In House With Amanda Palmer: Being 'Slutty' With Music and Onstage Hickeys

Technology is funny. It can create wonderful connections and destroy your faith in all that is hardwired, sending three grown music writers into a tizzy of fear and tears.

Before Amanda Palmer walked into Spinner's offices, we experienced a brain-jarring shock set off by the accidental deletion of an entire photo shoot. It was awful, and thankfully, we had Amanda to commiserate with.

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"I had that cheerful discussion with a group of friends in Scotland about whether we had seriously ever considered killing ourselves," she says. "I was recording my Australian record [Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under] and the biggest element that was going to make the record amazing was a recording of this live show in Melbourne. The guy who I paid huge money to record it called me up a week later to tell me the whole hard drive had crashed. I still put the album out without all that stuff on it but I'm not as proud of the album as I would have been."

Despite the hard drive failing to do its job, Palmer has never lost her faith in technology. The sometime Dresden Doll has been making a lot of noise on the 'net lately after funding her new album Theater Is Evil exclusively through crowd-sourcing site Kickstarter.

Palmer and co. set a goal of $100,000, and quickly exceeded it in a matter of weeks. Now, the singer can call herself a millionaire after raising $1.1 million to fund the project. No other artist has come close to earning that kind of dough from Kickstarter. Since then, Palmer seems to have found the holy grail of money-making in today's turbulent music business. But releasing her songs for a profit isn't her motive.

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"I don't think anything that spreads content is bad for artists. Nothing -- including overpriced CDs in big-box stores. Everything is possible and there's so many ways to make music available," she says.

"As an artist, you now get to pick and choose how you spread your music around. I'm very, very slutty with my music. I just want it everywhere. I want to put it in any possible place where it might reach somebody. And most musicians are like that. It's a fascinating moment in time right now because everybody's looking for The Answer [her capitalization], and there isn't one. And I don't think there's even going to be one."

Palmer's success is largely due to her adoring fan base: Thousands of weirdos and music lovers that have followed the singer since the beginning of her career. The citizens of "Palmer Town" helped her raise $19,000 on Twitter in one evening, and now, they're the main engine of the Amanda machine.

"I would probably spend most of my time running the bar at the brothel," she says of an imaginary city of millions of Palmer fans. "I would book the talent in the theater and despair at who was running the public works. I'd be a despicable leader, but we'd all have fantastic entertainment."

So how is Amanda giving back to her faithful army? Currently, she's working on some exciting new technology to debut on her upcoming tour.

"We sent a call out to anyone who's already coming to the shows; we asked them to upload seven photos. We're not telling people how we're using them but they're going to be integrated into the live show and they're going to be local specific."

Amanda's fans are so loyal that she doesn't use security at any shows. Rather, they are attentive and some of the most responsive listeners in rock 'n' roll. But it's not always blue skies -- Palmer recently let an overzealous concertgoer get a little too close.

"I got a mean hickey in Australia!" she says with a chuckle. "This one girl in Sydney just, like, made a beeline to me across a giant balcony and attached herself to my neck. I thought she was just going to kiss me but she just started sucking and wouldn't stop. She was definitely really, really high, or crazy -- or both. And I was singing a song! I just sort of made ongoing commentary about how this thing was happening to me. I was hoping that she would get the picture and detach. But she just kept sucking on my neck."

Now that the Sept. 11 release of Theater Is Evil is upon us, Amanda is feeling a bit of "postpartum depression." It's taken her four years and a hell of a lot of work to get to this point.

"I cannot tell you how proud I am of this album. It has been such a long road to the release of this record and I actually just feel exhausted by the enormity of it. I feel like my job right now is to just brace position."

You can catch Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra performing new tracks around the world for the remainder of 2012. (Oh, and if you were wondering about those photos -- we got 'em back! Check back for our interview with Diamond Rings, coming soon.)