the future of the dresden dolls

thank you all for your many recommendations of “wicked”.
read it. loved it. haven’t seen the musical. any good?

i’m holed up in the wonderful brighton home of the author and musician rohan kriwaczek, making teas and toasts, stealing his internet and trying to catch up on life.

a bunch of you asked about the band thing.
here goes, as honestly as possible.

there was a foibley chain of events that went down about a week ago when brian posted a comment – to a youtube clip – saying that the band was “over”:

the video is kind of lame – it’s obviously a journalist’s attempt to get some traffic by posting something sensational, especially the way it’s cut together and subtitled,
but since you’re all off searching for it anyway because of my last post, here it be:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMsBQWXQQ90&fmt=18

a bunch of people responded in a “WTF” manner, and brian and i both went over to the shadowbox and posted comments trying to explain what’s going on.

the long and short of it….?
life in this band is not easy.
never has been; never will be.
there’s never been an easy, crystal-clear channel of communication, it’s always taken lots of work and translation, and heaps of understanding from both sides.
and it’s one of the reasons that brian and i sort of drive each other nuts.

for better or worse, as you can tell from this blog, i am an over-communicator.
i like to talk feelings into the ground, chat until 5 am or later about something if it’s a problem.
this is not brian’s style. for those of you who have met brian in person, he’s a totally sociable and insanely nice in person….just….an extremely warm-hearted guy.
but when conflicts arise, he and i have very different ways of dealing.
mine is (typical chick) to bang on the door and demand a conference and make-up session.
his is (typical dude) to unplug the phone until he’s ready to talk. sometimes (as i learned last year, with bated fucking breath) this can take months.
this has made our relationship difficult at best, for years.

brian posted on the forum that  we’ve decided to leave things “open-ended” and that’s pretty much where we’re at … we’ve been touring and making records for enough years and dealing with our own personal conflicts that we’re BOTH happy to spend some time away from the band. very healthy. very normal.

on that note…i could tell you about the first time the dresden dolls broke up, back in 2001. before anyone on the internet cared.

tears were shed. discussions were discussed. things changed. we re-formed. nobody was around to notice.

i could tell you about the time when the dresden dolls almost broke up for the second time (in new york, 2003, after a show at tonic). or the third (boston, 2004, in the attic of my house). or the fourth (london, 2006, in the lobby of a hotel. i think it was 2006. somewhere around then. check the date of the avril lavigne karaoke. it was that week).

this band has gone through SO MUCH SHIT that we could fill a 22-volume novel called “the pain behind the punk cabaret” and make millions on the mini-series.
love, sex, betrayal, jealousy, violence, silence, all the juicy shit. honey, it would take a decade.

this is not the stuff i blog about. this is the stuff that stays between the four walls of the band. as it should.
we go through the pain we go through with each other, and always have, because WE LOVE WHAT WE DO.
the bullshit? mostly we’ve considered it WORTH IT. the same way that touring is worth it.
brian states in the interview that i hate touring…it’s not really true.
i hate conflict.
touring, for a long time, bred conflict with brian.
and i hated that.
i’m very, very happy touring right now, even with a broken fucking foot in the coldest, ghetto-tastic venues in europe … because there’s no conflict.
there is no doubt that the touring lifestyle is weird. but when we play shows, and hear people talking about how much they’re moved by our music, it’s worth any amount of impossible interpersonal bullshit, conflict and discomfort. it’s WHY we did it, it’s WHY i do it, it’s why we didn’t break up in 2001, 2003, 2004, 2006 and why we are not breaking up in 2008.

so i repeat: the dresden dolls aren’t broken up.
we’re just taking a BADLY needed hiatus.
this is, to date, what the band has decided, and the wording we’ve agreed upon.

on the contrary, we are expanding the empire. it really pisses me off to see people feeling the needs to take sides as they comment pissily on boards and on youtube (“amanda’s better off without brian!” “brian’s better off without amanda!” “why is brian in this other band?” etc. etc.). what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, ladies and gents, and if my solo record brings more attention to the dresden dolls (and hopefully it will) than fabulous. if brian’s work with world/inferno does the same, awesome. we love our band. we want it to grow. everything feeds everything. and it all comes back.

while we work on other projects, get perspective and travel the world doing god knows what (i’m overdue for a ten-year retreat at an ashram in india, i also want to learn to surf, and write a book, and learn to play piano) we will continue to live in the ears, souls and minds of all who discover us anew, with your help. and more than likely, we will return to kick ass on the vast stages, speakers and other exciting platforms of the future. i am still praying for a mass teleporter, so we can do shows on the moon.

like i said in that interview: i love making music with brian viglione way too much to imagine that we won’t do more.

in our own way, brian and i really, really love each other. our relationship has, i think, been one of my life’s greatest teachers.
we’ve committed a huge part of our young lives to each other.
we speak music together perfectly. it’s the rest that’s hard.
but any relationship is like that.
right now we’re pretty firmly entrenched in our projects (me in my solo record & tour, and brian in his new kick-ass band, world/inferno, who you should go see, because they’re awesome and old friends of ours).
and if nothing else happens, i’ll be super fucking bummed.
and if one of us dies, that’ll suck too.
and if the world collapses, then … nobody will be around to give a shit about one little punk cabaret band.
but, for now, let’s be optimistic.

with as much strength as i can muster, i say to you:
long live the punk cabaret.

can i get an amen.

love

AFP