Amanda Palmer

Amanda MacKinnon Gaiman Palmer is an American vocalist, pianist and performance artist from New York, United States, born in 1976. She grows up in Lexington, Massachusetts, attends Lexington High School, and later earns a B.A. from Wesleyan University. While at school, she is involved in the drama department, and she sometimes brings Lexington High School students into her shows to perform drama pieces.

Career

Palmer is best known as one half of The Dresden Dolls, which she forms with drummer Brian Viglione after they meet in October 2000. Before that, she plays in a band called Amanda Palmer and the Void. Her work is associated with alternative rock, dark cabaret and indie rock, and she is also linked with punk cabaret and alternative music more broadly.

She appears as a living statue under the name “The Eight Foot Bride” in Harvard Square and elsewhere. In 2005, she wins Best Female Vocalist in the WNFX/Boston Phoenix Best Music Poll.

Solo and collaborative work

Her solo album Who Killed Amanda Palmer is produced by Ben Folds, who also appears on the record, with Zoë Keating contributing to several tracks. Palmer later asks her label Roadrunner Records to remove her from its roster and discusses this publicly in interviews and on stage, including in the song “Please Drop Me,” sung to the tune of “Moon River”.

She collaborates with Jason Webley on Evelyn Evelyn, released in 2010. That year she also releases Amanda Palmer Performs The Popular Hits of Radiohead On Her Magical Ukulele, a solo EP of Radiohead covers. In 2011 she releases Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under, a studio album with an Antipodean theme built around songs she writes about, or while in, Australia and New Zealand. The album features The Young Punx, Brian Viglione, The Jane Austen Argument, Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen, and Lance Horne.

Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra

In 2012, Palmer forms Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra and releases a cover of Nirvana’s “Polly” as their first issue. The band’s album Theatre is Evil is funded through Kickstarter, which raises more than one million dollars, and the album is released later that year.

Personal life

In 2010, writer Neil Gaiman announces that he and Palmer are engaged. They later say that they are legally married.