Аманда Палмер - The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can only connect the dots that we can collect.

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

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

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