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

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So I started a band.

And we were loud.

We had no guitars; it was just me on the piano and the microphone and Brian Viglione, who stumbled into my life like a long-lost musical soul-twin, on the drums. Our minimal setup didn’t limit our sonic power in the slightest: the drums alone deafened people, and I cranked my electronic piano to match. Brian had been reared on a steady diet of metal, jazz, and hardcore punk, and he hit the drums like a smoke-choked victim pounding on the exit door of a burning building; for him, commitment to the religion of drumming was his gateway to redemption. And I played piano the same way, seeking salvation through volume.

I met Brian during a Halloween party I threw at the Cloud Club. A few hundred people in costume were packed into the house, roving around all four floors. I’d been so busy organizing the party that I’d taken the lazy route and dressed as a temporary office worker in the two-piece suit my mother had insisted on buying me “for job interviews,” which had been stuffed in a paper bag unironically marked “grown-up clothes” in the back of my closet for more than four years. Brian came as a severed head, dressed all in black with convincing-looking blood oozing down his neck.

Late that night, on the ancient upright piano, I played and sang four of my closeted songs to a small, drunk crowd of friends. Brian took me aside and declared: I am destined to be your drummer. I didn’t argue. I’d been trying to start a band and was heading towards my twenty-fifth birthday, the deadline I’d superstitiously given myself to get my musical shit together or else face the inevitability of being a Total Failure.

We formed the band a week later and called ourselves The Dresden Dolls, in a nod to Kurt Vonnegut’s account of the Dresden bombing in Slaughterhouse-Five and the innocent, delicate porcelain figurines I always imagined strewn under the rubble of the decimated city. Dark, light, dark. That was us.

My sweet and patient mother had taught me piano basics and encouraged me to take lessons, to which I reluctantly trudged. I hated practicing and I found it incredibly frustrating to sight-read music off the page—as I still do—but I could figure out how to play anything I heard on the radio. I’d been amassing a pile of hypomanic songs for the piano since I was twelve, recording them into tape recorders and scribbling lyrics into notebooks in almost total privacy. Until I met Brian, I’d been a repressed performer of my own music, only venturing out once or twice a year to timidly share my not-so-timid songs with a live audience in a café, at an open mic night, at a party. My early teenage lyrics reflected and copied the music I loved: musical theater, The Beatles, New Wave—my songs were confessional and dark, drawing mostly from my confounded struggle to understand myself. I also wrote satirical songs about Starbucks. I couldn’t handle any criticism, no matter how well-intentioned, and sharing my songs or playing live simply terrified me, since any rejection of the material felt like a direct rejection of me.

But now I was free to unleash my massive back catalog of unheard material onto Brian on the top floor of the Cloud Club, where Lee allowed us (of course) to rehearse for free. Brian sat at his drums and listened intently as I shared each song, and, without an ounce of judgment regarding the hyper-personal lyrical content, he orchestrated pounding, delicate, symphonic drum parts. Everything he did was perfect. One by one, I played Brian every song I’d ever written; we kept the best, we ditched the rest. We booked our first gig in a friend’s art gallery.

Along with some thrown-together vintage costumes (to my delight, Brian loved to cross-dress) and our soon-to-be-signature white face paint (to my extreme delight, he loved wearing stage makeup), we had a magic chemistry that ambushed people with the sheer magnitude of our sincerity to emote. I was ecstatic. After spending half my life all but alone with a pile of weird little songs, I’d found a comrade, an outlet.

Date Neil Gaiman. Date Neil Gaiman The Writer. Date Neil Gaiman The Writer?

Why not? I figured I’d try.

Though I was nursing a broken heart from my last breakup, and he was still recovering from his, along with the shadowy aftershocks of his divorce, we edged towards each other, day by day, like two cautious but wounded animals, and started to poke experimentally at each other’s hearts, opening up little doors one at a time. It was slow, self-conscious work; we both knew how damaged we were. At least we could joke about it. And bit by bit, we started to fall in love.

It wasn’t a plummet to the bottom of the love well, which was the only way I’d experienced falling in love. I was used to relationships going from Hi! to Fuck Me! to Fuck You! in under three weeks. Those relationships tended to slam into painful realities when the initial rush was over. This one was different: it was more like that moment in Wonderland when Alice’s dress poufs out like a parachute and she floats down to the bottom of the well like a delicate feather.

One thing, however, I just couldn’t shake. I could deal with the fact that Neil was famous. I was famous, too, in my own small, indie-rock way. But rich? I was struggling with that one. I made plenty of money when I toured, but I spent every penny on my recordings, my road crew, and my office staff. I had no savings and barely owned anything at that point: no car, no real estate, no kitchen appliances. I owned a lot of books, records, and T-shirts. My net worth was roughly equivalent to the cost of the grand piano I’d bought for $15,000 when I finally signed a recording contract. My rent was $750 a month. Neil owned multiple houses.

To make things worse, I couldn’t talk to anyone about how weird it felt. I mean, I talked to everyone about it—my close friends, my intimates, my touring mates—but none of them was in a similar position, and they couldn’t really advise me. Plus, complaining to my broke-ass artist friends about how to adjust to dating a rich guy felt like it was in particularly poor taste. I needed someone to ask who I knew was in the same boat. I tried to figure out who that might be.

Kathleen Hanna. Singer of Bikini Kill, the seminal Riot Grrl band. She would know. She was a punk feminist icon who was used to being embroiled in controversy, cutting records, and touring; cult famous but never famous enough to fill a stadium. Like me, she’d spent years just working her ass off on her bands and projects, but had never been rich. Then she’d married Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys, who had achieved stadium-sized success. From afar, they seemed really happy. I didn’t know her, but I tracked down her email address and wrote her:

Hi. It’s Amanda Palmer from The Dresden Dolls. I know you don’t really know me, but I need to ask you for advice. It’s a phone call, not an email.

She called me.

Honestly, Amanda? she said. For a while it just sort of sucked. There was a month when I was so broke I barely had enough money for food. And I was dating Adam and crashing in his swank apartment in Manhattan while he was away on tour, and I was, like, scraping together money to walk to the corner and buy instant noodles and oatmeal. It was really weird. And the thing that sucked most of all was not being able to talk to anyone about it.

You had my life! I said. And I’m not even that poor anymore. I can afford food. But I’m still freaked out.

Ha. I get it. You know, I’m glad you asked me… because I didn’t have anyone I could ask. It was really lonely, and in this creepy way that sort of made you feel like a jerk for being upset about it.

That didn’t sound familiar at all.

From the start, The Dresden Dolls functioned in an artistic community that depended on messy exchanges of goodwill and the swapping of favors. More than a decade later, when the outside world was trying to make sense of my million-dollar Kickstarter success, I found myself digging through the past, trying to explain how it worked.

The New York Times called. Forbes magazine called.

Tell us, Amanda, can you explain this relationship you have with your fans?

Are you married? I’d ask.

Actually, yes. My wife, Susan, and I just celebrated our tenth anniversary last week!

So tell me, can you explain this relationship you have with your wife?

At least I’d make them laugh.

Like all real relationships, my “special relationship” with my fans wasn’t some shtick that I came up with at a marketing meeting. On the contrary, I’ve spent many marketing meetings banging my head against a long conference table.

Throughout my career, the fanbase has been like one big significant other to me, a thousand-headed friend with whom I have a real, committed partnership. I don’t take vacations from communicating without warning. We share our art with one another. They help me run the business by feeding me constant information. I cop to my mistakes. They ask for explanations. We talk about how we feel. I twitter to say good night and good morning, the way I would with a lover. They bring me food and tea at shows when I’m sick. I visit them in hospitals and make videos for their friends’ funerals. We trust one another. Occasionally, I’ve broken up with fans. Some have broken up with me.

In the band’s first three years, we played in friends’ illegal lofts, in makeshift art galleries, in crappy sports bars that were trying to lure in drink-buying customers with the promise of live music, in people’s living rooms, in used clothing stores, at benefits for feminist sex-toy shops. Whether we were being paid or not, if it was a gig, we took it.

But mostly we just played at my house, since we could always get a gig there. I was already in the habit of throwing huge parties. Lee loved it when the Cloud Club came alive with guests, and my new housemate, the filmmaker Michael Pope, became a co-conspirator in organizing bashes at which we would cram people into the various floors of the house, and out into the back garden and onto the roof in the summer. We put a shoebox at the door of the house with a sign suggesting (but not requiring) a ten-dollar admission, and set up a bar in every kitchen, spending the rolling donation money on wine, beer, and vodka. Anybody could bring whatever they wanted to share, be it food, drink, art, or music. I was perfectly happy letting four hundred strangers waltz through my kitchen and bedroom; I had nothing so valuable in my apartment that I ever had to hide it.

The entirety of The Dresden Dolls’ travel inventory (electric piano, five-piece drum kit, and a few old suitcases full of costumes and the band T-shirts we sold for $10 each) could be perfectly Tetris’d into the back of my beat-up Volvo station wagon (affectionately dubbed The Vulva). We started driving farther and farther distances from Boston to take gigs. Brian was the technical expert (he knew everything there was to know about gear, including where to buy it and how to set it up), and I was the band’s manager, press agent, and booking agent. I’d just bought my very first cell phone.

It was 2001 and email was still coming into vogue (and slightly suspect—lots of people in my artistic social circle resisted it), but I was obsessive about maintaining an email-based newsletter for the band and for the house parties. I could send out an email to fifty Boston friends, they would spread the word, and two weeks later, hundreds of people would show up at our house for a party. So the band’s email list began as the house-party inner circle, then grew every time we had a gig or a gathering—there was no distinction between fans and friends. Not only did most of our early fans know where I lived and where we practiced, but most of them had also been in my kitchen.

Eventually, since it seemed impolite to be extending Boston house-party invitations to our fans in St. Louis, we made one email list per city. I considered the email list our pride and joy—the Thing From Which All Other Things Stemmed. Any time I ran into an old college friend on the street, any time I got into a conversation with a stranger on the subway, any time someone expressed even a remote interest in the band, I’d ask, DO YOU DO EMAIL? If the answer was yes, I recorded their address onto whatever was handy—my journal, a napkin, my hand—and when I got home, I’d send a personal welcome note.

My own email address was front and center on our website. I emailed back and forth with individual fans daily—about our lives, our gigs, ideas for shows—and often included a few words of den-mother comfort, because much of the fan mail usually came with a harrowing personal story attached. People thanked me for the songs: “Half Jack” had helped someone come to terms with their own parents, “Coin-Operated Boy” was popular with dancers on the burlesque circuit, who used it for routines, “Girl Anachronism” spoke to people’s own battles with self-doubt. While Brian drove us to out-of-town gigs, I managed the band from the passenger seat on my bulky, blue, constantly crashing Dell laptop. Managing the band didn’t mean talking to labels, agents, or publishers; we didn’t know any. Managing the band meant making friends with other freaks in other cities, finding performers to share the stage with, lining up couches to crash on, chasing down a gallery where a friend was hanging paintings and was happy to have a band play at the opening.

Slowly but surely we amassed a local, then regional, following as we convinced our art-party friends to follow us into the rock establishments of Boston and beyond. Like the Cloud Club parties, the early concerts were more like happenings than straight rock shows. We’d bike around town posting up flyers that read:

People got a kick out of dressing up for our shows, and we encouraged it. Top hats, zoot suits, body paint, feather boas, and wigs were de rigueur. Our email blasts, which I sent out every few weeks, were celebratory missives, written to our friends. I kept the tone personal: Come to a party at the house. Or come to a Dolls show at a club. Or come to a Dolls show at the house. It was all the same.

I told Anthony I was thinking about dating Neil Gaiman. I was nervous. Anthony never judged me, but he judged my boyfriends (and occasional girlfriends) as fiercely as a protective older brother would.

So who is he? Anthony asked.

He’s a writer.

Never heard of him.

He’s like… cult famous. He writes comic books and science fiction and stuff. He’s forty-eight. And British.

Anthony emitted a guttural, rumbling sound of suspicion.

What? Which part? The Famous? The British? Or the forty-eight?

None of it. He sounds… like a contender. When do I get to meet him?

Describing how art and exchange play off each other in The Gift, Lewis Hyde says:

In my darkest hours, I still go to my secret stash of medicine-music to comfort me, like a familiar childhood blanket, and cocoon myself in the songs of Kimya Dawson, Leonard Cohen, or Robyn Hitchcock, who seem to be expressing some inexpressible thing inside of me. And listening to those songs performed live, in concert, and sharing that blanket feeling with a crowd of strangers, gives me a feeling of humanhood that I don’t often get to experience; it’s the closest thing I have to church.

When the gift circulates, we feel the very essence of art and life not just in the words and songs, but also in our deep desire to share them with one another.

You probably don’t know who Edward Ka-Spel is.

Edward Ka-Spel is the singer of my favorite band, The Legendary Pink Dots. They formed in the early eighties in the UK, and they’ve been recording and touring for more than thirty years. They still tour, playing to crowds of hundreds more often than thousands, and their fanbase is like a family. I’m in the family. I joined when I was fourteen and my first boyfriend, Jason Curtis, started making me Pink Dots mixtapes. The psychedelic mash of synthesizers, violins, and drum machines, plus the raw emotional honesty of the lyrics, stole me straight out of the clutches of the “standard” alternative music I’d been listening to (The Cure, R.E.M., and Depeche Mode, mostly). But along with the Pink Dots’ music—which we had to hunt down in used record shops or mail-order from faraway Dutch distributors—came the community.

The first time I saw the band play live was at a small all-ages club in Boston. I was sixteen. I had barely experienced any live rock music, and certainly nothing like this: a band I loved, on a stage five feet in front of me. That night changed my life: I was finally experiencing, in person, the songs that had been the soundtrack of my life for the past few years, the lyric-images I’d memorized after hours of headphone-listening on walks to school, the worlds that had been direct-deposited into my heart through the channel of my ears—I was hearing them here, now, in a moment that would never exist again. I was also standing in a room with three hundred people who seemed to have formed a real, connected comradeship by virtue of Loving One Thing and, by extension, one another. It seemed that this whole scene of people had formed a sort of open secret society around their love of this strange music and the strange guys who played it. I hadn’t even known this was possible. I certainly hadn’t been expecting to meet the band after the show.

Meet the band? I asked Jason.

Yes, he said, they always do this. And he was right: there they were, selling their own CDs and shirts while holding court in the dim light of the club as the grumpy bar crew dismantled the stage. I stood in line, waiting to meet Edward, the main singer and songwriter, trying to think of what I could possibly say that could have any meaning to him whatsoever. My idol. And then, for a short moment, we were face-to-face.

It’s my dream, I said, looking right into his eyes, to make music as honest as yours.

Edward smiled and took my hand. He was as kind and warm as if I were a long-lost friend. We chatted for a minute, what about I’ll never remember. I was awestruck.

I’ll never forget that brief encounter. I didn’t feel like a fan meeting a rock star. I didn’t feel like a groupie. I felt like a friend.

Two years later, when I was about eighteen, The Legendary Pink Dots came through Boston again on tour, and I was lucky enough to be invited to tag along to the after-party at my friend Alan’s house, where the band was also crashing. Alan was an advanced-level computer geek who ran the fans’ online bulletin board system. Late into the night, we sat in Alan’s living room, sharing beer and stories. Jon, another member of the trusted Pink Dots family who hosted the band’s official website, said, out of the blue, Edward, did you know Amanda’s a songwriter? She plays piano. She’s pretty good.

I froze. No no no no no no no, I thought.

Edward looked interested.

Really? he said. Do you have anything we can hear?

Alan, do you have Amanda’s demo tape kicking around? Jon asked.

I’d made a four-track tape recording of a few of my piano songs with a few cheap microphones in my parents’ living room, and Alan had one of the twelve copies in existence.

I think so, said Alan, rummaging around in a milk crate. Yeah! Here it is…

No no no no no no no no.

He popped the tape into the stereo, and I sat there trying not to throw up while Edward and the collected company listened to my piano songs warbling through the speakers.

Hearing my own singing voice paralyzed me, and another voice that I knew intimately rose up inside of me:

I can’t write songs. I can’t sing. I have a fucking phony English accent and THESE PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY ENGLISH. How humiliating. And god, my lyrics are so pretentious and stupid and self-indulgent. Who the fuck do I think I am?

I wanted to run. I wasn’t ready to be judged, and certainly not here, in this room, by my heroes. After two songs (one a fast-pounding punk rant about my nail-biting habit, the other a dirge about the loss of my virginity set in a metaphorical playground), Alan snapped off the tape player.

There! She’s good, right? Edward and the band nodded affably and the conversation turned back to the show, politics, and other bohemian topics.

I was shaking. I stepped outside to smoke a clove cigarette, and was sitting on the steps in the cold autumn darkness, inhaling sharply and trying to calm myself down, when the door rattled shut behind me. It was Edward. He sat down next to me and lit his own hand-rolled cigarette. I’d never been alone with him before.

I want to tell you something, Amanda.

I had no idea what was coming, but I trusted him to be kind. God, I trusted him more than anyone or anything else in the world at that moment. But I was so afraid.

Yeah? I said, nonchalantly.

Your songs are good, Amanda. And I’m not just saying that.

I stared at him in disbelief.

I get given a lot of music, he continued. It’s like that on the road, you know, we get handed mountains of demo tapes every night. And they’re, you know, not always good. Your songs are good. I don’t know what your plans are. But I hope you keep going. I just wanted to say that.

And he stubbed out his cigarette and went back into the house, leaving me on the porch, feeling an emotion I can only describe as ecstasy. I stayed on that cloud for days, walking around in a fog, thinking that my fate had somehow been decided for me.

Nobody had ever said that to me before. Nobody qualified, at least. Nobody who really counted. I try to recall the enormity of that feeling every time I’m talking to a younger musician who summons the courage to play me their stuff. I bear in mind that I may be the only full-time musician they’ve encountered who’s ever directly said:

Yes. You’re allowed to go do that. Go ahead.

The next time they came through Boston on tour, I was in college a few hours away and came back home for the show. I talked my parents, god bless them, into hosting five English and Dutch indie rock stars (plus a merch guy and a sound guy) in our suburban house. Some of them slept in the attic, some in the van outside, and I slept over at Jason’s so they could take my bed. Early the next morning, I hurried back to fix them all breakfast before they drove off to the next tour stop. Seeing my favorite band eating in the dining room where my family celebrated Thanksgiving made my brain turn upside down. I had never put so much love into a batch of scrambled eggs.

I’d learned that it was pointless trying to tell these people what their music had meant to me. It meant everything. Their songs were the landscape of my inner life. I was modeling my own style of songwriting after theirs. It would just sound trite if I tried to explain it out loud.

But I could make them eggs.

By 2002, Brian and I were touring more and more, and we started earning real cash money at the shows. At the end of each night, the fans would ask us for CDs, but for a while we had nothing to sell besides some T-shirts and a bumper sticker that we had designed ourselves. No music.

The ability to burn CDs was a brand-spanking-new technology. So instead of taking our first cheap recording to a duplication house, we decided it would be more economical to just burn our own.

We made our first recording for free, thanks to a sound-engineer friend who snuck us into a studio after hours. I pasted together a collage I’d assembled out of old paper dolls to use as our album artwork, while Brian made endless OfficeMax runs in The Vulva to purchase boxes of blank CDs and empty jewel cases. We sat in the kitchen burning batches of our songs in a three-disc CD tower. On a good day we could make a few hundred discs, and we only needed a few dozen at a time to sell at shows: five songs for $5. The fans were eager to have them and they sold really well. Soon, my whole apartment in the Cloud Club—which was small to begin with—turned into a CD-assembly workshop. I got very friendly with the local post office, where we stood in line two or three times a week to ship batches of records to our fans with handwritten thank-you postcards. The fans used my home address to order everything. They paid by personal check and we sent the CDs before the checks cleared (or didn’t).

Meanwhile, I worked weekends as The Bride, got the stripping job as well, and Brian took shifts at the MIT student center branch of Toscanini’s, where he asked for and received Gus’s kind blessing to make a display stand for our CD at the register. At every shift, he wound up selling a few CDs to ice-cream customers.

GET THEIR EMAILS! I’d remind him.

He did. A good percentage of our initial hardcore fanbase was MIT grad students and professors, who stood happily at our gigs next to the twenty-two-year-old punk kids with their pierced septums and turquoise dreadlocks. Brian and I took great pleasure in the fact that we seemed to have created the most eclectic community of fans in Boston: art college students, vegan punks, drag queens, metalheads, academics, people who listened to National Public Radio. That meant the world to us. We didn’t want to tap a particular crowd—we didn’t want to be a hip indie band or a goth band. We wanted the people who came to the shows to feel like they were part of our weird little family, that they would never be turned away at the door for not being cool enough. Brian and I had both been insecure freaks in high school; we’d already spent our entire lives on the outside of that door, and we didn’t just want to gain entrance. We wanted to smash the door down completely.

Things started to catch ablaze. We couldn’t quit our jobs yet, but we were close. We won the local Boston battle of the bands. I quit smoking, because I wanted to take care of my voice, which I was constantly losing. We drove the van, we gigged, we drove, we ate metric tons of bad gas-station food, we drove, we soundchecked, we drove some more, and when we needed to sleep, we slept on the couches of old friends, out-of-town family, local fans, or crashed with other bands. In a pinch, we got a cheap motel or slept in the van, which was tricked out with a futon in the back.

In turn, we hosted countless musicians and friends at the Cloud Club, whether they were playing shows with us or not—it was a karmic couch-circle. I’d get photos emailed to me on the road of bands in the back garden, bands on the roof, bands in the bathtub. Bands left thank-you notes, drawings, books, CDs behind as gifts.

Our fanbase grew slowly but steadily. We’d go to a city—Philly, Portland, Northampton, DC—and play to fifty people, then a hundred and fifty, then three hundred. Word spread. The email list grew. We still had no manager, no agent.

Sometimes, if we didn’t have a place to crash, we’d just ask from the stage.

HANDS UP IF YOU CAN LET US SLEEP AT YOUR HOUSE TONIGHT.

We’d thank our hosts with CDs, T-shirts, tour stories, and our endless gratitude.

We made some wonderful friends that way.

One of those friends was a photographer in Philadelphia named Kyle Cassidy, a classic couch-patron who had been enthusiastically letting bands crash in his home for years. We sometimes shared space at Kyle’s with other bands passing through town, trading stories over group breakfasts. That house became a dependable haven after our Philly gigs and, since he loved capturing the band and we trusted him, Kyle also became our default official band photographer. If I knew a band was touring through Philly, I’d send them to Kyle and he’d take them in without question.

I started a computer list of our few dozen dependable couchsurfing hosts, organized by city. Kyle in Philly. Brian’s dad in New Jersey. His aunt in St. Louis. Josh and Alina in New York. Xanna and her girlfriend in Atlanta. Clare and Brian in Montreal. Emily in Brooklyn. My dad in Washington, DC. Kate in Chicago…

DIY is a tricky term.

I’ve been called the “Queen of DIY,” but if you’re really taking the definition of “Do It Yourself” literally, I completely fail. I have no interest in Doing It Myself. I’m much more interested in getting everybody to help me.

I think a better definition might be UWYC: “Use What You Can.” It is, unfortunately, not a very catchy term.

Everybody has access to different tools, people, resources, situations, opportunities. If you’re privileged enough to have family well-off enough to loan you money for your first recording? TAKE IT.

If you have a friend with a shack on the beach who’s offering you a quiet place to write? TAKE IT.

There’s really no honor in proving that you can carry the entire load on your own shoulders. And… it’s lonely.

Maybe we can break DIY mentality into two camps, because “collective” work doesn’t actually blow everybody’s dress up.

“Minimal DIY” is the kind of DIY where you literally try to Do It Yourself. The emphasis is on total self-reliance and individualism.

Don’t have the right kind of microphone? Use a different one.

Don’t have a huge budget for food/can’t afford takeout/have no kitchen? Just buy a box of ramen in bulk and cook it in the coffeemaker you got for $5 at a yard sale.

Can’t afford to hire a full choir of people? Don’t use a choir. Your song doesn’t need it and it’ll sound pompous and pretentious anyway. Or, if you must, record your own voice fifty times, singing slightly differently at different spots in the room.

Car runs out of gas on a long stretch of road? Grab the empty canister out of your trunk and start walking, sucker.

Then there’s “Maximal DIY,” which is more about expansion and asking. The emphasis is on collectivism; you throw the problem out to your circles to see what solutions will arise.

Don’t have the right kind of microphone in your studio? Use Twitter, shouting towards the musicians and studios; some kind person may lend you the right one.

Don’t have a huge budget for studio food? Ask if anyone local feels like helping/cooking/bringing you leftover food from their job at the bakery.

Can’t afford to hire a full choir of people? Send out a blog and have your fans come in and sing with you. They may sound amateur, but it’ll be fun, and people love being on a record.

Car runs out of gas on a long stretch of road? Put your thumb out. Someone will eventually give you a lift.

As you can see, the underlying philosophy is actually the same:

Limitations can expand, rather than shrink, the creative flow.

Minimal DIY doesn’t rely on trust; it relies on ingenuity.

Maximal DIY relies on trust and ingenuity. You have to ask with enough grace and creativity to elicit a response, and you also have to trust the people you’re asking not to ruin your recording session, not to poison your food, not to bludgeon you with a hammer as you sit in their passenger seat.

We hung out and signed merchandise after every show in every town, Pink-Dots-style, and a natural outgrowth of our beginnings in which the audience had blurred with our circle of friends. If we wound up getting kicked out of a venue because we’d hit curfew and we hadn’t finished signing things, we’d parade the remaining fans outside and finish in the street.

We signed our CDs, of course, and shirts and posters, too—usually with a black or silver Sharpie. But we also signed: phone cases, playing cards, sneakers, reading glasses, Bibles, passports (You know this is illegal, right?), purses, faces (please don’t get that tattooed), armpits, puppets, babies (please don’t get that tattooed, either), feet, shot glasses, teakettles, security blankets, breasts, and once, a guy’s penis (it was not erect). And one time, in Santa Barbara, Brian signed a girl’s anus. Everyone was impressed.

I asked him to please throw that particular Sharpie in the trash.

People loved giving us art they’d made. Sometimes the signing line would create art collisions unwittingly, like the time a girl at the front of the line gave me an anatomically correct, life-sized, gorgeously hand-knitted vagina, and a guy at the back of the line gave me a little plastic astronaut toy from the 1980s that nestled perfectly into the vulva. Somebody else in the line had a twist tie and threaded them together more tightly. They live, in harmony, on my kitchen shelf at the Cloud Club and have never been separated since that day.

In the early days, we talked to people for as long as they wanted, about whatever they wanted. Once we started touring internationally, these signings would sometimes last longer than the show itself; we’d sometimes play for two hours and sign for two and a half.

In retrospect, the act of signing was far more significant than I realized in the moment. Especially in the early days, when we were playing in small clubs, I was actually AFRAID of the audience. Not afraid they would hurt me, or throw glass bottles at my head (which DOES happen in some genres of music). I was just afraid of their judgment. We were only just starting to get criticized on the hipster music websites for being too gay, too dramatic, too female, too screamy, too lame, too goth. I would imagine that the strangers out there beyond the footlights were the same entities who were judging us in the snarky corners of the music blogs. I feared the critics. In my head, the critics and the crowd were one and the same.

As I played and looked out into the crowd, I could see clearly that the people in the front rows loved us, since they were mouthing the words to our songs, banging their heads, throwing their fists in the air. But what about the people in the ninth, tenth, and twentieth rows? I couldn’t see them. I imagined them all standing there with their arms crossed, rolling their eyes at our gay mime antics, waiting to be sufficiently impressed.

Signing fixed that, because we got to meet a pretty decent percentage of the audience every night. They weren’t judgmental hipsters. They were just sweet, human, smart, fumbling people like Brian and me, all of whom had kind faces and, usually, their own strange stories to tell. After hundreds of nights of signing, my instinct to fear the audience was worn away, like running water smoothing down a jagged rock.

It was an epiphany: Holy shit. They’re not scary at all. They’re just… a bunch of people.

It just wasn’t possible to feel that anxious anymore: I’d MET them. But I never would’ve known if I hadn’t made the effort to stand at the merch table every night; I might have stayed afraid for years. And when you’re afraid of someone’s judgment, you can’t connect with them. You’re too preoccupied with the task of impressing them.

Once we had enough money to be choosy, I turned down the option of using a real grand piano. Too much fuss to transport, rent, and tune, too hard to fit onstage, too hard for Brian to see my exact hand movements when we played. But most importantly, turning my head to the side to address the audience felt alienating. I wanted to look straight at them. I wanted to see them.

The typical electric keyboard stand is pretty ugly, though, so along with the tea, honey, hummus, and juice that our contract required from the ever-larger venues we were playing, I asked for a few bunches of flowers every night, so we could tape them to the keyboard stand to hide the ugliness. We often had flowers left over, though, and it seemed like a waste to leave them in the dressing room where they’d just be thrown away. Some divas get flowers thrown at them, but we started a tradition of pitching flowers at the audience when we first took the stage; a love assault of foliage. We started requesting that the flowers have absolutely no thorns, for safety. With some effort, we could usually hit people in the balcony.

People started bringing bouquets to the shows and passing them through the crowd up to the lip of the stage for use between songs, or throwing them at our feet, true diva style, at the start of the show. We would rip them up into manageable chunks and throw them back out to the crowd. The crowd would toss them back at the stage.

This game could last all night.

Later, in the signing line, people would take the flowers from behind their ears and hand them to me as a thank-you gesture. Then I’d recycle the same flower to someone down the line who looked lonely or in need of some extra love.

On a good night, you couldn’t tell who was giving what to whom.

Sharing my life on the Internet has meant that everybody knows the immediate score of my existence. Fans in the signing line will ask, How’s Neil? Did he get to his plane on time? And, How’s your chest infection—have you finished that run of antibiotics? I’m on the road and they’re on home turf. They bring books, herbs, teas, soaps, beers from the bar, organic wines from the region. The edible items are usually shared with the people standing behind them.

The signing line is a cross between a wedding party, a photo booth, and the international arrivals terminal at the airport; a blurry collision of flash intimacies. It’s a reunion with those I haven’t met yet. There are a lot of tears and a lot of high-fiving and a lot of hugging. There’s also a lot of asking, in both directions.

Will you take a picture for us?

Will you take a picture with us?

Do you need a hug?

Can I have a drink?

Do you want a drink?

Will you hold my drink?

Why are you crying?

It’s not always the fans crying. I’ve been held by many fans on nights I needed a random shoulder on which to collapse.

I’ve observed signing lines at other concerts that are not like this, where it’s all business and security officers stand there making sure nobody touches The Talent. I’ve had to argue with security officers appointed to my signing lines, explaining that, unlike other bands, we don’t WANT security to hurry people along, or shoo them away, making sure they don’t stop to talk. I need people to stop and talk and hug me, or else I feel like an automaton.

Listening fast and caring immediately is a skill in itself. People bring me compact stories: the song that got them through high school, the operation they just had, the recent breakup, the death of a parent. The story about the sick friend who wanted to be at the show but couldn’t make it.

Or the longer, more complicated story about the friend who was supposed to be at the show, but had just committed suicide.

What do you do with news like that? You stop the signing line, you take that person in your arms, you hold them and let them cry for as long as necessary.

Then you get back to work.

If I had a dollar for every time somebody gave me a CD, I’d have a lot of dollars. Instead, I have a lot of CDs. Years after my front-porch encounter with Edward Ka-Spel, I found myself empathizing with the mountains of tapes that he’d been given on tour.

Can I give you my CD? I’m in a band.

Can I give you my CD? My girlfriend is a singer-songwriter.

Can I give you my CD? I run a death-metal label here in town. I make beats in my bedroom. I make a cappella music on my phone.

The answer is always yes, yes, yes, and yes. I see those CDs as something more than just some local kid trying to get his band a break. They’re like a thank-you letter, a way for one artist to wave a flag to another, like two lighthouses; part of the must-never-stop, ever-circulating gift.

And you do not refuse that gift, ever.

Whether you’re prepared for it or not, part of the job that goes along with being a confessional songwriter is that you become a makeshift therapist by default. Except you don’t have a nice, quiet office: you’re doing it in loud, dingy nightclubs, in dark alleys outside tour buses, and in backstage bathrooms. I feel simultaneously honored and depressed when someone pulls me close and says, “There’s nobody else I can tell this to…” and proceeds to detail a secret abortion, a rape, a diagnosis of a mental illness.

In that instant of intimate exchange, I want to adopt every teenage kid who tells me their parents kicked them out of the house for being gay. I want to follow the story of every recovery, I want to stick around to see every baby get born and every wound heal and every heart evolve. But I don’t. I can’t. Every night, I drive away.

You see twenty patients a week. How do you deal with taking in so much pain from strangers? I asked Anthony one night, over the phone as I lay on a pull-out bed in a friend’s living room in Montreal. The post-show signing had taken ages and I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep.

Have you ever heard of a “sin-eater”?

No, I said. Tell me.

It’s when a local holy man, or a guru, takes on the sins and sufferings of the community by opening to those who are in pain, and filtering the pain and suffering. He takes all the emotional trash and, through his body, through his love and capacity to stay present, clarifies the pain into compassion. Lots of religions have their version of it. Jesus does it for the Christians.

A community confession-booth attendant, basically, I said.

Ha. Basically. There were professional sin-eaters in England. A guy, for money, would come around and eat bread over the corpse of a dead family member to purge the body of sin before it went to heaven. It’s also the magic and mystery of what we do—when we nail it—in psychotherapy. We take on the suffering of others, digest it, transform it.

And artists? I asked. Sounds like art.

Yeah, good artists do it. You know, the “Artist” and the “Medicine Man” used to be the same guy. “Musician” and “Shaman” used to be the same characters, in a way. Our jobs aren’t that different, you and me. I’ve seen you at the signing line, I’ve watched you. Eat the pain. Send it back to the void as love.

Can I ask you a question?

Ask, he said.

Do you ever have days where you can’t take it all in, and it just makes you too sad?

Yeah, beauty. It happens all the time.

Sometimes the signing line keeps me from having to be alone.

Sometimes the signing line reminds me that this job isn’t about me, it’s about everybody.

Mostly the signing line makes me feel connected to the people around the fire.

I need to see their faces.

Sometimes I feel like I need the signing line more than they do.

I notice a difference if I don’t sign after a show. It can feel deeply lonely.

Not signing or hanging out after a show is like taking someone home for a one-night stand, having passionate sex with them, and then watching them, from the bed, as they get dressed and leave right after the orgasm. I need the postcoital cuddle, the bit where you spend the night spooning, looking into each other’s eyes with a confirmation that, yes, that happened. And now let’s at least get breakfast and talk about the mundane details of our lives even if we’re probably never going to see each other again.

I hate it when people don’t spend the night.

Michael Pope and I decided to make a music video—he was a filmmaker, my housemate, and one of my best friends; it made sense—so we picked one of the band’s most popular live songs, “Girl Anachronism,” and co-wrote a treatment sitting at my kitchen table, then spent a week transforming our home into a production house. We asked Ron, the photographer friend of Anthony’s and all-around art enthusiast, to front us the money for film stock (real film stock!). We asked Lee to help decorate the top floor, we asked our housemate Zea to do the costumes, and we asked our fans to volunteer behind the scenes. We fed everybody pizza and beer, and shot for twelve straight hours (we couldn’t afford to rent the equipment for longer than a day), using almost every room of the Cloud Club, along with the back garden and the roof, as our film set. When the video was edited and we put it up on our website (these were pre-YouTube days), everybody in our immediate community had taken part in one way or another. And Lee was ecstatic: this was how he always imagined the space being used. We went on to shoot full-scale music videos in the house, and at my parents’ house, and at Ron’s house, and at my old high school, using the drama students. Through the act of asking, we created our community. That’s how it worked.

Our audience was growing. We sent hundreds of packages to hundreds of labels. Nobody wanted us. We finally decided that we should stop running a CD-toasting business out of my kitchen and make our own legitimate studio record. On our own, no label. If we printed a few thousand copies, the whole undertaking would cost us about $20,000, including the studio time, and then we’d have a high-quality CD with all of our songs to sell at shows, and make the money back.

But we didn’t have that kind of money. We were making a few hundred dollars here and there from gigging, but even when combined with our incomes from stripping, statue-ing, and scooping ice cream, that didn’t leave us with more than a few thousand dollars at a time, and we still had to get around, pay rent, buy food.

We did have a growing fanbase and a hardcore work ethic, though, and I figured that was decent enough collateral to guarantee a few personal loans. I made a short list of people, and then one by one, I asked them: Ron Nordin, Anthony’s best friend, a photographer and local arts enthusiast; my parents; our New York couchsurfing hosts Josh and Alina; a generous uncle who lived in Los Angeles. And we asked Tom and Steve, a gay couple who came to almost all of our gigs, lived in a house, and appeared to have real jobs. I asked everyone if they would pitch in up to $5,000 for the recording and printing of the record, with the promise that we would pay the money back within a year, sooner if possible.

They all said yes, and sent checks. I mailed them all printed letters so that they would have some sort of a legal record, even though they knew we weren’t going to run off to Mexico with the money. They trusted us.

I thanked them all profusely.

We spent a couple of harebrained months driving back and forth from Boston to Brooklyn, where we slaved over the record, and we hired two of my Cloud Club housemates (Zea, the painter, and Thom, the graphic designer) to create the album artwork. Then we sold the CD (which we titled, simply, The Dresden Dolls) straight to the fans at the shows for $10 a pop. We quickly sold out of the first batch of 5,000 and ordered another. My kitchen became a wonderland workshop of envelopes and packaging as we started mailing them out to fans in more and more distant states and countries, and to labels, radio stations, publicists, and managers, hoping someone would help us run our business—answer the phones, mail the T-shirts, handle the bookings. We couldn’t cope with all the work. We were getting overloaded.

After two years of constant gigging with no manager, no booking agent, and a growing pile of rejection letters from every indie label on the planet saying “we don’t sign goth bands” (we weren’t a goth band, dammit!), I started to get desperate. We were drawing five hundred people a night by then in a handful of cities, and though I was enjoying our Bohemian Traveling Circus Fantasy, our time between shows had become completely consumed by emails and phone calls, trying to organize our schedule while trying to get signed. I couldn’t keep up with being the touring act and the office manager. We got bigger and bigger, but nobody would sign us. We were too strange. We didn’t sound like any other band currently becoming famous.

Then a promising email came in from a guy named Dave. He wanted to talk to us. I’d never heard of his label, and when I googled it, I found bands with names like 3 Inches of Blood, Baptized in Blood, Make Them Suffer, Mutiny Within, and Satan. A METAL label? I’d been hoping to get signed by Matador. Or Mute. Somewhere we could stand alongside Belle and Sebastian, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Magnetic Fields, The Pixies, and other arty indie bands with harmless names. I found a music lawyer and showed him the contract.

They basically want to give you fifty grand to sign away your firstborn, he told me. They’d take a cut of everything you ever earn, now and forever, including your merchandise and the rights to every song you ever write. Are you sure you want to sign with them even if I sweeten up the deal and let you keep your firstborn?

I wasn’t sure, but we were working as hard as we could and nobody else wanted us. We were desperate.

Let’s de-firstborn it, I said. I’m game to try.

We played a show around that time with Karen Mantler, an off-the-wall jazz singer who, after releasing three CDs on an indie, was picked up by a major label (bloodsucking scum, is how I believe she referred to them) only to learn that the major considered her, as Karen put it, a “tax write-off.” She told us that after her album, of which she was incredibly proud, had been released, they’d mailed her ten copies, fired the guy who’d signed her, and did absolutely nothing else to sell or promote it—you literally couldn’t find or buy it in any stores. She was completely disillusioned, but fighting back, in her own way. At the merchandise table after the show, she was selling hand-burned copies of the CDs that the label wouldn’t put into circulation; she even designed a new cover that declared, “KAREN MANTLER’S PET PROJECT—BOOTLEG EDITION,” with a message on the back explaining how her label had screwed her.

I think we should sign, I said to Brian. I mean… we’ll always have a CD burner. We can always go all Karen Mantler on their asses.

After a few more go-rounds with the lawyers, we signed the contract in blood. (Actual blood. It was a metal label; we figured that was appropriate.) They paid us $100,000 for the eternal rights to the album that we’d recorded for $20,000 (territory: “the universe,” just in case our albums started selling big on Mars). Thanks to the lawyer, I kept my firstborn—my publishing and merchandising rights.

First, we paid our lawyer.

Then I wrote checks to pay back all the loans, which I mailed back with thank-you letters. Then Brian and I took all of our parents out to a celebration dinner in a restaurant fifty feet from my main Bride spot in Harvard Square.

And then we quit our ice cream, statue, and stripping jobs once and for all.

I introduced Neil to Anthony in an Italian restaurant in the North End of Boston. Neil and I had been dating for a few months. If they didn’t like each other, I was going to die.

We ate and drank wine, discussing all manner of things, and I couldn’t help feeling that they were tactically sizing each other up, like two dogs in a park.

Neil seemed to like Anthony just fine.

So? So? What did you think? I asked Anthony the next morning, over the phone.

Anthony said: I don’t know, beauty. He’s smart, that’s for sure. But he seems nervous. You know? Like, freaked out.

That’s because he was nervous and freaked out, clown-head. I’ve been talking about you since I met him. He was terrified you wouldn’t like him. So… do you like him?

Anthony made a hmmmmmmm sound.

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN??

Why’s it so important to you what I think?

I dunno. Because you’re you. Just help me out here, okay? You know me better than anyone. And you’ve saved me from like, what—five fatal relationships?

I have not, said Anthony.

You have so. Remember Mike? Remember how I thought it would be hilarious to get married in college because NOBODY would BELIEVE IT ha ha ha?

Well, yeah. That’s true.

And Oliver? The one who OD’d?

Well… okay.

We got a lot of fan mail. Some of it was hate mail, and we built a special page on our website to feature the worst of it. I hand-selected some choice excerpts for the website back in the day:

The hate mail page included, as the centerpiece, this letter to the editor in a Boston music zine:

The hate-mail page became the most heavily trafficked spot on our website.

People started writing to thank me for being brave enough to display the nastiness. But it didn’t feel brave; it felt like the only option, the only way I could deal with the pain. I still practice this same style of Internet jiujitsu to this day: I grab the hate and air it out, try to laugh at it, and share it back out into the world, so it doesn’t eat me alive. Around the same time that we built the hate-mail page, I started blogging regularly, sharing the good press, the bad press, and my emotional struggles riding the I AM LOVED! I AM HATED! yo-yo of praise and criticism as I tried to simultaneously balance touring, recording, managing the band, and whatever shreds were left of my local social life.

I was beginning to learn about online abuse, but, as people started to follow my blog by the hundreds, then the thousands, I also had my first taste of crowd power, and how double-edged the sword was.

We had just gotten our giant label check, paid off our loans, and had enough left over to buy a top-of-the-line drum kit for Brian and, my heart slamming with pride (I was Signed! I was Legitimate!), I started to shop for my first real piano, with a budget of about $20,000, to replace the dilapidated, untuneable piano on which I was currently composing in my apartment (someone had been about to throw it away; I’d paid the moving costs). I wanted something bright sounding and rugged, since I had a tendency to break strings. I went into every single used and new showroom in Boston, fingering the keys and nooks and crannies of every piano for sale with a kind of erotic disbelief that I was in a position to actually buy one. It felt so incredibly real.

One day I walked into a little piano shop in a converted old house in the deep suburbs. There were only a few other customers poking around; a lone nice-looking guy in a cardigan was minding the floor. I sat down at one of the baby grands and started test-driving it with some loud Beethoven, then with one of my own songs. I closed my eyes and listened, feeling the weight of the keys, hammering away like a maniac.

The guy approached me politely. I stopped playing.

Miss? Hello. I’m sorry but I’m going to have to… ask you to leave.

Holding my breath, I stood up, picked up my bag, walked out of the store and back to my car, and before I could process what had happened, I broke down crying. He thinks I’m a fraud.

I drove home and, still weepy, took to my blog. I poured out the whole story for my small readership, how ashamed and angry I felt, how devastating and embarrassing it was. I included the name of the shop, and the address, and encouraged my fans to write the guy a letter if they felt so inclined.

It wasn’t until the next day, as I read a few emails from fans who told me they had proudly written letters to the shop in protest, that I felt the gravity, the stupidity—the meanness—of what I had done.

I imagined scolding, scalding hate letters piling up on that poor guy’s desk as he tried to eke out a living running a little piano shop. Sure, he was a dick for throwing me out of his store, but wasn’t I a bigger dick to torment him like that? And wasn’t it even more dickish to use my own fans as weapons of destruction? Ashamed by my realization, I went back to my blog, removed the store name and address, and wrote a follow-up post, telling my fans that I’d been an idiot diva, that it was the insecure teenager talking. Then I prayed that the poor guy would be left in peace. I was afraid to drive down that street for a while.

I had sampled the power of cruelty. And it tasted awful.

Still, most of the early fan mail was love mail, not hate mail, and I started exchanging emails and letters with hundreds of fans. It was like having an infinite number of pen pals, and I eventually despaired when, after a few years, the number of emails coming in was more than I could keep up with. It made me feel like a bad friend.

Sometimes I’d dip into the fan mail just to cheer myself up, to feel useful to the world when I was depressed. Writing songs offered no instant gratification, but reading and answering a letter somehow did. There were recurring themes in the letters: unhappiness, rape, identity crises, self-abuse, suicidal thoughts. I answered as honestly as I could. I hope your parents eventually understand. Stay strong. I know how that feels, I’ve been there. It gets better. Yes, I’m happy to recommend some books on Buddhism. No, I haven’t always been this fearless… I was afraid to play my music for years.

During one of these answering sprees, I answered a note from a poetic, eccentric-sounding eighteen-year-old named Casey who had written to me from a hospital in Boston. She had ovarian cancer and they had put her in the children’s ward, where she was the oldest patient and having a hard time watching so many of the other children suffer. Getting to know all the parents was the worst thing, she told me. She would meet them and make friends with them and then watch them watch their kids die. After exchanging a handful of emails, I came back to Boston from a West Coast tour and, with my suitcases still unpacked, found myself staring at one of her emails on the screen.

She’d never asked me to visit. But I got in my car, happy to put off unpacking and facing my real life for an afternoon. I found her room number at the front desk, walked up, and rapped on the door. Her mother opened it, and her eyes blinked with a dawning recognition; she knew my face from The Dresden Dolls gig flyers Casey had taped to the wall of her unit. Hold on, she whispered. She scuttled back behind the curtain and I heard a yelp.

That was Casey. She was wearing a wig, because of the chemo. I stayed in her room for an hour, picking up where we’d left off over email. She showed me how she’d been taping up hopeful paintings she’d made in her windows, so the children in the ward across the courtyard could see them.

She didn’t die. We kept emailing. And gradually, she became my close friend. After she recovered, she came to Dolls shows and created beautiful chalk drawings on the sidewalks outside the clubs. Then she went to art college. Then I asked her if she needed a place to live.

She’s twenty-seven now, a painter with one ovary, the right one, and she’s been my Cloud Club housemate for five years. Lee brings her more reams of paper than she needs. She had a fish for a while named Left Ovary. Then Left Ovary died, and she named her new fish Everything.

I’d text her from the road to ask,

How’s everything?

And she’d text back,

Everything’s really good. He just pooped.

When things were particularly bad and she was going through boy trouble or something, I’d text,

Everything’s going to be okay. Everything exists.

One day, while I was on tour in Europe, I got a text from Casey saying,

Everything is gone.

The politician Tip O’Neill once said something along these lines: If you want to make someone your real friend, ask them for a favor.

As we forged along, the band made an art out of asking for help—from our housemates, from our friends, from our fans, from our family, from anybody who’d give it.

We’d done a good job of thoroughly angering and confusing the hell out of the local Boston nightclubs by showing up for gigs with our volunteer artist friends and fans, whom we’d dubbed “The Brigade.” Busker friends of mine stood outside the gigs playing accordions and posing as statues. Burlesque dancers roved around the venue in costume, handing out flowers and ripped-out pages from poetry books. Painter friends set up easels and worked, doing portraits. Volunteers decorated the sidewalks outside the venue, festooning the nooks and crannies of the lobbies and bathrooms with glitter, garlands of flowers, fortune cookies, Barbie doll heads.

We tried to set up an arm of The Brigade in every city; you just had to volunteer over email—to do basically anything—and I’d grant you a guest-list space. We paid with the usual currency we had on hand: T-shirts, CDs, backstage beer, shout-outs from stage, tickets, love. I announced any local shows or art openings from stage if a member of The Brigade had something coming up.

In my free time, I tried to hunt down potentially interesting local performers, which was becoming easier now that Google existed and you could search for “insane cabaret performers detroit.” If an extra performer we’d reached out to wanted to get paid for the gig, those decisions were random and made on the fly:

We’d love to come, but we’re all professionally trained ballerinas, so we need backstage space to warm up, a voice said over the phone as we barreled down the highway to our next stop. Then we set ourselves on fire to songs by Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, mostly all classic rock… but all the dancers live at least an hour outside Detroit and we each need fifty dollars for gas and there will be at least five or six of us.

I put my hand over the mouthpiece of my phone and turned to Brian, who was driving.

They’re ballerinas who set themselves on fire to AC/DC but they need money for gas, I whispered.

For gas to set themselves on fire? Brian asked.

No, gas for the car.

HIRED! Brian said, banging the steering wheel.

We’re totally down, I said into the phone. You sound amazing. We can do like two hundred bucks—however many ballerinas that buys us. Just grab the cash from me after the show. And for god’s sake, talk to the club about the local fire laws. Do you have a website I can post?

Yes, it’s Tutu Inferno dot org. Spelled T-u-t…

I got it, I got it. See you Sunday.

In the streets of Edinburgh one year, I ran into a busking duo called Bang On! who played percussion on junk and household objects. Our UK tour was already packed with opening stage acts, but I asked if they’d like to try a new experiment: to set up and play on the theater floor as people were filing in before the show, then pass the hat. They said they’d give it a shot. I came out half-dressed and half-made-up for the show, watched and applauded them, and then made a personal plea to the crowd, letting them know that these people had come to entertain out of the goodness of their own hearts and weren’t getting otherwise paid. The money poured in, and something about asking everybody—on the spot—to reach into their pockets to help these two artists changed the energy of the room. It turned the random crowd into a real community. It also meant that nobody ever came late to our concerts—the preshow entertainment started being too interesting to miss.

Other bands pissed off clubs because they would trash the dressing room and steal liquor from the stockroom. We pissed off clubs because the half-naked marching band outside the venue would elicit noise complaints, or because someone would leave a glittery cage of trained mynah birds in the hallway, thus blocking the bar-backs’ path to the ice machine.

Neil didn’t dance. He wasn’t much of a drinker. He didn’t like hanging out in loud bars unless he had a book.

These things worried me.

But I was infatuated with his accent.

Say it again! I’d plead. Say tomato!

ToMAHto, he would deadpan, as if not enjoying this game at all.

I would squeal with glee. Say it again!

ToMAHto.

Shivers. It also worked with “schedule” and “banana,” and my very favorite: “wastepaperbasket.” One night I asked him to say it fifteen times. It didn’t get old.

Late in bed that same night, when I wasn’t expecting it, he surprised me.

ToMAHto. He whispered into my ear. SHEdule.

I half opened my eyes and whimpered with pleasure. And then, sounding very pleased with himself, he murmured:

BaNAHna.

The label helped us a lot in the early days. They went right to work making the band better known around the world, especially in Europe and Australia. What we’d been doing at a grassroots level had been effective, but it was slow. They worked fast. They got our music into stores, onto the radio and television. Soon we were flying everywhere, hopping on and off tour buses, doing interviews with bigger and bigger magazines.

We’d heard that they had a reputation for squeezing bands dry and only caring about the bottom line, but that wasn’t what we noticed, not at first. What quickly became apparent to us was that they didn’t understand how to treat—or rather, not treat—our fans. It seemed simple enough to me: you work hard, you play for your crowd, you talk to, communicate with, hug, and connect with them in every possible way, and in turn, they support you and convert their friends into the fold. That’s when music works best, when people use it to commune and connect with one another. Simple.

However, the label thought that we could somehow be mega-launched into the echelon of indie bands that were blowing up and selling tons of records out of the gate around that time: The Hives, The Shins, The Vines, The Strokes. We couldn’t: we were too cult-y, our name wasn’t short enough, and we didn’t actually feel hip or destined for hipness. We functioned best as part of a tight community that grew slowly, fan by fan. If it grew too fast, it wouldn’t work. It’d be like suddenly pouring too many new unfamiliar fish into an aquarium and screwing up the ecosystem.

The label and the band had different ideas about what “enough” meant.

What was enough to make the band “successful”? We weren’t starving. We could pay our rent. What did we actually… need? To live? To be happy?

If you’re looking for help, it stands to reason that you’re going to start looking among the people most able to give you the help you need. When your house is on fire, you don’t call the fire department from seven towns over—you call the outfit down the street. They’re the most equipped to help you.

One of the strategies the label employed that always baffled me was wanting us to focus all the energy on casting the net elsewhere, to attract strangers, while ignoring our established fanbase. I loved new people. Of course. But it seemed insane to jeopardize the current relationships to find them.

The label’s theory probably followed some kind of cutthroat marketing maxim: once you’ve got a customer, you’ve got ’em. Move on to the next victim. Except that our driving motivation was to hang out with and bond with our small group of existing customers, whom we’d worked so hard to find in the first place. We knew from experience that our evolving friendship was slowly but surely bringing new people into the fray. Making fans that way—in person, one by one, as they were won over at our shows by our harder-core fans—seemed more effective than going out there and hollering on the radio to a group of unknowns, hoping to be heard by someone who might like us. Our way felt more like getting introduced to a person by a mutual friend, personally, at a bar over drinks. It felt real.

When I reflect on the last fifteen years of my life in music—all the touring, talking, late-night signing, blogging, twittering, couchsurfing, crowdsurfing, and all other variety of eye-to-eye, soul-to-soul, hand-to-hand connection I’ve shared with the members of my crowd—I see it as a net.

It has to start with the art. The songs had to touch people initially, and mean something, for anything to work at all. The art, not the artist, is what fundamentally draws the net into being. The net was then tightened and strengthened by a collection of interactions and exchanges I’ve had, personally, whether in live venues or online, with members of my community.

I couldn’t outsource it. I could hire help, but not to do the fundamental things that create emotional connections: the making of the art, the feeling-with-other-people at a human level. Nobody can do that work for me—no Internet marketing company, no manager, no assistants. It had to be me.

That’s what I do all day on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and my blog. The platform is irrelevant. I’ll go wherever the people are. What’s important is that I absorb, listen, talk, connect, help, and share. Constantly. The net gets so strong at a certain point that I can let it go for a few days—maybe weeks—and it keeps weaving and bolstering itself. But I can’t leave for very long.

The net tightens every time I pick up my phone and check in on Twitter, every time I share my own story, every time I ask a fan how their project is coming or promote somebody’s book or tour.

The net tightens when someone in the community loses her houseboat in a fire and tweets me for help, and I throw the information out to the fanbase, who go to work offering money, shelter, cat-sitting, and words of kindness.

It tightens when two people meet in line at one of my shows, fall in love, and come to a signing line after a concert three years later, asking me to Sharpie a swelling, pregnant belly.

I feel pride when I see that magic happening: the fans helping one another out, giving one another places to stay, driving one another around, helping one another with comforting words and links in the middle of the night, breaking the boundaries of “stranger” etiquette because they feel a trust and familiarity with one another under our common roof.

And I feel it at my shows, when I see people standing aside to allow a short person to see the stage, or carving a path for a person in a wheelchair, or just sharing a bottle of water. We’re all helping each other. Here. Now.

The label didn’t understand why they should pay for the band to maintain a website year-round. They thought it was something that only needed to be “up” when we had a new record to promote, and wouldn’t pay to keep the site active the rest of the time. I was baffled.

I don’t think you guys get it. Our website is like… a Real Place. It needs to exist all the time. You don’t shut it down and then come back later.

The whole point of being an artist, I thought, was to be connected to people. To make a family. A family you were with all the time, like it or not. This was the way we’d been doing it for years, whether or not we had an album or a tour to “promote.”

I knew the way to keep the fans happy was by staying present—through the forums, through sharing people’s art and music back out through the Internet channels, through keeping everybody connected. That’s just how a relationship works. And when the time came to ask them to buy a record, to buy a ticket, whatever… if I’d been there for them, they’d be there for me. It went beyond the emotional; it also seemed like smart business. The label disagreed. They wanted to expand. Immediately.

Tightening the net is not the same thing as expanding it. If you spread your net too far, too fast, it stretches too thin and it breaks; or it stretches too wide to be able to catch anything. The label didn’t seem to understand that we didn’t work like a pop band. We were far more interested in serving our slowly growing, tight-knit community of weirdos than we were in topping the charts.

So we threw up our hands and paid for everything ourselves: our web designers, our forum, our emailing list costs. The label asked for access to the mailing list, but I said no. I didn’t trust them with my fans’ email addresses. They were more than addresses; they were relationships.

I didn’t ask them for any more help in the Internet department.

The relationship with the label was doomed from the start, when I think about it.

They got the sex part. But they didn’t understand the cuddle.

I shot the video for my song “Leeds United” in London, casting hundreds of volunteer fans we’d enlisted through the blog and the email list. They came, from all over the UK, dressed to the nines in everything from Victorian formal wear to tongue-in-cheek soccer hooligan garb, and dutifully engaged in a pie-throwing brawl while I lip-synched and danced around onstage. While the video was being edited, one of the label higher-ups called me in for a meeting at their offices in New York.

Just wanted to chat with you about the new video. The director just sent us the first cut.

Yes! Isn’t it great? She killed it!

Yeah. It’s a great video. So, Amanda. Here’s the thing. We think some of the shots of you aren’t that… flattering.

He told me how they were concerned about my image and how they hoped I could edit out the shots that made me look fat.

Now, my relationship with my body is pretty healthy. I’ve never been massively overweight or underweight. I’ve never had an eating disorder or any kind of body dysmorphia. I’m pretty comfortable with myself. I don’t shave my armpits or legs very often (though sometimes I will, just to feel my legs slide around on fresh sheets like slippery eels; it’s delightful), and I’ve learned to accept that people sometimes stare. I shave my eyebrows and paint them back on.[4] I like to think I’ve managed to attain a decent level of corporeal self-acceptance over the years. That being said: I’m still vain. I still cringe when I see my belly after a monthlong muffin-and-beer binge, spilling over a waistline that’s too tight. No lie: I wanted to look hot in this video. But try as I might, I just couldn’t agree with the label’s assessment. The shots the label objected to didn’t seem unflattering to me. They just seemed… real. I thought I looked fine.

So I refused to make the edits.

The video went up, “unflattering” belly and all, and I told the whole story to the blog. The label considered this an act of war, and in a way, it was. It was the first time I’d publicly complained about our relationship.

Then something unexpected happened. A few people posted pictures of their own bellies—some fat, some thin, some hairy, some with Caesarean scars—on the band discussion forum. A few bellies bore messages aimed at the label (LOVE THY BELLY! BELLY PRIDE! THIS IS WHAT A BELLY LOOKS LIKE!) in paint and marker. I watched, in happy amazement, as more people followed suit. This was in the days before I was on Twitter and Facebook, but a few days later, hundreds of pictures had been uploaded, and one fan took it upon himself to bind them into a book. The fans had even given the viral movement a title: the ReBellyon.

It was the first time my fanbase had created something like this on their own at this scale, and I watched from a distance like a proud parent.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. These were the people I was making the video for. In my opinion, they were the ones who were supposed to love it, and thereby feel encouraged to buy more music and drive the sales up. They were the target audience, as far as I was concerned, not some ephemeral, theoretical audience—dreamed up by the record label—who would rush to Walmart demanding my music upon seeing my svelte figure in a video. My crowd was making it very clear to me that not only were they fine with seeing my non-anorexic belly, they were also locked in solidarity with my decision to look like an average person instead of a Photoshopped supermodel.

I figured, if my fans were okay with it, I could be okay with it. Because really, who was trying to impress whom?

I’d thought that I already had a relatively healthy body image, but this moment shifted things for me. I started to take a sense of pride in my own “flaws.” I blogged about the wrinkly crease on my forehead, challenging myself to accept it, I twittered a picture of my thigh stretch marks. Every piece of sharing opened a floodgate of shared insecurities and relieved “it’s not just me” comments and photos from men and women alike.

And bit by bit, I started judging myself a little less harshly every time I looked in the mirror. The fans gave me that gift, very directly. They weren’t some imaginary enemy, sizing me up and judging my weight, my skin, my tits, my ability to look perfect. They didn’t care how the package delivering the music—me—looked as long as we were all making one another happy, and taking care of one another.

They were all just a bunch of people.

The imaginary enemy had been in my head.

If I had an enemy at all, it was the label.

Anthony never really asked me for anything—certainly never for money, I didn’t have any. He hated lateness, so he would ask me to be punctual for our groks.[5] He also asked, usually joking, that I love him unconditionally, and without judgment, which was easy. That was love, or so I was learning. It was what he was teaching me.

But one time he asked me for something specific, and big. I was in my midtwenties, in the midst of making the first Dresden Dolls record. It was Christmastime, so I was kicking around closer to Boston for a few days, off tour, to be with my family and spend time on the couch in Anthony’s study, recuperating and grokking.

We’d been talking on the phone almost every day that month, and I knew that Anthony’s wife, Laura, had been going through a rough time, and he’d been worried about her. He’d been going through a pretty hefty depression himself. I’d take breaks from the studio and from cranking out vocals and fiddling with piano levels to check in and see how he was doing.

Laura and I hadn’t been very close when I was a teenager; she’d wondered, like everyone else in the neighborhood, what this angsty teenage girl was doing hanging out with her husband all the time. And she just looked to me like… an adult. But once I hit my twenties and created my own life, while deepening my friendship with Anthony, we started to understand and even love each other. We never got as close as Anthony and I had, but we became warmer friends. Allies.

They never had kids. I was sort of the closest thing.

Anthony was older than Laura. He started morbidly musing one night about how he hoped she would die first, just so she wouldn’t ever have to be alone without him.

But if I do die, look after her, okay? he said. It’s been haunting me lately. I can’t handle the idea of her being alone. I can’t stand the idea of her falling down the stairs, and being hurt… any of that. Just promise me you’ll check in if I check out.

A few nights later, I wrote him a letter. On Christmas Eve, I walked across my folks’ lawn to his study. I knocked the snow off my boots and collapsed onto the couch.

Here, I wrote you something.

It was a pretty simple letter. He poured me a glass of wine from a bottle in his little study fridge, and sat down to read it.

I promise I’ll take care of Laura if you die, the letter said.

I’ll watch out for her, I’ll check in, I’ll make sure she isn’t too alone.

And I’ll do it not because you asked me.

Not because you love me.

I’ll do it because I love her, even though she barely knows it.

I’ll do it because you’ve taught me what love is, and how easily you can give it.

I’ll take care of what you love.

I’ll be there for Laura when you’re gone and you’re not around to do it.

I promise.

He put the letter down and looked at me.

That was the first time I saw Anthony cry.

My blog readership grew steadily as I started to dump more of my inner self onto the page. I shared the backstage stories, I promoted the shows, I asked for volunteers, I posted digital postcards from every visual and emotional vantage. I publicly thanked anyone who helped us. I was punch-drunk from the instant gratification of sharing life in real time, the random closeness, the feeling that I wasn’t going through my struggles alone. When things went well, I blogged. When they went badly, I blogged. I tried not to sugarcoat. Sometimes I would post a short blog and get back over a thousand comments in which people would share their own stories, their own experiences. Sometimes I’d post a lengthy commentary about something I found fascinating, and get little or no response. I learned to love that about my fans: they weren’t sheep, they were people. I never knew what to expect, or how they’d react.

People started using me to help one another. I wrote blogs about body image and watched discussions and confessions explode in the comments, because people (of all genders) felt safe talking to one another. I took a poll on Twitter about health insurance. I asked people to provide: 1) COUNTRY?! 2) profession? 3) insured? 4) if not, why not, if so, at what cost per month (or covered by job)? Thousands responded. I posted the poll results on my blog and watched teenagers from the UK and the US now discussing health care, amazed by the fact that their systems were so different. They hadn’t known.

The dots kept connecting. One day, I stumbled across the story of Amanda Todd, a Canadian teenager who had committed suicide after being bullied, online and off, by some cruel kids in her school. A few months before her death, she’d posted a plea for help on YouTube, in which she simply held up written signs telling her story of loneliness, suicide attempts, and fear.

I posted the story and her video to the blog. It had hit a nerve for me. I’ve become adept at fielding Internet hate bombs: people hated my band, my lyrics, my eyebrows, my videos, my feminist politics, my armpit hair. I’d gotten used to waking up to a daily assault of love and hate coming at me over the Internet, and dealing with all those emotional landmines was becoming a skill in itself. I was a thirty-five-year-old who had grown a thick skin, and it was still a daily struggle. Amanda Todd was a kid. Fifteen. I couldn’t imagine being the target of an Internet hate campaign at fifteen. I wrote about all of this, and a young woman named Shannon Eck commented on the blog:

Story time. I am fat. I’m not a fan of being fat and have, in fact, struggled with it my entire life…

She told us about a boy named Austin who used to torment her in gym class, calling her a cow, making up songs about how she was a fat bitch, and about how much she struggled to deal with his constant onslaught of cruelty. And about how a few months into that school year, Austin killed himself. And about how she wept the day he died.

Most bullies are the way they are because of how they have been treated, she wrote. They just don’t know any different. They don’t know how to deal with their emotions, so they lash out. Austin’s death broke my heart, but it made me open my eyes. What if I had tried to just talk to him? Would it have made any difference? Probably not. But at the end of the day, we’re all human. We’re all broken in a way, and we’re just trying to feel whole. I try to understand where people are coming from, even if they are being horrible to me. When I would get mean messages online, I would instantly retaliate with something equally terrible and soul-crushing. After Austin, I didn’t do that.

Her story set off a rash of sharing and other stories, and the readers deepened the conversation in the blog comments, sharing confessions from both sides of the bullying fence. One young teenage girl blogged about her suicidal thoughts, and a few fans rushed in to support her, comfort her, send her their own phone numbers. The net tightened.

That blog (which I titled “On Internet Hatred: Please Inquire Within”) still lives online and now has more than two thousand comments. Every time someone reads it and adds in their own story, the net continues to tighten. We were and are creating our own space, our own history. The blog started feeding my songwriting.

But since The Media (Rolling Stone, the New York Times, MTV) wasn’t reporting on any of these sorts of things at the time—the blog discussions and the Twitter exchanges involving thousands of people—it didn’t seem important to the label. They were busy bemoaning the fact that SPIN still didn’t want to review our latest record. This was happening before anyone was paying much attention to Twitter: these sorts of new social media happenings—which had yet to be defined—were something the label missed completely. None of it seemed to have anything to do with how many records they could sell. It wasn’t in the marketing plan, so it didn’t exist.

I was learning, slowly but surely, that The Media—the traditional one, at any rate—mattered less and less. The ability to connect directly, under our own umbrella, was making one thing very clear:

We were The Media.

From the dawn of The Dresden Dolls, I saw our fans making art inspired by our music, and I loved it. Anything that was band-inspired was uploaded to the website and celebrated, and as video came to the Internet and YouTube exploded, the fans started to make their own unofficial music videos using our tracks. Some artists pulled and punished content like that, since the fans didn’t own rights to the music.

We not only allowed it, we encouraged it. One year, while opening up for another band, we booked a string of sideshows in art-house cinemas and ran a film festival with content made by our friends and the fanbase, including fan-made Dresden Dolls videos and the fans’ own original animations and shorts. We called it “Fuck The Back Row.”

To this day, some of the fans’ unofficial videos surpass the view counts of our official videos on YouTube. We not only don’t mind it—we openly celebrate it.

I was in a meeting at the label’s New York office with my manager at the time, Emily, who was young and sharp and understood the concept of pay-what-you-want. I was trying to figure out how to leverage all my digital power for the release of a new album. It seemed like a good idea, given the spirit of generosity and trust we shared with the fanbase.

Three weeks before, Radiohead had put out In Rainbows, the first pay-what-you-want album release from a well-known band, and we had been jumping up and down, saying, “Yes! Yes! That!” The story was all over the music and tech news and was a vital, breathtaking moment in the industry: for better or worse, it was obvious that the Internet had already changed everything and was going to make it possible for bands and fans to start doing business directly. Emily and I stood by a window in one of the corner offices, with the owner, the president, the in-house label lawyer, and a handful of other people, to talk about The Future.

The president said to the owner:

Have you heard about this whole “Radiohead” thing?

Emily and I looked at each other and were about to say Yes! Yes! The Thing! The Thing! before we were interrupted by the owner, who asked, suspiciously:

What is this “Radiohead”?

Our jaws dropped. We stayed silent.

Radiohead, said the president to the owner. You know, the British band.

The owner frowned.

They’re big, they’re big. Anyway, they just released an album on THE INTERNET, for NOTHING, they let the fans decide the price of the album, in a little box where you can choose your price.

The owner shook his head in disgust. The president shook his head in disgust. The lawyer shook his head in disgust. And Emily and I shook our heads in a totally different kind of disgust.

I didn’t know what was worse: that the owner of my label didn’t know who Radiohead was, or that he didn’t know that Radiohead had released a free record THREE WEEKS AGO in a move that had the ENTIRE MUSIC INDUSTRY talking. I figured he must at LEAST be like the president of the United States, getting little briefings at his desk every morning from some interior secretary of music industry information. Who was this guy?

When The Dresden Dolls recorded our second studio album in collaboration with the label, things went from okay to bad to toxic. We’d made our first record totally on our own, with no outside input, using all those loans from friends, fans, and family, and then simply sold it to the label. For this second record, the label fronted the money and the costs for the studio and producers, and told us that

THIS RECORD WAS GOING TO BE THE ONE THAT MADE US BIG!

We still had piles of songs that we hadn’t recorded yet, and I was writing all the time, so we went from touring to promote our first album straight into the studio for the second. With the label’s financial resources and a small army of engineers and producers, we recorded Yes, Virginia.

The record took about a month to finish and sounded magnificent; every song was an emotional nuclear bomb and it was a perfect sonic snapshot of the band at our live, bombastic best. The first week it hit the stores, we played a new city every single night and signed in record stores every day. The album hit the Billboard charts and sold twenty-five thousand copies. Brian and I were elated and danced around like kids on crack.

TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND PEOPLE BOUGHT OUR RECORD!!!

The label was not so quick to celebrate. When the second week of sales didn’t surpass the first week, they phoned to say they were cutting the entire promotional budget of the record. All the videos we’d planned wouldn’t be shot; any tour support they’d promised was pulled immediately: any marketing ideas on the table were scrapped. They were very sorry, they said, but they didn’t see any point in continuing to push it given that the initial sales were so bad. The album was considered a failure.

I could not wrap my head around the idea that selling twenty-five thousand records was bad—especially when our fans hadn’t even had the chance to really hear it yet, talk about it, spread the word, tell their friends, and so forth. People were still just finding out about us. We knew these songs. We knew our fans. We’d seen how it worked on the first record, which continued to sell consistently after every show and online, as people fell, one by one, slowly in love with the band. I knew how this worked. It would be gradual. But it would happen.

The label didn’t want to discuss it. Their decision sent us up shit’s creek financially, because we’d laid out tens of thousands of dollars from our own pockets for tour costs that the label had promised to repay, and now they were reneging. I couldn’t believe it.

You’re leaving?

No CUDDLE?

I tried to argue. When they finally stooped so low as to use the H word—We’ve also sent the album to people who specialize in radio play, Amanda, and to be honest… they just don’t hear a Hit—I gave up completely.

We didn’t need a fucking Hit. We were a punk-cabaret duo specializing in tear-jerking seven-minute songs with drum solos. We were not radio friendly. Our audience loved us precisely for all the weird, radio-unfriendly shit we did. We weren’t in the hit business, or anywhere near it; we were in the community-art-cult-poetry-family-love business. Even the music itself was only a part of it.

The recorded songs, the tangible CDs, were only the tip of the iceberg: the perfect, frozen, beautiful soundtrack for something far bigger, and far deeper.

The connection underneath was everything.

A 2010 Princeton University study conducted by two economists concluded that money DOES buy happiness, but only up to the point (which turns out to be an individual annual income of about $75,000) where you have your basic needs met along with a few extra comforts. After that, the ability to buy happiness with money nosedives.

Right: it’s not rocket science. We need to eat, we need shelter, a meal in a restaurant is nice. But there’s a satiation level, a happiness threshold you hit when you have enough.

I don’t know of any such formal studies of working musicians, but I see the same patterns in artistic success. The happiest artists I know are generally the ones who can manage to make a reasonable living from their art without having to worry too much about the next paycheck. Not to say that every artist who sits around the campfire, or plays in tiny bars, is “happier” than those singing in stadiums—but more isn’t always better. If feeling the connection between yourself and others is the ultimate goal, it can actually be harder when you are separated from your crowd by a thirty-foot barrier. The ideal sweet spot is the one in which the artist can freely share their talents and directly feel the reverberations of their artistic gifts to their community, and make a living doing that. In other words, it works best when everybody feels seen.

As artists, and as humans: if your fear is scarcity, the solution isn’t necessarily abundance. To quote Brené Brown again:

Which is to say, the opposite of “never enough” is simply:

Enough.

We had to get off the label. But they wouldn’t let us go.

At first, I asked nicely. During a tour in Europe, I went out to dinner with the owner, and requested to be dropped.

Amanda, Amanda, he said. You are a very talented girl. Very charismatic and you write very good songs. But you get in your own way wasting your time on all this fans-this and fans-that and the Internet-this and the Internet-that. One of these days you are going to focus and write some hit songs that are going to make a lot of money. I have faith in you. We are not dropping you.

Then he winked at me.

I blasted them in my blog. I complained about them openly in the press. I wrote them a letter-song called “Please Drop Me” to the tune of “Moon River,” performed it live, and asked the fans to video and upload to YouTube (they obliged). The label ignored it.

Meanwhile, the age of burning and downloading was in full flourish.

Because I was blogging so openly about wanting to be dropped from the label, and also explaining transparently that we, the band, were seeing absolutely no profit from the records people were buying in stores (it was obvious, at that point, that we would never recoup our advance) an interesting phenomenon sprang up at the signing table. People started handing us money.

A few people even took their checkbooks out and wrote us checks for the money they thought they “owed” us.

I was happily astonished, and I also took every single dollar. I’d been a stripper and a silent street performer; I was used to taking people’s dollar bills with grace. I never refused, I just took the money given to us, feeling grateful that I had a voice, literally, to thank the patrons personally.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

The label still wouldn’t drop us.

Asking wasn’t working.

Finally, I decided to lie.

I don’t like lying.

I had a tour stop in Los Angeles, and Freddie, my A&R guy (Dave, the guy who signed us, had long since been fired), was also in town. I called him up and we arranged to meet for dinner.

Ten minutes before he showed up, I drank a shot of whiskey. I poured another shot down my shirt. As he was pulling up in his car outside my cousins’ house where I was staying, I gargled. With whiskey. In vino veritas; I figured if he thought I was drunk, he’d never think I was lying. I got in his car, hugged him, and told him I’d been feeling really bad about all the tension and crazy label stuff. I was sorry. I hiccupped.

Over dinner, I asked Freddie about parenthood. He had kids, and happily told me his child-rearing stories. I listened, getting misty-eyed.

Finally, over dessert, I burst into what I hoped were uncontrollable-looking tears. Freddie sat there uncomfortably as I told him that all I wanted was a family. How I was tired of touring, tired of the fans, tired of the grind. I worried aloud that if I got pregnant, the label would think of me as a failure. I sniveled through my martini, swayed a little, and blew my nose on the sleeve of my dress.

No, no. Oh… Amanda, Freddie assured me, putting his hand on my arm. So you know, that would never happen. We’ve put all this time and energy into you because we BELIEVE in you. Okay? And in your whole career. It may be bumpy now but we’re in this for the long haul. That’s exactly why we won’t drop you. And if you want to have children, you should. And that would never hurt your standing with the label. Never. Ever.

Really? Truly? I said, sniffling.

Really. Truly, Fred said, kindly.

Okay. Please, please promise me that this stays between you and me, okay? Please don’t tell anybody at the label. Promise?

He promised, and drove me back to my cousins’ house. I called Neil.

I just pretended to be drunk and lied to my label guy all night about being brood-y and it felt really, really, really gross.

I love you, fake-drunk girlfriend, he said. Did it work? Were you a good liar?

I want a fucking Oscar. I cried real tears. Meryl-Streep-level shit, I told him.

A month later, I got a letter from my lawyer.

The label had dropped me.