Dresden Dolls Diary

The very first Dresden Dolls song I ever heard was “Coin Operated Boy.” It was given to me as part of a mix CD made by my best friend in high school, Heidi. It was 2005, and we were both 14.

That summer I remember eagerly awaiting the Dolls’ “Live at the Wireless” performance on Triple J radio, and rushing up the stairs in the converted church my mother’s friends lived in to the highest point of the structure to hit record on my tiny little radio/mp3 player and listen appreciatively through my headphones. I had missed the start of the performance, but unbeknownst to me Heidi had been recording at her place too, on a tape deck. She lent me the tape so I could stitch together the entire performance using an auxiliary cable and my laptop. I still have those recordings. They’re a bittersweet reminder, as my friendship with Heidi would be one of the most important of my life, and end sourly a few years later.

I bought “Yes,Virginia…,” and later the self-titled album, from a CD store in Shepparton, delighted and surprised that they had made their way there. I loved them immediately, and remember lying in bed mesmerised by the imagery of “Mrs. O.” and fantasising about giving an impassioned performance of “Coin Operated Boy” as an audition for the school musical, complete with complex mimes timed around every delicate and complex drum hit. Later I would give such a performance of “My Alcoholic Friends” to a room of stunned music students.

I discovered The Dresden Dolls website, back when it was small and purple. I researched the back catalogue, I downloaded the free tracks, I read the hatemail, I studied the pictures and I visited The Shadow Box. But mainly, I read Amanda’s blog. I lived a long way from my high school and the timing of the bus route meant that I arrived more than an hour before classes began each morning. So before school started I would go to the library, read books, log onto the computers and kill time. The Dresden Dolls Diary was a profoundly engrossing narrative into which I dived headlong. I can’t remember which was the first entry that I read, but it was somewhere around the end of 2006/start of 2007. What I do remember is that quite soon after I started reading, Amanda went on a yoga retreat, and didn’t blog again for two months. Each morning I would type in dresdendollsdiary.blogspot.com and check for more updates. It was during this pause, in yearning for more, that I decided to read the entire blog, from start to finish. I used the school’s internet to save the whole thing as a Microsoft Word document, it’s 167 000 words long. I read it in 4 days. And I fell in love.

I can’t even describe what that experience was like. I felt like I understood, and I felt so understood. I saw myself in that blog, who I was and who I would become. It was an emotional rollercoaster, and it left me with an ecstatic longing that I could never satisfy. Amanda was 26 when she started writing it, and I was 16 when I started reading it. I’m almost 26 now and I’m wondering what it would be like to read it again, 10 years later, at the same age in my life. But it would spoil it in a way, to read it again. It was never meant to be an enduring autobiography, there was something inherently transient about it, and reading it again would be like listening to a taped conversation over and over until all the context was lost. I didn’t just enjoy the blog as a work of memoir, as something that entertained or fascinated whether it was true or fictional – it was an expression of personality. Reading the blog was like making a friend. Each story was something I sat in rapt attention for, each concept was a conversation I wanted to have, and each post revealed more and more that we had in common. Amanda was on my resonance. And what she proffered up ignited my soul. Ideas such as ‘rock love,’ ‘the PLACE,’ ‘mindfuck’ and ‘blog paralysis’ gave names to things I didn’t have the words for. I relished stories about the cardinal on the fire escape, the menstrual sponge, art-love, Avril Lavigne, Madonna, Bill Hicks, yoga retreats, nakedness, the nature of communication, and oversaturation vs. mystique. But it wasn’t just about the content of the blog, it was about the way it was written. The rich descriptions of the ambiance, the way Amanda would savour each and every moment of her experience like it was nourishing her, then probe deeper, question everything, lay hints. She’d create an interwoven tableau of stories leaping from one topic to the next like someone remembering a dream then remembering that they had forgotten a bit. Sometimes it was an exploratory and evocative vignette of feelings. Sometimes it was an artfully constructed journey whose seemingly unrelated waypoints were brought together in a poignant revelation at the close. I felt so transported by the blog. Stories like “pump up the volume” hit me hard in the chest with future-nostalgia and made me pine for the romanticism of the perfect teenage rebellion neither of us had quite lived. And “On Not Taking Home A Stranger” brought to life the heart-breaking reality of a fan trying to make a connection. And I wanted to connect.

I wrote to Amanda a lot in those days of reading the Diary. It didn’t matter to me who Amanda was, whether Amanda was famous or not, there was a person on the other side of that keyboard who inspired me. I wrote emails to the website and comments on posts, never getting a reply, and growing disappointed with my inability to transcend the unavoidable clamour. But I made friends among the comments, other people desperate to connect, we connected with each other, in England and in France.

  

At the end of 2007 I met Amanda for the first time at The Spiegeltent in Melbourne, and pressed a handwritten letter into her hand. It was one of my first concerts and my mother had come with me, she was drunk and embarrassed me, somehow offended by my coyness. I can’t remember what I wrote. I tried to let Amanda know what I felt, how grateful I was, how similar we were. But I was already educated in the fleeting nature of such connections. How meaningful, how inconsequential.

Amanda Palmer at The Spiegeltent, 10th December 2007

The thing about the blog, the thing about saying that it felt like making a friend – is that really it’s all one sided. None of those things she wrote were written for me. Amanda didn’t know I existed until the moment I handed her that letter, and even then she didn’t really know who I was. What was the use in saying we had so much in common? There were no shared experiences. On my end I had this history of reading all these stories, of getting to know Amanda, of seeing all the pieces fall into place. That before I even knew about Amanda I wrote songs and chewed the sides of my nails, and was worried I was selfish and plagued by the idea that my whole life was just some sort of disingenuous screen-play in which I couldn’t tell the difference between the genuine hurt and the artifice in some sort of absurd retroactive continuity exercise designed to comfort my ego. And I fantasised about hosting parties where everyone fell in love and shared ideas and had conversations that changed them, and all the while I would be at the centre of it, wise and nonchalant, beloved and essential. And I wanted to meet my soul mate and start a band and finally turn my lyrics into actual songs that I could get up and perform. I wanted to show the singing teacher who had literally kicked me out of her class for not being able to sing that she was nothing more than an ironic anecdote. I felt like we were living on asynchronous parallel paths, both expressions of the same archetype.

A couple of days later, Amanda responded to my letter, she sent an email to the address I’d included. It was short and tender, conclusive. I wrote back, maybe a few more times. I was gratified, but the passion to communicate, to speak about the things that Amanda had elicited, did not abate. I had drunk in the honesty and the rawness and the passion of Amanda’s writing, and it made me want to write. I started my own blog, on January 1st 2008. Two of the people I met in the comments of Amanda’s blog became my first and only readers. I wrote the blog for nearly 3 years, spanning more than 200 000 words and a large collection of audio-book like podcasts. It changed the way that I looked at the world forever. I loved it profoundly, but eventually, and for better or worse, life got in the way. I moved to the city, I started university, and I met my husband. I remember writing: it is so hard to find the need and the energy and the time to tell the void of the internet my musings when I’ve already told the most important person in my life. I was aware this said something about me, about my need for validation verses my love of the art form. I was present, my life was so full, but ever I missed the edge of reflective gravitas blogging gave my life.

So much happened while I wasn’t writing, from 2011 to 2016. I built a house. I quit university during honours. I struggled to find work and eventually became a carer. I got married. I had many different relationships. I acquired a religion of sorts. I travelled to London and Hong Kong and Japan. I sung and I didn’t sing. I saw Amanda perform many times. I cooked pre-show dinner for her, and later for the Dolls, as well as the support acts and crew at The Forum in Melbourne. It was something I had wanted to do for years. I forever ceased to feel star-struck since that first night. Everything was just so real, and it broke down barriers for me. Something about being in that room with Amanda, backstage at The Forum, felt like being with family. How could I feel any trepidation? I met amazing people those nights, Brian Viglione, Mikelangelo, Tom Dickins, Jen Kingwell, Kim Boekbinder, Holly Gaiman. I was surrounded by friends, many of whom I still talk to and see to this day, and I am forever grateful to have had them brought into my life. That’s what I never understood about the payment scandal – I mean, I understood the wider message that it sent ethically, and why that was problematic – but it made me sad to see outraged outsiders stamping their opinions over something that had been so special to me. I knew exactly what I was getting myself into. I was doing something that I loved (cooking) for people that I thought were amazing and in return I got things money couldn’t buy, chatting backstage, watching the whole gig from on the stage in the wings, and friends I’ll never forget.

Maybe experiences like that and reading the blog made me too… familiar. I remember between the first and second cookings, seeing Amanda at a ninja gig at Rose Chong’s, a costume store. Dorian and I had lingered to talk about the upcoming gigs and Amanda was packing up after the performance. She saw me, and recognised me, stood up and took three expansive, quick strides to close the distance between us, face fixed on mine, expression hard, stopping with our noses a mere centimetre apart. It only lasted a moment. I politely continued the conversation as if nothing had happened. I have no idea what I had been meant to do. Was I being intimidated? Flirted with? Tested? I still wonder.

I have recently started making music, something that I wanted to do since I started writing lyrics at age 7. I’ve waited nearly 19 years for the chance. I can’t play an instrument to save my life, no matter how many lessons I have had. My musical theory education is sorely lacking. I couldn’t sing a note in tune until I had my tonsils out and found my new voice, and even now my voice is textured, bold, deep and uneven. My style is too cabaret for most, too jazz for some, and too indie rock for others. My songs are untimed and written in strange keys, driven by a vocal melody born from who knows where. I feel my way through the music like a blind man painting a picture. It is a miracle that I can do it at all, and it is a strange force that compels or curses me to do so. Music is one of the only two things in this world that I really struggle with (the other one is maths). So when I found someone who wanted to take all of that on and help me, it was a revelation. Someone finally understood, and they wanted to be the music to my lyrics, my producer, even if only for a demo EP. My songs were finally becoming actual songs. There were so many surreal moments of realising that all those teenage fantasies I’d worked so hard to push out of my head, were real scenarios that I had to make decisions about – like what to call my EP. I was so grateful that I hardly dared tell anyone about it lest I jinx the whole venture. I spent every moment I could working on sequencing, recording, and learning about the production process. I started writing new songs again, and conquering old demons with them. After so long in the dark, I felt so full of vigour. And then all my friendships started falling apart.

At first all I noticed was that the people around me were morose. And for the first time I experienced how draining it was to be around people who are consistently upset. I don't think I would have noticed if I had still been depressed. When you're down you don't much pay attention to other people's moods. You're too busy concentrating on being sad. When I asked what was going on I found that all my friends and lovers felt abandoned and ignored by me. I used to have a lot more time. When I was depressed I spent a lot of my time complaining about being a frustrated artist and not doing anything. I didn't feel inspired to cultivate any hobbies, and I let myself be dragged along to whatever the people around me insisted I do. Now that I have my music however, I am neither frustrated nor complaining about it, and I no longer possess so much free time.

Since the very first moment we met I had told my friends that music was my passion, and they had nodded and sympathised. But now that the moment had finally come for me to act on that passion they felt hurt by it, like my lack of time must be due to a shift in feelings for them, and that they were no longer a priority. Neither of things are true, but I know with matters of the heart it’s one thing to be told something, and another to have it happen. The practicality is that I only have so much time. I know this is an adjustment period for them, and for me. It's very fresh, days ago. Maybe I'm just being reactionary and callous. But I realised I was affronted. What did they expect me to do? Go back to not doing music anymore? I’ve waited my whole life for this opportunity. What did they need me for anyway?

So there I was, living in my own Momus song. And at that moment I realised, maybe Amanda and I are more alike than I ever thought. Maybe, I mean, I don’t know – but I understood something. About people creating needs where I just wanted them to be themselves and enjoy me. About people trying to take me away from my music and my happiness. About wanting people, and them needing me back. About being on the other side of the fence.

I don’t exactly know why I wanted to write this letter. I think it’s because it’s part of a whole. Half of that is Amanda’s, and her blog. She showed me a little bit of who she is, and I saw myself in it. I wanted to tell this story because it’s our story, I guess. It’s a good story, I think I tell it well, and I enjoy telling it. I am so thankful for everything in it. But I knew that wasn’t everything. I kept asking myself, in typical overthinking fashion, what is the purpose of this letter? What do I want?

I want the story to continue.

It’s been 10 years since I last gave Amanda a letter. Maybe I will write to her again in another 10 years. I hope those years will be filled with incredible stories and adventures, and that we will see each other many more times. I hope that I will continue to hear her, in her songs and her blogs and in conversation.

 I am listening, and sending all my love.

 – Autumn.