Amanda Palmer Discusses Friendship With Frances Bean Cobain

Posted on Mar 5th 2010 3:00PM by Pat Pemberton
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Despite a difficult childhood, the daughter of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love is an artistic, funny and intelligent person, according to Dresden Dolls singer Amanda Palmer.

"Given her life situation, she could be totally messed up," Palmer tells Spinner. "But she actually seems like she really has her s--- together."

When Palmer learned that Frances Bean Cobain was a Dresden Dolls fan, she reached out to Cobain, who was just a toddler when her father committed suicide in 1994.

"I sent her an e-mail and said, 'Hey, I'm so happy you love my band. I'd love to meet you some day.' And it also turned out she was a big Neil Gaiman fan," said Palmer, who is engaged to Gaiman, the author of books such as 'Coraline' and 'Stardust.' "So Neil and I befriended her and hung out with her when we were all in the same city at the same time. I took a real shine to her."

Cobain made news this winter when she legally split from her mother and requested a restraining order, requiring Love keep her distance. Now she's back in the press for a better reason, thanks to Palmer's latest project, Evelyn Evelyn, a concept album telling the story of two fictional conjoined twins. Cobain was one of several people asked to lend vocals to a line in the song 'My Space,' and while her contribution was heralded as her singing debut, Palmer's partner in Evelyn Evelyn, Jason Webley, says those reports overstated what really happened.

"I've gotten calls from people everywhere saying, 'Hey, I saw that you recorded Frances Bean Cobain on her debut recording,'" Webley tells Spinner. "It's just not really true. She e-mailed in a track of her singing for three seconds, and I mixed it into the song. You can't hear her voice in there."

The Evelyn Evelyn project contains similar contributions from people like Weird Al Yankovic, Tegan and Sara and Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance. As the project progressed, Webley says, the two began calling famous friends, seeking contributions.

"The week when we first started working on this, Amanda had been on tour with Cyndi Lauper, done lunch with Henry Rollins and had run into Trent Reznor somewhere," he says. " I was like, 'We have to do something with this -- the fact that you hang out with all these people, you should have a little recorder handy and you should record them as you encounter them.' The idea didn't end up working quite like that, and none of those people ended up being on it, but that's kind of where the idea came from."

Evelyn Evelyn's self-titled album is due out in late March. Meanwhile, Palmer hopes to continue her friendship with Cobain. Palmer said she would have no problem talking to Cobain about her parents.

"One of those things that may be difficult about being the kid of two celebrities is that everybody feels like they have to be very careful around you and walk on egg shells," she said. "Actually, nobody wants that. I'm sure she just wants to make her art, live a normal life and not have people around her acting strangely, which is what anyone would want."