Q1 How did you start out making music?
I was making music from before I have a memory. There was a piano in the house I grew up in and I just always gravitated towards it. My mum taught me the basics by sitting me on her lap and letting me copy her hands when I was about five years old, and I just took off form there and started writing and improvising. I was also doing a lot of musical theatre and singing in the church choir every week, and sitting glued to MTV most every day after school as a kid.

Q2 What inspired your latest single/album?
I had the idea for a solo album while on tour with The Dresden Dolls, since we needed a break from each other and from touring. It was supposed to be a very small, stripped-down solo piano affair, but Ben Folds showed up and asked if he could produce it and after that, it snowballed into an epic project with full orchestral arrangements. The lead single, 'Leeds United', was inspired by a lot of things that happened to me that spring... a trip to Leeds, a couple of aborted and suffering relationships, and the hilarity of football hooliganism.

Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
Almost every track on the record had a different path. One of the songs went through three studios, five different engineers, four mixes, and five different masterings. Nothing was simple. I tend to write when I'm at home, since it's the only safe place to let things gestate. When Ben and I started pre-production I brought a whole pile of songs dating back to the early 1990s and just spent a whole two days demo-ing songs for him. He whittled the list down to about fifteen tracks and we took a different approach for each one. Ben added a ton of instrumentation that he played himself: synthesizers, percussion, vocals. He's a great, mad genius in the studio. I brought a bunch of the songs out to LA at his suggestion and worked with a brilliant British string and orchestral arranger named Paul Buckmaster. He added some serious magic to the album.

Q4 Which artists influence your work?
My influences are far reaching and always shifting. Every time I answer that question I come up with something totally different. I'd forgotten until recently how hugely effected I was in college by the music of Phillip Glass and Michael Nyman. I listened to their soundtracks obsessively for a few years there. Laurie Anderson. The Doors. The Thompson Twins.

Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
I would hopefully not be tempted to say anything. I'd want them to enjoy it uninterrupted.

Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest single/album, and for the future?
I'm going to be touring, with a small string section and a great theatrical back-up gang, for the better part of a year after the album comes out in September. After that? I've been giving some thought to setting up a run of residencies in different small theaters around the world. I might learn how to play the ukulele a little better. I might want to take some time off and think. I haven't done that in about eight years.

published august 2008