More Info On the Who Killed Amanda Palmer Book and DVD News

Amanda Palmer (leading lady/corpse) says:

This book developed much like the album did: accidentally…a bizarre creative snowball gathering speed down a dark, lost highway. My label had given me a teeny packaging budget for Who Killed Amanda Palmer, released in September 2008, and I had too large a concept for the artwork than would fit on four panels. So I decided to cut the label out altogether and make a little companion book of photos to accompany the album. I had been hoarding these dead photographs of myself since I was about eighteen and I'd wanted to thread them together into some sort of themed collection. The dead photos of yore spanned from random self-portraits in light studios to political street theater to college performance art projects (I famously showed up bloody, naked and dead in several spots on the Wesleyan University Campus in 1997 for my senior performance art project - I got an A!). I started expanding my dead photo collection as I was traveling around the world over the past eight years with The Dresden Dolls, and it was often a sort of therapy for me to wake early in the morning and head off to a secluded spot and set the auto-timer. Once the actual book was in motion, I found myself coercing photographers from all over Europe and Australia to snap dead shots during official press shoots. Dead with kangaroos. Dead in front of the Moulin Rouge. Dead in The Hague. Dead in a Chinatown noodle warehouse in Boston. My touring crew and my assistant Beth aided in my obsession, snapping shots from weird vantage points. Dead in a river, being poked by a stick by the opening band Smoosh who happened to be twelve, fourteen and sixteen years of age. Dead on the set of a video shoot in London. Dead backstage on a pile of beer kegs. At a concert in New York, I ran into my friend Regina Spektor and asked her to slump over a table so we could get a nice dead two-shot. I ran into Tegan and Sara and Edward Albee at an Out Magazine photo shoot we were in and Tegan snapped my corpse in front of Albee as he sat and read a newspaper from 1946. He agreed to be included in the book so long as he wasn't "accused of the killing." Being dead so frequently kept life interesting.

I decided to ring the writer Neil Gaiman, who I'd recently been introduced to--and who I knew was a fan of the Who Killed Amanda Palmer album--to throw some text in, and he was so fancy I never expected him to say yes but, surprisingly, he did. Very soon, the book crashed, much like the album, into a giant project that ended up involving Neil flying to Boston for an entire week and writing odd Amanda-slaying stories while tucked into the corner of my bedroom while I practiced piano for an upcoming tour. We would undertake bizarre outings to old Victorian houses, to Walden Pond, to highway bridges, to the ghetto alleys behind my house with Kyle Cassidy, a photographer with whom I had a long-standing relationship, and my photographer/assistant Beth Hommel and we would shoot dead photos galore. Dead at my parents’ house. Dead stuffed with clarinet. Dead with feral cats. Dead with funny-haired British author. Dead with vibrator. Dead in the bathtub. Neil's stories sometimes inspired the shots, but mostly the shots inspired Neil's stories. His stories manage to capture something beyond the absurdity of my corpse project though they often play along guiltily with the sarcastic mortal tongue stuck in my cheek. They capture something about the girls behind the corpses, the hearts and brains of those girls still beating under the layers of fake blood, broken tree branches and digital celluloid.

Neil Gaiman (author and perpetrator) says:

What I responded to, apart from the music, was that Amanda had been taking photos of herself dead for fourteen years, and so many of those photos were small frozen stories, and, especially with Kyle Cassidy's glorious photographs, I loved trying to turn them into stories. Some big stories, some very small stories, each story odd, each story fun to write, and each story, invariably, fatal.

Kyle Cassidy (photographer and blogger) says:

My photography has, for a very long time, been about the intersection of the normal and the absurd and this was really a perfect venue for exploring that. I tried to give each image an element of both and with a dead body in each shot, some large part of that equation is already there for you. It then becomes a question of balancing that with a scene of the mundane and then storytelling accessories to give the trip from point A to point B a lot of possibilities in between. A body at the bottom of the stairs tells an obvious story. Add a dozen roses and the legs of someone walking away and it's a mystery.

Beth Hommel (photographer, designer and assistant to leading lady/corpse) says:

I think this book appeals to the part of all of us that slows down while passing highway crashes. We find death fascinating--tragic or horrific death moreseo--and murder is the most intriguing thing of all. For this project we made art showing the many shades of murder, equal parts horror and humor. As I worked on this book for the better part of a year, I was continually amused at the reactions to the content. Some people were offended, some were intrigued but they all LOOKED. I want people to see this book and be appalled or amused or unnerved or even turned on. The particulars of the reaction aren't important. The important thing is that they slow down and stare.

In addition, Amanda has tirelessly shot videos for every song on Who Killed Amanda Palmer and will release them on DVD June 16th. The DVD release, like the book, will also don the name Who Killed Amanda Palmer.