Yearly Archives: 2013
In Stores Now: An Evening With Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer
An Evening With Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer is available in stores now.
Recorded live in 2012, and initially released as a limited edition set to Kickstarter backers, Neil and Amanda now bring the experience to you for your listening pleasure.
Enjoy 3 full discs of Neil and Amanda performing audience favorites, duets, cover songs, poetry, short stories, and more!
The live album can be purchased within the webshop HERE.
Disc 1
01- My Last Landlady
02- The Rhyme Maidens
03- The Day The Saucers Came
04- Feminine Endings
05- The Winter Gardens
06- In Relig Odhrain
07- The View From The Cheap Seats
08- I Will Write In Words Of Fire
09- The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury
10- Making A Chair
11- 100 Words
Disc 2
01- Margaret Cho Introduces the Show
02- Makin’ Whoopee
03- (Introduction To The Problem With Saints)
04- The Problem With Saints
05- Jump (For Jeremy Geidt)
06- Ask Neil And Amanda
07- (Introduction To Broken Heart Stew)
08- Broken Heart Stew (By Amanda)
09- Poem for Amanda (By Neil)
10- Poem for Neil (By Amanda)
11- Electric Blanket (A Duet. Amanda Palmer And Jason Webley)
12- Psycho
13- (Introduction To I Google You)
14- I Google You
Disc 3
01- I Want You, But I Don’t Need You
02- (Introduction To Dear Old House)
03- Dear Old House
04- (Introduction To Gaga, Palmer, Madonna: A Polemic)
05- Gaga, Palmer, Madonna: A Polemic
06- (Introduction To Judy Blume)
07- Judy Blume
08- I Don’t Care Much (With Lance Horne)
09- Map Of Tasmania
10- (Introduction To Do You Swear To Tell The Truth, The Whole Truth & Nothing But The Truth So Help Your Black Ass)
11- Do You Swear To Tell The Truth, The Whole Truth & Nothing But The Truth So Help Your Black Ass
12- (Introduction To I Will Follow You Into The Dark)
13- I Will Follow You Into The Dark (For Ashlie Gough)
14- Look Mummy, No Hands
15- Ukulele Anthem
If that wasn’t enough, we have an opportunity for you to win a pair of EXCLUSIVE tickets to see Neil and Amanda perform live at Google on Friday, November 22nd at 12:30PM. Enter to win tickets by using the widget below, and tweeting about the show. Please ONLY enter the contest if you are in NYC. You must provide a first and last name in order to be eligible. Winners will be notified via email. Good luck!
THE GRAND THEFT ORCHESTRA HAS LEFT THE BUILDING.
THE GRAND THEFT ORCHESTRA HAS LEFT THE BUILDING.
2 years.
6+ tours around the states, canada, europe, australia, and new zealand.
2 drummers.
4 synthesizers.
1 kickstarter.
hundreds of volunteer horn and string musicians.
at least 3 kerfuffles.
thousands of hugs.
1 album.
3 chest infections.
3 rounds of antibiotics.
1 band mascot (a stuffed white tiger named “maxi” bought at a gas station in texas, and left, in shreds, in phoenix)
2 klaus nomi corsets.
5 pairs of shiny pants.
thousands of haters.
thousands of lovers.
miles of floss.
2 lost metal water bottles.
5 tour buses.
hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles.
28 house parties.
infinite cubic liters of whiskey, wine, and espresso; infinite cubic feet of donated vegan food to the backstage area.
1 broken tooth.
1 ear infection.
2 broken guitars.
thousands of phone calls and texts and emails from the road, dozens of hospital visits.
5 deaths, 4 births, 2 near-deaths.
96 tears.
1 divorce.
1 engagement.
and a partridge in a motherfucking pear tree.
thanks to michael mcquilken, thor harris, chad raines, jherek bischoff, our producer john congleton, my whole home-team office crew in the states (especially eric, sean, hayley, superkate, and the famehouse folks), all our magnificent opening bands, all the volunteer members of the grand theft orchestra, thanks to all who came to our shows large and small, our booking agents for making the shows exists, our publicists and distributors, the people who worked in all the venues to create rock realities, thanks to those who housed us, drove us, lit us, amplified us, tour managed us, filmed and photographed us, sang with us, cranced with us, rubbed us, crowdsurfed us, twittered with us, took us to local museums and squats and bars, thanks to those who held us tightly in the night when we needed to mourn and cry…
…GOOD NIGHT & THANK YOU.
OLLY OLLY OXEN FREE.
………..
photo by @Nin_FM from the second-to-last show in Budapest.
and do me a favor today. go listen to the record with joy and abandon….and give it a share back into the universe. it’s the end, but it’s also the beginning. theatre will be evil forever:
and on my site: amandapalmer.net/products/theatre-is-evil-digital/
kat robichaud from The Voice interviews me back (and she’s on again tonight)
hola comrades –
greetings from Budapest where we played a killer show last night on a MOTHERFUCKIN BOAT. that’s right.
i’ll post some recent tour pics at bottom.
but to the crux – after the last slapdash interview with Kat from the voice, she MADE IT to the next round. this time, she’s interviewing me. she’s on the show again tonight if you want to tune in/vote/all that.
i love this game!!!!
))<>((
So Amanda, I’ve been a fan of yours since I saw you and Brian as The Dresden Dolls at Lincoln Theater. Don’t remember the year (possibly 2004-5). You threw flowers at the audience. It was my first introduction to you, and I was a smitten kitten henceforth. I have always been entranced by the artistic troupes that seem to follow you wherever you go. I’ve never been in that environment. How did that all get started? Was it an organic thing that just happened? Did you seek these people out? Do tell.
funny, I was just talking about this on the bus with Die Roten Punkte, a band who’s opening up for me. here they are in milano (in a couch that’s like a home to them):
they perform on fringe theater circuits and live more in that theater world than they live in rock world…and they’re straddling the line playing in all these rock clubs with me. (they’re pretty fucking awesome, btw, give them a google). in the early days of the dresden dolls, it didn’t occur to me to do anything BUT invite all our crazy local art-friends to join in the proceedings. i’d already been running perfomrance-art based shows out of my art-collective-house, and we weren’t a normal rock band and never assumed we’d be one…our friends were all painters, actors, butoh dancers, filmmakers, and street performers…basically: artists of all types/shapes/sizes/styles.
BUT, i didn’t have very many musician friends, and not a single friend who was actually in a rock band. thusly, it made sense that when we were trying to make our shows EVENTS instead of just “come watch the dresden dolls” we invited all our freaky friends to do…whatever they wanted. and we quickly encouraged our fans to do the same, and we called the loose collective of all those performers The Brigade.
our early shows in boston and new york were all about lobby and street art, people making chalk drawings outside the venues, living statue’ing, bringing typewriters and handing out random poetry, craze burlesque dancers doing small acts in the unused coat rooms…that sort of thing.
people who’d never made art or performed before joined in on the fun because we encouraged people do weird shit even if they didn’t have any stage experience. i remember being so proud when a friend of mine who was an engineer and investment banker started doing performance art at our shows…using his origami skills. he just wore a tux, stood there, and made origami for people. he shone. it was thrilling, to be able to hand out the stage and the spotlight to people like a circus santa clause. and when we started touring, we did it though the internet and email, inviting any local performers who were fans to hop on stage with us or perform outside the venue.
i eventually stopped doing it, hoping it would take on a life of it’s own. and mostly, it has. people still come to our gigs all the time and busk…i recently accidentally adopted a punk marching band (perhaps contraption) who decided to follow us around on tour in europe to play before the show for audience donations. i saw them at glastonbury in a tent that served pizza, and asked if they’d come do their thing at our london show and one thing led to another.
it worked beautifully. you keep the door open and shit like that doesn’t stop happening. you just have to ask.
i think a lot of it stemmed out of my original desire not so much to be a musician, but to be a PART of something, a moment in history where it felt like art was changing the world a little, the way my heroes had in the 1920s in weimer and in the 1960s at woodstock. and since i went searching for the art scene i wanted in my early twenties and never found it, instead, we just created it ourselves.
“The Point of It All” is one of my favorite songs of yours. You were kind enough to briefly explain what it’s about. As a fellow songwriter, what is your typical process in writing a song? What is the longest space of time that you’ve gone without writing or attempting to write? Do you feel guilty when you don’t write? (I do).
note: if it’s been a while since you’ve heard it, here’s “the point of it all”…and the music video…
oh god. you know, i try hard not to talk ABOUT songwriting too much because i feel like the more i talk about it the more i fuck with what seems to be a perfectly functional mysterious process, but…
the truth is, i spent a great deal of time in my teens and twenties carrying around a kind of catholic guilt about the songs i wouldn’t finish. i had a really masochistic relationship with songwriting – i felt like a constant failure because i couldn’t finish things i started, and i was full of ideas, so i was forever beating myself up. it took years and years (my twenties, mostly) to learn to just live with the fact that my discipline is built in, and i can’t fight it. i’m so much more disciplined at doing email, for instance, than i am at writing a song. and my assistant and manager will have a good laugh at that one, since i’m currently behind on all of my emails to them, and clearly behind my mac screen right now, happily typing away this interview with you instead (BAD AMANDA). but that’s the crux of it; i do whatever is INTERESTING to me at the moment and pray that the pieces will all eventually fit together. communicating with people is almost always more interesting to me than writing alone, so the internet has been a real fucking curse along with its social media blessings of connectedness.
as far as length goes…most (i’d daresay all) of my best songs were written in one or two short sittings, and knocked out super-quickly. but sometimes i’ll leave a song cooking for YEARS before i polish it off or use it’s component parts for writing fodder. there’s a song on the second dolls album called “necessary evil” that actually was written with an entirely different set of lyrics (it was originally titled “speech to text”) and i just wasn’t happy with it, but i loved the drive and the melody of it. so years after i wrote it, i revisited it, started fucking with it, changed one lyric, changed another lyric, and all of a sudden i had frankenstein’ed an entirely new song. and it was good enough to go on the record, so that’s something, but i do maintain you lose some magic when you keep repainting the same canvas. it gets thick and crusty. there’s a GREAT book of interviews i recommend you read by paul zollo called “songwriters on songwriting“. it’s a fascinating look into the heads of people like bob dylan, leonard cohen, and a bunch of other greats about their own weird idiosynchrocies and processes.
I absolutely loved your TED talk and I reference it constantly because I connect so much with the idea of the importance of being seen and seeing others, having felt invisible myself so often in life. I was particularly interested in your time as a living statue. What led you to take that up as a job? Boston and Raleigh are two very different scenes, although Raleigh has a quickly blossoming circus/burlesque crowd that I have recently been accepted into.
it was a slow process. i first saw TED when someone sent me a link to jill bolte taylor’s talk about having a stroke (if you haven’t seen it, for fucks sake bookmark it and watch it the next time you want to have your brain blown open) and i got to poking around the site and watching a lot of the talks and wondering: WHAT IS THIS THING? i had no idea there was an entire culture and history to TED (there is, and man is it complicated), i just knew i loved the content of the talks. a few years later my friend sxip shirey went and performed there and came back glowing with tales of a week that changed his life. and yet another year later, i played a show in london with thomas dolby, a childhood 80s hero of mine (i collected his records and you may know his as the guy being “she blinded me with science”). while we were chatting, thomas mentioned that he was involved with the TED people and helped curate the music and i shot my hand into the air and said “ME ME ME I WANT TO PLAY AT TED! and maybe i can do a TALK ABOUT SOMETHING!” and thomas took the idea back to the TED overlords. he followed up with an email asking me if i had any footage of me speaking in public and i thought “of course there is” and then quickly realized that was bullshit. i talk plenty on stage, i’ve done huge numbers of interviews and q&a type things at festivals, but i actually had never done a proper “talk”. so i did what anyone would do who needed footage of a talk: i booked a talk. i called my friends at the american rep theater at harvard, asked if i could use their stage, called my friend noah who had a decent camera, wrote a couple note cards and cobbled together a more-or-less-passable speech about street performing and how it relates to the way i view the business of music. (it’s HERE on the internet if you want to see it…it looks like what it is, a very very rough draft of the TED talk – with about 4,800,000 fewer views as of writing this…crazy.)
thomas shared it with the TED overlords but they passed on inviting me that year. then my kickstarter happened, and all the controversies that went along with it. that’s when they called. interestingly enough, i got the feeling that they wouldn’t have invited me if the whole kerfuffle about my use of volunteer musicians hadn’t happened. so in a way, those few months of pain (go read the blogs, it was a rough time) led to the TED talk, which led to a lot of happiness, and also led to the book deal i just signed. shit always sorts out.
How much do you and Neil inspire each other? You are both fantastic writers. Has your writing process changed since you met him? Has his?
i think we’d probably both answer yes. neil has directly inspired some lines and a few songs (“the bed song” was inspired by a story he told me), but the indirect effect is impossible to measure. we edit each other’s writings…we read and email each other articles and short writings before we send them off to press; we know each other’s weak spots and we’re generally pretty gentle on one another. it’s important, i think, that neither of us were huge fans of each other before we met. i’d heard of him but never read anything he’d written, and he had a couple dresden dolls songs on his ipod but didn’t really know much about me or the band. so we’re able to help each other as equals, and we really do, at the best of times, inspire and support each other’s work. there’s also the help that we give each other with general decision-making. both of us are really distracted workaholics and it’s nice to have someone around to kick your ass and tell you to rest, take care of yourself, and say no to shit.
on the downside: i’ve barely written any songs since meeting neil. my free time in singlehood used to be spent generally alone and improvisationally, which was usually where the songs sprang to life, and now time off tour is spend trying to spend time with himself, usually in cramped spaces with no sonic/psychic privacy (which desperately need in order to write). this is about to change, we hope, because we finally found a place to live. i hope so. i need to get back to dumping songs out of my brain.
Ok, now I have to ask a “Voice”-related question, but I’m curious. If you could pick one song for me to perform on the show, what would that song be and why?
oooh, that’s hard. i think i’d like to see you sing “I WANNA DESTROY YOU” by the soft boys. it’s a vocally fantastic song and i think it’s one of the underrated hits of all time.
give it a listen.
and once again
GOOD LUCK GAL!!!!!
**The top 12 contestants on The Voice will perform their songs on Monday. Voting will start at the end of the show and will be conducted the same as last time (please note: Kat’s Voice Voting number has changed from 4 to 7). Song downloads count as votes ONLY during the voting period, so it’s important people don’t start downloading the song or voting until after the show. The contestants in the bottom 3 will have a chance to be saved on Tuesday night by people tweeting who they want saved within a 5 minute time frame. (I can send more info on that later). At this point, everyone on the show is crazy good, so voting is important and every single vote and download counts.
Ok, Amanda! I hope you are having an amazing time on the road. Funny enough, before we made this connection, I bought a beautiful autographed screen print flyer from your recent show in Tel Aviv. I have a degree in graphic design, and I appreciate when beautiful graphic art like that comes around. 
Also, I don’t know if you saw anything about my original music, but here’s a video we made for my song, “Scream””: bit.ly/17quguB
XOXOXO YOU ARE THE BEST.
-Kat
and there you go!
p.s. as promised, here are some tour photos from the last week or so, mostly from my instagram…
backstage upper deck dressing room on the rock boat, last night in budapest:
SNOW (driving through switzerland on the way to milano, with only three shows left in the entire grand theft tour):
alp! alp! alp!
jherek and a rug of people hair (photo by thor):
milan (photo via @allegrissima87):
krakow.
in krakow, after we came up with the Communist Color Wheel:
also krakow (photo via @PMuzyczny):
a bit belated, but this was halloween in copenhagen (makeup by thor):
cologne (photo by @DInderfurth)
shirt by @electroblake (he screens them himself). photo by @GeetaDayal:
jherek wanted to point out that hipsters do NOT ruin everything, because they make the best espresso.
he is, as usual, correct.
(BTW, if you want one of the shirts, the info is HERE)
against a wall, on a fence, after the show (milan, italy).
berlin.
“in berlin. by the wall. you were five foot ten inches tall.” thinking about lou reed. here we are:
also from that day – warning: heavy – a vine from the berlin wall, of the faces of people who lost their lives (shot, or fatally wounded).
today in budapest. climbed the hill. in awe.
milano, italy.
p.p.s. yesterday was neil’s birthday. because i’m off on tour, me and the attendees of the london kickstarter house party (which took place at the legendary and quite literally underground fox & cutlass) made a video. warning: contains tits & dinosaurs.
huge thanks to @DannCasswell, @El_Prune, @AlexandraBecker, @LiabilityEden & all the party-people for putting this together.
i love our art family.
and i love my husband.
every day. but for his birthday, he got a video with tits and dinosaurs.
i interview kat robichaud from The Voice (she’s a fan and competing tonight, info within)
(please note: if you came here from this blog and you want to vote…voting info (how-to stuff) is towards the end. ALSO: Kat’s Voice Voting number has changed from 4 to 7 for this round!)
quicky quick quick one from backstage in warsaw, where we just KILLED IT.
(i still owe you endless blogs about tel aviv, the last round of house parties, and more. i’m fucking slammed on the road. forgive me)
we literally just got off stage. chad got markered by the polish
but this one is good and worth pissing off the venue people who are desperately trying to clear us out of backstage…..
story:
two days ago on twitter i saw someone named kat robichaud chatting with someone about how she was a fan.
she’s a contestant on the american TV show “The Voice” right now.
i know nothing about TV in general. i never follow it, i never watch it. really, never.
i hear what i hear through the internet and through occasional youtube clips.
i googled her and saw her performance on The Voice and thought she was fucking fantastic.
and my first thought was: please don’t let her be eaten by yet another one of these uber-negative evil-competitive tv shows.
i wrote to her on twitter, told her that i thought her performance was stellar, and wishing her luck in the world of evil media, and we starting chatting.
she seems genuinely awesome. she’s a dolls fan, and a doctor who fan.
and she maintains that she’s actually having a great time on the show. she asked if i would plug her appearance tonight – it’s elimination time.
eh? ok.
i told her that i’d plug the show if she would let me interview her. so here we go…and she’s on in JUST A FEW HOURS.
i wish i could tune in and watch her, but i’ll be on a bus with no internet driving from warsaw to krakow.
how awesome is the internet?
for visual: here’s kat on the voice….and here’s the clip i saw. she’s owning it.
und das interview:
afp:
hey kat. so…i was totally impressed by your performance on the voice. i am totally un-educated about reality/music/tv shows and assume they’re all the devil.
but you assure me the voice isn’t, and jherek, my trustable bassist, says he was chatting with some musicians about how the voice was actually pretty cool.
what makes the voice different from say, american idol or x factor or all those other ones? i assumed they were all the same and generally evil.
kat:
The show is amazing with the kindest people working for it. I have never been a number, always a person. They take great care to paint you in the best light. My experience has been amazing. They’re so supportive and I’ve become a better singer from the show.
but how do you feel about music as competition? you’re a pro and you’ve been touring for years, but don’t you worry that “competitive” shows and this weird environment of elimination, etc, can be crushing for an emerging artist? talk to me. i’ve seen a few clips of american idol and the extreme meanness of the judges and how they deliberately break the egos of young artists, and i just shut it off in disgust….it seems like the opposite of what the world needs…
Yeah, and that’s why I’ve waited until now to do a show like this. The Voice is the anti Idol. They don’t put you in front of a camera until you’ve passed several auditions and tons of practice. The coaches are all very kind. They have great constructive criticism. I didn’t want to go on a show like this for the longest time because I felt like it would be a rat race, but it’s been a great experience and I honestly have no regrets. Thus is the only show I’ve ever tried out for. Other people on the show have tried out for other shows and said it was a nightmare. I know what it’s like to struggle to get people to come to your show and struggle to get people to follow you. The show is a great jumping off point, but you really have to hit the ground running when it’s over and be ready with new music. Otherwise I think time lapses and you leave people’s minds.
that’s really interesting. i hope all those connections stick. now….since you you were in a touring band for years and now are tasting the impending possibility of real mainstream success, how are you keeping your head on straight? surely you’re smart enough to look around and know that mainstream success is a slippery slope if you’re not careful. how are you going to protect yourself from the evils of the machine you know may be waiting on the other side of the wall to chew you up and spit you out?
None of it is real to me so far. I don’t think it’s hit me. I still watch my followers on twitter as I would count the people walking in or not walking into our shows in the past. The great thing about The Voice is most of the contestants are working musicians like me. They write their own music like me and they are extremely talented. We’re forming friendships and making connections that I hope will carry into working together in the future. I don’t know what’s going to happen after the show, but I don’t want to force anything. I’ve forced creativity and forced a lot if things over the years, and I really need to make sure that what I’m doing musically and in my life is making me happy. My dream would be to work with you, Amanda. You are my inspiration. Even if working together meant you painting my body whilst I’m hanging upside down above a fire pit. And gay males dancers keep spinning me.
you cannot lose with gay male dancers spinning you. :: that’s a perfect point about forcing creativity and so forth. it always leaves you totally fucked to force art. and you’re on for a collaboration. the next time we’re in the same city, it’s PAINT TIME. ok, last stupid question….miley vs sinead. throw down your opinion in 1,000 words or less.
PASS. Haha. Ummm Sinead? Because her controversy actually stood for something.
OKFINE. but…..bonus points: gaga vs madonna. any angle. GO.
I’m an 80s baby and grew up idolizing Madonna, so I love her and her catalogue of music. But Gaga writes her own music and plays the hell out of that piano. Eh, love them both.
aw, me too. me and all my female musician friends cannot ever let go of our love of madonna. it’s embedded in the hardware. OK….it’s time. good luck……
I absolutely adore you. Thank you for taking time out of your fabulously busy schedule to support little old me. I love you. I had an interview with US Weekly and the guy interviewing me, Brody, asked me who my inspiration was for music. I said your name and he FREAKED, saying he was a huge fan, too. We fangirled. It was adorable. you are so incredibly kind for helping! I know you’re busy. I have so much love for you. I’m hugging you with all my limbs from LA.
Tell Neil I love the Doctor Who episodes that he’s has written.
i love you too. i’ll tell neil.
ok ok ok good luck, girl. you’re on in a couple hours.
stay strong and no matter what happens, you’re a fucking star. fuck everything else.
….
now
people…..
HERE’S THE TV/VOTING info if you want to see how her shit plays out.
mind you, i endorse none of this fundamentally (some of these rules, etc make my anti-mass-media bones twinge, but i’m sharing it for kat. who cares.)
the show is on NBC at 8est (7 central)
voting is “currently closed” as of posting this about half an hour before 8EST but the site says it will open up in approximately 3-3 1/2 hours. maybe by the time you’re reading this it’s already open, even.
you have to vote in this round by 11am EST 6 Nov 2013.
you can vote in these ways:
1. By phone to 1-877-5-KEEP-04 up to 10 times per phone line
2. NBC website 10 times per email address – vote at bit.ly/KatOnTheVoice (again, this will be live soon)
3. Facebook app allows 10 votes per FB account
4. Text message (Sprint users only) 10 times per # Text 4 to 8642
5. MOST IMPORTANTLY iTUNES. each download (of the song she sings that tonight/future nights) counts as 1 vote. and kat says “IF MY SONG REACHES THE TOP 10 on the iTUNES OVERALL CHARTS, MY iTUNES DOWNLOAD VOTES ARE MULTIPLIED 5 TIMES!”
also, she’s @katrowbeeshow on The Voice. if i don’t manage to stay up til 4am here in poland i’ll check in first thing in the morning.
and below…. a few more photos, i asked kat to send some over. bam bam bam
the end
this was fun.
and thanks to @indecisean for getting this blog up lickity split in time for the show.
x
x
a
digital feminism & the BBC.
ironically enough, this 7-minute segment on the new age of digital freedom & feminism has been uploaded to youtube…with the comments disabled.
i did the interview right before leaving london.
i’m embedding it here and encourage you to use the comments section below to discuss whatever you want.
please do. there is lots of shit to talk about, including the weirdness collision now taking place between old and new media.
surely we can do more. it’s starting to feel fucked up. i will write more later.
love from copenhagen (last night in hamburg, first night of tour, was off the fucking HOOK).
xxx
AFP
i’m sticking with you (contains: lou reed, teen years, theater, music, and sex).
lou reed died. he was 71. the above picture and quote ran in the guardian.
warning: this blog contains listening instructions (a soundtrack for reading).
…please load this and press play and then read on:
(since it’s blocked for some regions on youtube, here’s a fan video on vimeo that uses the song as soundtrack, and here it is on spotify)
i was in a cab on the way to a house party in london when i saw it on twitter, and once i determined that it wasn’t a hoax, i texted neil.
then my sister. then my dad, who gave me “new york” on tape when i was 16.
i knew neil would be shaken up. neil worshipped lou. everybody has their teenage idols, the rock stars that shaped them. his were david bowie and lou reed.
mine were robert smith and edward ka-spel, but the velvet underground and lou reed climbed into the bed of my lonely and ecstatic teenage art-head, and i was forever changed and happily violated. neil wrote a beautiful piece that ran in today’s guardian, about how lou influenced “sandman”, his writing, his life, how lou’s non-singing singing voice made him brave enough to front a punk band, and how he named holly after a drag queen in “walk on the wild side”.
when we were on tour a couple years ago recording the “evening with neil and amanda” collection, neil’s birthday was coming up, and i always find it impossible to get him anything. we’re not really into Things, we don’t do Gifts the way some people would, there are no socks and sweaters or watches or gadgets or whatever. the greatest gift we can always give each other is some kind of art, or experience, or accidental wonderful moment, because we both know that it means more. especially because we’ve been so fucking busy and homeless since we started going out. sometimes we fail. neil once tried to send me to a bar full of people in australia who were all instructed to hug me. i was feeling overwhelmed and depressed and it was one of the hardest things i ever did, hugging all those people when all i wanted to do was cry. i think i actually did cry most of the time. whatever. gifts are weird.
anyway, on that tour i decided to give neil a lou reed or velvet underground song every night…i called it a “hanukkah-birthday” countdown. a song every night for 8 days until his birthday arrived. i’d already covered a lot of lou reed and velvet’s songs in my career….”femme fatale”, “perfect day”, “caroline says”…the grand theft orchestra had been doing a roving acoustic “walk on the wild side” all summer. it’d be easy. i learned a few easy ones i’d never hit before and roped in friends to help. he liked his present.
his birthday is coming up again, on november 10th. he’ll be in wisconsin. i’ll be in budapest, touring. it just worked out that way due to the cancer re-scheduling. i’m trying to make him happy. so this blog is part of it. i want to tell him, and you, how lou reed fit into my plot. my life plot. not my canadian plotte. plotte means vagina in canadian.
neil reminds me of lou. he looks like him, a little; maybe it’s deliberate, and maybe it’s just fate. maybe neil was drawn to lou because he saw some cosmic variation of himself…a perfect doppelganger, a portrait of the artist as another man: neil gaiman as a lower-east-side new york jew strung out on heroin hanging at the factory, instead neil gaiman as a suburban english jew from east grinstead, strung out on milky tea and hanging inside libraries and science fiction stories.
here’s the other thing: i worship lou’s wife as well, laurie anderson. i was turned onto her music in college and fell hard. when those two got together, i felt the way some people tell me they feel about me and neil; that two of their favorite forces collided. their relationship made sense. lou was only a little older than laurie, by about five years. my first thought when i read the news about his death was about how she must be feeling. my second thought was that’s going to be me, neil’s 16 years older than me and looks like lou reed. he’s going to die and leave me alone. my third thought was shut up you paranoid asshole.
i texted neil to please not die, not just now. i asked the same thing of my dad.
my dad is 69.
i don’t want anyone to die.
the velvet underground made songs that didn’t sound like anything else, but they sounded like songs, which is why i got addicted. i was 15.
i started with “the velvet underground & nico”, found a used “best of” compilation CD somewhere in harvard square, taped “VU” off my stepbrother, and got lou reed’s “berlin” on cassette tape. that was it. i was satisfied and i played those four records over and over and over. dad gave me “new york” and the sound was different: it was just lou telling stories over much plainer rock and roll. it didn’t do it for me quite as much, but i still played the tape into the ground. the stories were worth it.
“manhattan’s sinking like a rock
into the filthy hudson
what a shock
they wrote a book about it
and said it was like ancient rome”
nothing even really rhymed.
lou was just talking.
the velvet underground records, with songs like “heroin”, “i’m waiting for the man” and “andy’s chest” made me feel like i was listening to something cool – it was you’re-inside-the-warehouse music. there was a time and a place and the people in it were being drawn for me, sketched in bloody lines, and along with lou’s own harrowing drugged-out self-portraits, they were a fantasy cast of characters living in the hotel chelsea in manhattan, doing all the substances they could get their hands on but being ARTY once they were high. these were my people.
and nico’s voice gave me hope. if she could sing that flat, so could i dammit.
i talked in a recent blog about how certain artists stretched my songwriting playing field. lou reed was a huge one. i remember listening to “i’m sticking with you” and thinking “you’re allowed to do this? you’re allowed to sing about heroin over a seven-minute drone with a screeching avant-grade violin, and then sign a major key almost-OOMPAH-song on solo piano that sounds like it belongs in a children’s musical about rainbow puppet-friends? you’re allowed to do that?? guess so.”
lou was fucking punk rock because he did it. there is no genre, only zuul. when i went on family vacations and i brought my walkman, lou reed’s “berlin” went in the bag with the 90 minute tape that had VU on one side and “the velvet underground & nico” on the other, along with my legendary pinks dots’ tapes, the soundtrack to “cats”, the pixies, and a soft cell tape. i listened to what i liked. i miss having that intimacy with music. i miss my walkman. i miss putting “berlin” in and listening to the bee-DEE-BEEE of the tape start and then the soundtrack to the musical i hadn’t seen.
“berlin” is the favorite, because while all the velvet underground records made me feel cool as shit, “berlin” made me feel something deeper. i knew these stories were real, every one of them. lou was doing reportage on his own psyche, and on the women around him, and i related to their unsalvageable situations.
the original “bed song”…if you thought mine was depressing, try lou’s sometime (here it is youtube/spotify).
“the kids” goes down in history as the only song i’ve ever heard that has made me cry every time i hear it.
there’s a lot of lore about the sample at the end…but no matter.
i dare you to close your eyes, listen to this song, and not fucking lose it. again, i suggest waiting for a quiet moment. selfishly i want you to stay on the current plot of this blog. (here it is on youtube / spotify)
lou had a leitmotif of “says” songs; “candy says”. “stephanie says”. but nothing beats “caroline says II”.
and THIS was a song that aimed an arrow right into my head, where it struck and took a ninety-degree turn down into my gut.
okay, this one you should listen to right now:
(here it is on spotify if that’s blocked for you)
“caroline says
as she gets up from the floor
why is it that you beat me?
it isn’t any fun”
you’re allowed to say that? i suppose you are.
it almost sounded funny, really. it’s that major key again.
i always tried to picture her.
was she with lou?
was she heading over to lou’s house after shit got bad, and acting as a junkie muse?
was she lou?
“caroline says
as she gets up from the floor
you can hit me all you want to
but i don’t love you anymore
but she’s not
afraid to die
all of her friends call her alaska
when she takes speed
they laugh and ask her
what is in her mind?”
when i was seventeen, i was writing and directing my own plays. they were never linear, or very dialogue-heavy, they were more like strung together live music videos.
i gathered images and inspiration from the music i was listening to, and i wrote the songs onto the stage. when i was 16, i wrote a play called “i’m sticking with you”.
the idea came to me when i was on a ferry to nantucket, making an illegal visit to my then punk-rock boyfriend-of-sorts, stu. stu was prepping to head off to brown college in the fall and was working a summer job as a dishwasher on the island. we’d met that summer in The Pit in harvard square and had run around to punk parties a fallen in love just a little. i wanted to keep chasing him. my parents were away for the weekend and expressly forbade me from leaving our town. i went anyway. i felt a sort of freedom i’d never felt before…even though i was traveling only 4 hours from my home, it involved buying bus tickets and ferry tickets and heading to an unknown destination to undoubtedly have sex, which i’d JUST started doing, and it all seemed very mature and adventurous to me. i selected my walkman tapes gingerly. i needed a soundtrack for a rebellious adventure. i chose my VU/nico 90-minute double-header cassette and a few others.
the ferry landed and i eventually located stu’s restaurant, where i sat and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes feeling incredibly bad-ass and grown-up, until he got off his shift. we spent the night together, we woke up in the sandy bed in his 6-roommate flophouse with the sun streaming down on us and his piles of dirty clothes and ashtrays, we hitchhiked to the beach, we chased each other around, we went back to his flophouse to have sex again in the middle of the day. i had an orgasm unlike any i’d had before.
my relationships up until that had all been (and currently were) fraught, dark, deep and complicated. this one wasn’t. it felt like absolute freedom, absolute yes-ness, absolute happiness. there were no punishments or dark sides, nobody was playing wicked mind games, nobody was tying anybody else up. i didn’t know it could be like this. i was in awe of life and sex.
on the ferry home, i sat out on the bow of the boat and listened to VU while the wind whipped my face. i’d accomplished my mission, i’d had a legitimate adventure, i’d somehow lost some version of my virginity. i closed my eyes.
“i’m sticking with you” started, and i saw it all – the entire image of the last scene of the play.
she was tied to a chair, and he was dancing with her. but in order to dance with her, you see, he had to carry the chair with them. because she was, you know, tied to it.
all of it, the cycles of abuse, the masochism, the craving, the light, the dark, the whole mess of it, my own impossible relationship with my sex life and the push and pull and lust and love of the men around me and the guilty wreck inside me, it all fell out onto that song, onto the blank stage in my mind’s eye.
the production didn’t come to fruition until later that year, and i still think it was one of my better ones. i wish it had been video taped. maybe somewhere, it is.
the protagonist was named caroline, of course. i played her myself. the soundtrack was broad: king missile’s “the box”, legendary pink dots’ “regression”…”caroline says II”.
i was basically doing primal scream self-therapy on stage and casting the rest of the theater kids in high school as the players in my life. i’m not even sure how much they understood.
this is what the most powerful music does, i think. it opens doors, it makes more art.
neil, in his guardian article: “Brian Eno said that only 30,000 people bought the first Velvet Underground album when it came out, but they all formed bands. That may have been true. But some of us listened to Loaded over and over and we wrote stories.
I would see Lou’s songs surface in the stories I read.”
the best art pries you open, it makes you want to make. it ploughs up dirt and lets you plant things.
and the best artists make you want to make, to think more, to try to express something in a way you hand’t thought of…to say something in a way nobody has ever said it.
lou did that.
ten years later, i dated blake.
i stole a page out of lou’s book (as antony did with “candy says” and countless others probably had too), and wrote my own portrait.
audio-only that works everywhere (because bandcamp)…
and it’s all completely, absolutely true, except the parts that aren’t.
now go make something.
x
afp
CONTEST: Win Tickets to see AFP in Europe
Amanda Palmer’s European tour is currently underway, and we have your chance to grab a ticket. Enter to win a ticket to the select dates closest to you by using the widget below, and tweeting about the show. Please ONLY enter the contest if you are able to make the concert. Winners will be notified via email. If you’re not feeling lucky, general admission tickets are still on sale here.
Tickets for Poland, Italy, and Hungary dates are below!
WARSAW: a AFP giveaway
KRAKOW: a AFP giveaway
MILAN: a AFP giveaway
BUDAPEST: a AFP giveaway
Please note that for your entry to be eligible to win, you must enter your full name and click the widget button that says “+1 Do It!” – click the button that says “Tweet” – and follow the directions for entering your tweet’s URL. You can tweet once a day until the show, and the more you tweet the better your chances are to win. You MUST include your full name to enter and your name must match your photo ID to claim your tickets at venue will call. Contest prize is for concert tickets to the show only, all travel and accommodation arrangements are up to you. Good luck!
all about the “evening with” album…plus some news & links from the intellectual twerking front.
hola comrades!
greetings from boston, where i took one of those pathetic tour breaks that wasn’t actually a break because i basically just had time to do laundry and answer email. and now i’m getting back on a plane.
neil is already over in england (his “fortunately the milk” big-ass released party is on tuesday in london, and super-sold-out, hooray). i’ll be heading there later this week to play a benefit in cambridge (UK that is) for a local non-profit arts charity called Squeaky Gate (also sold out). then we both head to the shows in tel aviv and i move on alone to do the last grand theft orchestra tour of the project. lots of the euro-dates aren’t sold out yet, especially poland and hungary. tickets and dates all over europe are HERE. more personal intellectual-twerking news down below, but FIRST….all about the “evening with”.
if you MISSED the mailer that came to your magical email inbox (if you’re not on the email list, FIX THAT)…here’s the longer story:
neil and i did a kickstarter about two years go, to sell pre-orders/pay for a tour recording of our “evening with neil gaiman and amanda palmer” tour up the west coast in fall 2011.
the kickstarter raised over $100k with about 3k backers, and we took two engineers on the road with us (many of you know jaron luksa, my veteran sound guys…he was one of them, and he brought his pal ken). they recorded every show in HIGH FIDELITY and then neil and i spent the rest of the fall and winter picking out our favorite tracks from what was probably about twenty+ hours of recordings. (that was slightly agonizing). that tour was pretty magical, and lots of unexpected things happened…including a fan of ours dying at occupy vancouver a few days before we got to town. one of the songs is dedicated to her. neil combatted his stage fright. i tried to work on my stage-control issues. we both learned to give each other space. we took questions every night from the audience and surprised ourselves, and each other, with some of the answers (so now there’s a “best of ‘ask neil and amanda'” on the record). mostly, we watched our fanbases merge, like a giant family wedding, and were relieved that no brawls broke out.
on the contrary, there was lots of making out.
photo by mr. peterman
photo by elisa sherman
photo by anja weber
photo by elisa sherman
and this happened……
that was when someone asked us about our first kiss. no shit.
and here’s a few less-kissy pictures from various shows:
photo by laura anne anderson
photo by chad elder
photo by paige k. parsons
and, as you can see from the tracklisting (below), there’s a special cameo but a good friend of mine, evel…i mean, jason webley.
we wrote a song about a blanket together a few years ago and FINALLY recorded it for this tour.
we asked our friend cynthia von buhler to make the art (it’s a hand-made cut-out, and gorgeous) and we packaged the whole she-bang onto 3 CDs.
around christmas 2011 – to tide them over, since the kickstarter backers were waiting for their discs (it took a WHILE) – we sent everybody a digital collection of material that didn’t make the final cut. it was called “a prelude to an evening with…”
here’s the variant cover (still cynthia’s art, adapted by @indeciSEAN):
and then eventually everybody got their discs in the mail and everybody was pretty happy, so yay.
this was the original artwork on that first kickstarter-edition:
then we didn’t do anything…..we didn’t release it online to the public or put it on sale in stores….no iTunes, no bandcamp, no topspin, no nothin. we wanted the kickstarter backers to enjoy it and i was already in the full throes of preparing “Theatre is Evil”. so we waited.
NOW – or, well, next month – is the moment we’ve picked (ta da) to release it to the general public…ALMOST the same tracklisting, but all-new packaging (so that the kickstarter edition stays super-special).
we also made VINYL. the whole album would have taken up (gulp) 6 sides, so we pared our favorites down even further and condensed everything onto two records.
this is the NEW packaging:
we also thought long and hard about what kind of merch to offer along with the album – since we know you love good merch, and christmas is coming.
we picked things we’d give each other and our friends and families: moleskine jounrals (blank, of course, cuz fuck lines), teapots & tea towels, mugs, and fuzzy velvet posters. we tried to bundle things in such a way that made the ordering pretty simple. the pre-sale of these bundles will end around november 1st. some of these items will make it to the webstore, but some may not – it all depends on order quantities. here’s the “super deluxe” bundle with all this awesomeness:
SO, your best bet is to order NOW before halloween night…all orders placed during this period will definitely arrive in time for the holidays.
(while we’re on the topic: all orders made from the webstore by december 1st SHOULD also be good for holiday delivery, but we can’t control international customs so…)
i deliberately chose songs for this tour that i HADN’T ever released but was aching to…songs like “dear old house”, “gaga, palmer, madonna”, “i want you but i don’t need you”, and “look mummy no hands” have been huge live favorites but didn’t quite fit on “Theatre is Evil” so they were burning a hole in my pocket. i consider these the official versions.
there’ll be plenty more noise on the socials to remind you, and i DO hope you all pre-order, but if you’re holding out for any reason…
on november 19th, the album should be available in stores (more on where as we get details) and online in the usual spots (bandcamp, amazon, iTunes, etc.)
we’ll have the ENTIRE digital collection (the three disc’s-worth and the “prelude” EP – over 5 HOURS of material) up on my webstore for $10+
if you *ARE* one of the 3k kickstarter backers, WE THANK YOU SO MUCH for making this project possible. we wouldn’t have done it without you.
and if you want to help the cause and push the album forward, write some thoughts/reviews about it all (you’ve had it for a while, you’re entitled) down in the comments (or anywhere on the web) to help us, please. and include the pre-order link – bit.ly/EveningWithPreOrder – anywhere you are talking up the record.
here’s the final track listing:
Disc 1: NEIL SOLO
1 – My Last Landlady
2 – The Rhyme Maidens
3 – The Day The Saucers Came
4 – Feminine Endings
5 – The Winter Gardens
6 – In Relig Odhráin
7 – The View From The Cheap Seats
8 – I Will Write In Words Of Fire
9 – The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury
10 – Making A Chair
11 – 100 Words
Disc 2: AMANDA AND NEIL
1 – Margaret Cho Introduces the Show
2 – Makin’ Whoopee
3 – (Introduction to “The Problem With Saints”)
4 – The Problem With Saints
5 – Jump (for Jeremy Geidt)
6 – Ask Neil And Amanda
7 – (Introduction to “Broken Heart Stew”)
8 – Broken Heart Stew (by Amanda)
9 – Poem for Amanda (by Neil)
10 – Poem for Neil (by Amanda)
11 – Electric Blanket (a duet, feat. Amanda Palmer & Jason Webley)
12 – Psycho
13 – (Introduction to I Google You)
14 – I Google You
Disc 3: AMANDA SOLO
1 – I Want You, But I Don’t Need You
2 – (Introduction to “Dear Old House”)
3 – Dear Old House
4 – (Introduction to “Gaga, Palmer, Madonna: A Polemic”)
5 – Gaga, Palmer, Madonna: A Polemic
6 – (Introduction to “Judy Blume”)
7 – Judy Blume
8 – I Don’t Care Much (with Lance Horne)
9 – Map Of Tasmania
10 – (Introduction to “Do You Swear To Tell The Truth, The Whole Truth & Nothing But The Truth So Help Your Black Ass”)
11 – Do You Swear To Tell The Truth, The Whole Truth & Nothing But The Truth So Help Your Black Ass
12 – (Introduction to “I Will Follow You Into The Dark”)
13 – I Will Follow You Into The Dark (for Ashlie Gough)
14 – Look Mummy, No Hands
15 – Ukulele Anthem
Bonus: A PRELUDE TO AN EVENING WITH… (which is available with the digital)
1 – Intro
2 – Ampersand
3 – Runs in the Family
4 – Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar
5 – Blake Says
6 – Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire
7 – Do You Swear To Tell The Truth, The Whole Truth & Nothing But The Truth So Help Your Black Ass
8 – Zombies and Shy People
9 – Drinking With John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester
10 – Making Mixtapes
11 – Everyone Should Have a Hobby That Could Kill Them
12 – It Was All Going So Well
13 – On-Stage Dating Service
YOU CAN ORDER HERE.
AGAIN, ORDER BY NOVEMBER 1st FOR THE XMAS DEADLINE!!!!!!!!!
if you have any questions not covered here, eric’s being a dear and helping out HERE on the forum.
also, do us a solid: ONCE YOU ORDER, share the joy & link, spread the word! please? make friends jealous of velvet posters!
BONUS for OZ/NZ: @POSstore has 1 of 10 LIMITED EDT 7″ vinyl that you have a chance at winning…more info at bit.ly/AFP7inch
OH!! and ONE MORE LAST THING!!
NEW YORK (and surrounding areas): to celebrate the release of the record, we’ve added a (second) EVENING WITH NEIL & ME show on FRIDAY NOVEMBER 22nd at town hall (since the first night sold out super-quick). there ARE still tickets available, but they’re moving fast. you can grab yours HERE. it’s gonna be a fun couple o’ nights.
ok.
exhale.
MEANWHILE in REAL LIFE:
things have been going at an interesting intellectual clip since i posted that sinead letter, and the best thing to spring out of miley’s twerk-gate has been an unprecedented amount of discussion in the old-media news and online about MUSIC and FEMINISM. this weekend i took part in a round table discussion on BBC4 about work, music and gender equality (leave it to the brits, them’s a smart bunch). a few of the other amazing guests? kathleen hannah (bikini kill/le tigre/julie ruin) and laura mayberry, the singer from chvrches who just wrote THIS fantastic piece in the guardian after getting ambushed by online trolls. when she talks about sitting on the toilet backstage and reading the hateful comments on her phone, i related and wanted to hug her. one of the problems of new age of pocket-love-hate-technology right there.
you can listen to the bbc4 roundtable HERE.
the host was lauren laverne (@laurenlaverne) and the whole collection of guests were: @charlottechurch, @kathleenhanna, @AnnieMac, lauren mayberry (of @chvrches), annie nightingale (@aanightingale), and me (@amandapalmer)
UND
i spent the better part of the last week agonizing over a 2,100-word article that russell brand invited me to write for his guest-edited issue of the new statesman, which is a super-smart political/cultural magazine in the UK. i can’t reveal the other writers/artists involved (hint: they’re awesome) but i’m STOKED AS FUCK for this issue to come out, and i’ll share all links online. i said yes to writing the article somehow thinking that i’d done many things like it before, and then realized that was bullshit. i’ve blogged. i’d never written a long piece for a legitimate magazine. i froze, crumbled, wrote, rewrote, and enslaved my husband and at least five other friends into being my editors. it’ll be out in about two weeks. pray for me. also, if this 2,100-work piece caused me so much agony and made me consider smoking again: HOW THE FUCK AM I GOING TO WRITE A BOOK?
speaking of the book, i’ve written NOTHING. i forgive myself hard; i’ve been touring and traveling. the current plan is to hole up in australia for the better part of the winter and write it in melbourne, where the coffee is better. i SEE YOU, melbourne. don’t distract me, you fuckers. i know all about you and your tantalizing offers of free vegan bread and anarchist bike rallies. my only plans are to write, go to yoga, and then sorrowfully, drunkenly pore over my pitiful day’s writing by candlelight at night in various watering holes, pretending i’m as cool as charles bukowski. if you see me, just RUN. or throw electronic cigarettes at me and run.
also, if you haven’t seen RUSSELL BRAND DOING THIS, drop everything and watch. i wanted to stand up and applaud the fucking screen. THANK CHRIST someone is doing this shit, someone needs to…”russell brand on morning joe”:
and if you’re curious, he wrote an editorial about the appearance HERE for the guardian.
right. off to research more history of the israeli–palestinian conflict.
love,
AFP
women who slay the balance
yesterday, as i was preparing to fly from texas day the other day (where i wrote the open letter/THIS happened) on home (to get ready for THIS), someone tweeted a question at me…
.@amandapalmer In your letter, you say re fem artists “Those who manage to find a perfect balance are rare.” Examples? Who are yr favorites?
— Michael Goodman (@mikewgoodman) October 4, 2013
he was referring to this bit of the letter to sinéad:
“It’s a Chinese finger trap that reflects the basic problems of our women-times: we’re either scolded for looking sexy or we’re scolded for not playing the game. Those who manage to find a perfect balance are rare, and the culture at large seems hellbent on undermining our ability to create that balance peacefully within ourselves. And weirdly, it’s generally women scolding other women…we’re our own worst enemies.”
responding to the tweet with a few of my favorites (patti smith, diamanda galas, tilda swinton) created a really wonderful dialog and spontaneous twitter-list, with lots of people sending in suggestions of amazing women that should be included.
the internet loves its lists, that’s for sure (THANKS, BUZZFEED)…BUT, it’s actually surprising how at a glance, there seem to be very few notable galleries of awesome females.
(WHADDUP, BUZZFEED?!)
SO…
why not make one? why don’t we ALL make one fer fuck’s sake?
disclaimer: there are a LOT of great people missing here – in fact, this is almost all musicians with a few random badasses sprinkled throughout (it’s just what me and sean put together quick to get us going with a few from neil at the end). there are plenty of actresses and advocates and politicians and AUTHORS we didn’t even broach. and THAT my dear friends, is what the comments are for. know of a particularly good book by a particularly rad woman? you know what to do.
TILDA SWINTON (wiki)
GRACE JONES (@Miss_GraceJones)
JODIE FOSTER (wiki)
MERRILL GARBUS aka tUnE-yArDs (@tuneyards)
“DR. RUTH” WESTHEIMER (@askdrruth)
WENDY DAVIS (@WendyDavisTexas)
NATASHA KAHN aka BAT FOR LASHES (@Bat_for_Lashes)
GILDA RADNER & MISS FUCKING PIGGY (Gilda’s wiki)
MELISSA AUF DER MAUR (@xMAdMx)
KATHLEEN HANNA (@kathleenhanna)
KIM GORDON pictured w/ thurston moore (@KimletGordon)
QUEEN LATIFAH (@IAMQUEENLATIFAH)
TEGAN & SARA QUIN (@teganandsara)
TINA TURNER (aunty entity, mofos)
NICO (wiki)
MARA WILSON (@MaraWritesStuff)
JUNE CARTER CASH pictured w/ johnny (June’s wiki)
ELLEN DEGENERES (@TheEllenShow)
(bonus awesome via KRISTEN BELL and LOLA the SLOTH – video)
last but not least…
SINÉAD O’CONNOR
neil wanted to add these fine women: ELAINE STRICH, DAME JUDI DENCH, MAGGIE SMITH, JUDY COLLINS, GERMAINE GREER, DILLIE KEANE, and GLORIA STEINEM
and now…
well, today is ROAD TRIP DAY to a secret location.
i can’t wait to come back here later and read the comments. HIT IT!!!
xxx
a
an open letter to sinéad o’connor, re: miley cyrus.
edit 10/06/2013: read a sort-of followup to this blog HERE when you’re done with this and all of the amazing discussion in the comments section
Sinéad O’Connor wrote a letter to Miley Cyrus, you can read it here: bit.ly/SOColMC
(or HERE on The Guardian if her site’s down from heavy traffic)
This is my letter back to Sinéad.
Dear Sinéad,
I love you. I grew up worshipping your music and your bold attitude and, especially, your refusal to sign up to the bullshit beauty standard. You were one of the few women rockstars that was clearly doing things her own way, and you inspired me to no end. I want to thank you for doing that. I listened to your stunning voice and your true, deep lyrics endlessly on my walkman, flipping the tape again, and again, then again, then again…and I know those ingredients still live and breathe inside me every time I write a song of my own. You shaped me.
I read your letter to Miley Cyrus this morning and I wanted to write back to you. I’m writing this on my cell phone in a plane on the way to Dallas, TX to play a benefit tonight for a group called Girls Rock Dallas…a local group that empowers young girls to become brave musicians. The timing is pretty wonderful and I want to talk to them all tonight about Miley and your letter.
As a musician and a songwriter, I grew up alone, writing in solitude. I don’t know how old you were when you signed your major recording contract, but both of us know that we didn’t go through what Miss Miley here went through – growing up in public and never having the golden opportunity to incubate in her own private world of making-art unseen, thoughts and words with no audience, no big public mirror. You and I had this, more or less, or we at least had it more than Miley. For an artist, that time to incubate is a special kind of gift. We should be really grateful for it. I know I am.
I think you’re right on about so many things, and I also applaud you for posting to your own site with a open letter instead of speaking via rolling stone or any of the other journalists who were calling you to comment. For the most part, they really don’t seem to care very much about the real issues at hand and we’re all just click-bait. What are the real issues…? You and I know it – being a female musician/rockstar/whatever is a pretty fucking impossible and mind-bendingly frustrating job. Our male counterparts are given a way wider playing field than we are. It’s a Chinese finger trap that reflects the basic problems of our women-times: we’re either scolded for looking sexy or we’re scolded for not playing the game. Those who manage to find a perfect balance are rare, and the culture at large seems hellbent on undermining our ability to create that balance peacefully within ourselves. And weirdly, it’s generally women scolding other women…we’re our own worst enemies. Which is not to say there aren’t some mean motherfucking men out there. I faced my fair share of that sort when I was at a major label and told that I was too fat to wear a bra on stage for my Leeds United music video. I stood my ground and got my way, but that was the beginning of the end of my relationship with those dudes. (Funny, the irony here: *I* had to FIGHT my label to be half-naked in a video…)
Here’s where I think you’re off target. Miley is, from what I can gather, in charge of her own show. She’s writing the plot and signing the checks, and although I think it’s tempting to imagine her in the board room of label assholes and management, I don’t think any of them masterminded her current plan to be a raging, naked, twerking sexpot. I think that’s All Miley All The Way. Now, would these men ARGUE with her when she comes into the room and throws down her treatment to hop up naked on the proverbial (and literal) wrecking ball? Of course not. Sex sells. We all know it. Miley knows it better than anyone: swinging naked on a big metal ball simply gets you more hits than swinging on a big metal ball wearing clothes. We’re mammals. LOOK BOOBS! And even more tantalizing: LOOK HANNAH MONTANA BOOBS! But none of this means that Miley is following anyone else’s script. In fact, what I see is Miley desperately trying to write her own script; truly trying to be taken seriously (even if its in a nakedly playful way) by the standards of her own peers.
You and I are no strangers to controversy and we both know how it feels to be screamed at by the public, by the music press, to be misunderstood, reviled, ignored, and used as a punching bag for a larger cultural conversation. It is always my fantasy that we can take these painful experiences and feed them back to the upcoming generation of women rockers in a way that creates a larger playing field instead of a smaller one. I want female musicians to feel like they can do MORE with their mad artistic energy, not LESS. I want women to feel less trapped inside their bodies, less afraid to express themselves, less afraid to be nailed to the cross of the cultural beauty standard. But that necessarily means there needs to be room on the vast playing field for Adele to wear a conservative suit, room for Lady Gaga to do naked performance art in the woods, room for PJ Harvey to wear high-collared 18th century jackets on stage, room for Natasha Kahn to pose boldly naked on the cover of her last record, and room for Miley to rip a page out of stripper culture and run around like a maniac for however long she wants to.
Do I want a whole generation of teenagers looking at Miley Cyrus to determine that the only way to get hits and hawk your music is to rip your clothes off and wiggle around as violently and loudly as possible? (And while we’re at it – while weighing close to nothing and looking perfectly manicured without a single eyelash or molecule of mascara out of place even when a tear rolls down your face?)
Fuck no. But I don’t want to tell them it’s wrong, either, because like I said: the field has to encompass EVERYTHING. There’s no way Miley is going to read your letter and turn around saying “holy shit, they’ve been taking advantage of me this whole time!” She’s been taking advantage of herself, of her youth, her fame and her sexuality…and she knows it. We females all do this, to some extent, and we just want to feel like it’s our hand on the joystick. Telling her that her team is to blame is telling her that she’s not steering her own career and decisions, and I think she’ll just feel patronized.
When I was about 15 (not inconsequentially, right around the time I was listening to your albums non-stop on my long walks to high school every morning), I started having fights with my mother every time I left for school. I’d decided to dress like an oversexed punk and my attire often consisted of sheer lingerie worn over ripped tights and Doc Martens. You remember. This was 1991. My mother would say: “Amanda Palmer, get back in the house and put some real clothes on. You look like a prostitute. I won’t have my daughter walking around town like a harlot.” (I swear to god, my mother actually used the word harlot. Bless.)
I would say: “It’s my life fuck you I didn’t ask to be born etc etc”, grumble back into the house, and throw a flannel dress over my entire ensemble…which I would, of course, remove and stuff back into my bag the minute I got to school.
I know my mother was trying to protect me. She loved me. She didn’t want me to fall into dangerous situations, she didn’t want me to be ridiculed, she didn’t want people to think badly of me. And often they did – the jocks all called me Freak and Lesbo in the halls. But I took it as almost a marker of success – I didn’t want to belong to their club. I took the rolling eyeballs and raised eyebrows of my peers, teachers and parents as a sign that I was on the right track. It was my artist’s uniform, and I was learning how to wear it with pride; I was figuring myself out.
I’m 37 and I’m still trying, and I change my uniform sometimes. Sometimes I play with nudity because it makes people pay attention, sometimes I play with nudity because it makes me loudly vulnerable to those in the room and it turns their brains inside-out as I challenge them to see me for what I am…without clothes.
As much as we may not want to see it this way – because, from a far distant she looks like just another airbrushed hottie from a lite beer commercial – we gotta give Miley (and every female) space to try on her artist’s uniform. It’s like a game of cosmic dress-up, but the stakes are high. If we’re allowed to play it, we’re empowered. If we’re not, we’re still in a cage.
While it may be true that the live-fast-die-young sex-pot female pop stars are washed up and thrown on the “rag heap”, like you say, wouldn’t it be better if we changed the entire plot instead of dealing with it as it’s been handed to us? Keith Richards and Jagger go out there night after night and shake their asses and everyone oohs and aahs that they’ve managed to age and maintain their spot at the sexy table.
Why shouldn’t this be true for women? Who says Miley can’t flip the script anytime she wants?
I want to live in a world where Miley (or any female musician) can twerk wildly at 20, wear a full-cover floral hippie mumu at 37, show up at 47 in see-through latex, and pose semi-naked, like Keith & co, on the cover of rolling stone at 57 and be APPLAUDED for being so comfortable with her body. This is not to say that women have to play the desperate I’M-STILL-SEXY game as they age. Watching Madonna’s plastic surgeries and apparent stubbornness around aging just makes my inner teenager want to scream (YOU’RE MADONNA! YOU COULD HAVE MADE AGING SEXY GODAMMIT AND YOU DIDN’T!!), but the grown-up in me just pauses for a breath and remembers that Madonna is just carving out her section of the playing field. How she chooses to sculpt her face and body is just…her choice. I gotta let her make it and applaud her for being her, even if I’d never make the same choices.
This is a push for more freedom, and in order to make it there, we have to jump massive hurdles and set assumptions. I’ve been following you and the very candid writings on your site about sex and your own sexuality….and I can’t imagine you disagree with me on this point: women need more freedom to say what they want (double entendre there), express what they want (same) and be respected for their bravery, not reprimanded for endangering themselves.
I want to live in a world where the internal dialogue of a woman’s brain has evolved to the point where a female performer can wear a sex-pot outfit and, instead of the all-too-common head-chatter chorus of “UNFAIR! MANIPULATED! WEAK! MANIPULATIVE! EVIL!”, she dons her sexy costume and hears internal voices screaming “FAIR! POWERFUL! PLAYFUL! BRAVE! SEXY!” You know…you go girl. But not “you go girl and be manipulated by the man, or manipulate the men in your wake”. just…”you go girl and wear whatever the fuck you want. And play smart.”
I want to live in a world where WE as women determine what we wear and look like and play the game as our fancy leads us, army pants one minute and killer gown the next, where WE decide whether or not we’re going to play games with the male gaze and the starry-eyed hard-ons that can make men so easy to manipulate. But seriously, let’s all play the game together, with a wink and a nudge…so we don’t hurt each other. If men and women don’t have a constantly open dialogue about how we do and don’t (or should and shouldn’t) manipulate and play with each other, we all lose. We are all fragile humans with little time on this beautiful, sexually-charged, ecstatic planet. Let’s share it to the fullest extent that we can and make the playing field for all of us the size of the whole earth.
In other words, let’s give our young women the right weapons to fight with as they charge naked into battle, instead of ordering them to get back in the house and put some goddamn clothes on.
With immense respect,
Amanda Palmer
P.S. I love you and your music so much, Sinéad, and a bunch of people on my Twitter feed send their love as well. Thank you for writing this letter and giving me the the chance to crank my brain open, and I hope I get to meet you in person someday so I can weep and thank you for everything you’ve done for me and for so many others.
P.P.S. For any of y’all curious to check out those wonderful Sinéad albums that provided my teenage soundtrack, the two big ones were “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” and “The Lion and the Cobra”. I’ll leave it up to Sinéad to let you know whether to buy them on iTunes or just go torrent them. I don’t know how her relationship with Ensign/Chrysalis is…chances are those labels don’t even exist anymore.
*edit 10/4 10am EST* The night I wrote this blog, I performed at a benefit in Dallas for a non-profit called Girls Rock Dallas. I explained to a bunch of young teenage girls who Sinéad was, and I decided to play a ukulele Miley/Sinéad mash-up. it was pretty awesome…(also if youre interested in donating to/helping GRD, click here):
(new video source swapped in 10/8/13)
