Amanda Palmer, be it with or without The Dresden Dolls, can make some pretty sad songs.
- Let's talk about the Dresden Dolls for a moment. Even the name is depressing. Highlights include about ninety percent of their debut album (listen to the lyrics of "Half-Jack" closely and marvel at what you're hearing), "Delilah," "Sing" (which manages to be both one of the most somber songs ever written and one of the most triumphant), and "Me & the Minibar," the last line of which will make your jaw drop with depression overload. Imagine something so depressing you can't help but laugh and dial it back exactly enough to keep it completely serious.
- "The Point of it All
" from Amanda Palmer's solo album, Who Killed Amanda Palmer? "But no one can stare at the wall as good as you, my baby doll/and you're aces for coming along/you're almost human, after all..."- Obnoxious title aside, "Strength Through Music" can still make some people bawl. How many songs are there about school shooters? How many artistic works in any medium that make you pity them?
- The cover of "What's the Use of Wond'rin'?" puts the song in a whole new (and disturbing) perspective.
- Pretty much the entire album of Who Killed Amanda Palmer? counts. It was produced by Ben Folds, for whom this trope may be an actual superpower.
- "Trout Heart Replica" a song Amanda wrote while on tour after seeing a dead trout's still beating heart. At several shows when she played this, the entire audience was in tears.
- From the 8in8 project, we have "Because the Origami," a duet between Ben Folds and her about a runaway son. Grab a box of tissues, and take a listen.
- The final verse of Amanda's parody of Friday.
- "The Bed Song". Just reading the lyrics can make you sob. It's about a couple that starts moving up on the income ladder, going from sharing a sleeping bag, to having a huge bed but they start growing apart. The narrator lambasts herself for not asking "what is the matter" and goes through the motions fo their marriage. It ends with them buried together, and the narrator finally asks. We never find out.
- The music video just makes it more so. It actually shows the verses playing out, and you can tell from the meaningful looks that each person gives when the other is not looking that they still love each other. Then just as the old couple lies under a cherry tree image, to depict them in graves, the cameras moves to show when they were young and still passionate about each other.
- The music video just makes it more so
- This may be a bit of a given, considering the song, but her cover of 'Hurt' is heart-wrenching.
- "Coin Operated Boy". It is about a girl who wants a coin-operated boy because she has grown bitter after several failed relationships. At the end of the music video, the boy in question strokes her gently, and she flinches, as if she's worried about getting hurt.
- "The Thing About Things".
- "A Poem for Dzhokar" because a lot of people outside the Amanda Palmer fandom mistook it for a poem that did Cry for the Devil. The poem itself is quite sad, with stream of consciousness lines that question how can an ordinary person do such a terrible thing like bomb the Boston City Marathon.
- The entirety of "There Will Be No Intermission". It tackles the most hurtful, devastating topics humanity is experiencing, and it does so in such an incredibly empathetic way it's impossible to stay unfazed by it.
- "The Ride", a hymn about suicidality, connection, and the absurd nihilism of life being meaningless. It was played as the closing number of every show on the album's accompanying tour, as Amanda felt she couldn't leave people without having given them the message of it.
- "Drowning In The Sound" is about climate grief and the feeling of the apocalypse approaching and the powerlessness that comes with it.
- "Bigger on the Inside". Written after the backlash from "A Poem for Dzhokar," where Amanda talks about the hurt from the aftermath, especially "You’d think I’d learn my lesson/ From the way they keep on testing/My capacity for pain/And my resolve to not get violent".
- The story of the song's creation makes it even sadder: Two people that were extremely close to her in life slowly being defeated by cancer as well as the intense online shaming she experienced for the poem made her fall into a deep mental health crisis which gave her severe writers block. She was unable to write music - which is extremely unusual for her, as she's written music all her life. One evening she was invited to have dinner with friends, and she'd managed to write this song, which wasn't a good song, but it was something, and she asked her friends if she could play it to them and if they would listen, because otherwise she would have combusted.
- "Voicemail For Jill" is a message to a fictional friend who's currently going through an abortion. Amanda has had three abortions herself, so she knows exactly just how thoroughly alone of an experience it is, and how ostracized you are from society for it. It is a gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, brilliant song and one of the most important songs Palmer has ever written.
- "A Mother's Confession" is a 10 minute song about all her fears about being a mother, the biggest of which is that her child will die, and she could be responsible for it.
- It finally concludes with "Death Thing", a song dealing with the traumatic loss of two people that were very, very close to her, to cancer, and the absurdity and guilt for almost getting used to losing the people most important to you.
- On tour, she tells the story of her miscarriage - a story so brutal and yet tragically beautiful it can only properly be told by Amanda herself. She follows it up by playing a breathtakingly powerful cover of "Let It Go", a song that, in the context of the story, takes on an entirely new meaning.
The Art of Asking
- Amanda entire relationship with Anthony, especially when she details him succumbing to cancer.
- On the chapter about Christchurch, Amanda reveals that a journalist found out that Earthquake Girl had made up her story about losing her entire family. She was hurt and yet marveling by everyone who came together to support Earthquake girl.
- Amanda choosing to terminate her Surprise Pregnancy because of the baby suffering birth defects from an antibiotic she took. Even worse is how Neil doesn't know how to comfort her
