending on Halloween back in Boston. Any big plans for that show?
BV: Yeah, it's not like it's going to be one great, big finale show, we're basically going to be touring with two friends of ours from this circus troupe up in Montreal who are going to be kind of heading up the brigade of kids and performers and organizing things throughout each city for vignettes and things like that they'll be doing in the crowd, in between bands performances and things like that. And that's going to carry on through Boston, too. We'll also be doing some songs together with Faun Fables and also, hopefully DeVotchKa!, which we're really looking forward to, so there's not necessarily a big strip tease like we did last year [for Halloween] planned, but we'll definitely do something special.

October 2005