AMANDA PALMER: Let Me Tell You A Story About Truth.
An interview by Sarah Kidd.
As one half of The Dresden Dolls, Amanda Palmer has always stood out, her performances and talent for lyricism drawing fans like moths to a flame. Understandably a cult following soon blossomed and grew, following her through the years and projects such as Evelyn, Evelyn as well as her early solo work.
In 2008 Palmer released her debut solo album, Who Killed Amanda Palmer and her path was set; Theatre is Evil released soon after in 2012 following a campaign that raised over a million dollars on Kickstarter. The support and financial backing of her fans, of her very community allowing Palmer to branch out and begin to view her song writing in a different way altogether.
The culmination being There Will Be No Intermission.
Crowdfunded, but this time through Patreon, Palmer’s third solo album is an absolute masterpiece of truth. Utilising once again the support and financial backing of the community that has built up around her, Palmer has unpacked herself, stripped back the layers and analysed the resulting bare pieces in fine detail. Each song on the album is the direct result of this process, from ‘The Ride’ which examines the journey of life itself, and all emotions and confusion it brings with it through to ‘A Mothers Confession’, Palmer exploring her own experiences as a mother, the struggles, the rewards, as well as a love quite unlike any other.
Now thanks to the Auckland Arts Festival, New Zealand fans will be able to witness Amanda Palmer bring There Will Be No Intermission to life on stage at the beloved The Hollywood in a solo performance that is not just her story, but ours.
I had the absolute pleasure of catching up with Amanda Palmer ahead of her New Zealand dates to discuss both the album and performance in greater detail as well as the stories behind it. Commenting that “It’s not unusual for me to play New Zealand at the end of a tour but, you guys are going to get the best of me as this show is in a really fucking good shape!” Palmer only raised my anticipation of this unique experience tenfold…
There Will Be No Intermission will see you perform a solo show, do you find that that is something confronting, cathartic or both?
“That’s a good question, confronting usually involves an object [laughs] so I mean I suppose there is a level at which you could say I am confronting myself every night when I talk about this material and I tell these stories; but I don’t think those are the words that I would choose.
I mean it’s definitely cathartic, it’s hugely cathartic and I have spent a lifetime using song writing and performing to work through difficult times and to work through trauma and to work through my past and to work through my insecurities. I have used the stage as a therapist’s couch for twenty years [laughs] there’s no way around that.
It doesn’t mean that it feels easy, it can feel very scary to talk about topics that are so vulnerable up there, I also think it’s important to point out that I don’t just tell sad, bleak stories. A lot of what I am doing up on the stage is sort of revealing and diving into my own complex ambivalence about things like abortion, and having children, and compassion and it’s really hard stuff to talk about because I am like the opposite of a minister.
I don’t have a really, really concrete moral thesis [laughs] up there. I’m up there telling you how confused I am and that is really hard to do especially at the beginning because you often feel as a performer that you are supposed to get up there and deliver some kind of truth. And what I feel like I am doing is getting up there – and I am definitely delivering some kind of truth – but it is the truth of how deeply confusing it is to be a human being.” [laughs]
Oh, I hear you on that one!
“The more I tour, the easier it gets because I see so much recognition in people’s eyes; people are so grateful that I am talking so openly and so tearfully about how hard it is to make decisions.”
I think that is quite a beautiful thing, because the album is all about you cracking yourself open and revealing all. The fact that it was completely crowd-funded do you think allowed you more freedom to do that?
“Absolutely. I do not think there is any way had I followed the path of staying on a major label, I would have made a piece of work like this. I just don’t think I would have had the fortitude to walk into a boardroom of men and present this record while having to convince them that it had a right to exist.
Because I got into arguments like that about material way less risky than this, and none of this material will ever be played by the radio; you know the average length of a song on this record is like eight minutes, there’s just no commercial [chuckles] potential in it and I really think there’s something profound that shifts artistically when you know that a bunch of people just have your back, and that you’re not there to make something marketable or saleable, you’re there to make something from your heart for you community.
It really changes your psychological processing [chuckles] when you sit down to write a song! And I didn’t see that coming when I started my Patreon, I just thought it would be a really good way to get financial stability and pay the bills. I did not understand how much of a profound effect it would have on how I sat down and wrote. I didn’t see that coming.”
Understandable, all of a sudden you have a genuine support network! People who want you to be you, to speak your truth, who aren’t looking for a payback, or a profit, or glory…
“Yeah, or the payback that they are looking for, it’s not monetary [chuckles] it’s connective; and that’s something that I just find so fascinating about patronage because it’s also different from having government funding where there is this sort of tasteless, bureaucratic bank that is funding your art that could go away at any minute. And it’s also different from having one really rich, millionaire patron loving your work and supporting you because one person is not like fifteen thousand people. One person is a rich patron. Fifteen thousand people is a community.
And there is something so rewarding about knowing that your community wants to hear what you have to say and will pay for it no matter what it is! That is something that is very different from having one really rich person agree to pay all of your costs because they believe in your art; it’s not bad, but it’s not deeply fulfilling like an entire community saying ‘We think your voice is important.’”
Yes, I can definitely see how that would completely change how you compose your work.
Now one of the most obvious components I think that has made this album what it is, is the fact that you are at the stage in your career where you have lived life; and you’re embracing both the good and the bad, the darkness and the light.
You can speak so much more from experience – whether it be through music or art or even just telling a story – than when in your twenties.
“You know one of the interesting things is looking back on the early Dresden Dolls stuff and going ‘Wow, what was I doing back then!’”
[chuckles]
“Not in a bad way, it was good what I was doing; but like what were the ingredients and what did I think my job was back then vs what I think my job is right now. I go back to the songs I was writing in my teens and in my twenties and they are kind of the same – they just can’t pull from the life experiences that I can pull from now.
Back then – I talk about this in my show – I wrestled with some really hardcore tragedy in my teens. You know, I had debilitating depression, I had a boyfriend and a brother who died within a month of each other, I had an abortion at seventeen, I was sexually assaulted…
There was all sorts of darkness to pull from.
But I was very cognisant that my job as a songwriter was to hide everything in poetry. I mean I really thought that’s what my job was. I though that if I were a good artist I would know how to costume and fictionalize all of these dark events and that’s what would win me the prize of ‘You’re a Good Artist’. [laughs] It never even occurred to me that it was an option to be direct. But also, I was a goth, so I was listening to a lot of The Cure, Nick Cave and PJ Harvey, I wasn’t listening to a lot of like Anita Franco and other direct artists. I wasn’t listening to a lot of lyricists who just laid it on the table and said ‘I had an abortion; I was raped; I had a miscarriage; this is what happened’.
I was listening to a lot of artists whose job it seems is to be to wrap everything up in nine layers of mystique; and the biggest difference I see between this record and say the first Dresden Dolls record is that I’m dealing with equal parts light and dark, but the dark is way more exposed. It’s not hidden in poetry, it’s very upfront and I think it took me twenty years to be brave enough to get up on the stage and say I’m not going to make this easy for you… [laughs]
But also, it does make it easy for people because being direct in music and in art can be incredibly medicinal for people you know? And, so can being indirect, I mean I’m married to Neil Gaiman for fuck’s sake…”
[mutual laughter]
“Like there’s a real power in being fictional and indirect and wrapping all of your trauma up in a story that takes place on another planet. But there’s also a great deal of power, especially as a woman in 2020, there is a lot of power in standing on a stage and looking into people’s eyes and saying “I’m going to tell you what it’s like. I’m going to tell you what happened. And I want you to listen”.
In many ways you have taken that darkness and you have dragged it into the light.
“Yeah! And there is also an incredible lightness about doing these things in communities, because all of this is #metoo stuff. Every night I hold women and men who have been through miscarriage and abortion and love and death; and it is all of us. It’s definitely not my story.”
I think that’s one of your greatest traits; your honesty and the fact that you continue to defend that along with your truth in a world that is literally just full of social media facades.
“Well, inspired feels like the wrong word but I feel politically called nowadays [chuckles] to not rest and become comfortable given what is going on in politics, in social media, in feminism; everything feels incredibly urgent right now. And you know it’s been a really interesting time to be on tour and talking about this stuff while the fires sometimes literally rage outside the theatre.
And it feels like a good time to remind people that telling the truth to your community might be one of the only weapons that we have left [chuckles] as the fascists rise, the biggest weapon is always the truth.”
I agree, totally agree; the truth will prevail. The powers that be have always played a game of distraction, trying to turn society’s heads, getting them to focus on the little things, oblivious to the obvious.
And the more people, the more communities that hold those conversations of truth within themselves, within their wider communities… eventually it will change.
And it is changing; slowly, but surely.
“Yeah it does seem like that there is a battle royale for what the truth is right now.”
I think there will be a greater change in another ten to fifteen years when a certain generation of men in power begin to die out… [chuckles]
“And men who have been raised in a different kind of awareness you know are hopefully in positions of power and have learned a different language of respect for the earth, for women, for community. We’ll see.”
When you released your album, There Will Be No Intermission, it came with a book containing photographs and essays. What prompted this extension of your artform?
“It sprang from the fact that I was collaborating with Kahn & Selesnick, these upstate photographers; my original collaboration was supposed to just produce an album cover and some press images. We took so many stunning photographs that I just could not… I couldn’t resist doing something with them!”
[mutual laughter]
“There were too many to just use for press and shit and album artwork, I mean we had upwards of fifty really stunning images all taken in different places and so we just kept going and we created kind of a narrative photo book. And I called it There Will Be No Intermission and I wrote stories about all the songs and I wrote an introduction about the album and how it came to be, how the photographs came to be. It’s like mega, mega liner notes basically.
But also, like a fine art book that touches on the themes on the record. I mean there’s some really heavy stuff in that; there’s some photographs of me three months pregnant not knowing that I was about to miscarry the child that was in my belly. I mean it’s really, really heavy stuff. But beautiful you know, it really just sort of celebrates the therapeuticises not just of music but of image and how using photography and image making and creating visual themes actually really can heal.”
Most definitely. I suppose also – and we have touched on this just previously in our conversation – you have always challenged traditional frameworks in the arts. This passion to do so originally came from where?
Was it something that you were always inherently drawn to, or were there particular people that inspired you to follow that same path?
“I think it was definitely a combination of both, I mean I grew up the youngest of four children, so I was naturally a compassion getter. And you know – and once again I talk about a lot of this in the show – I talk about getting turned on to artists in my teen years who were speaking about the dark in a way that I found incredibly comforting and alluring. I was at an era of my life where I ditched all of my Madonna and ABBA and Duran Duran [chuckles] and ran towards Depeche Mode, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Sinéad O’Connor, PJ Harvey and all of the artists that were discussing the dark.
And I thought ‘I could do that! I could provide that for other people’”
[At this point the interview is sweetly interrupted by the awakening of Palmer’s four-year-old son Ash]
“I just put up a great tweet from last night; Neil was in the other room and I was in bed with Ash and Ash was asking who my dada was and I said my dad was Grandpa Jack and he said, ‘Who’s daddy’s dada?’ And I said ‘Well Ash, daddy’s dada died’.
And Ash said, ‘How did he die?’ and I was like ‘Oh god…’ [chuckles]
So, I go into see Neil and then I hear this little shuffle in the room and it was Ash and he goes ‘Mama said that your dada died’ and Neil goes ‘I’m going to take you into bed with your mama and I will tell you a story. I will tell you the story of how my dada died’.
And Ash looked at him and goes ‘Noooo, not a story. You need to tell me the truth’.” [laughs]
[chuckles] Oh wow!
“So good, but also, it’s just like right on topic. It’s just classic. The story is the truth and the truth can be the story, it’s actually really fascinating.”
What do you see as your greatest challenge as an artist moving into and through this new decade?
“You know all artists right now have one big challenge, which is not getting distracted. There is so much to fucking distract, from the mundane daily distractions of social media to inbox paralysis.
So yeah, the distraction on a mundane level but also getting distracted by ourselves is really dangerous right now. I said something on twitter about the left and the progressive really like eating ourselves because everyone is distracting each other. Everything has to happen immediately, everything has this sense of anger and panic and urgency and that’s not necessarily good.
I just see so many people taking so many of their allies down because they cannot create the space of non-distraction to let everybody just do their work and go at their own pace. And I think art can be a remedy to that in so many ways.
Art can change the conversational topic, art can literally, physically create spaces in which we aren’t distracted. Art can be a really good crutch as we hobble [chuckles] along in times of incredible crisis. I just hope, if anything I hope that everybody out there in society remembers that art is not totally a luxury. That we actually really need it, to sew together the fabric of our survival. We need it. It’s a necessity on some level.”
Thank you, thank you. I completely agree.
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darwin, intermission. look there’s a practice piano backstage i think i’ll take a fuckin nap on it
I have one last question for you; as a woman, a wife, a mother, I am interested to know how you see the world today in these testing times, and will we prevail?
“Well… I don’t know.”
[mutual laughter]
“I don’t know if you know Archie Roach, but I just got to see Archie Roach speaking at the Woodford Festival in Australia. He’s this legendary, aboriginal artist and he was one of the stolen generation and a great songwriter.
And I asked him kinda the same question, and he said something really beautiful about how the stories will remain even when we’re gone. Which sounds bananas right? [chuckles]
But in a sense, especially if we’re getting back to that truth-story paradox, I think we will prevail because we already have; because we exist and we’re here now and I think our egotistical obsession about what’s going to happen to us doesn’t matter as much as we think it does”
[mutual laughter]
“I think we keep asking the wrong questions, and I think we can prevail right now, is what I think. And I think that’s what fucking matters. I think we can listen to each other now, I think we can help each other and communicate and connect with each other now.
And that’s what we need to focus on instead of staring into the middle distance and wiping our brows.”
Amanda Palmer will be performing as a part of the Auckland Arts Festival, which kicked off last night across Auckland and runs through to the 29th March 2020. Amanda will be performing two shows at The Hollywood Theatre, Avondale on the 12th and 13th of March – but both shows are now completely sold out.
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