The Art of Asking

by Amanda Palmer

  I figured, if my fans were okay with it, I could be okay with it. Because really, who was trying to impress whom?

  I’d thought that I already had a relatively healthy body image, but this moment shifted things for me. I started to take a sense of pride in my own “flaws.” I blogged about the wrinkly crease on my forehead, challenging myself to accept it, I twittered a picture of my thigh stretch marks. Every piece of sharing opened a floodgate of shared insecurities and relieved “it’s not just me” comments and photos from men and women alike.

  And bit by bit, I started judging myself a little less harshly every time I looked in the mirror. The fans gave me that gift, very directly. They weren’t some imaginary enemy, sizing me up and judging my weight, my skin, my tits, my ability to look perfect. They didn’t care how the package delivering the music—me—looked as long as we were all making one another happy, and taking care of one another.

  They were all just a bunch of people.

  The imaginary enemy had been in my head.

  If I had an enemy at all, it was the label.

  Anthony never really asked me for anything—certainly never for money, I didn’t have any. He hated lateness, so he would ask me to be punctual for our groks.5 He also asked, usually joking, that I love him unconditionally, and without judgment, which was easy. That was love, or so I was learning. It was what he was teaching me.

  But one time he asked me for something specific, and big. I was in my midtwenties, in the midst of making the first Dresden Dolls record. It was Christmastime, so I was kicking around closer to Boston for a few days, off tour, to be with my family and spend time on the couch in Anthony’s study, recuperating and grokking.

  We’d been talking on the phone almost every day that month, and I knew that Anthony’s wife, Laura, had been going through a rough time, and he’d been worried about her. He’d been going through a pretty hefty depression himself. I’d take breaks from the studio and from cranking out vocals and fiddling with piano levels to check in and see how he was doing.

  Laura and I hadn’t been very close when I was a teenager; she’d wondered, like everyone else in the neighborhood, what this angsty teenage girl was doing hanging out with her husband all the time. And she just looked to me like…an adult. But once I hit my twenties and created my own life, while deepening my friendship with Anthony, we started to understand and even love each other. We never got as close as Anthony and I had, but we became warmer friends. Allies.

  They never had kids. I was sort of the closest thing.

  Anthony was older than Laura. He started morbidly musing one night about how he hoped she would die first, just so she wouldn’t ever have to be alone without him.

  But if I do die, look after her, okay? he said. It’s been haunting me lately. I can’t handle the idea of her being alone. I can’t stand the idea of her falling down the stairs, and being hurt…any of that. Just promise me you’ll check in if I check out.

  A few nights later, I wrote him a letter. On Christmas Eve, I walked across my folks’ lawn to his study. I knocked the snow off my boots and collapsed onto the couch.

  Here, I wrote you something.

  It was a pretty simple letter. He poured me a glass of wine from a bottle in his little study fridge, and sat down to read it.

  I promise I’ll take care of Laura if you die, the letter said.

  I’ll watch out for her, I’ll check in, I’ll make sure she isn’t too alone.

  And I’ll do it not because you asked me.

  Not because you love me.

  I’ll do it because I love her, even though she barely knows it.

  I’ll do it because you’ve taught me what love is, and how easily you can give it.

  I’ll take care of what you love.

  I’ll be there for Laura when you’re gone and you’re not around to do it.

  I promise.

  He put the letter down and looked at me.

  That was the first time I saw Anthony cry.

  My blog readership grew steadily as I started to dump more of my inner self onto the page. I shared the backstage stories, I promoted the shows, I asked for volunteers, I posted digital postcards from every visual and emotional vantage. I publicly thanked anyone who helped us. I was punch-drunk from the instant gratification of sharing life in real time, the random closeness, the feeling that I wasn’t going through my struggles alone. When things went well, I blogged. When they went badly, I blogged. I tried not to sugarcoat. Sometimes I would post a short blog and get back over a thousand comments in which people would share their own stories, their own experiences. Sometimes I’d post a lengthy commentary about something I found fascinating, and get little or no response. I learned to love that about my fans: they weren’t sheep, they were people. I never knew what to expect, or how they’d react.

  People started using me to help one another. I wrote blogs about body image and watched discussions and confessions explode in the comments, because people (of all genders) felt safe talking to one another. I took a poll on Twitter about health insurance. I asked people to provide: 1) COUNTRY?! 2) profession? 3) insured? 4) if not, why not, if so, at what cost per month (or covered by job)? Thousands responded. I posted the poll results on my blog and watched teenagers from the UK and the US now discussing health care, amazed by the fact that their systems were so different. They hadn’t known.

  The dots kept connecting. One day, I stumbled across the story of Amanda Todd, a Canadian teenager who had committed suicide after being bullied, online and off, by some cruel kids in her school. A few months before her death, she’d posted a plea for help on YouTube, in which she simply held up written signs telling her story of loneliness, suicide attempts, and fear.

  I posted the story and her video to the blog. It had hit a nerve for me. I’ve become adept at fielding Internet hate bombs: people hated my band, my lyrics, my eyebrows, my videos, my feminist politics, my armpit hair. I’d gotten used to waking up to a daily assault of love and hate coming at me over the Internet, and dealing with all those emotional landmines was becoming a skill in itself. I was a thirty-five-year-old who had grown a thick skin, and it was still a daily struggle. Amanda Todd was a kid. Fifteen. I couldn’t imagine being the target of an Internet hate campaign at fifteen. I wrote about all of this, and a young woman named Shannon Eck commented on the blog:

  Story time. I am fat. I’m not a fan of being fat and have, in fact, struggled with it my entire life…

  She told us about a boy named Austin who used to torment her in gym class, calling her a cow, making up songs about how she was a fat bitch, and about how much she struggled to deal with his constant onslaught of cruelty. And about how a few months into that school year, Austin killed himself. And about how she wept the day he died.

  Most bullies are the way they are because of how they have been treated, she wrote. They just don’t know any different. They don’t know how to deal with their emotions, so they lash out. Austin’s death broke my heart, but it made me open my eyes. What if I had tried to just talk to him? Would it have made any difference? Probably not. But at the end of the day, we’re all human. We’re all broken in a way, and we’re just trying to feel whole. I try to understand where people are coming from, even if they are being horrible to me. When I would get mean messages online, I would instantly retaliate with something equally terrible and soul-crushing. After Austin, I didn’t do that.

  Her story set off a rash of sharing and other stories, and the readers deepened the conversation in the blog comments, sharing confessions from both sides of the bullying fence. One young teenage girl blogged about her suicidal thoughts, and a few fans rushed in to support her, comfort her, send her their own phone numbers. The net tightened.

  That blog (which I titled “On Internet Hatred: Please Inquire Within”) still lives online and now has more than two thousand comments. Every time someone reads it and adds in their own story, the net continues to tighten. We were and are creating our own space, our own
history. The blog started feeding my songwriting.

  But since The Media (Rolling Stone, the New York Times, MTV) wasn’t reporting on any of these sorts of things at the time—the blog discussions and the Twitter exchanges involving thousands of people—it didn’t seem important to the label. They were busy bemoaning the fact that SPIN still didn’t want to review our latest record. This was happening before anyone was paying much attention to Twitter: these sorts of new social media happenings—which had yet to be defined—were something the label missed completely. None of it seemed to have anything to do with how many records they could sell. It wasn’t in the marketing plan, so it didn’t exist.

  I was learning, slowly but surely, that The Media—the traditional one, at any rate—mattered less and less. The ability to connect directly, under our own umbrella, was making one thing very clear:

  We were The Media.

  From the dawn of The Dresden Dolls, I saw our fans making art inspired by our music, and I loved it. Anything that was band-inspired was uploaded to the website and celebrated, and as video came to the Internet and YouTube exploded, the fans started to make their own unofficial music videos using our tracks. Some artists pulled and punished content like that, since the fans didn’t own rights to the music.

  We not only allowed it, we encouraged it. One year, while opening up for another band, we booked a string of sideshows in art-house cinemas and ran a film festival with content made by our friends and the fanbase, including fan-made Dresden Dolls videos and the fans’ own original animations and shorts. We called it “Fuck The Back Row.”

  To this day, some of the fans’ unofficial videos surpass the view counts of our official videos on YouTube. We not only don’t mind it—we openly celebrate it.

  I was in a meeting at the label’s New York office with my manager at the time, Emily, who was young and sharp and understood the concept of pay-what-you-want. I was trying to figure out how to leverage all my digital power for the release of a new album. It seemed like a good idea, given the spirit of generosity and trust we shared with the fanbase.

  Three weeks before, Radiohead had put out In Rainbows, the first pay-what-you-want album release from a well-known band, and we had been jumping up and down, saying, “Yes! Yes! That!” The story was all over the music and tech news and was a vital, breathtaking moment in the industry: for better or worse, it was obvious that the Internet had already changed everything and was going to make it possible for bands and fans to start doing business directly. Emily and I stood by a window in one of the corner offices, with the owner, the president, the in-house label lawyer, and a handful of other people, to talk about The Future.

  The president said to the owner:

  Have you heard about this whole “Radiohead” thing?

  Emily and I looked at each other and were about to say Yes! Yes! The Thing! The Thing! before we were interrupted by the owner, who asked, suspiciously:

  What is this “Radiohead”?

  Our jaws dropped. We stayed silent.

  Radiohead, said the president to the owner. You know, the British band.

  The owner frowned.

  They’re big, they’re big. Anyway, they just released an album on THE INTERNET, for NOTHING, they let the fans decide the price of the album, in a little box where you can choose your price.

  The owner shook his head in disgust. The president shook his head in disgust. The lawyer shook his head in disgust. And Emily and I shook our heads in a totally different kind of disgust.

  I didn’t know what was worse: that the owner of my label didn’t know who Radiohead was, or that he didn’t know that Radiohead had released a free record THREE WEEKS AGO in a move that had the ENTIRE MUSIC INDUSTRY talking. I figured he must at LEAST be like the president of the United States, getting little briefings at his desk every morning from some interior secretary of music industry information. Who was this guy?

  When The Dresden Dolls recorded our second studio album in collaboration with the label, things went from okay to bad to toxic. We’d made our first record totally on our own, with no outside input, using all those loans from friends, fans, and family, and then simply sold it to the label. For this second record, the label fronted the money and the costs for the studio and producers, and told us that

  THIS RECORD WAS GOING TO BE THE ONE THAT MADE US BIG!

  We still had piles of songs that we hadn’t recorded yet, and I was writing all the time, so we went from touring to promote our first album straight into the studio for the second. With the label’s financial resources and a small army of engineers and producers, we recorded Yes, Virginia.

  The record took about a month to finish and sounded magnificent; every song was an emotional nuclear bomb and it was a perfect sonic snapshot of the band at our live, bombastic best. The first week it hit the stores, we played a new city every single night and signed in record stores every day. The album hit the Billboard charts and sold twenty-five thousand copies. Brian and I were elated and danced around like kids on crack.

  TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND PEOPLE BOUGHT OUR RECORD!!!

  The label was not so quick to celebrate. When the second week of sales didn’t surpass the first week, they phoned to say they were cutting the entire promotional budget of the record. All the videos we’d planned wouldn’t be shot; any tour support they’d promised was pulled immediately: any marketing ideas on the table were scrapped. They were very sorry, they said, but they didn’t see any point in continuing to push it given that the initial sales were so bad. The album was considered a failure.

  I could not wrap my head around the idea that selling twenty-five thousand records was bad—especially when our fans hadn’t even had the chance to really hear it yet, talk about it, spread the word, tell their friends, and so forth. People were still just finding out about us. We knew these songs. We knew our fans. We’d seen how it worked on the first record, which continued to sell consistently after every show and online, as people fell, one by one, slowly in love with the band. I knew how this worked. It would be gradual. But it would happen.

  The label didn’t want to discuss it. Their decision sent us up shit’s creek financially, because we’d laid out tens of thousands of dollars from our own pockets for tour costs that the label had promised to repay, and now they were reneging. I couldn’t believe it.

  You’re leaving?

  No CUDDLE?

  I tried to argue. When they finally stooped so low as to use the H word—We’ve also sent the album to people who specialize in radio play, Amanda, and to be honest…they just don’t hear a Hit—I gave up completely.

  We didn’t need a fucking Hit. We were a punk-cabaret duo specializing in tear-jerking seven-minute songs with drum solos. We were not radio friendly. Our audience loved us precisely for all the weird, radio-unfriendly shit we did. We weren’t in the hit business, or anywhere near it; we were in the community-art-cult-poetry-family-love business. Even the music itself was only a part of it.

  The recorded songs, the tangible CDs, were only the tip of the iceberg: the perfect, frozen, beautiful soundtrack for something far bigger, and far deeper.

  The connection underneath was everything.

  A 2010 Princeton University study conducted by two economists concluded that money DOES buy happiness, but only up to the point (which turns out to be an individual annual income of about $75,000) where you have your basic needs met along with a few extra comforts. After that, the ability to buy happiness with money nosedives.

  Right: it’s not rocket science. We need to eat, we need shelter, a meal in a restaurant is nice. But there’s a satiation level, a happiness threshold you hit when you have enough.

  I don’t know of any such formal studies of working musicians, but I see the same patterns in artistic success. The happiest artists I know are generally the ones who can manage to make a reasonable living from their art without having to worry too much about the next paycheck. Not to say that every artist who sits around the campfire, or plays
in tiny bars, is “happier” than those singing in stadiums—but more isn’t always better. If feeling the connection between yourself and others is the ultimate goal, it can actually be harder when you are separated from your crowd by a thirty-foot barrier. The ideal sweet spot is the one in which the artist can freely share their talents and directly feel the reverberations of their artistic gifts to their community, and make a living doing that. In other words, it works best when everybody feels seen.

  As artists, and as humans: if your fear is scarcity, the solution isn’t necessarily abundance. To quote Brené Brown again:

  Abundance and scarcity are two sides of the same coin. The opposite of “never enough” isn’t abundance or “more than you could ever imagine.”

  Which is to say, the opposite of “never enough” is simply:

  Enough.

  We had to get off the label. But they wouldn’t let us go.

  At first, I asked nicely. During a tour in Europe, I went out to dinner with the owner, and requested to be dropped.

  Amanda, Amanda, he said. You are a very talented girl. Very charismatic and you write very good songs. But you get in your own way wasting your time on all this fans-this and fans-that and the Internet-this and the Internet-that. One of these days you are going to focus and write some hit songs that are going to make a lot of money. I have faith in you. We are not dropping you.

  Then he winked at me.

  I blasted them in my blog. I complained about them openly in the press. I wrote them a letter-song called “Please Drop Me” to the tune of “Moon River,” performed it live, and asked the fans to video and upload to YouTube (they obliged). The label ignored it.

  Meanwhile, the age of burning and downloading was in full flourish.