The Dresden Dolls

Yes, Virginia
Roadrunner, 2006

Yes, Virginia can be an uncomfortable and embarrassing listen. It captures something hard to grasp – that slippery feeling of shame and excitement dredged up and quickly swallowed again when remembering fumbling with teenage relationships or having sex for the first time. Amanda Palmer's best songs are inspired by that split-second emotion mixed with a dark side. On one track she's a slutty supermarket check-out girl with tattoos on her back, on the next a back-alley abortion nurse in full cabaret mode. "There's this thing that's like fucking, except you don't fuck," is the last song's first line.

Everything about The Dresden Dolls is exaggerated, but also acutely real. Half-way through his first interview with Palmer at a restaurant in New York, journalist Ben Chappel found himself curled up on a bench with his head in the singer's lap, telling her about a German who broke his heart. He emailed a photo of the occasion (which can be found here on Flickr) to his editor at high-brow New York blog Gothamist but declined to write an article on the band out of respect for his new friendship. Palmer and Chappel ended up going on a date where they talked to each other on a laptop. When he died in March last year, Palmer posted a eulogy with the transcript of their conversation on her website.

Ten days after Chappel's death I met Palmer in a hotel room in Melbourne and proved little more professional than he had been while I interviewed the Dolls' drummer and co-founder Brian Viglione. Since then I've wanted to write about Yes, Virginia constantly and often wondered what I would have asked after having more time to take it all in. Its chemistry is so sexual and its pitfalls so human – arrogance, indulgence, loneliness – that describing it in a column would be no easier than bottling a few seconds of time. Perhaps I never would have found the right question. What exactly do you ask about a chorus like "all across the nation, the girls are crying and the boys are masturbating"?