“You don’t wanna hear about my Good Day”
In 2008, the Dresden Dolls would play Los Angeles for, seemingly, the last time. In 2008, I was 23 years old, still in college in the rural North of California, fairly isolated from the meccas of civilization and regular concerts of better-known bands. I missed it. After moving to Los Angeles the following year to attempt and fail at breaking into the film industry, I had all but lost hope of ever seeing the Dresden Dolls perform.
I satiated myself by diving deeper into Amanda Palmer’s solo career filled with unique collaborations and performance pieces, catching her performance with Ed Ka-spell at The Troubadour and witnessing her one-woman show There Will Be No Intermission at The Ace Theatre Hotel before the COVID-19 Pandemic upended all of our lives. I was pretty content with all of this. Then, one day, an Instagram post changed everything.
Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione were rehearsing new material. A Dresden Dolls tour felt imminent, and sure enough, courtesy of the mailing list, I discovered planned shows in select cities were coming, and after some time, a weekend of shows in Los Angeles and San Diego was announced, again via the holy mailing list. Now, it is 2023. I’m 38 years old, and I walked into the Belasco Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles to finally witness the glory of an evening with the Dresden Dolls.
Opening with “Good Day,” the first hour of the evening was filled with songs spanning the first four records of their career. Fans sang along loudly as Amanda hammered her keys and Brian, hair whipping hypnotically while doing his absolute damndest to break his sticks on his drums. There was so much joy filling the room, from the stage to the house and all the way up in the mezzanine.
The Dolls are such an incredible duo of performers, feeding each other little bits of physicality throughout, including bits of miming and cheekiness. At one point during “Alcoholic Friends,” their long-time tour manager hopped up on stage and shared a shot with Amanda during a pause before they could hammer out the ending of the song and later on, modern Jazz artist Veronica Swift (no relation to the other well known Swift), joined the stage for an incredible duet vocal rearrangement of my favorite Dolls song, “Delilah.”
Following a riotously funny cover of Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet,” Amanda took a moment to talk about the new music she and Brian had been working on and that they were then about to play, much of which is so new that they’re still working on it. After a bit of light teasing from Brian about nervousness, they began what would be an hour of new material on a mostly somber note, but not without that beautiful blend of tenderness, humor, playfulness, and emotional honesty that has endeared them to so many, myself included. One of my favorites of the evening ended up being a Christmas song, which brought Amanda out from behind her keys and Brian from his drums, acoustic guitar in hand. It’s a song in the vein of songs like Joni Mitchell’s “River” and The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York,” simultaneously evoking the beauty and misery that come hand in hand with the holiday.
Following two more deeply personal new works, the tempo shot up with fan favorite “Coin Operated Boy” and their cover of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.” But the true showstoppers were the encore of “Half Jack,” with an extended jamming intro that further cemented the prowess of these two musicians, and a blisteringly high octane blast into “Girl Anachronism” the song that introduced me to the Dolls on the radio in 2004. It was an incredible end to an incredible and euphoric evening.
