Performer answers to herself and her fans
Amanda Palmer has ditched record labels in favour of crowdfunding her music
Amanda Palmer picks up the phone roughly 12 hours after Donald Trump has been named the United States’ next president and, of course, conversation immediately turns to the elephant about to start smashing blindly about the American room.
“Oh, man, it’s pretty bad,” she says, while a friend drives her home in New York. “It’s truly frightening. Like, I remember Bush getting elected and thinking, ‘Oh, this sorta sucks.’ But this is truly frightening because it’s so unpredictable. I’m upset. We’re pretty dumbfounded.
“But we will chop wood and carry water and, you know, maintain our homes. I’m going to see Ani DiFranco tonight at the same venue I’m playing tomorrow and we will do whatever we can f---in’ do. Because that’s what we do,” she says.
“As a fundamentally optimistic, enthusiastic artist, the only silver lining I can see here is if we are indeed headed here into an American Weimar era, we’ll have some fantastic cabaret.”
At the very least, Palmer has added fodder for the talkier bits of her current solo tour, a mixture of music and stream-of-consciousness chit-chat and her first road show performing with “just me, an empty stage, a piano and a ukulele,” that will usher the former Dresden Dolls frontwoman to Toronto’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre Friday.
She’s grateful, in fact, that the tour is starting this moment because otherwise, she says, “it would be really easy to fall into a depression about what’s going on.” And as an artist who’s cultivated an uncommonly close bond with her audience — particularly since ditching the traditional record-label system for the ongoing symbiosis of crowd-funded creation with 2012’s smashingly successful (and quite smashing overall) glam-rock opus-Theatre Is Evil — she’s hoping to offer a little extra succour for fans left stricken in the wake of “the post- Trump wave of mutilation.”
“I suspect I will be trying to find a private little space in every venue, whether it is a bathroom or a coat closet or a gender closet or a hidden dressing room to have a special ‘hugging room’ for people before the show who need someone to sob with because that’s just what I enjoy doing if I can actually take a half-hour to do it,” she says.
The communal nature of making music is something Palmer has come to appreciate more than ever in recent years, as she now relies largely on money raised through the nearly 8,700 fans who regularly support her on the crowdfunding website Patreon to keep her art coming.
Her willingness to use her doting admirers as a financial resource has made her an occasional lightning rod for controversy; witness the outrage that ensued, for instance, when she put out a call for musicians to perform for free (later rescinded) on Theatre Is Evil tour dates after raising $1.2 million to record the album via Kickstarter. But it has also allowed her to follow a thoroughly whimsical career path.
The past year alone has seen her release an album of covers recorded with her dad, Jack Palmer, entitled You Got Me Singing; a David Bowie tribute EP entitled Strung Out in Heaven, cut with composer Jherek Bischoff; and another EP of typically wry, wordy, piano-led ditties laid down with frequent collaborator Jason Webley entitled Sketches for the Musical JIB, along with a handful of capricious one-off singles and videos issued with no one to answer to but the fans who helped get them made.
Not being beholden to anyone else’s schedule has also been “a godsend” to the newly minted mother of a 1year-old boy named Anthony, Palmer’s first child with husband, noted author Neil Gaiman. This “working mom” works when she can and/or wants to — which is a lot, admittedly — and the proper album-length followup to Theatre Is Evil will come when it’s ready.
“The fans give me a really broad canvas to work on,” she says. “I feel like that’s a hard-earned relationship. I don’t feel like that’s something that’s happened overnight or out of nowhere. But, yeah, I’ve been even surprised myself at how much trust and leeway the fan base has given me with the Patreon. It’s been really inspiring.
“It has to go both ways or it doesn’t sustain. I treasure this relationship we’ve built with each other, me and the fan base, because it’s a long one now; this is a long-term relationship that we’ve been in. Some of these people who come to my shows have been coming since 2003 and they know me,” she says.
“I really find that incredibly comforting but, at the same time, I never want to fall into so comfortable a space that I feel like I could just get onstage and telephone my way through a gig. I always expect that the fans will keep me honest about the quality of my work and my songwriting and my playing. And when I’m sloppy, they let me know.”