Tone Glow 153: Diamanda Galás
An interview with the legendary singer-songwriter about singing in different languages, her relationship with Maryanne Amacher, and detesting artists who are self-obsessed
Diamanda Galás
Diamanda Galás (b. 1955) is a singer-songwriter based in San Diego, California. Throughout her decades-long career, she has used her voice as an instrument of monumental force, singing about topics such as AIDS, genocide, torture, and war. Often inspired by poetry, her deep studies produce works that are holistic in scope and are demanding of the listener. With a string of legendary albums from the 1980s, including The Litanies of Satan (1982), Diamanda Galás (1984), The Divine Punishment (1986), and Saint of the Pit (1986), her works fall into a number of categories ranging from power electronics to dark ambient to neoclassical darkwave while still remaining singular. Her singing, while adjacent to contemporaneous practitioners of extended vocal techniques and sound poetry, remain rooted in traditional musics, bridging the past with the present, the sacred with the profane. More recently she has released a studio album titled Broken Gargoyles (2022), which was inspired in part by the German poet Georg Heym. Her newest release is a live album titled Diamanda Galás in Concert and features recordings culled from performances in Chicago and Seattle back in 2017.
Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Galás on June 5th, 2024 via Zoom to discuss the process of translating poetry to song, the research that goes into writing her music, and experimenting on herself with lab equipment.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I want to let you know that this interview is only going to be transcribed as text. There isn’t going to be any audio or video, especially as you’ve requested that we turn off our cameras.
Diamanda Galás: Yes, it’s always superior because you can talk in a much more expansive way.
This reminds me of a film I’ve seen that is almost completely black. Part of why the directors did this is because a movie theater is one of few public spaces where the average person can have access to a great sound system and be committed to sitting still. They want you to listen to the film.
It’s marvelous you’ve said that. I’ve presented a few pieces in the dark, just completely black. They were quadraphonic pieces and I was very demanding of the audience. I love what you’ve said—it’s going to stick in my brain.
“Demanding” is an interesting word to use. In some sense, it feels instead like a generous offer to the audience. You’re asking them to position themselves to be attentive. And of course when you remove one sense, the others become heightened.
You’re absolutely right. It just depends on what a person’s taste is. If someone is afraid of a certain type of music, then I think listening to it in the dark, in a room where the door is shut, can be more difficult than actually being able to see the performer perform the work. It becomes unknown. I did a performance in Spain and it was a piece called Schrei 27. I didn’t do it live, but we presented it in this quadraphonic space and it was in a small room where it was completely dark. The presenter, Xabier Arakistain, locked the doors so people couldn’t leave. Some people liked it but others really didn’t. She said, “This is the way it’s going to be. If they don’t like it, it’s their problem.” And I agreed with that, but sometimes people prefer to escape from what I’m doing, and I think it’s fair to allow them to escape.
These extreme experiences with art remind me of your love for Maryanne Amacher.
Oh my god! You’ve spoken the holy words. We had names for each other—she was the “White Witch” and I was the “Black Witch” (laughter). I adore her. She studied with Stockhausen, and you could hear that. Her work is so powerful. She was working in Germany once, and the promoter told me that she would sleep in the space that the work would be presented in; she didn’t sleep in the hotel room. He came in one day and I guess she was asleep. She stood up and chased him out of the room, screaming, “You Nazi bastard! I’m going to kill you!” (laughter). She just became very upset if someone approached the space she was in.
This makes sense because she took her work so seriously. It wasn’t personal music; she understood how music was something greater than herself.
I don’t know if it’s possible for anyone to say all the right things, but you certainly are (laughter). I agree with that “absence from the parlor room” idea when it comes to doing my work. I really do not believe that people should care about my personal life. For Christ’s sake! I can’t imagine doing anything more banal than writing a piece about some trite, cavalier, oft-practiced breakup. Our life is not so long on this planet that we should waste people’s time writing Hallmark postcards. She and I both agreed on that.
Sometimes I will fall across a poem and, if it resonates with me for a long enough time, or if it hits me and I can’t move on from it, I will interpret it. And that’s been true with so many poets. It feels like they’re grabbing my hand, allowing me to continue. It is a sacred space—well, I don’t want to say “sacred space,” that sounds too much like yoga—but it is a sacred position to be in. It prepares me to be greeted fondly in the underworld. I’ve composed music and sung for at least 30 dead poets. One of them announced himself as being alive and I almost fainted. We became friends afterwards (laughter). He’s from El Salvador and I thought he got killed during the guerrilla war and he said, “Hello, this is Miguel Huezo Mixco” when he visited New York.
It’s kind of like the traditions. One of the Greek traditions, which I come from, is the mirologia singing. The dirge singers will put a hand on the head or the chest of the dead, and they will start singing the death song. Right before she finishes the song, she’ll grab hold of another mirologistra, and then this other person continues the singing, and then she’ll grab the hand of the next one. So there is no silence, and the continuation of this song allows the dead to go to the next station unimpeded. It’s a really sacred belief system. I must’ve been doing this all these years, so I must have some friends down there. (as if talking with someone in the underworld) “Hey buddy!” (laughter).
Do you remember the first time you met Maryanne?
Yes! I met her in San Francisco and someone—who is not human—insisted that we meet each other. [Editor’s Note: It was confirmed with Galás after the interview that this person was Naut Humon]. I went down to the place where she was working. She stood before me and she looked enchanted. She was a very unusual looking dame. She had this long, blonde hair past her waist. I don’t want to say “mischievous” in the way that most people think of it. People think of it in a sweet, chirpy way. No. She was someone who lived for the voyage, and no matter what, she would go through the wall. Actually, I believe she could go through walls with the low and high frequency sounds she worked with. She’s a wall breaker! And she looked like one.
I loved her on sight. She was kind, gentle, and welcoming. The second time I saw her was in Berlin. She invited me to go to her show and I went to this installation. She had this wall with all of my press articles. I was like, “What are you doing? This is your show!” And she said, “No, but you’re part of me, you’re part of my life.” There was something so unusual about that. It was really, really sweet. And she had a lot of other things too, but it was really shocking to see that! I love her. She’s a lawbreaker. She wasn’t ever playing at anything; she was either going to be 100% or not going to be there. I love playing her works very loudly. And I would say that the only person she reminds me of is Stockhausen and his greatest works.
There’s such a physicality to her works, of course. You can’t listen to her records and understand the full scope of what she was doing. The only way to do so was to be fully committed to the experiences she offered in an actual space.
I agree with you completely. I used to not write program notes for my works, at least until I got into work that became political. For me, there might have been a psychological paradigm. With Plague Mass (1991), suddenly it did have a study of political paradigms when dealing with the AIDS crisis. One can do a work about AIDS across 50 records—it’s that complex of a situation.
But my beginning is never political. I don’t read the newspaper to decide what to do, and people often say to do that. One time, a presenter naively said in front of my audience, “Oh, you must be doing this as a reflection of what you read is happening to Bosnian women.” I said, “No, absolutely not.” The audience laughed, and he’s never forgiven me (laughter). Backstage he said, “I should’ve known that you were that sort of interviewee.” I said, “I don’t know what you think you’re supposed to know, buddy, but the fact is that I commit myself to my work, it’s not because I read about it in the fucking newspaper.”
Reading about it in a newspaper and to then make art about it implies that it is something you didn’t know in the first place, or that it is not something you have contact with in the real world.
Yes. These things are undeniable, and an artist knows that they have to do something about it. It’s like when you’re in a room and you feel a temperature change, you take your coat off or put it on. A change that one experiences physically will produce a necessary action; it isn’t because somebody’s told you what has happened. I think Borges said this many years ago, that inevitably your work is going to be about the present. You’re living in that air, rarified or otherwise.
I despise artists who say their work is about the future. You know what buddy, you’re living right now, so why don’t you stop where you are. Isn’t that good enough for you, that someone could give you the credibility of doing something that is meaningful whilst you’re alive? Why do you shoot for 100 years from now? Just fucking forget it, take your ego somewhere else. “My voice is the voice of the future.” Go fuck yourself.
I’m not super well-versed in traditional Greek music but someone like Manos Hadjidakis, as well as other artists from his time, were regularly referencing poets from the past. And you’re pulling from poetry too, and even if it is an older poem, it still takes shape and has relevance to the current day when referencing it.
The fact is that a poet is a great poet because he always resonates. He is addressing a situation that is timeless; he is not a footnote to the present. My father once told me that the measure of intelligence is the ability to form analogies, and I think that’s the answer to that question. They’re working with large hand gestures, they go into clay and mold it, the meaning is large, the intent is unstoppable, there is a propulsion to the energy. And obviously that has to match the craft. But that’s what it is: you have individuals whose craft matches their vision, and you read them now and they’re inescapably relevant.
I talked with Patty Waters a couple years ago—
Ohhh! You know, she didn’t have an influence on me but she inspired me—I heard her when I was already doing my singing at the time, and I said, “Oh my god, I’m so happy.” And it was because when you hear her work and my work, there’s no similarity, but she would go into a dark hole. I think she’s more of a creature that goes further and further into a black hole, while I’m a creature that flies out of it and then comes back. My work is more extroverted while her work is extremely introverted, maybe even inverted (laughter). But that’s for her to say. What did you two talk about?
A lot of things, but something that stood out to me is when she said that the actual act of composing happens when she sings. I’m curious about your own process of writing songs and how that correlates to your relationship with your voice.
I agree with her, but the only thing that one might say is very different in my approach, and this is true with a lot of improvisers, is that I like to start working on a piece without any idea of where it’s going. I want no ideas at all; it has to have a propulsion and an incantational structure. When I have that, then I start to compose the work. After practicing and trying it many, many times, there are many sections that arise. Like with “O Death,” after I performed the piece several times, I realized that there should be a structure with which I improvise. You always know you begin with A and have to go to B, and when you know that, you can be free with A because you don’t have to organize B. This has been a success with longer compositions.
I think having too much freedom is fine when you’re starting to learn your craft or starting to learn improvisation. You can get lost in the moment. But after years of it, suddenly something has to change—or at least something changed in me. I wanted the best of all worlds—the best of the pre-composition world, the immediacy of improvisation. It’s like telling a person, (mockingly) “No… I only write my poems on the tape recorder because it would be insulting to the medium of poetry to write it down.” Take a walk buddy! As a musician or writer or anything, we want to know as many modi operandi as possible. You want to get in the center of the meat and get the best bite (laughter).
When did you first recognize the power you had in your voice? And this could be in relation to music or outside of that.
The one thing I always had to remember is that I had to listen to my father’s steps. If my father heard me singing, he would start screaming at me. He would say, “Only whores sing!” In the part of Greece that his people came from, with a lot of the singers that sang in the bouzoukia clubs, a lot of them did “double time”—they would sing and then they would do other kinds of work. He would say, “Singers are tone deaf, they have no sense of time, they can’t read music, they can’t read chord changes, they get drunk, and everyone playing instruments has to transpose the song—they’re annoying, don’t be one!”
That sounds like a dream!
(laughs) Tell me why!
Everyone is tending to you and showing through their actions that you are the center of attention. There’s a certain glamor to everything you described.
You’re saying there’s a glamor to being a tone deaf, drunk singer? I’ll see you in the next life! (laughter). Or maybe I’ll see you in a bar. People will say, “This bitch! We can’t get rid of him!” (laughter).
What really strikes me about your work is your willingness to sing and speak in other languages. That’s something that I feel people today really shy away from.
Yes, especially the Americans and the British—they are equally pathetic. The British may even be worse because, you know, it’s “the Queen’s language”! (laughter). Everyone has to drag themselves to the Queen’s language—pun intended. Let’s come off it. I’m in San Diego, but that’s about 10 minutes from TJ [Tijuana] so I grew up listening to Mexican music as well as Greek music. It wouldn’t even occur to me to not sing in Spanish. I’ve done a lot of work in Spanish for many years, and a lot of my audience is from Latin America, primarily Mexico. It’s a beautiful relationship. When you do a song in a different language, the worst thing is when people come to you with shit like, “If you love this song so much, why don’t you do it in English?”
I did this work on the Asia Minor Greek genocide. I’ve done work on the Greek, the Assyrian, the Armenian, the Yazidi, the Azeri genocides—I did it in London and in Melbourne, where there’s a lot of Greeks. The critics, well a lot of them wouldn’t even show up, but some would write these bad reviews saying poets like [Nikos] Kazantzakis are really important, but that I should’ve done them in English. Can you fucking believe it? Are you hearing what you’re saying?
Wow, that shows me that they don’t even understand anything about language, let alone poetry. Every language has its own prosody and there’s so much beauty in thinking about their specific personalities, emotions, and nuances.
Yes, there is a personality. You’re gonna be able to communicate specific emotions in Spanish better than German. This is why, when I work with a poem, I get my dictionaries out, and these are dictionaries in a few languages. Even if I know what the words mean already, I don’t trust that. Like, a lot of words in English and Spanish come from Greek, so I’ll look at the Greek derivation. And I will feel like I’ll have some real definition of the word, as well as its origin.
To me, you can say something is a pronoun but I will want it to be a verb. I’m treating it as music—the poem doesn’t need me, it’s already its own music with its own delivery, and I have to be careful not to ruin it. So I have to try and make sure I am not insulting the poem when I am interpreting it musically. Opera singers do this too, where I will take the text, and there may be some crappy English translation attached to it that I will completely ignore. Translators will mix up the sentences—they’ll sometimes switch the order of the lines. And a lot of translations will be what the composer could afford to pay for. What singers will do is go through every single word and write their own translation so they understand what the fuck they’re singing about—and that’s pretty important!
I’ve become quite obsessive about this. I’ll take a poem and will look at each word. It becomes a religious experience. I’m practically going to the dark web on a single word (laughter). I find out every possible meaning of it. For a person to lazily accept the word of the translator… you can only get what you put out. If you’re gonna be lazy and accept one person’s word for it, you’re gonna be screwed. Alternatively, you can go into the universe of that word and discover things about a poem that you would’ve never dreamed would be related because you’re American and not, say, Peruvian. You would have to be from Peru to know the meaning of a certain poem. No matter how great the translator, it will never be what the poem is. And I say this with knowledge that the great translators, like Jack Hirschman, knew they could approximate but not do something exact.
Right, it’s always going to be an approximation. And that’s going to be even more true if you’re turning this into music.
I’ve done one of Paul Celan’s pieces, “Todesfuge,” but I also heard him recite it. And I realized that there would never be a way I could interpret it that would be anywhere near how he did it. He saw his mother killed by the Nazis, and he’s reading this poem about the execution of the Jews, and he is reading it in a very flat voice. But one can understand that. And when you look at his later poems, they become shorter and shorter and they become something that most poets tell me they cannot understand. What I observed is that they become closer to his mother, who is dead. To me, they become more traumatic. I tell these poets, “Don’t you see? He wants to join his mother. He’s lived with this horrible trauma and he’s tried to stand it, but he can no longer do so.” You have to be a person who is eaten alive by a poem. You have to sacrifice yourself.
I was looking at something from César Vallejo, who was Peruvian. He was mestizo. I was translating something and it led to these child sacrifices that were done in the snow, as well as other places. These were sacrifices to the Gods. These tiny children would be placed outside in the snow and they would be given cocaine to bear the pain, and they would just leave them out there to die. Imagine going to one word and discovering that. I had to go very, very deep into the research to find that.
I’m curious about the music you heard growing up in San Diego. You heard corridos and rancheras. I’m thinking about artists like Chavela Vargas and Irma Serrano, both of whom had such powerful voices. I can’t imagine listening to them sing in a different language.
Ugh, of course! I don’t know Irma Serrano, I’ll have to look her up, but Chavela… imagine if people asked her to sing those songs in English. Jesus fucking Christ. She’d take a piece of shit out of her ass and smear it on their face. Think about the Greeks. They don’t have power in multiple countries and people don’t realize that. The expression “it’s all Greek to me” has to do with the “Byzantine” nature of the language. This is something that people dismiss. We can see this in current generations. This idea of, “Why would I need to know about something that’s Byzantine?” If people can make the shortest path from one dot to the next, that’s the path they will take. And that’s what has happened. We have a bunch of simple-minded imbeciles who think they are right about anything when they have not opened even one book to educate themselves.
I’m curious about your experiences with hearing regional Mexican music. You have “La Llorona” on the new album, for example. Can you talk about that and why you decided to sing it?
I don’t think it was a decision. When you have people in the neighborhood playing the radio, and the music from TJ is coming from Mexico City, and then you have mariachis across the street and in the house… what happens is that it becomes a part of your thinking. There are a lot of times where I’ll be thinking in Spanish or in Greek, in addition to English. What I notice about the Spanish poetry that I choose is that it rolls off the tongue. Also, a lot of Spanish poetry is incantational. It’s a naturally sung language, much like Italian. Just think about the vowels, think about the bel canto tradition. There are so many vowels in the language. When you go to Germany, there are so many consonants in the language and it makes it far more difficult to sing. I don’t think most opera singers would tell you that because from an early age they sing all those languages. But Spanish, it wasn’t so much of a choice as an obvious thing to do.
I came across a poem by Borges recently and when I would say it, I would just be singing it. They have a rhythmic concatenation like a lot of Henri Michaux. He wrote hexes, and what he said is that if they don’t work it’s okay, it’s about this process, which allows me to separate myself from my aversions. For me, that’s the reason that I do anything. I extrovert pain and these things that would destroy me. So with Spanish, I didn’t make a decision about it, it just happened. How many things have I done with English poems? Very few.
For me, English has a lot to do with jazz singing. It’s about ripping into those consonants and beginning a phrase. It’s not the mellifluous way that opera singers sing English. They have to focus on the vowel to make that long legato; they can’t just cut every word. But jazz is different. The fact that the words in English are cut by so many consonants means that it becomes a syncopated approach to the lyrics. And it really works. If you hear Esther Phillips or Dinah Washington, you’ll know that there’s nothing wasted. The consonants are just as present as the vowels. I do think there’s different styles of singing for different music. Someone might think that English is the most mellifluous language and if they said that, I’d want to hear why. I grew up speaking English, and especially being from California… well that doesn’t do anyone any favors.
Can you expand on that?
People in California tend to run over the vowels with consonants. There’s not a focus on the vowels as with someone from New Jersey or New York or these other places that have Italian ancestry. That’s a singing language, so when people were confused by the early pronunciation of English words by Italians, they got confused because the vowels were longer and the way of speaking would be deeper—it’s like with the Greeks. So if you’re a singer, you really have to try and get rid of that, otherwise you’ll end up sounding like most of these pissant rock singers who are from California. Jesus fucking Christ (laughter). They have all these thin, dainty voices. It’s always like a little-girl voice, like one who would have a pink dress and a tiara. It’s pedophilic.
I always loved Britney Spears’ voice, and I know that she had a normal voice initially, but she is an extreme case. There’s this extreme EQ on her voice and something with the consonants and the tone quality sounds like something that isn’t human. That’s what I liked about it. But the fact is that people try to mimic it and with this other shit I’m hearing… are you kidding me? There are so many singers that have this infantilized voice. The producers must be doing it. It’s like they’re telling them to sing like a seven year old. If you told me to do that I’d kick you in the head. I mean, nobody would say that to me (laughter). They don’t want me to sing, they want me to leave the room.
Since you’re Greek, are there things that you feel are only possible in your music because of your heritage? You mentioned earlier that somebody who isn’t from Peru could not fully understand a Peruvian poem. Is there something that you feel like you’re able to tap into because you are Greek?
When I go to Greece, everybody understands what I’m saying. I did this really crap version, and I didn’t rehearse it much, of a piece by Sotiria Bellou. This was many years ago. Somebody from the audience yelled at me and I said, “What’s the matter with you?” But I knew he was right! There were a few words I fucked up and I wasn’t prepared. So that’s a mistake that you don’t make when you go to Greece. I’m just saying this because it makes me laugh.
I love the fact that when I do the Greek songs in Greece, they’re understood and appreciated. I’ll say hello to the singer who was best known for interpreting the work. I’ll say hello to Marinella, who is a really well-known singer. It’s the last song on the record, “Anoixe Petra.” I love that tradition and the excitability. When I was singing “La Llorona” in Chicago, there were a lot of Spanish speakers there so the response was very exciting. It’s so marvelous when people understand what you’re singing. With “La Llorona,” I think everyone appreciates that song because it’s a very famous song. But this is less so with Greek material in America. People don’t know what it is.
I’ve been referred to as an “exotic” singer. I really hate that. It basically says, “she who cannot be understood by us” because it means somebody who is outside of the realm. “Exo” signifies a stranger or foreigner, and it tells me that they don’t understand and do not want to have to understand. Thanks to Chicano politics, some things have changed. If you don’t understand Spanish, you wouldn’t just proudly go around admitting it now. But with Greek, well we don’t have a politicized insistence that people don’t treat us like “exotic” people.
We know this is true with every ethnic group who comes to the United States. There's hostility. There’s this notion of, “I’m not gonna learn your language, why would I learn your language?” But the thing is that the Greeks have been here for years, but people think of Greeks as a dead people, of an ancient culture they don’t have to worry about it, and you will see Turkey saying the most egregious things about Greece and it’s because they have this relationship with the EU. The Greek genocide is never discussed anywhere, it’s not discussed by the EU. They don’t feel like Greece has that much to offer them. It’s a terrible situation.
I did “O Prosfigas,” which means “The Refugee,” and it refers to our genocide from 1914-1923. People ask, “Why do you do this today?” The ignorance is colossal. I’ve spent no less than 150 hours just writing essays and doing research. I know that I’m meeting people who are completely ignorant to this situation.
What keeps you going despite knowing that so many people would choose to remain ignorant?
I mean, that’s probably what keeps me going (laughter). There’s something powerful about antagonism, just that word. I do what I’m doing just to stick around. If I’m not engaged in that, then I’m going to be engaged in what I said before—the “parlor room of the personality,” which is endlessly not fascinating. “I’m an individual, I’m like nobody else.” You know, there’s a toilet right there, why don’t you take a dive (laughter). That’s what I hate about so much music, even alternative music. There’s an endless obsession with oneself. “Oh, I am infinite. You can’t even count the nuances of my personality.”
I know that you studied biochemistry. I’m actually a high school science teacher for my day job.
Wow! What a wonderful job. Your students must love you.
It really feels like a job that’s well-suited for who I am.
So you work as a writer and as a teacher?
A lot of my free time is spent with the arts, so I do a bunch of reviews and interviews. And I love doing interviews.
I’m not saying this to flatter you, but the fact is that you come with so much knowledge and it is then a great pleasure for me. You have to understand that we are met by people where we have to really challenge ourselves to answer questions and to stay on the phone. It is torture (laughter).
Well, part of the reason I started interviewing is because I hated so many interviews I read. I could go on about this forever. So many times I see the interviewer treating the interaction as a business exchange. They talk about the new piece of music and they wouldn’t ask thoughtful follow-up questions and it would feel so robotic.
Good for you. And you’re right. There are too many ignorant people in the field you’re in. They are not prepared to have empathy. I had read some of your interviews before and I told myself, I’m not going to spend two hours preparing for this, I’m just going to enjoy myself because I will be able to enjoy myself. I really mean it. I knew that this would be an interview that isn’t just facts, facts, facts. I knew I was going to enjoy myself thoroughly, and I was right! Thank you for the great joy.
Thank you for saying all that. I do want to ask about what you said in a previous interview where you were “experimenting” on yourself. What did that mean?
That meant that I was hanging out with some pre-med students and we had some discussions and we agreed that we would experiment on the rats but also ourselves. We wanted to learn some things. This was the same time as B.F. Skinner and Pavlov and sometimes this would result in sadistic, masochistic experiences. If you believe that the pain of stepping into scalding water is all in the mind, and you do it, you find out otherwise quite rapidly (laughter).
Is that what you did?
I was talked into it (laughter). I had done so much reading and I was like, well, there’s a 50/50 chance. I passed out. We were stealing syringes from the medical labs and doing a lot of wild shit. I learned a lot. I was reading research papers. You know, I didn’t want to be with all those people in class. It’s the happy people that scare me the most. They’re all standing around and it’s like they’re all laughing at the same joke and saluting the same general. I felt very estranged from that. And I learned the most about biology and biochemistry at a small city college with small classrooms, not from these big universities.
That’s why I like staying at the high school level. I like teaching people in smaller settings and at that age range.
It’s the most important time. It’s when a lot of people freak out because they feel they’re being socialized instead of allowed to continue learning. My father taught school at a city college and he was teaching people who had just come to this country how to speak English. He would be surrounded by students and work with each of them very carefully and with a lot of love. He would understand them since he was cast as an outsider. When he retired, I found this gigantic card on which they all had personally thanked him. I just started crying. It was a testament to how it can work when you really do care about your students, as you obviously do.
Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to talk about?
No, it was an absolute luxury.
There’s a question that I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
(laughs). Love about myself! Well, let’s just say that I have come to accept the thing that people in restaurants detest most about me.
What is it?
My laugh. It separates the men from the boys.
More information about Diamanda Galás can be found at her website. Her newest album, Diamanda Galás In Concert, can be found at Bandcamp.
Thank you for reading the 153rd issue of Tone Glow. I have heard no better qualification for what makes someone a real man.
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Magnificent!
I absolutely loved this interview