The Art of Asking

by Amanda Palmer

  Because I was blogging so openly about wanting to be dropped from the label, and also explaining transparently that we, the band, were seeing absolutely no profit from the records people were buying in stores (it was obvious, at that point, that we would never recoup our advance) an interesting phenomenon sprang up at the signing table. People started handing us money.

  I know it’s illegal, but I burned your CD from a friend. I know you hate your label and stuff…I just wanted to give you this ten dollars. I love the record.

  I’ve been downloading your stuff for a few months and there’s no way to pay you. So here’s a twenty. I read on your blog that you wouldn’t get the money even if I went into a store and bought the CD, so here.

  I feel really guilty, I’ve been listening to burned copies of both of your CDs. Here’s five dollars. I know it isn’t much but I can’t stand the feeling that I’ve never paid for them.

  A few people even took their checkbooks out and wrote us checks for the money they thought they “owed” us.

  I was happily astonished, and I also took every single dollar. I’d been a stripper and a silent street performer; I was used to taking people’s dollar bills with grace. I never refused, I just took the money given to us, feeling grateful that I had a voice, literally, to thank the patrons personally.

  Thank you.

  Thank you.

  Thank you.

  The label still wouldn’t drop us.

  Asking wasn’t working.

  Finally, I decided to lie.

  I don’t like lying.

  I had a tour stop in Los Angeles, and Freddie, my A&R guy (Dave, the guy who signed us, had long since been fired), was also in town. I called him up and we arranged to meet for dinner.

  Ten minutes before he showed up, I drank a shot of whiskey. I poured another shot down my shirt. As he was pulling up in his car outside my cousins’ house where I was staying, I gargled. With whiskey. In vino veritas; I figured if he thought I was drunk, he’d never think I was lying. I got in his car, hugged him, and told him I’d been feeling really bad about all the tension and crazy label stuff. I was sorry. I hiccupped.

  Over dinner, I asked Freddie about parenthood. He had kids, and happily told me his child-rearing stories. I listened, getting misty-eyed.

  Finally, over dessert, I burst into what I hoped were uncontrollable-looking tears. Freddie sat there uncomfortably as I told him that all I wanted was a family. How I was tired of touring, tired of the fans, tired of the grind. I worried aloud that if I got pregnant, the label would think of me as a failure. I sniveled through my martini, swayed a little, and blew my nose on the sleeve of my dress.

  No, no. Oh…Amanda, Freddie assured me, putting his hand on my arm. So you know, that would never happen. We’ve put all this time and energy into you because we BELIEVE in you. Okay? And in your whole career. It may be bumpy now but we’re in this for the long haul. That’s exactly why we won’t drop you. And if you want to have children, you should. And that would never hurt your standing with the label. Never. Ever.

  Really? Truly? I said, sniffling.

  Really. Truly, Fred said, kindly.

  Okay. Please, please promise me that this stays between you and me, okay? Please don’t tell anybody at the label. Promise?

  He promised, and drove me back to my cousins’ house. I called Neil.

  I just pretended to be drunk and lied to my label guy all night about being brood-y and it felt really, really, really gross.

  I love you, fake-drunk girlfriend, he said. Did it work? Were you a good liar?

  I want a fucking Oscar. I cried real tears. Meryl-Streep-level shit, I told him.

  A month later, I got a letter from my lawyer.

  The label had dropped me.

  DO YOU SWEAR TO TELL THE TRUTH THE WHOLE TRUTH & NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH SO HELP YOUR BLACK ASS

  (with thanks to N.W.A)

  When I was six years old my sister Alyson

  Asked for a stove for her birthday

  A miniature one you could actually cook with

  And my mom was nice and she bought one

  Alyson needed a reason to bake something

  Barged in my room and she grabbed me

  She said:

  “I made a cake and we’re going next door

  To Sam Weinstein’s and you’re getting married”

  The cake was burned

  It tasted gross

  She made me kiss him

  On the mouth

  Now I am thirty-three

  Unmarried happily

  No plans in life and I’m planning to keep it that way

  I do kissing with only one mission:

  Do you like to kiss? Then you have my permission

  And I have already spent too much time

  Doing things I didn’t want to

  So if I just want to make out all the time

  You can bet your black ass that I’m going to.

  When I was nine I was kind of a loser

  The kids in my class didn’t like me

  Melanie Chow was the meanest of all

  And my mom made me go to her party

  Nobody talked to me, I sat there quietly

  Drawing with crayons on a napkin

  A picture of Melanie skewered with a pitchfork

  Her legs getting eaten by lions

  The cake was good

  I took some home

  I had a party

  In my room

  Now I have friends and I’m not such a loser

  But I go to bars all the time and I sit there

  And order red wine and I write and I like being alone around people

  Yes that’s how I like it

  And I’ve already spent too much time

  Doing things I didn’t want to

  So if I wanna sit here and write and drink wine

  You can bet your black ass that I’m going to

  Yes I come here often

  Sure I’ll have another one

  Yes I come here often

  Sure I’ll have another one.

  (But I don’t have to talk to you)

  When I was seventeen I was a blowjob queen

  Picking up tips from the masters

  I was so busy perfecting my art I was clueless to what they were after

  Now I’m still a blowjob queen (far more selectively)

  I don’t make love now to make people love me

  But I don’t mind sharing my gift with the planet

  We’re all gonna die and a blowjob’s fantastic

  And when I was twenty-five I was a rock star

  But it didn’t pay too well, I had to strip on the side

  Of the road to get ready for shows and the cars driving by

  Baby, they’d never know

  What a bargain they’d gotten

  And if I’m forgotten

  I’m perfectly happy with all that has happened

  And I still get laughed at but it doesn’t bother me

  I’m just so glad to hear laughter around me

  And I’ve already spent too much time

  Doing things I didn’t want to

  So if I want to drink alone dressed like a pirate

  Or look like a dyke

  Or wear high heels and lipstick

  Or hide in a convent

  Or try to be mayor

  Or marry a writer

  Smoke crack and slash tires

  Make jokes you don’t like

  Or paint ducks and retire

  You can bet your black ass that I’m going to.

  —from An Evening With Neil

  Gaiman & Amanda Palmer, 2013

  You remember what Joe said, about the horse? Anthony once asked me.

  Joe was Anthony’s dad, who would show up as a recurring character in Anthony’s stories. I loved the stories from when he was little.

  Okay, Anthony, Joe would ask. You wanna be smart? Or you wanna be stupid?

  I wanna be smart, Anthony-the
-kid would answer.

  Okay, I’ll tell ya. You wanna be stupid? Then you do what you want. If you wanna be smart? You listen to me. And with that, Joe would dispense his advice.

  Joe’s saying about the horse was one of Anthony’s favorites.

  It’s one thing to want a horse to win, Joe would tell him. And it’s another thing to buy the ticket.

  All artists connect the dots differently. We all start off with all these live, fresh ingredients that are recognizable from the reality of our experiences (a heartbreak, a finger, a parent, an eyeball, a glass of wine) and we throw them in the Art Blender.

  My songs are personal and intimate; a lot of them chronicle my inner life. I mine the depths of my own experience and lay it on the page, sometimes naked, sometimes in costume. I fictionalize to protect myself and my targets (though I’ve still had to organize several apology dinners with ex-lovers in order to ask forgiveness). I tend to only let things mix and blur very slightly, which is to say, I usually keep my blender on a low setting. On a scale from one to ten, it’s at level three. If you look, you can still recognize the component parts: in the final art gazpacho, the finger might be severed and mangled, but you can still peer into the bowl and see it floating there.

  Neil writes fiction about very non-real things: a book about a boy raised by ghosts in a graveyard; an America in which old gods and new battle over humanity’s fate; graphic novels in which a star that falls from the sky turns out to be a girl with a broken leg. Neil sets his Art Blender at eleven. The reader usually has no idea where the experiences of his life have settled in the superfine purée of the final product. You may taste a finger, but it’s not recognizable as a human one.

  Since I’ve met him, he’s dialed his blender down a bit for certain projects, and I’ve dialed mine up. Neil and I have wound up as human ingredients in each other’s work. During my previous breakup, and before I’d started the slow descent into loving him, Neil and I went to a trout farm, and found ourselves witnessing our dinner being clubbed and gutted by the fishmonger. One of the tiny trout hearts laying on the metal counter didn’t stop beating for several minutes. It was tragic, and beyond symbolic, given the relationship from which I was currently struggling to extricate my own heart.

  The image gave birth to a poem by Neil (“Conjunctions”—blender level: 8) and one of the best songs on my then-forthcoming Kickstarter record (“Trout Heart Replica”—blender level: 5). Neil told me an anecdote about a relationship where the beds and the emotional distance got bigger and bigger, and I turned it into a song. We started to blend with each other, the only way we knew how. Using art. Collecting and connecting the dots of each other’s lives. All art, no matter what shape it is, has to come from somewhere.

  We can only connect the dots that we can collect.

  As soon as the label dropped me, I posted a celebration blog, thanking everyone at the various international offices of the label for all the work they’d done (the thanks were sincere; many of them had done wonderful, helpful things for us, and I was sad to lose the relationships), and thanking the fans for supporting me. I also raced into a studio and recorded a song I’d just written, which stole its title from lyrics from “Fuck Tha Police” by N.W.A: It was called “Do You Swear To Tell The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth So Help Your Black Ass” and it was, appropriately, about how I hate being told what to do.

  I uploaded the song, for free download, along with my jubilant blog, and, for the first time, I put out my virtual hat. I asked the fans to pay whatever they wanted for the song. Some took it for free, some paid a dollar, some paid a hundred dollars in a gesture of symbolic congratulations. It worked.

  I decided, at that moment—unlike other bands who were aligning with the RIAA (who was shutting down Napster and arresting teenagers for “pirating” music)—that I would try to make things as freely available as I could: I would encourage sharing, burning, torrenting, and downloading. But I would leave my hat out, I would ask, and I would work from a place of gratitude if people stepped up to help. I wanted it to be like the street.

  I didn’t want to force people to help me. I wanted to let them.

  They say: What’s the harm in asking?

  But asking can hurt.

  When I was just breaking ground on this book, I was on tour and found myself staying with Duncan, one of my very distant European relatives, one night while everybody else camped in the tour bus. We were enjoying a late breakfast on his sunny back porch, and he asked what I was scribbling in my journal. I told him that I was thinking about the difference between “asking” and “begging.”

  Asking… Duncan said. Asking. Hm. That’s interesting. I’m a person who really doesn’t like to ask for things. And the funny thing is, the less you like asking, the worse off you can be when you finally do.

  What do you mean?

  I’ll tell you a story. My mother and my aunt were in this awful feud, he began, pouring milk into his second cup of coffee. When my grandmother died, she left an antique rosary to my mother, who felt she deserved it because she’d converted to Catholicism when she married. But my aunt was an antiques dealer and apparently had expressed an interest in it, and my grandmother had promised it to her, and blah blah blah…you get the picture. Fury on both sides. They didn’t speak for three years. Can you imagine? And when my mother started battling cancer, I suffered watching them not talk for another year, while my mother got weaker, until I finally found the nerve to call my aunt and say, “Listen. I’ve never asked for anything from you, but now I am, with everything I’ve got. Call my mother. Please, just pick up the phone and smooth it over, apologize even if you feel you’re lying. She’s dying and this is helping kill her. You don’t even have to do it for her. I’m asking you to do it for me.”

  And do you know what she said?

  I shook my head.

  She said no.

  I let out a sigh.

  It was so hard to ask, Duncan said. I never ask anyone for anything. And I’d finally asked.

  He was quiet for a second.

  That answer, Amanda…it crushed me.

  Around the time the label freed me, I was still skeptical about Twitter, which I thought of as the social media tool that people used to share what they’d had for breakfast.

  A few months later, I was in Austin for the SXSW music conference when Neil and Zoë Keating, my touring cellist, dragged me onto the Twitter wagon and gave me a quick lesson, showing me the little box into which you could input your 140 characters of text. I set up the account and told the fans. I twittered a few pictures. Then I dipped my toe in more experimental water, announcing that I would be hosting a pillow fight.

  ANYONE IN AUSTIN!?! TODAY. 3:17 PM!!! PILLOW FIGHT. Corner of red river & 6th. TELL EVERYBODY. Bring pillow!

  I only had a few thousand followers, but I guessed at least a few dozen of them were at SXSW. I wasn’t giving them a whole lot of warning, though, and I had no idea what to expect. Ten people? Twenty?

  At 3:15 p.m. I showed up at the corner of Red River and Sixth Streets with a pillow to find a crowd of around a hundred people—all armed with pillows—milling around. As soon as they saw me, with no words exchanged, we all attacked each other. (Nobody was injured.)

  It was AN AMAZING PILLOW FIGHT, I said to Neil, showing him the photos later that night. I wonder if they enjoyed it as much as I did.

  Have you checked Twitter? Neil asked.

  What do you mean, “checked Twitter”?

  Neil started laughing. I hadn’t realized that Twitter allows you to see the people talking to or about you. I’d thought it was simply a one-way communication device. I had been shouting into my Twitter megaphone without realizing, for three weeks, that thousands of people had been responding.

  STOP LAUGHING AND SHOW ME HOW TO DO IT, I said.

  Neil introduced me to the “mentions” function, and my phone filled up with a list of hundreds of comments, pictures, short videos of pillow fights, thank-yous, and
general buzz about the event that had just occurred. After that, I was convinced. I haven’t left Twitter since.

  Explaining how I use Twitter to those who’ve never used it is difficult. It’s a blurry Möbius strip of love, help, information, and social-art-life exchange.

  Only now does it occur to me that my first official “twittered” flash gig—The Epic SXSW Pillow Fight At Sixth And River—featured no actual music. I just twittered, hit my fans with pillows, hugged them, and took off. But I didn’t bother to play any songs, and nobody seemed to mind much. They just seemed deliriously happy to be part of something so sudden and surprising. Plus, how could I play music spontaneously in the street? I’m a pianist.

  I started playing the piano when I was three—because there it was, in the house—and since then I’ve been a generally monogamous instrumentalist. Occasional fantasies of learning how to play the cello, the guitar, and the acoustic bass have all been left unrealized.

  Around the time I discovered the joys of Twitter, I bought a twenty-dollar wooden red ukulele with a plastic fretboard—the world’s smallest, cutest, easiest instrument—as a gag for a friend’s benefit at a small nightclub. In one short evening, I taught myself to play “Creep” by Radiohead, looking up the chords on the Internet. Instead of playing on the nightclub stage, I hopped up onto the bar, and then hopped down to weave through the crowd, playing my ukulele—truth be told—pretty badly. I thought my affair with the instrument would end there, but during that five-minute performance, I was amazed at the power that one little mini-guitar could wield.

  Playing the song that night felt like a gimmick, but that summer, I toted the ukulele around with me, for kicks. Cyndi Lauper—my childhood hero (eight-year-old me was beside herself)—invited The Dresden Dolls to open for her on a summer package tour called True Colors, the proceeds of which would benefit the Matthew Shepard Foundation. Almost every night of the tour, I did a quick busking experiment and played “Creep” by Radiohead, still the only song I knew, in the parking lot or the lobby of the venue, with a hat at my feet. I liked surprising people, and they laughed, applauded, and threw in dollars and change. The collected take from the hat went to the foundation, and there it was again, that feeling: