As one-half of the punk cabaret duo The Dresden Dolls, Amanda Palmer has earned a loyal following, due to her theatrical performances and literary, emotion-packed lyrics. With the Ben Folds-produced Who Killed Amanda Palmer?, the pianist makes her solo debut, which continues to showcase Palmer’s flair for balancing ballads and catchy melodies. As the fans and critics reveal their thoughts on the album, which have been positive, Palmer finds herself reflecting on just what reviews mean to her, as well as how and why she makes music at all.

Ben Kharakh: I read an interview that you did where you responded to the perception of being dark and conflicted by saying, “People are often surprised that I’m a pretty relaxed, balanced, happy person. I can be that way because I’m outputting all this heavily-charged, dramatic, isolated kind of music.” I wanted to know — how do you keep these heavily charged, dramatic, isolated things that you write about from consuming you?

Amanda Palmer: Well, I’m creating the things themselves so I never really feel in danger of the things themselves consuming me. What I must have been talking about is that people’s reactions and the sort of reverb from the songs and their effects can be a little more consuming than I want it to be, especially when people make assumptions about what I’m like as a person. Frankly, it’s not something I’ve given much thought, and that probably has to do with music that I grew up with, which was fundamentally emotionally charged, dramatic, and heavy. I just assumed, because that’s the way people wrote because that’s what I was listening to and the music I was drawn to. So it never struck me as strange, and I think I let it not consume me by not taking anything too seriously and always being able to say, “This is my creation; this is not my life. This is an expression,” instead of, “This is who I am.” It’s more like, “This is what I make,” and I think that separation is every artist’s choice. Some people absolutely want to live, breathe, and be what it is they’re creating, and I prefer to create some kind of division. The easy way to simplify this is to look at why I write songs in the first place, and I’m usually inspired to write by things that are frustrating me. That’s the pattern I’ve detected. In that sense, the kind of song writing that I do tends toward the therapeutic side, and if that expression can be used for somebody else’s entertainment, then that’s truly lucky for me. Then the other stuff that I write, that’s sort of more outward and poppy and not as inward or therapeutic, is more of a stream of consciousness where I think I stand by the assumptions -– the more I think about why I write or what I’m writing or for whom, the more trouble I get into. If you start overanalyzing your process, you’re really fucked.

BK: What was it like before you had your writing as an outlet for the things that frustrate you?

AP: It’s funny because I can’t really remember a time, because I started writing right around the time when I also started being an angsty teenager, so it’s hard to actually make the argument that it was helping. But certainly being depressed, feeling like there’s nowhere to go with those emotions, being confused… I think one of the things that’s interesting about looking at my course in life, as it parallels my course as a songwriter, is that I was expressing plenty as a songwriter when I was a teenager, but nobody was hearing that music. It was just being stockpiled in a box, and that, in turn, even added to my frustration because it was like I was writing all of this music and putting voice to all of these confusions and frustration, but I didn’t feel confident enough to share them with anybody. That put fuel to the fire of being frustrated. I created a nice little snowball for myself there.

BK: When it comes to the things that frustrate us, sharing them with someone else who could then validate or affirm our frustrations can be a very powerful thing, but it’s also difficult to take that first step.

AP: Oh, absolutely. I mean, the minute you take a work of art and you put it out there for public consumption, you’re really making yourself a blank canvas onto which other people can unload their frustrations about the world. It’s a beautiful trade-off; I obviously think it’s worth it because I do it. I know plenty of people out there who don’t think it’s worth it and they don’t do it. It was the scariest thing in the world for me, for a long time, to play my music for other people, because I didn’t have the strength of ego to be able to handle them really. It took a long time, actually, for me to get to the point where I could accept that some people would like it and some people wouldn’t like it, and I hid for a long time. It really wasn’t until I was 25 or 26 and started the band that I really started playing my music for people, and most of that was just the fear factor of not really wanting to put myself out there. It was almost better to sit and stew in the possibility of my own potential than to make myself a target for people’s opinions. There are definitely days when I read a bad review where I agree with that terrified 20-year-old version of myself, and then there are moments that I look at adoring crowds of a couple thousand people and I definitely think that I made the right decision. It changes from day to day.

BK: You use the word “potential.” Before performing, when you were writing your songs, did you think there was something in your work that other people hear?

AP: Oh, I don’t think “need to hear” is quite right. “Would be interested to hear,” I certainly believed that. It’s a complicated emotion, because I definitely thought I had a lot of potential as a performer, and I really did think that once I got my music in good enough shape and wrote good enough songs that people would want to hear them and that it was things that would be of interest to other people. But I was also terribly afraid of feeling entitled and what that meant about me. I also came from a household where it was really frowned upon to look for attention, and I was constantly struggling with pretty basic human needs to get attention and to want attention, but simultaneously feeling really ashamed about it every time I did. A lot of my early songs that — God willing you’ll never hear — tackled that issue of “how do I handle that paradox?” I wanted people to see me and I wanted to touch them, and I wanted people to hear my songs and I wanted people to like me. Meanwhile, I felt like everyone around me is saying, “Don’t go thinking you’re special,” and that was really tough. It was one of my main agonies as a teenager -– trying to make heads or tails of that.

BK: Now that you’ve been performing, how do you see the whole experience of performing — of having fans, of people buying your albums… how has that transformed your perception of yourself?

AP: It fueled me with a lot of self-acceptance, I have to say, and I think the fact that I struggled for so long as a songwriter in a vacuum, the feeling of ambition and that need to get my stuff out there has left me with a wake of gratitude that seems to be endless. I’m so just in awe that people come to shows and love the music and want to talk to me, appreciate what I do… It feels like a constant surprise and a constant gift, and I feel really grateful for that. The fact that a lot of people have connected with the music on what seems like a really deep, emotional level provides a wonderful feeling of justification. Like all of that struggle and all of those years of confused feelings were worth it, in a way. I wasn’t crazy. This music actually makes sense to someone other than me, and that’s given me a huge confidence boost. I mean, in that simple way, but there’s also this other element that I don’t think I could have foreseen. It was such a connection with other people and winding up being far more meaningful, and the ability to play a show and connect with that many people and meet them and have meaningful conversations with them and feel like I was actually doing something positive in the world… That’s something that I never sat in my bedroom and fantasized about, but in a twist of fate, that sort of wound up being the trump card of my life. Otherwise, I think I’d be lost in a sea of narcissism.

BK: That makes me think of a quote by philosopher RJ Collingwood: “When someone reads and understands a poem, he is not merely understanding the poet’s expression of his [the poet’s] emotions; he is experiencing emotions of his own, in the poet’s words, which have thus become his own words. We know that he is expressing his emotions by the fact that he is enabling us to express ours.”

AP: That puts its finger on the pulse. I think that it relates to all art in that the best artwork in the world can elicit that kind of response, and it doesn’t matter what it is — it can be a song or a painting or a sculpture. If it stirs something like that within the beholder, then it’s doing its job, in my opinion.

BK: Who are some artists who have done this for you?

AP: Well, musically, the Legendary Pink Dots, my favorite band of all time, used to do that for me. Especially seeing them live — it was just a sublime experience. Some beautiful, random theater that I’ve seen that has, probably, with names that I can’t even remember that would mean nothing to anyone, has done that for me. And films have done that for me — certain films. Films are good at doing that because they hit you from all sides. That’s why they have that beautiful advantage of being music plus visual, and that can sometimes just destroy you. But it’s really interesting. As the beholder, you really have to want to be hit. I’m always really amazed tha,t when in the right mood, you can be elevated to some sort of ecstatic artistic state by something really simple, but if you’re not receptive, you can be sitting in a massive cathedral, listening to the most beautiful music ever penned by anyone, and distracted and untouched. So that’s something I’m constantly trying to remind myself, especially during record release week, so I’m doing all this ego-bearing and ego-protecting, and trying to remember why it is I fundamentally do what I do, as my record gets lauded and ripped to shreds. It’s really perfect; I just read a little obituary yesterday in a newspaper for David Foster Wallace. I guess it was one of those great little indirect moments where he was quoted in the obituary, by the author, speaking on the subject of David Lynch. I thought, “Oh, this is an interesting coincidence.” He was saying, about David Lynch, that what makes a great artist is that you can really tell they’re just fundamentally doing what’s impulsively coming to them naturally. And it was really perfectly timed because, at a moment, when I start questioning all of my motives and I start questioning my sanity and I start questioning the product that I’ve just given to people and I start questioning the artwork and I start questioning everything — because some people love it and some don’t like it — I snap back into reality every so often and just remind myself, “Oh, I did this because that’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t make this for the critics. I didn’t make this to please people. I did this because that’s what I thought of, so it’s fundamentally right; it’s fundamentally fine.” I didn’t put it out there to get points and I didn’t put it out there to pray and hope that someone would have some kind of sublime experience. I did it because that’s what I do. That was a comforting moment.

BK: How do you feel when you read reviews?

AP: I feel like I’m about 11 years old and I’m an insecure ball of nerves again. It’s a really sticky spot because you can get a bad review that’s badly written and not pay any attention to it, or you can get a bad review that’s very well-written where, obviously, the writer just has it out for you and has listened very carefully to your record and is trying to pinpoint your Achilles’s heal. And vice versa, you can read reviews that are just ove- the-top that seem uninformed and just buoyant for all the wrong reasons, and then you can read articulate, wonderfully intelligent good reviews. So it’s all over the place. With every record that comes out, I understand more and more why older artists especially talk about how they don’t read their reviews anymore. I still get a sense of… I get a little Christmasy every time I get sent a press clipping or a link comes my way. I just want to know. I get excited. “Is it going to be good? Is it going to be bad? Did they like it? Did they hate it? Did they hear what I was expecting?” It’s like a little adrenaline rush, and then you go through withdrawal. It’s such a weird job — it’s so multifaceted. You’re expected to not only be a songwriter  but also a performer and also a business person and also a level-headed review reader. It’s got a lot of different emotional pieces to it.

BK: I was very intrigued by the song, “Runs in the Family.” One thought that came to mind is how people throw around so many terms about psychology that’s all common knowledge to us and make judgments about what makes someone who they are, despite the fact that, in the end, we still don’t have a firm understanding of it, and the nature versus nurture argument remains unsettled.

AP: Correct.

BK: Where do you stand on this argument?

AP: I think that it is an extraordinarily mysterious combination of both nurture and nature, and I think a strong belief in either one or to believe that the other is irrelevant is misguided because you just can’t take either of those things out of the mix, ever. They’re both in there. One may be more prominent than the other, but to say it’s all one is like saying you can live without air or water; it’s not possible.

BK: Many people would be surprised to learn that so much of what makes us who we are is cultural rather than biological creations, such as gender, family, marriage… I want to know: of all these various cultural creations, which do you find most sacred?

AP: I don’t think any of them. Thinking about it, there are certainly pieces that you mention that hit a nerve, but I think I spend a lot of energy trying to not take anything for granted, more and more everyday, actually. In my relationships, in this weird, cultural construct that we’re all floating around in, as I walk down the street, it occurs to me more and more, every passing minute, how improbable this all is. I find myself questioning less and less and just being more and more awestruck. That includes all of those constructs fading into questions instead of sacred little shrines that I need to protect. But I think what it also comes down to is feeling those decisions in the moment and saying, “This is what family means or doesn’t mean.” It might not be up to me to decide, but I know that, in this moment, this is the right thing to do to serve this situation or this relationship. And whether it’s a cultural construct or not, I know that calling my mother is going to make her happy and it’s going to make me happy. So I’m just going to do it. I’m going to take the time out of my day and just fucking do it. And I think I drove myself crazy, as a teenager, just running around screaming, “It’s not real, it’s not real. It’s all bullshit,” and now I think I still know that, but the effect that it’s had on me is not quite the same as the effect that it had back then, which was within accepting that it’s not real, then what? After you’re finished complaining, then what do you do? That’s made me infinitely happier, I have to say.