A Few Evenings With Amanda Palmer

The “An Evening With Amanda Palmer” outing is being called the singer/songwriter’s first proper tour since she gave birth a year ago. Stops include Toronto, Chicago and Minneapolis. But first she’s headed to Europe for sold-out shows in the U.K., Austria and Germany.

The news of the U.S. tour comes less than two weeks after she reunited with drummer Brian Vigilone for a few East Coast gigs, marking The Dresden Dolls’ first shows since 2012.

“I’ve spent the last few years blurring my own self-definition, artistic and physical,” Palmer says, “I’ve become speaker-shaped, and author-shaped, then mother-shaped. I feel like people have forgotten that behind everything – the Kickstarter, the TED Talk, the book, the feminism, the infinite side-projects – I am fundamentally a songwriter who performs her own songs on a stage. That’s the source. Sometimes I even forget. It’s time to get back on stage and remind myself and everybody else that without the music, there’s nothing. It drives me crazy when people have read my book three times cover to cover but don’t bother to look up the music of The Dresden Dolls or dig into my songwriting catalog … it’s time to fix that.”

Palmer adds that the setlist will feature tunes from throughout her career – it all depends what she’s in the mood for. 

“After I wandered away from the safety of The Dresden Dolls in 2007, I was terrified to hit the road totally solo and I always brought a circus of friends with me, whether it was a back-up band, or a bunch of strings players, or a posse of Australian butoh-based performance artists … the van was never empty,” she said. “This time it’s just me, a piano, and a microphone. I’ll delve into my entire catalog and play whatever I feel like playing, and I’m hoping the upcoming tour also inspires me to finish some of the songs that have been craving attention since the baby was born. Sometimes you just need a really concrete reason – like a tour – to nail your ass to the songwriting chair. The new material I’ve been working on is surprisingly dark given how deliriously happy I’ve been as a new mother, but what else would you expect – the demons have to escape somehow to clear the way for joy.”

Here’s the routing:

Nov. 10 – Albany, N.Y., The Egg     
Nov. 11 – Toronto, Ontario, Queen Elizabeth Theatre
Nov. 13 – Chicago, Ill., Thalia Hall   
Nov. 15 – Minneapolis, Minn., The Theatre At The Woman’s Club 
Nov. 17 –  Boulder, Colo., Boulder Theater

Tickets go on sale to the general public Sept. 9 at 10 a.m. local time. Visit AmandaPalmer.net for more information.