Emilie Autumn Will Not Be Pacified; Fight Like A Girl Comes Out Today

Emilie Autumn's website describes her as "famously bipolar." In 2004, she was hospitalized after a suicide attempt. The experience inspired her to pen a five-pound tome, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, now the basis of her new pop/industrial record Fight Like a Girl. A former violin prodigy and member of Courtney Love's backup band, Autumn composed, sang, played and produced every note of the album, which drops today.

(And here's a fun bit of gossip: The only other person who worked on the record was Swiss metal guru Ulrich Wild, who mixed and mastered it. Autumn met Wild when she was living with -- as in, dating -- Metalocalypse creator Brendon Small in 2006.)

Originally from Los Angeles, Autumn was here putting the finishing touches on the record -- and we're the first to hear and talk with her about it.

During your shows, do you really throw tea on the audience? Or is it "tea" in quotations?

It used to be "tea" in quotations ... prior to maybe a year and a half ago. It wasn't because of an alcohol thing -- like we want to get the audience drunk.

My manager started reading the fan forums. ... She saw that a couple underage kids were saying that they weren't allowed to get tickets to my new tour because, when they had gone to the last one, and they had been in the first three rows ... their parents got upset because they came home smelling like whatever was in the teapot!

We hear you have plans to turn your album into a musical in London by 2014.

That's exactly right! What is on the FLAG record is certainly not by any means the complete musical, but most of the material that is on there is in this three-hour-long, cast-of-forty-people musical. And so, on the FLAG record, I'm singing a few songs that other characters are supposed to be singing.

Your lyrics talk about "eradicating the enemy." Who's the enemy?

It's this Victorian insane asylum meant to illustrate what [mental hospitals] are like today. They're not necessarily that different, in a lot of really unfortunate ways. The enemy is the staff and the doctors who run this establishment.