The Art of Asking

by Amanda Palmer

  Can I give you my CD? My girlfriend is a singer-songwriter.

  Can I give you my CD? I run a death-metal label here in town. I make beats in my bedroom. I make a cappella music on my phone.

  The answer is always yes, yes, yes, and yes. I see those CDs as something more than just some local kid trying to get his band a break. They’re like a thank-you letter, a way for one artist to wave a flag to another, like two lighthouses; part of the must-never-stop, ever-circulating gift.

  And you do not refuse that gift, ever.

  Whether you’re prepared for it or not, part of the job that goes along with being a confessional songwriter is that you become a makeshift therapist by default. Except you don’t have a nice, quiet office: you’re doing it in loud, dingy nightclubs, in dark alleys outside tour buses, and in backstage bathrooms. I feel simultaneously honored and depressed when someone pulls me close and says, “There’s nobody else I can tell this to…” and proceeds to detail a secret abortion, a rape, a diagnosis of a mental illness.

  In that instant of intimate exchange, I want to adopt every teenage kid who tells me their parents kicked them out of the house for being gay. I want to follow the story of every recovery, I want to stick around to see every baby get born and every wound heal and every heart evolve. But I don’t. I can’t. Every night, I drive away.

  You see twenty patients a week. How do you deal with taking in so much pain from strangers? I asked Anthony one night, over the phone as I lay on a pull-out bed in a friend’s living room in Montreal. The post-show signing had taken ages and I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep.

  Have you ever heard of a “sin-eater”?

  No, I said. Tell me.

  It’s when a local holy man, or a guru, takes on the sins and sufferings of the community by opening to those who are in pain, and filtering the pain and suffering. He takes all the emotional trash and, through his body, through his love and capacity to stay present, clarifies the pain into compassion. Lots of religions have their version of it. Jesus does it for the Christians.

  A community confession-booth attendant, basically, I said.

  Ha. Basically. There were professional sin-eaters in England. A guy, for money, would come around and eat bread over the corpse of a dead family member to purge the body of sin before it went to heaven. It’s also the magic and mystery of what we do—when we nail it—in psychotherapy. We take on the suffering of others, digest it, transform it.

  And artists? I asked. Sounds like art.

  Yeah, good artists do it. You know, the “Artist” and the “Medicine Man” used to be the same guy. “Musician” and “Shaman” used to be the same characters, in a way. Our jobs aren’t that different, you and me. I’ve seen you at the signing line, I’ve watched you. Eat the pain. Send it back to the void as love.

  Can I ask you a question?

  Ask, he said.

  Do you ever have days where you can’t take it all in, and it just makes you too sad?

  Yeah, beauty. It happens all the time.

  Sometimes the signing line keeps me from having to be alone.

  Sometimes the signing line reminds me that this job isn’t about me, it’s about everybody.

  Mostly the signing line makes me feel connected to the people around the fire.

  I need to see their faces.

  Sometimes I feel like I need the signing line more than they do.

  I notice a difference if I don’t sign after a show. It can feel deeply lonely.

  Not signing or hanging out after a show is like taking someone home for a one-night stand, having passionate sex with them, and then watching them, from the bed, as they get dressed and leave right after the orgasm. I need the postcoital cuddle, the bit where you spend the night spooning, looking into each other’s eyes with a confirmation that, yes, that happened. And now let’s at least get breakfast and talk about the mundane details of our lives even if we’re probably never going to see each other again.

  I hate it when people don’t spend the night.

  Michael Pope and I decided to make a music video—he was a filmmaker, my housemate, and one of my best friends; it made sense—so we picked one of the band’s most popular live songs, “Girl Anachronism,” and co-wrote a treatment sitting at my kitchen table, then spent a week transforming our home into a production house. We asked Ron, the photographer friend of Anthony’s and all-around art enthusiast, to front us the money for film stock (real film stock!). We asked Lee to help decorate the top floor, we asked our housemate Zea to do the costumes, and we asked our fans to volunteer behind the scenes. We fed everybody pizza and beer, and shot for twelve straight hours (we couldn’t afford to rent the equipment for longer than a day), using almost every room of the Cloud Club, along with the back garden and the roof, as our film set. When the video was edited and we put it up on our website (these were pre-YouTube days), everybody in our immediate community had taken part in one way or another. And Lee was ecstatic: this was how he always imagined the space being used. We went on to shoot full-scale music videos in the house, and at my parents’ house, and at Ron’s house, and at my old high school, using the drama students. Through the act of asking, we created our community. That’s how it worked.

  Our audience was growing. We sent hundreds of packages to hundreds of labels. Nobody wanted us. We finally decided that we should stop running a CD-toasting business out of my kitchen and make our own legitimate studio record. On our own, no label. If we printed a few thousand copies, the whole undertaking would cost us about $20,000, including the studio time, and then we’d have a high-quality CD with all of our songs to sell at shows, and make the money back.

  But we didn’t have that kind of money. We were making a few hundred dollars here and there from gigging, but even when combined with our incomes from stripping, statue-ing, and scooping ice cream, that didn’t leave us with more than a few thousand dollars at a time, and we still had to get around, pay rent, buy food.

  We did have a growing fanbase and a hardcore work ethic, though, and I figured that was decent enough collateral to guarantee a few personal loans. I made a short list of people, and then one by one, I asked them: Ron Nordin, Anthony’s best friend, a photographer and local arts enthusiast; my parents; our New York couchsurfing hosts Josh and Alina; a generous uncle who lived in Los Angeles. And we asked Tom and Steve, a gay couple who came to almost all of our gigs, lived in a house, and appeared to have real jobs. I asked everyone if they would pitch in up to $5,000 for the recording and printing of the record, with the promise that we would pay the money back within a year, sooner if possible.

  They all said yes, and sent checks. I mailed them all printed letters so that they would have some sort of a legal record, even though they knew we weren’t going to run off to Mexico with the money. They trusted us.

  I thanked them all profusely.

  We spent a couple of harebrained months driving back and forth from Boston to Brooklyn, where we slaved over the record, and we hired two of my Cloud Club housemates (Zea, the painter, and Thom, the graphic designer) to create the album artwork. Then we sold the CD (which we titled, simply, The Dresden Dolls) straight to the fans at the shows for $10 a pop. We quickly sold out of the first batch of 5,000 and ordered another. My kitchen became a wonderland workshop of envelopes and packaging as we started mailing them out to fans in more and more distant states and countries, and to labels, radio stations, publicists, and managers, hoping someone would help us run our business—answer the phones, mail the T-shirts, handle the bookings. We couldn’t cope with all the work. We were getting overloaded.

  After two years of constant gigging with no manager, no booking agent, and a growing pile of rejection letters from every indie label on the planet saying “we don’t sign goth bands” (we weren’t a goth band, dammit!), I started to get desperate. We were drawing five hundred people a night by then in a handful of cities, and though I was enjoying our Bohemian Traveling Circus Fantasy, our time between shows had become c
ompletely consumed by emails and phone calls, trying to organize our schedule while trying to get signed. I couldn’t keep up with being the touring act and the office manager. We got bigger and bigger, but nobody would sign us. We were too strange. We didn’t sound like any other band currently becoming famous.

  Then a promising email came in from a guy named Dave. He wanted to talk to us. I’d never heard of his label, and when I googled it, I found bands with names like 3 Inches of Blood, Baptized in Blood, Make Them Suffer, Mutiny Within, and Satan. A METAL label? I’d been hoping to get signed by Matador. Or Mute. Somewhere we could stand alongside Belle and Sebastian, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Magnetic Fields, The Pixies, and other arty indie bands with harmless names. I found a music lawyer and showed him the contract.

  They basically want to give you fifty grand to sign away your firstborn, he told me. They’d take a cut of everything you ever earn, now and forever, including your merchandise and the rights to every song you ever write. Are you sure you want to sign with them even if I sweeten up the deal and let you keep your firstborn?

  I wasn’t sure, but we were working as hard as we could and nobody else wanted us. We were desperate.

  Let’s de-firstborn it, I said. I’m game to try.

  We played a show around that time with Karen Mantler, an off-the-wall jazz singer who, after releasing three CDs on an indie, was picked up by a major label (bloodsucking scum, is how I believe she referred to them) only to learn that the major considered her, as Karen put it, a “tax write-off.” She told us that after her album, of which she was incredibly proud, had been released, they’d mailed her ten copies, fired the guy who’d signed her, and did absolutely nothing else to sell or promote it—you literally couldn’t find or buy it in any stores. She was completely disillusioned, but fighting back, in her own way. At the merchandise table after the show, she was selling hand-burned copies of the CDs that the label wouldn’t put into circulation; she even designed a new cover that declared, “KAREN MANTLER’S PET PROJECT—BOOTLEG EDITION,” with a message on the back explaining how her label had screwed her.

  I think we should sign, I said to Brian. I mean…we’ll always have a CD burner. We can always go all Karen Mantler on their asses.

  After a few more go-rounds with the lawyers, we signed the contract in blood. (Actual blood. It was a metal label; we figured that was appropriate.) They paid us $100,000 for the eternal rights to the album that we’d recorded for $20,000 (territory: “the universe,” just in case our albums started selling big on Mars). Thanks to the lawyer, I kept my firstborn—my publishing and merchandising rights.

  First, we paid our lawyer.

  Then I wrote checks to pay back all the loans, which I mailed back with thank-you letters. Then Brian and I took all of our parents out to a celebration dinner in a restaurant fifty feet from my main Bride spot in Harvard Square.

  And then we quit our ice cream, statue, and stripping jobs once and for all.

  I introduced Neil to Anthony in an Italian restaurant in the North End of Boston. Neil and I had been dating for a few months. If they didn’t like each other, I was going to die.

  We ate and drank wine, discussing all manner of things, and I couldn’t help feeling that they were tactically sizing each other up, like two dogs in a park.

  Neil seemed to like Anthony just fine.

  So? So? What did you think? I asked Anthony the next morning, over the phone.

  Anthony said: I don’t know, beauty. He’s smart, that’s for sure. But he seems nervous. You know? Like, freaked out.

  That’s because he was nervous and freaked out, clown-head. I’ve been talking about you since I met him. He was terrified you wouldn’t like him. So…do you like him?

  Anthony made a hmmmmmmm sound.

  WHAT DOES THAT MEAN??

  Why’s it so important to you what I think?

  I dunno. Because you’re you. Just help me out here, okay? You know me better than anyone. And you’ve saved me from like, what—five fatal relationships?

  I have not, said Anthony.

  You have so. Remember Mike? Remember how I thought it would be hilarious to get married in college because NOBODY would BELIEVE IT ha ha ha?

  Well, yeah. That’s true.

  And Oliver? The one who OD’d?

  Well…okay.

  We got a lot of fan mail. Some of it was hate mail, and we built a special page on our website to feature the worst of it. I hand-selected some choice excerpts for the website back in the day:

  You are the worst act I have ever heard. Avril Lavigne is WAY better than you. BUT so are The Backstreet Boys. And THEY FUCKING BLOW. You ugly-looking fuck and the hairy French lookin’ Chinese chick [sic].

  I’m not usually into violent imagery, but when I’m forced to listen to your album I start channeling violent thoughts.

  This shithead in my work (where we have an employee playlist on all the time) keeps putting “Coin-Operated Boy” on the playlist. I hate you, and I hate her. The female in the band looks like German Gestapo unshaven monkey shit. The dude in the band is a coin-operated child molester. Please eat shit and die.

  The hate mail page included, as the centerpiece, this letter to the editor in a Boston music zine:

  It always amazes me how easily impressed Boston audiences are. Especially when it comes to an act like The Dresden Dolls, who are not only mediocre as a duo, but totally unoriginal as well. Amanda can’t get through a show without trying to shock people…and her piano playing is atrocious. It’s obvious that the real brains and the real musician in that band is Brian (stellar drummer by the way, too bad his playing is totally mocked by Miss Palmer). I can’t help but wonder…if Amanda didn’t act like a total ass, or rather, an attention-starved daddy’s girl, flaunting her flabby, hairy body to everyone and playing herself off to be “a performance artist”…would anyone care?

  The hate-mail page became the most heavily trafficked spot on our website.

  People started writing to thank me for being brave enough to display the nastiness. But it didn’t feel brave; it felt like the only option, the only way I could deal with the pain. I still practice this same style of Internet jiujitsu to this day: I grab the hate and air it out, try to laugh at it, and share it back out into the world, so it doesn’t eat me alive. Around the same time that we built the hate-mail page, I started blogging regularly, sharing the good press, the bad press, and my emotional struggles riding the I AM LOVED! I AM HATED! yo-yo of praise and criticism as I tried to simultaneously balance touring, recording, managing the band, and whatever shreds were left of my local social life.

  I was beginning to learn about online abuse, but, as people started to follow my blog by the hundreds, then the thousands, I also had my first taste of crowd power, and how double-edged the sword was.

  We had just gotten our giant label check, paid off our loans, and had enough left over to buy a top-of-the-line drum kit for Brian and, my heart slamming with pride (I was Signed! I was Legitimate!), I started to shop for my first real piano, with a budget of about $20,000, to replace the dilapidated, untuneable piano on which I was currently composing in my apartment (someone had been about to throw it away; I’d paid the moving costs). I wanted something bright sounding and rugged, since I had a tendency to break strings. I went into every single used and new showroom in Boston, fingering the keys and nooks and crannies of every piano for sale with a kind of erotic disbelief that I was in a position to actually buy one. It felt so incredibly real.

  One day I walked into a little piano shop in a converted old house in the deep suburbs. There were only a few other customers poking around; a lone nice-looking guy in a cardigan was minding the floor. I sat down at one of the baby grands and started test-driving it with some loud Beethoven, then with one of my own songs. I closed my eyes and listened, feeling the weight of the keys, hammering away like a maniac.

  The guy approached me politely. I stopped playing.

  Miss? Hello. I’m sorry but I’m going
to have to…ask you to leave.

  Holding my breath, I stood up, picked up my bag, walked out of the store and back to my car, and before I could process what had happened, I broke down crying. He thinks I’m a fraud.

  I drove home and, still weepy, took to my blog. I poured out the whole story for my small readership, how ashamed and angry I felt, how devastating and embarrassing it was. I included the name of the shop, and the address, and encouraged my fans to write the guy a letter if they felt so inclined.

  It wasn’t until the next day, as I read a few emails from fans who told me they had proudly written letters to the shop in protest, that I felt the gravity, the stupidity—the meanness—of what I had done.

  I imagined scolding, scalding hate letters piling up on that poor guy’s desk as he tried to eke out a living running a little piano shop. Sure, he was a dick for throwing me out of his store, but wasn’t I a bigger dick to torment him like that? And wasn’t it even more dickish to use my own fans as weapons of destruction? Ashamed by my realization, I went back to my blog, removed the store name and address, and wrote a follow-up post, telling my fans that I’d been an idiot diva, that it was the insecure teenager talking. Then I prayed that the poor guy would be left in peace. I was afraid to drive down that street for a while.

  I had sampled the power of cruelty. And it tasted awful.

  Still, most of the early fan mail was love mail, not hate mail, and I started exchanging emails and letters with hundreds of fans. It was like having an infinite number of pen pals, and I eventually despaired when, after a few years, the number of emails coming in was more than I could keep up with. It made me feel like a bad friend.

  Sometimes I’d dip into the fan mail just to cheer myself up, to feel useful to the world when I was depressed. Writing songs offered no instant gratification, but reading and answering a letter somehow did. There were recurring themes in the letters: unhappiness, rape, identity crises, self-abuse, suicidal thoughts. I answered as honestly as I could. I hope your parents eventually understand. Stay strong. I know how that feels, I’ve been there. It gets better. Yes, I’m happy to recommend some books on Buddhism. No, I haven’t always been this fearless…I was afraid to play my music for years.