ECSTASY/LAUNDRY. the END OF TOUR, REGINA, ANI and the GREAT MUNDANE
(public post)
hallo my loves….
i wanted to take a moment to every single person who came to see THERE WILL BE NO INTERMISSION on tour in north america. twenty-three cities, twenty-five shows. one very emotional woman and one very fucking on-point road crew veering around trump’s america trying to convince people that art is worth making and stories are worth telling and that compassion is worth having. i think we did it.
in the end we played this show, in one format or another, to about 20,000 people, and if you’re one of them….
just…thank you.
i don’t take for granted that you sat in a chair for upwards of 4-5 hours to listen to me sing and talk.
i also don’t take for granted that we added hundreds of people to this community while i was on the road. if you’re new to the patreon because i convinced you from stage – THANK YOU, and WELCOME.
………
i’m still processing so much of what happened on the road and i think i’ll have plenty of chances to write about it over the summer….i also feel a potential second book coming (although i did promise myself that i’d never write another one because goddamit that first one was a lonely and difficult process). but for now i can say this:
this tour truly changed me. it really did. i can’t say that about any other single tour i’ve done in my career.
and i would not have been able to do this tour unless you had been sitting there, listening, respecting, crying, applauding, laughing….this was a collaboration between me and 20,000 people. i hope you know how very important that is to me.
i said it multiple times on tour to multiple journalists: i couldn’t have done a tour like this fifteen years ago, or even five years ago. this relationship we are in – y’all and i – is like a marriage, a long-term relationship where the trust and respect grows and grows and grows. you make me braver. the patreon has made me braver than i ever imagined. it is real, this thing. it translated to stage. i have become a more fearless performer, speaker, sharer. but it only happened in relationship. it didn’t happen because i sat down in front of a mirror and practiced. it happened because your encouragement, your words, your blog comments, your stories, your having-my-back-on-the-internet is a really, truly real thing.
anthony – my gone best friend – had a great saying that he got from his dad. his dad used to say: it’s one thing to think the horse is gonna win. it’s another thing to buy the ticket.
you literally bought the ticket.
it means so fucking much to me.
so, all to-fucking-gether now:
THANK YOU FOR COMING TO MY TOUR. WE KILLED IT.
(photo by john tona from the beacon theater)
…………………
and now…..slow clap……i’m home, i’m home, and grappling with the typical ill-adjusted head and body and melancholy of reality after tour, where the laser0sharp focus of preparing shows and getting from one location to another must give way to mundane misunderstandings about childcare, arguments over what time to leave the house, and other things that just crush your inflated sense of importance to the size of a raisin. neil is coming off a huge project as well and we are both deflated ego-balloons at the same time. it’s always interesting to see what happens, the bends.
this tour was the most exhausting – physically and emotionally – that i’ve ever done, and i wasn’t expecting that.
i really was working on the assumption for a while that this tour would be the opposite: the easiest, the simplest.
i mean how had could it be: one piano, one ukulele, only 2-4 shows a week, short soundcheck because no band, telling some silly stories from stage. it sounded like a walk in the park.
that being said: i’d vowed to my promotors and manager that the show would be 2.5 hours.
by the time i did night #2 in portland – the final curtain – the show felt finished…well, i felt i was finished writing the first draft, at least. it took that long.
it was a little over four and a half hours with one twenty minute intermission and no encore. if i’d added the two encores that i initially planned when i fantasized this tour, the show would have run closer to five. i lost my voice, completely, once during the tour (sorry atlanta and nashville). i had never
done this sort of show and didn’t realize that talking itself would be even more taxing that singing, which puts less of a load on my
poor vocal cords, who’ve already gone through one full surgery after i beat the crap out of them on the first and second dresden dolls world tours.
i plan to be cremated…..but if i got to chose a headstone motto: “WAIT AND ANOTHER THING” would be a strong contender.
and yet, i said it to many friends while on the road, and i said it to many friends since coming home in the last week:
i have never felt happier in my life. i get four to five free hours of therapy every night. i’ve never felt so clear-headed, so settled in myself, so unafraid of anything.
and it’s easier to feel that, of course, outside of the domestic sphere. it’s easy to feel when my main occupations by night means being on a stage in front of thousands of people and my main occupation by day is scrambling from one location to the next to do it all over again.
my favorite buddhist saying:
after the ecstasy, the laundry.
now, the laundry.
but i was also ready for a break – i had hit the end of my capacity to turn myself inside out night after night after night. i was so looking forward to coming home.
so now i’m here and i have to just accept that neil gaiman is going to complain that someone put the can opener in the wrong drawer or whatever and that that is the most critical problem of the world at the moment.
i can do it.
……….
i missed ash.
this last leg of tour was the longest span of time i’ve left him since the recording of THERE WILL BE NO INTERMISSION – i was away from him for about 16 days. it felt like too much. i stopped feeling like a mother and started to transform into a weird hybrid of my old free self and a guilty criminal.
being back with him is so wonderful but he’s also in an ego-bruising stage of his three-year-old ness (he’s four in september). i am 43 and my ego has become very flexible. i can really handle someone small yelling at me GO AWAY MAMA and GET OUT OF MY BED and NO I DON’T WANT YOU TO HUG ME STOP HUGGING ME. my ego feels the light melancholy bruising like a small bee sting and then quickly recovers because, y’know, he’s three. but i also wonder how my poor ego at seventeen would have dealt with such stings. i was so fragile, so lost, so angry, so completely vulnerable because i hadn’t grown any kind of ability to deflect or absorb pain like that.
the more i get out there a fight for a woman’s right to choose the more my imagination must exercise that thought: it feels like a necessary exercise. seventeen-year-old amanda as mother, and what would have happened.
…….
this weekend.
neil, ash, and i took a trip to nyc.
first of all:
this is a photograph taken in secret at a secret rehearsal for secret guest spot at somebody’s upcoming show on broadway.
i am not saying whose broadway show or whose studio we are in.
i am not saying that her broadway show opens this thursday and runs five nights.
i am not saying that i may be the one of the secret special surprise guests.
i am not saying that this very handsome man, lance horne, may also be one of the secret special surprise guests.
i am not saying that may happen on thursday night.
i am not saying that there are still tickets available to her broadway show which is running for five nights with secret special surprise guests every night.
i am not saying anything at all really.
and i am not saying that the photographer in question has anything to do with any of this.
i am not saying anything.
here i am, not saying anything.
la la la la la.
(photo by regina spektor)
link, y’all. c’mon:
THERE ARE STILL TICKETS. ahem. this thursday. ahem.
http://www.reginaspektor.com/broadway
…………….
second of all, neil got to spend father’s day morning with maddy gaiman which was an unexpected treat,
and he got to hang with ash and read him books while i went to a secret party at a friends house in brooklyn…
(this photo and header photo by zivar amrami).
……………..
also
i went to see ani difranco last night.
she played in woodstock, my new hometown (weird, i still cant call it that, but hey) and i actually got to feed ash dinner and then head down the street to see her play in a tiny venue called levon helms studio – a barn in the middle of the woods that was, before he died, levon helms’ (from The Band) private playground and weekly jam-joint.
here she be.
i was front row, but this was such a teeny intimate show (the space only fits about 200 people) that it was more like being next to her in a living room. someone from twitter (@betsiwithani to be exact) sent me this picture from the little balcony that’s me on the right, behind the bass player, looking peachy:
…and that smile was real.
and surreal.
after three months of talking about my relationship with ani’s music from stage (and selling her AMAZING NEW MEMOIR to raise $$ for abortion care network), it felt like such a poetic closer to come home from tour, drop my bags, and get to drive down the road into the woods to see her do her thing.
you can see a little clip i filmed for periscope here.
she played a song i was hoping she’d play, called “play god”.
an excerpt from the lyrics:
….’Cause there’s one thing that a man needs
To be truly free
This is the modern world
And that one thing is money
But there are two things
That a woman needs
Control over her own body
Yeah I pay the price
On top of everything
Each month a bill
Each month a reckoning
And each seed that dies
I cry and I bleed
So you can’t tell me
You can’t tell me
I am a soldier
It’s my blood that flows
I’d give my life
So that this tree can grow
You don’t know creation
Like I know
So you can’t tell me
No you can’t tell me
You can’t tell me
You can’t tell me
You get to run the world
In your special way
You get much more
Much more than your say
Government, religion
It’s all just patriarchy
I must insist you leave this one thing to me
Just leave this one thing
Just leave this one thing to me
Just leave this one thing
‘Cause I’m my brother’s keeper
Every chance I can
I pay my taxes
Like any working man
And I feel I’ve earned
My right to choose
You don’t get to play God, man, I do
You don’t get to play God, man, I do
You don’t get to play God, man, I do
………..
A FUCKING MEN.
and also.
it was weird. she only played for like an hour and half: old songs, new songs, her bassist and drummer a faithful army of two, tight as fuck, and following her every leap and change, and she had that relaxed stance of someone who has been doing this for thirty years. and i was like WAIT WHY IS SHE NOT PLAYING FIVE HOURS. i want more.
i felt the same way at imogen heap’s show a few weeks ago in seattle, where everything just just really nice and really normal and there was even an intermission but the show only ran about two hours or so and i was like: i’ve fucking lost it. am i going to be forever doomed to a fate where rock shows don’t make any sense unless the person delivering the message on stage basically strips naked emotionally, sings and talks for five hours, and doesn’t let up. this is no good, amanda. I DON’T EVEN WANT TO KEEP DOING THIS TOUR.
but it’s like…..what is it like…it’s like any addictive drug, i suppose. you get hooked, you up the dosage, you keep turning the emotional volume up and up and up up up more, and up and up, (or: to borrow a phrase from ani, up up up up up up up) and then your tolerance is shattered. i wanted to stay in the venue for a few more hours and cry. she did get me, though, during, joyful girl. i’m gonna navigate away from this here blog and find you a link hold on: here you go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS_b_ExBfWI
and, god look at her. look at her in that clip and the honesty in her face.
the trueness.
I do it for the joy it brings
‘Cause I’m a joyful girl
‘Cause the world owes me nothing
And we owe each other the world
I do it ’cause it’s the least I can do
I do it ’cause I learned it from you
And I do it just because I want to
‘Cause I want to
Everything I do is judged
And they mostly get it wrong
But oh well
Bathroom mirror has not budged
And the woman who lives there can tell
The truth from the stuff that they say
She looks me in the eye
So, you would you prefer the easy way
No, well OK then
Don’t cry….
….and at that point yes i was crying.
i was crying for her,
and i was crying for me
and i was crying for all of us
and i was crying because i was tired.
and now i’m crying because earlier in the set she played some weird guitar tuning and i called out “TRITONES” and she said back to me “WHAT ARE YOU SAYING INTERRUPTIVE GIRL” and said: “er, tritones” and she said
“i’ve seen you. and you can play, girl.”
and i’m crying just to be on this earth
with music in it
music in it
music in it
everywhere
and i’m crying because this is how i felt about my whole tour, with every person there.
I do it for the joy it brings
‘Cause I’m a joyful girl
‘Cause the world owes me nothing
And we owe each other the world
x
a
p.s. yep still crying
——THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS———
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THE NEXT TOUR, EVEN THOUGH IT SEEMS LIKE LIGHTYEARS AWAY, IT’S REAL
Wed Sep 4 – Netherlands – Amsterdam – Meervaart
Fri Sep 6 – Germany – Berlin – Admiralspalast
Wed Sep 11 – Germany – Munich – Kongressaal
Fri Sep 13 – Germany – Offenbach – Capitol
Sat Sep 14 – Austria – Vienna – Konzerthaus
Sun Sep 15 – Austria – Graz – Stefaniensaal
Wed Sep 18 – Germany – Stuttgart – Theaterhaus
Thu Sep 19 – Germany – Essen – Colosseum
Fri Sep 20 – Belgium – Antwerp – De Roma
Tue Sep 24 – Germany – Hamburg – Laeiszhalle
We Sep 25 – Germany – Leipzig – Haus Auensee
Thu Sep 26 – Czech Republic – Prague – Hybernia
Fri Sep 27 – Luxembourg – Luxembourg – Conservatoire
Sat Sep 28 – France – Paris – Bataclan
Fri Oct 11 – Denmark – Copenhagen – Bremen Teater
Sat Oct 12 – Sweden – Stockholm – Södra Teatern (SOLD OUT)
Wed Oct 16 – UK – Bexhill – De La Warr Pavilion
Sat Oct 19 – UK – Cardiff – St David’s Hall
Sun Oct 20 – UK – Cambridge – Corn Exchange
Wed Oct 23 – Ireland – Cork – Opera House
Thu Oct 24 – Ireland – Dublin – National Concert Hall
Sat Oct 26 – Ireland – Belfast – Ulster Hall
Sun Oct 27 – Ireland – Limerick – Univeristy Hall
Frin Nov 1 – UK – Dunfermline – Carnegie Hall
Sat Nov 2 – UK – Glasgow – City Halls
Sun Nov 3 – UK – Manchester – Albert Hall
Mon Nov 4 – UK – York – Opera House
Thu Nov 7 – UK – Newcastle – Tyne Theatre
Sun Nov 24 – Portugal – Braga – Theatro Circo
Thu Dec 5 – UK – London – Union Chapel (NEARLY SOLD OUT)
Fri Dec 6 – UK – London – Union Chapel (SOLD Out)
Fri Dec 13th – UK – London Union Chapel (JUST ADDED)
