AMANDA PALMER. NEW YORK: GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING, 2014. 336 PP.
Amanda Palmer is a multi-talented singer, songwriter, musician, performance artist, and author. Beloved by many and unknown to many more, her name has become increasingly common since the debut of her punk cabaret duo, The Dresden Dolls, in 2004, and more recently, her book, “The Art of Asking.”
Part road map, part memoir, “The Art of Asking” follows Palmer on her quest to become a full-fledged career woman in the alternative arts scene. Through a meandering series of vignettes and stories, she has created a field guide for anyone with a desire to break out of the mould and chase a dream, a promotion, a career change, or a hobby. There are no chapter breaks and the timeline is not linear; instead, she leads us to her destination much in the way she got there herself — through one-on-one conversations over coffee, late night parties in foreign countries, and couch surfing with strangers. Palmer nurtured her community of fans until their support set her free from the control of record labels, managers, and distribution contracts.
“The Art of Asking” grew out of a TED talk Palmer gave in 2013 after a successful Kickstarter campaign funded her solo album, Theatre is Evil. She raised over a million dollars and immediately faced a cruel backlash in the form of accusations that she was a selfish narcissist who refused to get a “real” job. These words stung, as they had been shouted at her time and again from car windows as she stood in city squares as a living statue, and later as a musician, passing a hat around for tips. Palmer credits her early work for giving her the confidence to ignore the haters, saying, “I highly recommend street performing over attending a conservatory to any musician, especially if they’re going into rock and roll: it wears your ego down to stubby little nubs and gives you performance balls of steel.”
With “The Art of Asking,” Palmer wants to set the record straight. She discloses how she was able to cultivate a following of artists, bohemians, and everyday creatives, who had her back and were more than happy to pay her in advance to create a new album. This fostering of a strong, vibrant, and loving community was a years-long process, one which she took to naturally through her outgoing personality and flair for creating intimacy between people.
In 2021, it’s unfathomable that an artist wouldn’t cultivate a social media following, however impersonal it may be. In 2008, Palmer was far ahead of the game, using Twitter to organize shows, find couches to sleep on, or simply to connect with fans. At the time, this seemed outrageous to her associates in the music industry, “Managers kept telling me to stop Twittering and get back to work.” She remembers, “They didn’t understand. That was the work.”
Palmer is every bit as accessible as she claims to be. In 2017, I stood in a line that stretched around the perimeter of a record store in New York City, waiting for my turn to ask her to sign a copy of her book for me. Her signing lines famously lasted for hours after every show; one more method for connecting with fans. A few months ago, as she was about to perform for a live audience in Covid-free New Zealand, I commented on a Facebook post to thank her for including us (via Patreon-funded livestream), and received a direct reply thanking me for thanking the Patreon.
Despite her loyal fans, Palmer is not immune to feelings of doubt about her worth as an artist, and describes an affliction shared by many creatives: “Psychologists have a term for it: imposter syndrome. But before I knew that phrase existed, I coined my own: The Fraud Police.”
Palmer does an excellent job of bringing her inner critics to life, quoting their taunts with near-audible inflections “We’ve been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DOING. You stand accused of the crime of completely winging it, you are guilty of making shit up as you go along, you do not actually deserve your job, we are taking everything away and we are TELLING EVERYBODY.”
A turning point in Palmer’s ability to believe in her own worth came when she faced a difficult financial situation with a simple solution – asking her husband, Author, Neil Gaiman, to financially support her for a few months while she was between tours. After years of asking her fans to fund albums, it took her friend and mentor being diagnosed with cancer for her to accept the support closest to her. This experience led her to explore the act of asking even further, questioning why we feel shame and fear around asking.
Palmer’s methods are as unique as her history, and it would be impossible to replicate her career. But anyone with a desire to examine their own feelings around asking for and accepting help will find her advice useful. She draws on a little known fact about the famously reclusive writer, Henry David Thoreau, to drive her point home, “What he left out of Walden, though, was the fact that the land he built on was borrowed from his wealthy neighbor, that his pal Ralph Waldo Emerson had him over for dinner all the time, and that every Sunday, Thoreau’s mother and sister brought him a basket of freshly baked goods for him, including donuts.”
Thoreau was not unique in his situation, Palmer writes, “Every artist and entrepreneur I know has a story of a mentor, teacher, or unsung patron who loaned them money, space, or some kind of strange, ass-saving resource.”
So, if you have a generous someone offering to bring you a metaphorical basket of donuts while you work on accomplishing your goals, remember Amanda Palmer’s words,
“Take the donuts.”
Alternative Music Blog 