The Art of Asking

by Amanda Palmer

  During one of these answering sprees, I answered a note from a poetic, eccentric-sounding eighteen-year-old named Casey who had written to me from a hospital in Boston. She had ovarian cancer and they had put her in the children’s ward, where she was the oldest patient and having a hard time watching so many of the other children suffer. Getting to know all the parents was the worst thing, she told me. She would meet them and make friends with them and then watch them watch their kids die. After exchanging a handful of emails, I came back to Boston from a West Coast tour and, with my suitcases still unpacked, found myself staring at one of her emails on the screen.

  She’d never asked me to visit. But I got in my car, happy to put off unpacking and facing my real life for an afternoon. I found her room number at the front desk, walked up, and rapped on the door. Her mother opened it, and her eyes blinked with a dawning recognition; she knew my face from The Dresden Dolls gig flyers Casey had taped to the wall of her unit. Hold on, she whispered. She scuttled back behind the curtain and I heard a yelp.

  That was Casey. She was wearing a wig, because of the chemo. I stayed in her room for an hour, picking up where we’d left off over email. She showed me how she’d been taping up hopeful paintings she’d made in her windows, so the children in the ward across the courtyard could see them.

  She didn’t die. We kept emailing. And gradually, she became my close friend. After she recovered, she came to Dolls shows and created beautiful chalk drawings on the sidewalks outside the clubs. Then she went to art college. Then I asked her if she needed a place to live.

  She’s twenty-seven now, a painter with one ovary, the right one, and she’s been my Cloud Club housemate for five years. Lee brings her more reams of paper than she needs. She had a fish for a while named Left Ovary. Then Left Ovary died, and she named her new fish Everything.

  I’d text her from the road to ask,

  How’s everything?

  And she’d text back,

  Everything’s really good. He just pooped.

  When things were particularly bad and she was going through boy trouble or something, I’d text,

  Everything’s going to be okay. Everything exists.

  One day, while I was on tour in Europe, I got a text from Casey saying,

  Everything is gone.

  The politician Tip O’Neill once said something along these lines: If you want to make someone your real friend, ask them for a favor.

  As we forged along, the band made an art out of asking for help—from our housemates, from our friends, from our fans, from our family, from anybody who’d give it.

  We’d done a good job of thoroughly angering and confusing the hell out of the local Boston nightclubs by showing up for gigs with our volunteer artist friends and fans, whom we’d dubbed “The Brigade.” Busker friends of mine stood outside the gigs playing accordions and posing as statues. Burlesque dancers roved around the venue in costume, handing out flowers and ripped-out pages from poetry books. Painter friends set up easels and worked, doing portraits. Volunteers decorated the sidewalks outside the venue, festooning the nooks and crannies of the lobbies and bathrooms with glitter, garlands of flowers, fortune cookies, Barbie doll heads.

  We tried to set up an arm of The Brigade in every city; you just had to volunteer over email—to do basically anything—and I’d grant you a guest-list space. We paid with the usual currency we had on hand: T-shirts, CDs, backstage beer, shout-outs from stage, tickets, love. I announced any local shows or art openings from stage if a member of The Brigade had something coming up.

  In my free time, I tried to hunt down potentially interesting local performers, which was becoming easier now that Google existed and you could search for “insane cabaret performers detroit.” If an extra performer we’d reached out to wanted to get paid for the gig, those decisions were random and made on the fly:

  We’d love to come, but we’re all professionally trained ballerinas, so we need backstage space to warm up, a voice said over the phone as we barreled down the highway to our next stop. Then we set ourselves on fire to songs by Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, mostly all classic rock…but all the dancers live at least an hour outside Detroit and we each need fifty dollars for gas and there will be at least five or six of us.

  I put my hand over the mouthpiece of my phone and turned to Brian, who was driving.

  They’re ballerinas who set themselves on fire to AC/DC but they need money for gas, I whispered.

  For gas to set themselves on fire? Brian asked.

  No, gas for the car.

  HIRED! Brian said, banging the steering wheel.

  We’re totally down, I said into the phone. You sound amazing. We can do like two hundred bucks—however many ballerinas that buys us. Just grab the cash from me after the show. And for god’s sake, talk to the club about the local fire laws. Do you have a website I can post?

  Yes, it’s Tutu Inferno dot org. Spelled T-u-t…

  I got it, I got it. See you Sunday.

  In the streets of Edinburgh one year, I ran into a busking duo called Bang On! who played percussion on junk and household objects. Our UK tour was already packed with opening stage acts, but I asked if they’d like to try a new experiment: to set up and play on the theater floor as people were filing in before the show, then pass the hat. They said they’d give it a shot. I came out half-dressed and half-made-up for the show, watched and applauded them, and then made a personal plea to the crowd, letting them know that these people had come to entertain out of the goodness of their own hearts and weren’t getting otherwise paid. The money poured in, and something about asking everybody—on the spot—to reach into their pockets to help these two artists changed the energy of the room. It turned the random crowd into a real community. It also meant that nobody ever came late to our concerts—the preshow entertainment started being too interesting to miss.

  Other bands pissed off clubs because they would trash the dressing room and steal liquor from the stockroom. We pissed off clubs because the half-naked marching band outside the venue would elicit noise complaints, or because someone would leave a glittery cage of trained mynah birds in the hallway, thus blocking the bar-backs’ path to the ice machine.

  Neil didn’t dance. He wasn’t much of a drinker. He didn’t like hanging out in loud bars unless he had a book.

  These things worried me.

  But I was infatuated with his accent.

  Say it again! I’d plead. Say tomato!

  ToMAHto, he would deadpan, as if not enjoying this game at all.

  I would squeal with glee. Say it again!

  ToMAHto.

  Shivers. It also worked with “schedule” and “banana,” and my very favorite: “wastepaperbasket.” One night I asked him to say it fifteen times. It didn’t get old.

  Late in bed that same night, when I wasn’t expecting it, he surprised me.

  ToMAHto. He whispered into my ear. SHEdule.

  I half opened my eyes and whimpered with pleasure. And then, sounding very pleased with himself, he murmured:

  BaNAHna.

  The label helped us a lot in the early days. They went right to work making the band better known around the world, especially in Europe and Australia. What we’d been doing at a grassroots level had been effective, but it was slow. They worked fast. They got our music into stores, onto the radio and television. Soon we were flying everywhere, hopping on and off tour buses, doing interviews with bigger and bigger magazines.

  We’d heard that they had a reputation for squeezing bands dry and only caring about the bottom line, but that wasn’t what we noticed, not at first. What quickly became apparent to us was that they didn’t understand how to treat—or rather, not treat—our fans. It seemed simple enough to me: you work hard, you play for your crowd, you talk to, communicate with, hug, and connect with them in every possible way, and in turn, they support you and convert their friends into the fold. That’s when music works best, when people use it to commune and connect with one another
. Simple.

  However, the label thought that we could somehow be mega-launched into the echelon of indie bands that were blowing up and selling tons of records out of the gate around that time: The Hives, The Shins, The Vines, The Strokes. We couldn’t: we were too cult-y, our name wasn’t short enough, and we didn’t actually feel hip or destined for hipness. We functioned best as part of a tight community that grew slowly, fan by fan. If it grew too fast, it wouldn’t work. It’d be like suddenly pouring too many new unfamiliar fish into an aquarium and screwing up the ecosystem.

  The label and the band had different ideas about what “enough” meant.

  What was enough to make the band “successful”? We weren’t starving. We could pay our rent. What did we actually…need? To live? To be happy?

  If you’re looking for help, it stands to reason that you’re going to start looking among the people most able to give you the help you need. When your house is on fire, you don’t call the fire department from seven towns over—you call the outfit down the street. They’re the most equipped to help you.

  One of the strategies the label employed that always baffled me was wanting us to focus all the energy on casting the net elsewhere, to attract strangers, while ignoring our established fanbase. I loved new people. Of course. But it seemed insane to jeopardize the current relationships to find them.

  The label’s theory probably followed some kind of cutthroat marketing maxim: once you’ve got a customer, you’ve got ’em. Move on to the next victim. Except that our driving motivation was to hang out with and bond with our small group of existing customers, whom we’d worked so hard to find in the first place. We knew from experience that our evolving friendship was slowly but surely bringing new people into the fray. Making fans that way—in person, one by one, as they were won over at our shows by our harder-core fans—seemed more effective than going out there and hollering on the radio to a group of unknowns, hoping to be heard by someone who might like us. Our way felt more like getting introduced to a person by a mutual friend, personally, at a bar over drinks. It felt real.

  When I reflect on the last fifteen years of my life in music—all the touring, talking, late-night signing, blogging, twittering, couchsurfing, crowdsurfing, and all other variety of eye-to-eye, soul-to-soul, hand-to-hand connection I’ve shared with the members of my crowd—I see it as a net.

  It has to start with the art. The songs had to touch people initially, and mean something, for anything to work at all. The art, not the artist, is what fundamentally draws the net into being. The net was then tightened and strengthened by a collection of interactions and exchanges I’ve had, personally, whether in live venues or online, with members of my community.

  I couldn’t outsource it. I could hire help, but not to do the fundamental things that create emotional connections: the making of the art, the feeling-with-other-people at a human level. Nobody can do that work for me—no Internet marketing company, no manager, no assistants. It had to be me.

  That’s what I do all day on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and my blog. The platform is irrelevant. I’ll go wherever the people are. What’s important is that I absorb, listen, talk, connect, help, and share. Constantly. The net gets so strong at a certain point that I can let it go for a few days—maybe weeks—and it keeps weaving and bolstering itself. But I can’t leave for very long.

  The net tightens every time I pick up my phone and check in on Twitter, every time I share my own story, every time I ask a fan how their project is coming or promote somebody’s book or tour.

  The net tightens when someone in the community loses her houseboat in a fire and tweets me for help, and I throw the information out to the fanbase, who go to work offering money, shelter, cat-sitting, and words of kindness.

  It tightens when two people meet in line at one of my shows, fall in love, and come to a signing line after a concert three years later, asking me to Sharpie a swelling, pregnant belly.

  I feel pride when I see that magic happening: the fans helping one another out, giving one another places to stay, driving one another around, helping one another with comforting words and links in the middle of the night, breaking the boundaries of “stranger” etiquette because they feel a trust and familiarity with one another under our common roof.

  And I feel it at my shows, when I see people standing aside to allow a short person to see the stage, or carving a path for a person in a wheelchair, or just sharing a bottle of water. We’re all helping each other. Here. Now.

  The label didn’t understand why they should pay for the band to maintain a website year-round. They thought it was something that only needed to be “up” when we had a new record to promote, and wouldn’t pay to keep the site active the rest of the time. I was baffled.

  I don’t think you guys get it. Our website is like…a Real Place. It needs to exist all the time. You don’t shut it down and then come back later.

  The whole point of being an artist, I thought, was to be connected to people. To make a family. A family you were with all the time, like it or not. This was the way we’d been doing it for years, whether or not we had an album or a tour to “promote.”

  I knew the way to keep the fans happy was by staying present—through the forums, through sharing people’s art and music back out through the Internet channels, through keeping everybody connected. That’s just how a relationship works. And when the time came to ask them to buy a record, to buy a ticket, whatever…if I’d been there for them, they’d be there for me. It went beyond the emotional; it also seemed like smart business. The label disagreed. They wanted to expand. Immediately.

  Tightening the net is not the same thing as expanding it. If you spread your net too far, too fast, it stretches too thin and it breaks; or it stretches too wide to be able to catch anything. The label didn’t seem to understand that we didn’t work like a pop band. We were far more interested in serving our slowly growing, tight-knit community of weirdos than we were in topping the charts.

  So we threw up our hands and paid for everything ourselves: our web designers, our forum, our emailing list costs. The label asked for access to the mailing list, but I said no. I didn’t trust them with my fans’ email addresses. They were more than addresses; they were relationships.

  I didn’t ask them for any more help in the Internet department.

  The relationship with the label was doomed from the start, when I think about it.

  They got the sex part. But they didn’t understand the cuddle.

  I shot the video for my song “Leeds United” in London, casting hundreds of volunteer fans we’d enlisted through the blog and the email list. They came, from all over the UK, dressed to the nines in everything from Victorian formal wear to tongue-in-cheek soccer hooligan garb, and dutifully engaged in a pie-throwing brawl while I lip-synched and danced around onstage. While the video was being edited, one of the label higher-ups called me in for a meeting at their offices in New York.

  Just wanted to chat with you about the new video. The director just sent us the first cut.

  Yes! Isn’t it great? She killed it!

  Yeah. It’s a great video. So, Amanda. Here’s the thing. We think some of the shots of you aren’t that…flattering.

  He told me how they were concerned about my image and how they hoped I could edit out the shots that made me look fat.

  Now, my relationship with my body is pretty healthy. I’ve never been massively overweight or underweight. I’ve never had an eating disorder or any kind of body dysmorphia. I’m pretty comfortable with myself. I don’t shave my armpits or legs very often (though sometimes I will, just to feel my legs slide around on fresh sheets like slippery eels; it’s delightful), and I’ve learned to accept that people sometimes stare. I shave my eyebrows and paint them back on.4 I like to think I’ve managed to attain a decent level of corporeal self-acceptance over the years. That being said: I’m still vain. I still cringe when I see my belly after a monthlong muffin-and-beer binge, s
pilling over a waistline that’s too tight. No lie: I wanted to look hot in this video. But try as I might, I just couldn’t agree with the label’s assessment. The shots the label objected to didn’t seem unflattering to me. They just seemed…real. I thought I looked fine.

  So I refused to make the edits.

  The video went up, “unflattering” belly and all, and I told the whole story to the blog. The label considered this an act of war, and in a way, it was. It was the first time I’d publicly complained about our relationship.

  Then something unexpected happened. A few people posted pictures of their own bellies—some fat, some thin, some hairy, some with Caesarean scars—on the band discussion forum. A few bellies bore messages aimed at the label (LOVE THY BELLY! BELLY PRIDE! THIS IS WHAT A BELLY LOOKS LIKE!) in paint and marker. I watched, in happy amazement, as more people followed suit. This was in the days before I was on Twitter and Facebook, but a few days later, hundreds of pictures had been uploaded, and one fan took it upon himself to bind them into a book. The fans had even given the viral movement a title: the ReBellyon.

  It was the first time my fanbase had created something like this on their own at this scale, and I watched from a distance like a proud parent.

  The irony wasn’t lost on me. These were the people I was making the video for. In my opinion, they were the ones who were supposed to love it, and thereby feel encouraged to buy more music and drive the sales up. They were the target audience, as far as I was concerned, not some ephemeral, theoretical audience—dreamed up by the record label—who would rush to Walmart demanding my music upon seeing my svelte figure in a video. My crowd was making it very clear to me that not only were they fine with seeing my non-anorexic belly, they were also locked in solidarity with my decision to look like an average person instead of a Photoshopped supermodel.