Who Needs Love When There's Southern Comfort?: The Irony and Ecstasy of Amanda Palmer

There aren't many women in music that I actually like. I've always been worried that that makes me secretly sexist or a traitor to my own race. It's no secret that I consider myself a feminist and I have for quite some time. Blame being raised by a progressive thinking mom who I often heard rant about the injustices of the world when you have a pair of jugs from the time I was approximately three years old and on. I was taught that my vagina is no reason to be an idiot and, as I reached adolescence, I did the proper reading to back that up. (Yep, I was one of those girls in ninth grade who carried around a copy of The Beauty Myth.) I don't believe women are superior, on a whole, to men, I believe they're equal. It's morals (or lack thereof) that makes one person better than another, in my opinion, but that's a whole different can of worms and all of us here at Boil It First know how easily I get sidetracked.

Speaking of "sidetracked", to get back on point, if you were to go through my massive iTunes library, you would find an approximate ratio of one female musician for every fifteen males. What it comes down to is the fact that the artists I relate to, lyrically, are men and the voices that appeal to me are in a lower register. It just sounds good to me. There are female artists I've grown fond of over the years: I used to rock the album Haunted by Poe back in high school and I had an intense, burning love affair with Cat Power back before she went honky tonk and regurgitated the same exact story, word for word, of her sobriety in the press (The fact that it sounded so rehearsed made me doubt her sincerity and just feel put-off, to be honest). But in the recent years, no female musician has affected me half as much as that Will Sheff fellow.

That being said, I believe former Dresden Doll, current Neil Gaiman muse Amanda Palmer deserves your respect. All your respect.