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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can only connect the dots that we can collect.

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

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

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

I didn’t want to force people to help me. I wanted to let them.

They say: What’s the harm in asking?

But asking can hurt.

When I was just breaking ground on this book, I was on tour and found myself staying with Duncan, one of my very distant European relatives, one night while everybody else camped in the tour bus. We were enjoying a late breakfast on his sunny back porch, and he asked what I was scribbling in my journal. I told him that I was thinking about the difference between “asking” and “begging.”

Asking… Duncan said. Asking. Hm. That’s interesting. I’m a person who really doesn’t like to ask for things. And the funny thing is, the less you like asking, the worse off you can be when you finally do.

What do you mean?

I’ll tell you a story. My mother and my aunt were in this awful feud, he began, pouring milk into his second cup of coffee. When my grandmother died, she left an antique rosary to my mother, who felt she deserved it because she’d converted to Catholicism when she married. But my aunt was an antiques dealer and apparently had expressed an interest in it, and my grandmother had promised it to her, and blah blah blah… you get the picture. Fury on both sides. They didn’t speak for three years. Can you imagine? And when my mother started battling cancer, I suffered watching them not talk for another year, while my mother got weaker, until I finally found the nerve to call my aunt and say, “Listen. I’ve never asked for anything from you, but now I am, with everything I’ve got. Call my mother. Please, just pick up the phone and smooth it over, apologize even if you feel you’re lying. She’s dying and this is helping kill her. You don’t even have to do it for her. I’m asking you to do it for me.”

And do you know what she said?

I shook my head.

She said no.

I let out a sigh.

It was so hard to ask, Duncan said. I never ask anyone for anything. And I’d finally asked.

He was quiet for a second.

That answer, Amanda… it crushed me.

Around the time the label freed me, I was still skeptical about Twitter, which I thought of as the social media tool that people used to share what they’d had for breakfast.

A few months later, I was in Austin for the SXSW music conference when Neil and Zoë Keating, my touring cellist, dragged me onto the Twitter wagon and gave me a quick lesson, showing me the little box into which you could input your 140 characters of text. I set up the account and told the fans. I twittered a few pictures. Then I dipped my toe in more experimental water, announcing that I would be hosting a pillow fight.

ANYONE IN AUSTIN!?! TODAY. 3:17 PM!!! PILLOW FIGHT. Corner of red river & 6th. TELL EVERYBODY. Bring pillow!

I only had a few thousand followers, but I guessed at least a few dozen of them were at SXSW. I wasn’t giving them a whole lot of warning, though, and I had no idea what to expect. Ten people? Twenty?

At 3:15 p.m. I showed up at the corner of Red River and Sixth Streets with a pillow to find a crowd of around a hundred people—all armed with pillows—milling around. As soon as they saw me, with no words exchanged, we all attacked each other. (Nobody was injured.)

It was AN AMAZING PILLOW FIGHT, I said to Neil, showing him the photos later that night. I wonder if they enjoyed it as much as I did.

Have you checked Twitter? Neil asked.

What do you mean, “checked Twitter”?

Neil started laughing. I hadn’t realized that Twitter allows you to see the people talking to or about you. I’d thought it was simply a one-way communication device. I had been shouting into my Twitter megaphone without realizing, for three weeks, that thousands of people had been responding.

STOP LAUGHING AND SHOW ME HOW TO DO IT, I said.

Neil introduced me to the “mentions” function, and my phone filled up with a list of hundreds of comments, pictures, short videos of pillow fights, thank-yous, and general buzz about the event that had just occurred. After that, I was convinced. I haven’t left Twitter since.

Explaining how I use Twitter to those who’ve never used it is difficult. It’s a blurry Möbius strip of love, help, information, and social-art-life exchange.

Only now does it occur to me that my first official “twittered” flash gig—The Epic SXSW Pillow Fight At Sixth And River—featured no actual music. I just twittered, hit my fans with pillows, hugged them, and took off. But I didn’t bother to play any songs, and nobody seemed to mind much. They just seemed deliriously happy to be part of something so sudden and surprising. Plus, how could I play music spontaneously in the street? I’m a pianist.

I started playing the piano when I was three—because there it was, in the house—and since then I’ve been a generally monogamous instrumentalist. Occasional fantasies of learning how to play the cello, the guitar, and the acoustic bass have all been left unrealized.

Around the time I discovered the joys of Twitter, I bought a twenty-dollar wooden red ukulele with a plastic fretboard—the world’s smallest, cutest, easiest instrument—as a gag for a friend’s benefit at a small nightclub. In one short evening, I taught myself to play “Creep” by Radiohead, looking up the chords on the Internet. Instead of playing on the nightclub stage, I hopped up onto the bar, and then hopped down to weave through the crowd, playing my ukulele—truth be told—pretty badly. I thought my affair with the instrument would end there, but during that five-minute performance, I was amazed at the power that one little mini-guitar could wield.

Playing the song that night felt like a gimmick, but that summer, I toted the ukulele around with me, for kicks. Cyndi Lauper—my childhood hero (eight-year-old me was beside herself)—invited The Dresden Dolls to open for her on a summer package tour called True Colors, the proceeds of which would benefit the Matthew Shepard Foundation. Almost every night of the tour, I did a quick busking experiment and played “Creep” by Radiohead, still the only song I knew, in the parking lot or the lobby of the venue, with a hat at my feet. I liked surprising people, and they laughed, applauded, and threw in dollars and change. The collected take from the hat went to the foundation, and there it was again, that feeling:

I can play this instrument for people ANYWHERE, as long as it’s not raining!

In a field! In an alleyway! On the bus!! On a beach!!! In a closet!!!

People will listen to me sing, and I don’t need a stage!

I will never have to be enslaved behind a piano again!

I hadn’t realized how limiting the piano had been, but now that I knew, I’d had it. I decided to start dating other instruments.

This combination of Ukulele Freedom and Twitter Freedom led to the birth of the Ninja Gig, which was the name I gave the flash events I started creating once I realized how easy it was to whip a crowd up to any place at any time. Before and after official gigs, on off days when I was in the mood, or when I was visiting cities where I didn’t have any official gigs planned, I could summon a crowd using Twitter on only a few hours’ notice.

There’s something uniquely thrilling about conjuring up a crowd of five hundred people and watching an instant free festival sprout up before your very eyes in a public place, but it took me a few years of bouncing between official gigs and ninja ones to realize what really drew me to the latter: I felt like I was in control of my life again. I had missed the freedom of the street.

The “freedom” of ninja gigs didn’t actually translate to more free time. Adding them last-minute to a tour made my schedule more hectic on paper, but I didn’t really notice that I was taking my off days to play spontaneously any more than you would have seen complaints from a high-security prisoner who was given the option to spend their recreational yard time out at the local bar. I loved waking up and thinking, MAYBE I’LL PLAY IN A PARK TODAY!

Sometimes I’d go to bed thinking I’d do an afternoon ninja gig the next day, then wake up, feel tired, and cancel on myself. Canceling an official show is never an option. Not really. A canceled show wreaks havoc on the schedules and pocketbooks of the ticket-holders, the venues, and the promoters, to say nothing of the work of rescheduling and the black mark on your reputation. It’s almost always easier to take the “show must go on” approach; take the stage sick and barrel through. During the long winter tours of The Dresden Dolls, Brian and I would sometimes get the flu simultaneously and still play the gig, both battling fevers, boxes of tissues beside our instruments transforming into foot-high snot-covered mountains by the end of each night. The crowd would sympathize.

But ninja gigs aren’t at all pre-organized, so they aren’t hard to un-organize.

All the intimacy, none of the commitment. So nice.

I also realized that ninja gigging solved an irritating problem that I’d been battling for years: the dearth of all-ages venues. I’d battled many promoters and agents to ensure that my gigs would be all-ages at all costs, because a good handful of my fans are teenagers. The ninja gigs are always free, always all-ages, and generally never announced more than a day in advance. There is no advertising: only Internet posts and word of mouth. People are encouraged to bring instruments, cameras, children, pets, or whatever else they think of, and there’s no official end time or shape to the event. I usually throw the attention to another musician for a while if I have songwriter friends in town or on tour with me who can show up with an acoustic instrument. It feels a little like an old-school folk hootenanny.

I once paraded a group of two hundred people in Brisbane from a corset shop to a modern art museum and played gigs at either end. I’ve done ninja gigs on the steps of the Sydney Opera House to a crowd of seven hundred in the rain (we paraded to shelter). I played a string of Occupy sites up and down the West Coast when I was on tour there during the height of the movement. I did a silent ninja gig inside Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon, where I wordlessly recommended and signed books of poetry for hundreds of people.

I found out that the people of Byron Bay, Australia, don’t really do Twitter. They don’t even really do the Internet. I morning-twittered an evening ninja gig on the beach, expecting one to two hundred people. Seven people came. I played on the beach and then we all went for ice cream.

I did a ninja gig in Canberra, the Australian capital. All of my fans showed up on bikes, or were loaned bikes, at the headquarters of Rat Patrol, a “freak bike community” of men, women, and children who ride through the city regularly on tall bikes, choppers, and other creatively Frankensteined cycles, wearing flamboyant helmets. We all rode, a pack of a hundred people, to the strains of a battery-powered boom box, passing beers back and forth, through the center of town and to the National Carillon, the five-story bell tower to which someone had a key. I was given a tour of the tower and allowed to play one of my songs on the bells for the crowd gathered down below. A local band played acoustically as thunder roared in the distance. Someone showed up with a surprise upright piano, which they offloaded from their flatbed truck. We wheeled the piano under the bell tower, and I played an all-request concert as the rain pelted us. Everyone was soaked and freezing, we covered the precious piano with jackets, and it was one of the best gigs of my life.

Exactly one year after my TED talk, I arrived in Vancouver for a guest performance at the conference and twittered:

THINKING OF A NINJA GIG AT TED! WHO’S GOT IDEAS?

Three days later, the Vogue Theatre had volunteered their space, and about a dozen TED speakers and performers showed up and shared whatever they felt like. It was like a 1,500-capacity living room. Chris Hadfield, the astronaut and songwriter, played “Space Oddity” on guitar while everybody sang along. A local punk marching band showed up and hung out onstage. The Vancouver food bank, who’d recruited volunteers through my Twitter feed, passed buckets through the crowd and raised almost $10,000.

The most miraculous part of this gig, though, was Sarah Shandl, a girl who raised her hand on Twitter the night I announced the gig, volunteering her services as a last-minute stage manager. I hired her over Twitter, and we spent the next eighteen hours emailing and texting back and forth at least ninety times. She created order in the chaos, helping arrange food and booze, liaising with the food bank, emailing all the performers updated info. She even brought along a friend to manage the guest list of TED people and guest artists for whom we had agreed to save seats. I’d barely met her and she’d saved my ass.

When I took her out to lunch the following day to thank her and get to know her better, I learned that she’d never heard of me, or my music, before the moment she’d volunteered. She’d just seen that someone with a bunch of Twitter followers was throwing a free gig in Vancouver, and thought that that person might need a hand.

Neil got to know me better. I had a bad habit of wanting to disappear completely for a few full days after freshly separating. When we first got together, I couldn’t stand that he wanted to send back-and-forth texts as soon as we separated. Like, five minutes after saying good-bye at the airport.

He learned to adjust to my Run Away! Run Away! approach every time we parted company, and I was learning to resist emotionally vanishing once we weren’t in the same space together.

I started learning how Neil worked. I figured out how to reassure him that I wasn’t actually leaving him; I was just thrilled to be alone and able to work, to make art, to think, and to email by my lonesome. We pissed each other off, royally, frequently, in those early days. But we were getting better, bit by bit. I stopped thinking he was going to cage me, and he stopped thinking I was trying to flee. The poetry wasn’t lost on us: He had abandonment issues, and I had commitment issues. Go figure.

Also, the sex, which had been fumbling and awkward at the beginning of our relationship, got really hot. We figured that was a promising sign of general relationship progress.

Mostly we realized it was about leaving the doors and windows of the relationship wide-open enough. That way, he could see in, and I could see out.

I was backstage talking with a friend I knew from the road, the lead singer of a pretty big indie band, after their show at a club in Boston. I’d come to visit, since I was off tour.

Our shows are selling like shit, he said, tossing his sweaty shirt onto the couch and putting on a fresh one.

You sounded great, I said. And the new album is amazing. But you know—it couldn’t hurt if you would actually talk to your fans from stage. They’re there. They’re crowdsurfing. They’re screaming and yelling. But most of the time you acted like the audience wasn’t even in the room. You barely talked to them.

He opened a beer for himself. Easy for you to say. I remember when you stopped in the middle of your set in Seattle and asked them all to text people they knew in Portland for the next night, because it wasn’t sold out. My whole band was backstage, like, in PAIN because it was so awkward. I mean… it’s kind of genius. But we could never do that. You’re such a freak.

Why? Because I talk to my fans?

But, like, who DOES that? I mean, YOU can get away with it because you’re Amanda Palmer Queen Of The Internet “it’s all one big happy family” and whatever. But that is NOT us. Do you know how fucking CRUCIFIED we’d get if we even so much as mentioned that we had a mailing list? We don’t even announce that we have merchandise for sale… it just seems so tacky.

Well, dude, you’ve got nothing to lose. Your tour is tanking. And it might not be so bad. In fact, if you ask your fans for help, they might surprise you.

How?

They might be really flattered that you trusted them enough to look uncool.

Crowdsurfing is like couchsurfing is like crowdsourcing.

You’re falling into the audience—you’re asking them to help you. By asking, you’re building.

Crowdsurfing is where this moment of trust is at its physical paragon, and best of all, it’s set to the climactic soundtrack of the art itself: the music.

You stand at the lip of the stage, you trust, and you dive.

There is nothing in the world like being held aloft in the cloud of loudness by a sea of random, sweaty arms, every single one of them like a tree in a huge, storm-blustered forest of trust, being floated along by hundreds of fingers and palms. I also feel a sympathetic rush when I look out into the crowd during shows and see the audience hoisting each other up, holding one another in the air, carefully but impulsively pushing each other over the crowd with the cooperative, fevered camaraderie of a barn raising set to a rock-and-roll score. You’re a human-sized symbol of trust, and if you don’t stay in circulation, you not only cease being a gift… you become a liability. Falling to the ground from a crowdsurf isn’t pretty. But you survive. And, usually, people grab your arm and pull you back up. That’s also a wonderful feeling.

Side note: If you ever get a chance to crowdsurf, do it. It’s a blast. Stash your wallet somewhere you won’t lose it, don’t wear loose jewelry, and for god’s sake, no sharp heels, you wanna kill someone?

After almost four years of nonstop touring and recording side by side, Brian and I experienced classic band burnout. Even though we’d graduated from The Vulva to a van (named Ludwig) to a rented tour bus, we were driving each other mad. We took a break and I started working on my first solo record, Who Killed Amanda Palmer, the one with the dead/naked-Amanda photo book I’d asked Neil to help me caption. Touring on my own sounded liberating and lonely at the same time—so I hired Zoë Keating, who plays intricate, electronically looped solo cello music, to open for me and play on a handful of my new songs during the stage show. Then I called my friend Steven Mitchell Wright, an Australian theater director whose work draws on the Japanese Butoh tradition, in which performers paint themselves white and writhe in joyously painful existential ecstasy.

Want to figure out a way to add some theater to my tour? I asked him. There’s almost no budget. But we’ll create something magnificent with some actors, I’ll pay for their flights and make sure everybody has a place to stay and food to eat. We’ll need to pass the hat for your salaries. You may also have to help me find couches for us to sleep on.

Steven, who is crazy in the very best ways, said yes and selected three equally crazed and committed Australian performers, and threw in Lyndon, his classical violinist friend, as a bonus. Steven named this company The Danger Ensemble, and they became my touring art family for the next year.

We drove around America, Canada, Europe, and Australia in various cheap tour buses and vans, relying heavily on crowdsourced generosity. Zoë and my sound and light crew were paid a regular support wage, but Steven and The Danger Ensemble relied on the generosity of the crowd throughout the entire tour. Each night onstage, I would introduce them all towards the end of the show and announce that these performers had come on tour with me for no fixed salary and were relying on the audience. The five of them would rove through the crowd during the next song, holding their boots to collect donations. Some nights, they made less than a few hundred dollars. Other nights, they’d make over a thousand. It balanced out. I was relieved, but I wasn’t surprised that the crowd liked helping.

While my busking, bohemian circus friends had no problem passing the hat, not everybody was quite so comfortable. I once brought an opening band on tour with me: five guys in dapper suits who played cabaret music for half an hour before I hit the stage. As the tour progressed, they got into the spirit of all-hands-on-deck and backed me up for five or six of my own songs—learning a new song each night during our soundcheck. I suggested we ask the audience to directly reward their extra effort, and so they went into the crowd, each night, hats in hand, where the fans happily gave them an extra few hundred dollars. It all worked splendidly, but there was one musician in the band who hung back in the dressing room and refused to take part. I asked him one night why he didn’t join the others.

I just… can’t, he said. It’s embarrassing, Amanda. It feels too much like… begging.

But the fans didn’t seem to mind being asked. On the contrary, it made them feel included at a new level.

We also crowdsourced our nightly meals, which was a new test for my professional crew, who were accustomed to a tour diet of ordinary takeout pizza, falafel, and pad thai. I wasn’t certain they’d be thrilled about trading consistency for adventure. Towards the beginning of the tour, I had a conversation in Dublin with one of my sound guys who was somewhat suspicious.

Are you sure about this? Some of your fans are pretty intense and I mean… doesn’t it sort of creep you out? They could put, like, anything in our food.

But I trust these people, I said. I trust them more than I trust, I dunno, random line cooks in restaurants who might piss in my food because they hate their jobs. These people like me. Why would they hurt me?

I’m just saying… watch yourself, Amanda. You trust people too much.

Sometimes a supreme feast would arrive: In Philly and Seattle we were treated to five-course dinners created by chefs who spent two days in preparation for the meal and arrived backstage with burners, sauces, and flambées. In Chicago, a restaurant owner who was dating a fan supplied us with twenty-five varieties of sushi rolls. There was also a flip side. In one Austrian city, a girl arrived with a single red plastic beach pail filled with undercooked pasta. We supplemented that night’s dinner with takeout falafel.

Neil and I were in a giant drugstore, in a hurry, and all we needed to buy were condoms and tampons. I approached a woman who worked there who seemed to be in her late seventies, and asked her. Then I proudly called out to Neil, who was in another aisle, loud enough that he, and everyone else in the drugstore, could hear me:

HONEY, I FOUND OUT WHERE THE CONDOMS AND THE TAMPONS ARE. THEY’RE BOTH HERE IN AISLE FIVE.

Neil came around the corner into the aisle I was in, looked at me, and began to laugh.

Darling, he said, you’re human after all. You’re blushing. You’re embarrassable.

I could feel my cheeks burning. He was right. I’d been trying to prove how fearless I was, but truthfully, I had embarrassed myself.

He loves telling people the story of the time that he learned I was not quite as shameless as he had believed: the time he saw Amanda blush, when she asked for a tampon.

I had a manager who couldn’t understand why I was upset that his assistant had booked me a hotel with no wireless during a three-day press trip in London.

I NEED A NEW HOTEL WITH INTERNET, I tried to explain over the phone. I NEED THE INTERNET TO LIVE.

You’re on a three-day press trip doing ten hours of interviews a day. What do you need the Internet for?

Another manager didn’t understand why I thought it was so important that she read my Twitter feed to understand what was actually happening. To see what the fanbase was feeling, saying, sharing, complaining about, and how they were responding to the shows.

It was a massive leap of faith for these people to believe that “just connecting with people,” in an authentic, non-promotional, non-monetary way, is so valuable.

But it is. It’s invaluable.

Those managers seemed really reluctant to believe that if you just trusted and listened to, talked to, and connected with the fanbase, the money and the profits would come—when the time came.

Managers kept telling me to stop twittering and get back to work.

I broke up with a lot of managers.

They didn’t understand. That was the work.

As we barreled along, crowdsourcing food and passing the hat, I continued crashing with fans, and when I left the Dolls and brought along my merry, motley crew of Australian performance artists, things became even more challenging: there were seven of us. We offered our typical exchange of tickets, merch, and gratitude—and with Steven at the helm, we sorted through hundreds of email offers of crash pads. My traditional road crew—sound person, light person, tour manager, and merchandise vendor—were all on full salary, and I paid for their hotels. But nobody bitched about a double standard. The road crew weren’t taking a job with me for an exercise in humanity-trusting. They were taking a job with me to tour in a bus, get their off days in hotels, get paid, and do their jobs. I could afford to put them up. The rest of the performers and I tried our luck on the couches of the universe.

One summer in Melbourne, where we did a run of shows at a venue called The Famous Spiegeltent, we all slept in a single room, on a compilation of mattresses and futons loaned by various people. It was like a weeklong slumber party, or like a bunch of artistic bears hibernating in a very hot cave, all piled up next to each other with no particular boundaries. Mostly, we were staying in places like the ones we lived in ourselves: share houses full of grad students; giant messy lofts inhabited by musicians and painters. But sometimes we stayed in the more grown-up homes of working professionals who were happy to leave us behind with the Wi-Fi password, instructions for the espresso machine, and the keys, because they had to split for work early in the morning. It was a testament to the generosity of my fans that on several occasions, our hosts couldn’t even come to the shows, but still welcomed us into their homes.

Couchsurfing is about more than saving on hotel costs. It’s a gift exchange between the surfer and the host that offers an intimate gaze into somebody’s home, and the feeling of being held and comforted by their personal space. It’s also a reminder that we’re floating along due to a strong bond of trust, just like when I surf the crowd at a show, safely suspended on a sea of ever-changing hands. It can feel almost holy, looking at somebody else’s broken shower nozzle, smelling the smells of a real kitchen, feeling the fray of a real blanket and hearing the crackle of an old steam radiator.

Sometimes we’d have the energy to burn the midnight oil with our hosts over tour stories and wine, but usually we were all so exhausted from the show itself that we were more likely to collapse as soon as we were assigned our sleeping spots. Mornings were often more social, though we usually had a strict deadline to get out the door to the next city. Off days were even more fun—we could hang out with our hosts and spend more human time petting cats and learning about who these people truly were.

Staying in your own home can be corrosive and stifling, especially for creative work. The surroundings can smother you with the baggage of your past and the History of You. Staying in a hotel can be a blissful blank slate. There’s no baggage, just an empty space onto which you can project anything. But staying in a stranger’s home can inspire like nothing else. You get to immerse yourself in the baggage of someone else’s past, and regard someone else’s mess of unsorted books piled up in the corner of the living room.

It’s not always all rainbows and unicorn bedsheets, though. Couches come with people who own couches. Sometimes people just aren’t good at the dance, and can’t tell when the performers need to stop socializing. In those awkward situations, you smile wearily, edge politely towards your toothbrush, and make the best of it, hoping the hint will be taken. I will hug you. I will love you. I will genuinely admire your kitchen cow collection. But when it is time, please let me go the fuck to sleep.

There’s an inherent, unspoken trust that happens when you walk through the door of your host’s home. Everybody implicitly trusts everybody else not to steal anything. We leave our phones, our wallets, our laptops, our journals, and our instruments lying scattered around our various mini-couchsurfing campsites. To my knowledge, I’ve never had anything go missing.

I’m often asked: How can you trust people so much?

Because that’s the only way it works.

When you accept somebody’s offer for help, whether it’s in the form of food, crash space, money, or love, you have to trust the help offered. You can’t accept things halfway and walk through the door with your guard up.

When you openly, radically trust people, they not only take care of you, they become your allies, your family.

Sometimes people will prove themselves untrustworthy.

When that happens, the correct response is not:

Fuck! I knew I couldn’t trust anybody!

The correct response is:

Some people just suck.

Moving right along.

Shortly after my tour with The Danger Ensemble ended, I went on a solo tour of the American South with a sister duo called Vermillion Lies opening up for me, plus a merch girl and a sound guy, which made us a small, cramped van of five. We were staying with fans wherever people had volunteered, and in cheap motels when they hadn’t.

The morning of our Miami show, we navigated our van through a rough-looking neighborhood towards the house where we were staying, eager to unload our stuff, say hello to our hosts, and take a nap after the long drive from Texas. As we approached the address, we exchanged worried glances as we passed desolate, boarded-up houses, cars broken down on lawns, and the subtle signals that crystal meth was probably easy to score. Arriving at the house, we were welcomed by Jacky, our eighteen-year-old host, into a small but warm and inviting home.

Jacky’s family were undocumented immigrants from Honduras, her mother barely spoke English, and they made an absolute fuss over us. Jacky, who was beside herself that we were staying, brought out the medical-lab jackets that she and her friends had bedazzled and paint-splattered to wear to the show the next night, before showing us to our beds. There were only three beds in the house, but I had already met Jacky, her mother, and her brother.

I’m confused, I said.

No confusion! In our family, the guests always sleep in the beds. We’re all sleeping outside and on the couches… We’ve been planning this for weeks. You should have seen our shopping adventure for vegan food for you! She looked so happy. We’re going to give you tortilla lessons at breakfast tomorrow!

I lay awake that night in Jacky’s comfy little bed with the purple quilt, staring at her moonlit dressing table covered in tiny perfume jars and books and the necklaces she’d hung on the mirror.

How is this fair? I thought. These people have so little. I’m being treated like royalty by a family living in poverty.

It wasn’t guilt that I felt; that would have been an insult to their generosity. It was an overwhelming gratitude, more than I knew what to do with. I thought about how I used to feel as The Bride, when people would throw in a ten- or twenty-dollar bill. Or when a homeless person would give me a dollar, and all I had to give them in return was my gesture of thanks, my gratitude, my stupid token flower. And sometimes it would feel so small.

We woke up the next morning, and tortilla lessons were under way. They tried their best to teach us, Jacky’s mother gesticulating helpfully in Spanish. My tortillas were terrible and fell apart immediately. Jacky’s and her mother’s were perfect. My tortillas, even after many tries, did not improve. Everybody laughed. Breakfast was delicious.

We hung around the kitchen for a little while, and Jacky told me the complicated story of her dad—who was stuck in Honduras—and how everybody was living on a knife-edge of worry that he wouldn’t be able to get back to Florida because of immigration issues. Jacky’s mother called out from the living room.

Ooh! My mother wants to give you a present, said Jacky. She’s all excited.

Jacky’s mother took me aside and pressed a teeny little Bible, the size of a pack of cards, into my hand. Then she said,

For you. Thank you, for stay here. Your music, helps Jacky. You make her so happy, you help her. Thank you, thank you.

I felt my insides cringe.

How is this fair?

This is fair, I realized.

This is fair.

The music is the flower.

Things you get when you couchsurf that you don’t get in a hotel:

The rattling sound of pots and silverware in the morning. Bathrooms with ratty, beloved mismatched towels. Leftover birthday cake. Dark hallways humid with the smells of baking. Looking at the weird shit people keep in their medicine cabinets. Cats to pat, who are at first standoffish then decide they love you at four a.m., when you’re finally asleep. Walls of Elvis plates. The recaptured feeling of having a sleepover party. Dodgy electric blankets. A chance to try on hats. Morning coffee in a wineglass for lack of enough cups. Children of all ages and temperaments who draw pictures for you. The ability to make your own toast. Record players. Wet grass in the backyard sunrise, where the chickens are roosting. Out-of-tune pianos and other strange instruments to fondle. Candles stuck to mantelpieces. The beautiful vision of strangers in their pajamas. Weird teas from around the world. Pinball machines. Pet spiders. Latches that don’t quite work. Glow-in-the-dark things on the ceiling.

Late-night and early-morning stories about love, death, hardship, and heartbreak.

The collision of life. Art for the blender.

The dots connecting.

I assumed that because Neil had poured out so many details of his life the second time we met, he must be, like me, a chronic self-sharer. In fact, he was the opposite. Shy and guarded about his real feelings most of the time, he had a lot of friends, but hadn’t told many people about his past and his own personal stories. That surprised me.

You tricked me, I said. Why did you tell me so much about yourself when I first met you?

Because you asked me, he said.

Asked you… what?

How I was doing. About my life. Nobody else had ever asked me before, he said.

That’s totally ridiculous, I said. You’ve been surrounded by people all your life who love and worship you. You have friends. You’ve had a million girlfriends. I’m sure you’ve been asked relentlessly. Like, to the point of being annoyed.

No, said Neil.

Nobody ever poured you a Scotch and said, “So, hey, Neil, how the hell are you really doing?” No girlfriends ever asked what was truly going on? That’s utterly impossible. I’m sure they were asking but you weren’t hearing them.

Maybe, said Neil.

Maybe you just weren’t ready to be asked, I said.

Or maybe, he said, I found the person I could answer.

Back in music-release-land, I decided to stay totally independent. I’d had it with labels. I decided to see what would happen if I released everything direct to the fanbase, posting digital downloads using pay-what-you-want and sending CDs and vinyl straight to their mailboxes. I recorded two experimental little records: Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under, a mishmash of live recordings from Australia and New Zealand (including a song about how much I detest Vegemite), and Amanda Palmer Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead on Her Magical Ukulele (featuring “Creep” by Radiohead, of course, and four more songs I’d proudly added to my burgeoning Radiohead-ukulele repertoire). I hired a publicist so that the newspapers wouldn’t forget I existed, but other than that, I flew under the radar and went straight to the fanbase, using the golden email list, my blog, and my Twitter feed to spread the news of every release. As I’d do later on Kickstarter, I released both of these records along with Bundles of Extra Things: $15 for the CD, $25 for the CD plus a personalized Polaroid sent from the Australian tour, $35 for the vinyl + T-shirt + button, $100 for the CD + the pillowcase + screen-printed tie + poster + pilsner beer glass + neoprene beer cozy + T-shirt + orchestra patch + three stickers + two buttons. (That’s not made up. That was an actual package.)

It was also my first experiment selling house parties. When I released Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under, $3,000 bought you All The Things plus a show in your own home; I sold half a dozen of these, and had a blast delivering them throughout my next Australian tour. I took these preorders well in advance of manufacturing the goods so that we didn’t over- or under-order and wind up with an excess of neoprene beer cozies (the realities of price breaks meant, unfortunately, that I am STILL the proud owner of about 500 neoprene Amanda Palmer beer cozies—these are the joys of small-business entrepreneurship).

I coped with the gargantuan task of manufacturing and shipping all of these releases with the help of my office staff of three or four people, some part-time, some full-time, all working in different parts of the world, on the Internet, from their own kitchens.

Neil and I also did a quick tour together, recording a bunch of live songs and stories we released as An Evening with Neil Gaiman & Amanda Palmer. I was very proud: Neil sang onstage for the first time since getting a full beer can thrown at his face (requiring stitches) during his very brief tenure as a punk singer in the 1970s.

Instead of selling that record straight from one of our websites, we decided to try using Kickstarter, which indie artists were just starting to use as a way to finance and ship records. I chatted constantly online, and listened to input and feedback from the fans. If they wanted high-end lithograph posters, I made high-end lithograph posters. If they wanted 180-gram vinyl, I made 180-gram vinyl. If they wanted Things—pillowcases with hand-drawn art on them, T-shirts that came in gray in size XXXL—I made the Things. The only department where I wasn’t open to input was the writing, the music itself. That’s my job, not theirs, but I tried to involve them in every other facet of the new world of independent artist-hood. They were now officially along for the ride.

Right around the same time, I was with Jason Webley in New York doing a weeklong run of shows in a small theater in the West Village. We were performing in character as the conjoined-twin Evelyn Evelyn sisters, wearing a custom dress lovingly hand-sewn for two people of considerably different heights by our seamstress friend Kambriel. I was the right Evelyn, Jason was the left Evelyn, and we each used a single hand to play one side of each instrument—guitar, piano, and accordion. We wore matching wigs, Jason shaved his beard and wore lipstick, and the result was absurdly unconvincing. Our friend Sxip played the role of our sleazy Svengalian stage manager, and our actual tour manager, Eric, pulled double duty playing the role of the silent, oppressed, and worrisome stagehand. The twins were reluctant performers. The shows were shambolic and perfect.

As usual, I was crashing with Josh and Alina across the river in Brooklyn. One day I realized that our show and signing wouldn’t be over until eleven thirty, and I had a meeting next door to the theater at ten the next morning. It seemed pointless to spend an hour getting to Brooklyn just to sleep, get up, and turn around again, but it also seemed ridiculous to splurge on a hotel. Without giving it much thought, I twittered:

Who’s got a couch/decent bed anywhere in/near West Village? Need crashspace. Will be low-maintenance, in and out. Will trade tickets for the @EvelynEvelyn show

Which is how I arrived, six hours later, at the doorstep of Felix and Michelle. In the moment my finger touched the buzzer, I started to worry that perhaps I was taking this whole Twitter-crowdsourcing thing too far. I’d only ever couchsurfed with Brian, or with the Australians, or with Jason by my side. What if these people were axe murderers?

Axe murderers don’t follow me on Twitter, I reassured myself.

But think about what the neighbors say about certain killers, I argued back, as they’re being interviewed by the local news. “They seemed so normal.”

They said in the email that their names were FELIX AND MICHELLE. How could a nice-sounding couple like FELIX AND MICHELLE be axe murderers?

Bonnie and Clyde, I argued. Bonnie and Clyde. Plus—

The door opened and there was Michelle.

Hi, Amanda! She threw the door open and ushered me into the kitchen of the apartment. Jesus, you must be exhausted. How many shows have you done in a row? Five? Sorry we couldn’t take you up on the ticket offer, we had some stupid museum benefit to go to. Let me show you the guest room… I’ve just changed the sheets for you and… wait, before anything… WINE. Red or white? Or Scotch? Felix just brought back a special bottle from Scotland…

And she bustled me into the guest room, where fresh towels were folded on the bed.

I stood there in awe, wondering how I ever could have doubted the universe.

In 2011, I was on tour in New Zealand, an hour from boarding a small plane bound for Christchurch, when the giant earthquake hit. My flight was canceled. All the flights were canceled. My show, which was scheduled that night in central Christchurch, was also canceled. The venue no longer existed.

I spent that entire day—and most of the next few days—on Twitter, talking nonstop with my Christchurch fans. All of them were okay, but a lot of them were freaked out, and everybody knew someone who knew someone who’d been killed, since it’s a small community. Some people had traveled there for the show and were trapped with no place to stay. And everybody shared their stories, and I shared the stories back out to the worldwide crowd. We tightened.

One of the New Zealanders, Diana, had suffered an unbelievable loss. Her entire family—mom, dad, and two brothers—had been killed in the earthquake. I reached out to her online and asked for her address and phone number. She was staying with cousins in Australia, and in too much turmoil to talk, but I told her to stay in touch, to call if she needed me, to use me, to use the whole community.

A few days later, I played a show in Melbourne, and over a thousand fans decorated, kissed, and markered love-wishes for Diana on a bedsheet-sized blank poster I arranged to have hung in the lobby. I mailed it off to her. A few days later, she did call and we spoke for about an hour while I paced around a friend’s backyard in Melbourne.

What could I say? She’d lost everything. Her family. Her home. Her whole life. Her Australian cousins were being kind, but she was having difficulties sorting out her head, and I asked her gentle questions, comforted her, tried to distract her and make her laugh. I assured her that she was loved, that she had a whole human family around her that would not let her fall or feel alone. She sounded strange, despondent, distant, confused, which wasn’t surprising.

A day later a friendly newspaper journalist called me from Auckland. He was a fan as well, and had done some research because he wanted to do a story about this phenomenon: the girl, the fans, me, the net. He had just talked to the Christchurch Red Cross, asking for the details of the teenage girl who had lost both her parents and siblings.

No such girl existed.

All of the people in Melbourne who’d turned the lobby into a group art-therapy project had felt something real. They’d been deceived. I’d been deceived. I didn’t tell them that the tragedy was fictional. (They’ll know now, though, and I wonder if that girl will read this book. I hope she is okay.)

The saddest thing about Earthquake Girl was that either way—truth or fiction—the story was tragic. Anyone who was unhappy and unhinged enough to pull a stunt like that clearly needed love.

Oddly enough, her lie had pulled us all together. She was like a broken thread in the net, hanging down.

A lot like art, I thought, like any work of fiction.

The story was fake, but the impact was real.