On her Patreon page, where she does the bulk of her blogging these days, she cites acute Lyme disease, by way of a nasty bug bite (upsetting stuff, but the story of how she came down with it is, as always, beautifully told). She is, as she says, “doing the Totally Adult Thing” and cancelling her appearance in San Jose on Saturday.

(Ed. note: Amanda Palmer has dropped out of this show, citing complications from treatment of acute Lyme disease. Read about it here.)

It’s hard to talk about Amanda Palmer without first addressing her haters. From her days as the frontwoman of The Dresden Dolls to her flourishing solo career, Palmer, like her hero, Morrissey—for whom she’ll be opening at the SJSU Event Center on Saturday—has been on the receiving end of public criticism for pretty much as long as she’s been an artist.

Why? Take your pick. She bared her breasts onstage. She wrote a bouncy song about some pretty dark subject matter—the tale of a girl raped at a party and her subsequent positive STI test and abortion. She asked local musicians to play dates with her for free. She married geek hero Neil Gaiman. She doesn’t shave her armpits.

“People really don’t like being confronted by women misbehaving,” she says, rather calmly for someone who has a section specifically for hate mail on her band’s site. “Whereas men misbehaving can be kind of sexy. That’s part of this game of entertainment.”

She is, admittedly, hugely influenced by Morrissey. Palmer was a teenager in the ’80s—hormonally primed to be influenced by the sweeping drama of The Smiths. “I got my first Smiths tape when I was 14, 15,” she says over the phone, driving home to Boston from upstate New York. “One side was Strangeways, the other Meat is Murder. I just wore it into the ground.”

The Smiths and their contemporaries (Depeche Mode, The Pixies, Nick Cave and “all that dark apocalyptic stuff one of my boyfriends got me into”) have always been lurking in her work, even when she was writing vampy cabaret choruses on keys as one half of “punk cabaret” weirdoes The Dresden Dolls, which is where she got her start. She’s always had a theatrical, sentimental bent, somber but never sappy. Both her and Morrissey’s bodies of work speak of something more suited for the Shakespearean stage or a Lifetime movie than moody, morose rock ‘n roll.

“One of the things I love about being an older musician and having the perspective of time is that your own formation is a mystery to be solved,” she says—posing and then answering a question. “Why did the Smiths speak to me? The music you listen to as a teenager, you take for granted, until you look back at the greater context of things and realize there wasn’t anyone writing songs like that. Now I realize how formative it was.”

These days, after years of sticking almost solely to piano, she’s starting to work her way back to the sounds that started it all. “My really early music has cheesy synths and handclaps,” she says. Theater Is Evil, her 2012 crowdfunded record, which drew $1 million (she asked for $100,000), saw her going all-in on ‘80s conventions—making heavy use of the synthesizer. She is continuing in the same vein with her currently in-progress album, which she is recording with Edward Ka-Spell of The Legendary Pink Dots.

“I had this entire conversation with Edward,” she says. “We sat down (to record with electronics) and it was like I was going back to a language I hadn’t spoken in 20 years.”

Palmer’s opening slot on Saturday’s show came about under sudden, strange circumstances. “I was having lunch with an old manager of mine who offhandedly asked if I might want the gig,” she says. “In the mysterious ways of the underbelly of the industry, I was called up about the gig a few days later.”

She says she isn’t sure whether Moz personally requested her to open. “I’ve never actually met Morrissey, but rumor had it he did attend a Dresden Dolls gig.” (If Morrissey message boards are be believed, he surfaced at a Dresden Dolls show in LA around 2008.) In any case, playing for one of her teen idols seems a fitting end to the most current chapter in Palmer’s career and life.

This will be the last show before she goes on an indefinite hiatus—she’s currently seven months pregnant, and not entirely sure what the future holds, musically or otherwise. “I really, really believe in living a life of no regrets and radical compassion for myself and others. There are times when I wish I did take myself more seriously,” she says. “I feel like the key to life, as self-helpy as it sounds, is pure, unadulterated, simple self-acceptance. We are built the way we’re built. And that’s the thing I love about Morrissey. He’s totally and utterly himself.”

Like it or not, so is she.

Amanda Palmer opens for Morrissey on July 25 at the San Jose State University Event Center. More info.

Did they just kill Morrissey? That’s what I’m thinking as I watch the craziest end to a concert I’ve ever seen in my life unfold.
Moz, opening his 2014 tour at the San Jose Civic on Wednesday night, has just come back for the encore, playing his third Smiths song of the night, “Asleep.”

I am pondering whether the selection of this song, with its lyrics “Deep in the cell of my heart, I will be so glad to go,” is some kind of clue about whether retiring from music is still on his mind. A couple of years ago, most fans know, Morrissey announced he planned to retire in 2014, but since then he’s done things like sign a two-record deal (the first of which comes out in July) and launch a tour, so clearly that isn’t happening yet. But still, with his recent assertion that he’s found more success as a writer than he ever did with music, you gotta wonder if he’s dropping hints about heading to the exit.

After “Asleep,” Morrissey launches into what could be considered an even more loaded choice for the set list: “One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell,” my favorite song from his 2009 album, Years of Refusal. Fans are now jumping on stage wanting to touch him, which starts out cute but quickly gets annoying. Who are these creepy people always demanding hugs, anyway? Don’t give me that crap about the unique understanding they have with their rock idol. If I was Moz, I’d be petrified that one of these crazies was going to slip me the loveknife. I wouldn’t show up for my own concerts, either!

SEE MORE: Photos from Marrissey at City National Civic

Sure enough, eventually a bunch of these jackass fans bumrush the poor guy all at once. Stage security is just completely overwhelmed. Think about that for a minute. Have you ever seen those big dudes on stage at shows get overwhelmed? No, their whole existence is about being whelmed exactly the right amount. But this group gets by them, in a chaotic scene that recalls one of those shakycam fights from the Bourne Identity movies where you have no clue what’s going on. Morrissey just disappears, swallowed up midway through the line “And before you know, goodbye will be farewell.” It’s not clear if they dragged him into the wings, pulled him off the stage, or what.

The lights immediately go up, the PA music goes on, and a thousand Morrissey fans are now just staring blankly at each other, completely confused. Is the show really over? Did that just happen?

Again, I’m left fearing for Morrissey’s safety, but as the roadies milling on stage don’t seem too worked up, I figure he’s got to be all right. But it does make the opening lines of “One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell” seem bitterly ironic: “Always be careful when you abuse the one you love/The hour or the day no one can tell/But one day goodbye will be farewell/And you will never see the one you love again.”

If that was indeed the last song he was planning to sing at this show, it bookended well with the opening “Hand in Glove,” with its repeated lyric “I’ll probably never see you again.” Was that a message? And was it significant that he opened with the Smiths’ very first single, and ended (we have to assume) with a farewell song from his last record?

Maybe. But otherwise, this set didn’t feel like Morrissey had one foot out the door. It wasn’t a greatest-hits show in any way, with a slowed-down “Everyday Is Like Sunday” and a Latin-tinged “First of the Gang to Die” (the highlights of the night) the only solo hits he played. Perhaps you could count “That’s How People Grow Up” or “I Have Forgiven Jesus, or the closer “The National Front Disco” among the favorites, but that’s only because Morrissey’s fans love all his songs.

This was in fact a very unsentimental show, which is another way to view the use of “Hand in Glove,” which is one of the most unsentimental love songs ever written. “Meat is Murder” was a particularly vivid example of this raw approach, accompanied as it was by brutal slaughterhouse footage that was Moz at his most militant. (PETA also had a booth inside the Civic for the show).

Most tellingly, he played several songs from his upcoming album, World Peace is None of Your Business, including the title track, the flamenco-tinged “Earth is the Loneliest Planet,” and “The Bullfighter Dies.” The songs are more varied sonically than on his last couple of rock records, although the band was ready to rip all night. The rest of the set was made up of some interesting offbeat choices, like the B-side “Ganglord,” Vauxhall and I’s “Speedway” and Maladjusted’s “Trouble Loves Me.”

This was not a set designed by a guy who thinks he’s going away for good. Morrissey is definitely looking ahead on this tour, and if he can dodge the hugs, he should be fine.

Despite releasing his autobiography last year, Morrissey is more of mystery than ever. After climbing to rock icon status after only five years with the Smiths, he’s risen and fallen in the pop-culture consciousness over and over, but to paraphrase one of his own songs: the more they ignore him, the closer he gets.

He’ll be closer than ever May 7, when Morrissey opens his U.S. tour at the City National Civic in San Jose. Tickets go on sale Thursday, Feb. 20, at 10am. A May 10 Los Angeles date is the two-month tour’s only other stop on the West Coast.

No end of questions have swirled around Morrissey for the last couple years: will he really retire, as he once proposed, in 2014? (The two-record deal he signed with Capital last month definitely points to no.) How serious are the health problems to which he’s alluded? What kind of novel is he writing? When will he release a long-overdue follow-up to his excellent 2009 album Years of Refusal? Does he have something against the Bay Area, where he’s cancelled two of his last three scheduled shows? (Although, to be fair, the Paramount concert in Oakland was great.)

The singer’s autobiography didn’t provide much insight into Morrissey as a person, (and none at all into his songwriting); it was more a series of remembrances about his career, and observations about the world. Not surprisingly, he seemed to be taking his cues from Oscar Wilde, and quite effectively. But one thing it revealed is that he’s never more in touch with his fans than when he’s on stage, and that is likely to be true once again when the South Bay contingent of his devoted following gets the chance to see him kick off this tour.

Morrissey opens his U.S. tour at the City National Civic in San Jose on May 7. Tickets and more info.