spotlight
The Musical Side of
Margaret Cho
by lance perkins
When a community pulls together in the face of adversity to support a great
cause, wonderful and beautiful things can happen. One shining example of this
in our LGBT community is the success of The True Colors Tour. The brainchild of
Cyndi Lauper, in 2007 she enlisted a plethora of talented artists to unite in the
fight for human rights with the mission to “Erase Hate.” Lauper chose comedian
Margaret Cho to emcee the tour and featured many comedic guests, top music
icons and up and coming artists of our LGBT community. Two True Colors com-
memorative albums have since been released.
Recently Margaret Cho, herself has gotten many of the artists from the tour
to collaborate on a new CD / DVD including Amanda Palmer from the Dresden
Dolls and Girl in a Coma. The Rage Monthly caught up with Margaret to talk about
this amazing new project and see what she has been involved with since that
memorable tour.
Margaret hopes to tour again with True Colors. “I would love to do it if they do it
again. It was so great and I’m always hoping to. They are just so fabulous and I love
working with Cyndi, I just adore her.”
Planning for the new CD/DVD to be released early 2010, Cho talks about work-
ing with Amanda Palmer and Girl in a Coma. “Amanda and I have been friends for
many years, we’ve toured together and worked together a lot so we wanted to
do the songs together, which is fun. I work with some of the people that Girl in a
Coma work with too, so that worked out really well and I am a huge fan of theirs— I
love them.” When asked if there would be a tour for the new album, Margaret
replied, “I don’t know. I’m hoping to but I’m not sure. We’ll see what happens in
the coming year.”
After the True Colors tour, Margaret Cho appeared with Amanda Palmer in the
Dresden Dolls video for “Shores of California.” Palmer said of the experience with
Cho, “I’ve been friends with ‘The Cho’ for a long time, ever since we found out we
were mutual fans of each other. She’s wonderful to work with, about as funny as
you would imagine, her being Cho and all. I can’t wait to see her blossom musi-
cally. I found it so inspiring that she wanted to play guitar and just picked it up and
DID it. Woman’s got ovaries!”
Cho is also planning to have music videos on her new CD / DVD. She explains,
“I’m going to make videos for every song. I don’t think I’m going to direct them all,
although I haven’t gotten to that point yet, but every song will have its own video
– it will be like a video record. I really like Olivia Newton John and when she put out
the album Physical, she made a video for every single song, so I want to make my
mine like a video album.” Of course the songs on new CD will include Cho’s notori-
ous brand of humor. Margaret elaborates, “The one I wrote with Grant Lee Philips
is called, “Eat Shit and Die,” that’s a good one. There’s also a song called, “My Puss”
that is live from the True Colors Tour with Diana Yanez. There’s just a bunch of stuff
that I’m putting together. I’ve been doing music a while and I have incorporated it
44 RAGE monthly | August 2009
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