Good lord, it's been 20 years.

That should be the tagline of this blog now, I guess, because I'm sure I'll be saying it over and over again. or, "staires! an adventure in painful nostaglia".

The Dresden Dolls have re-recorded their second album, and it's great. It's a little different, which seems most apparent on the opening track, Sex Changes, where Amanda's vocal take is just a bit different enough to be different without being annoyingly different, I think. I say I think, because I argued with myself during the first listen, but ultimately I think that I like it. Not more, per se, but I like it and I'll accept it.

I saw them on this tour, October 10, 2006 at the Orpheum Theatre. There's undoubtedly some picture of me there, in the crowd, floating around in some Dresden Dolls' fans' picture gallery on Flickr.

I thought I would write more about Amanda Palmer here, but the truth is, who cares? I'm sitting here, listening to a re-recording of an album from 20 years ago, not to reflect on things that have happened to us (or them) over those 20 years, but to pretend that they didn't happen. We're still just where we used to be, listening to this music for the first time, blissfully unaware of everything we will go through after. Isn't that nice? Let's just take a moment to enjoy it.

Oh, shit, now playing: the song where Amanda sings about masturbating while school children run around outside. Well, that moment is over.

Either way, I'm glad as hell that we're all still here. The ones of us who are still here, anyway.

When I saw Amanda Palmer live, I didn't really expect her to play any Dresden Dolls songs, which was kind of dumb considering The Dresden Dolls play her songs and she probably likes her songs. She played Coin-Operated Boy, naturally, because she isn't one of those asshole musicians who refuses to play her "one big hit" (or refuses to play their best song, like The Essex Green who I will consider eternal assholes for shaking their heads at the audience when they shouted out that they wanted to hear Sixties) but what really did it for me was her playing Bad Habit, off the Dolls' debut album. Before the show I quietly hoped that she'd play Bad Habit, but I knew that it was probably just a random unpopular album track that no one cared about so I didn't get my hopes up.

Arguably my favorite song about self-mutilation... wait... OK, the only song about self-mutilation within my collection, Palmer really gets me with this line: "When I jab a sharpened object in / choirs of angels seem to sing / hymns of hate in memorandum." I can't relate to the whole cutting yourself thing, never got into that when I was a teenage girl in high school (you see, I was never a teenage girl), but I can relate to other things she says, like, "even if I quit, there's not a chance in hell I'd stop," which is another one of those lyrics that really, in the end, almost makes no sense at all, but the feeling of it is relatable. I know what that's like.

I like to think that her nonsensical mention of "Vaseline" is a reference to Elastica. If you understand why I say that, then a cookie for you! If anyone knows of any other good songs about self-mutiliation, then you should totally shout them out in the comments.

Site News: I've added those nifty Amazon overlays to the album art when you mouse over so it's more obvious that it's a link to Amazon. Staires had 100 visitors yesterday! I'm very happy, and I hope you're happy, too. I'm also happy that I got this book back yesterday, after a year, as well.