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

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One of my favorite yoga teachers once told a story during class.

Since ever, in China, bamboo farmers have planted baby bamboo shoots deep into the ground. And then, for three years, nothing happens. But the farmers will work, diligently watering the shoot, spreading hay and manure, waiting patiently, even though nothing is sprouting up. They simply have faith. And then, one day, the bamboo will shoot up and grow up to thirty feet in a month. It just blasts into the sky.

Any small, sustainable artist-fan community works like this. Crowdfunding works like this.

There’s years and years of authentic work, tons of nonmonetary exchanges, massive net-tightening, an endless collection of important moments. Good art is made, good art is shared, help is offered, ears are bent, emotions are exchanged, the compost of real, deep connection is sprayed all over the fields.

Then, one day, the artist steps up and asks for something.

And if the ground has been fertilized enough, the audience says, without hesitation:

Of course.

But it isn’t magic. That first part can take years. Decades.

A lot of misunderstanding about crowdfunding stems from missing this point: if somebody hasn’t been watching you farm, suddenly sees the fruits of the labor, and thinks that maybe it all happened by magic, it can be painful. I got a lot of that after my Kickstarter launched:

But I’ve never heard of her… how can people want to give her that much money? What a lucky bitch.

This is why some lesser-known people have had such real success with crowdfunding—they’ve fertilized over time, and diligently—and some better-known people who appear to have massive reach haven’t done well at all. Fame doesn’t buy trust. Only connection does that.

National Public Radio has been following the connect-connect-connect-then-ask model forever: it’s called the annual on-air fundraiser. They create and transmit nonstop, they give away their reporting, storytelling, and content for free all year.

And then when the time comes: they ask.

And, fundamentally, all asking works like this. You must prepare the ground. If you’re going to be asking one day, you need someone to ask who is going to answer the call. So you tend to your relationships on a nonstop basis, you abide by the slow, ongoing task, going out there like a faithful farmer, landing on the unseeable bamboo shoot.

And then, when it is time—whether you’re asking a bunch of people to preorder your album, or asking one person to hold back your hair while you’re puking—someone will be there for you.

There’s a difference between asking a stranger for a handout, a friend for a favor, or a customer for a down payment on a piece of merchandise. Crowdfunding artists are generally working in the third category, in the spirit of the second.

My Kickstarter had been carefully constructed to allow everyone who wanted to get involved to contribute, no matter how little the amount. The lowest price point was a single dollar, which bought you a simple digital download of the album (which we promised would be out within five months). The CD package cost $25, and the more expensive packages included an art book, a painted portable record player (I spent a whole weekend that summer painting them, with Casey and two artist friends of hers, on my parents’ back porch), fancy double-disc vinyl records ($50), limited-attendance art parties in five cities ($250 a ticket), and house parties ($5,000 each).

By the time we closed, after a monthlong campaign that gathered over a million in backing, the most astonishing thing to me wasn’t the number of dollars. It was the number of people: There were just under twenty-five thousand backers. Almost the exact number of sales that had constituted a failure in the eyes of the label. I had fallen into my crowd, and they’d caught me. The backers were ecstatic about the success of the Kickstarter, and everybody who had helped me to build it was over the moon.

But a backlash started in the press and on the music blogs. Some journalists were suspicious about artists doing business via crowdfunding, calling Kickstarter a form of “online begging.” I blogged my position and made my business expenses transparent so that people could understand the nature of this system: crowdfunding wasn’t charity, as some people seemed to think; my backers were buying things. It was a means for implementing a business model based on the currency of asking and trusting. I was doing exactly what I had been doing for years, going directly to the fanbase, asking them to buy everything in advance: the records, the tickets, the high-level record players and the intimate house parties. Some journalists didn’t understand how crowdfunding worked, and many thought that all the money was donations, rather than advance purchases of actual things that I had to create and deliver.

It shocked me that even some of my smart business friends asked me what I was going to do with a million dollars. I explained that, er, the million dollars was going to be used to pay back my recording debts, and to manufacture thousands of records with high-quality packaging, and to print thousands of art books, and to pay thirty-five fine artists for their work in that book, and to pay for the shipping, and to fly me around to deliver what I’d promised. And after that, there wouldn’t be a whole lot left.

Even weirder, a few folks who supported the concept of crowdfunding singled me out. They grumbled that I didn’t have the right to ask my fans to preorder the album using Kickstarter because I wasn’t a “true independent”—I was a refugee from the major-label system who was already known. Therefore, I shouldn’t be allowed to use Kickstarter, which was, in their minds, supposed to be reserved for the unknown.

These sorts of critics would write screeds online about how I was equipped to “find some other way” to put an album out. This is what struck me as particularly ironic. I had found “some other way” to release music: crowdfunding.

This made me wonder: Who wasn’t allowed to use crowdfunding? Who wasn’t allowed to ask for help directly from their fans? Lady Gaga? Madonna? Justin Bieber? The answer is: anyone can. Crowdfunding has to be a democratic tool, and mega pop stars have as much right to use the tool as anyone else—as much right as any unknown garage band with no fanbase or head start.

For a couple of weeks, I had a hard time looking at Twitter because for every thousand congratulations, there were another hundred insults being hurled in my direction. They were hard to read.

I REALLY USED TO LIKE AMANDA PALMER UNTIL SHE STARTED BEGGING HER FANS FOR MONEY.

People were calling me “shameless,” but I decided to take that as an unintended compliment. Wasn’t shame… bad? Like fear? I mean, nobody uses “fearless” as an insult.

I laughed most of it off, but it was hard in truth not to feel a glimmer of doubt. I knew I’d worked hard for all this, and I had an almost unquestionable faith in my songs, my band, and my ability to create something magnificent to send to my backers. But my ego also withered with the amount of people telling me I was a useless, entitled narcissist, conning my fans out of their money.

There was a distinctly familiar GET A JOB quality to all of the yelling aimed in my direction.

I recognized the voice.

You’re not allowed to ask for that. You don’t deserve it. You’re not real enough.

It was my own.

After the Kickstarter campaign succeeded and closed, my life turned into a hurricane of preparation for the upcoming tour, which was scheduled to last almost a year and hit dozens of countries. I wanted the stage show to be an unforgettable, rolling, worldwide celebration of the record that the fans themselves had helped me to make, and, to that end, I wanted it to feature as much crowdsourcing, crowdsurfing, and crowd-connecting as humanly possible. I worked together with Michael (McQuilken, the Grand Theft drummer who was also a theater director) on a pile of ideas to take onto the road: we designed a dress with a train the size of a ballroom floor that I wore while crowdsurfing, covering the audience under a giant sheet of translucent blue as they held it aloft and sailed me over their heads; the band dressed from scratch using clothing items the fans brought and tossed up onto the stage; we asked people to upload photos of images that connected to specific song themes—childhood bedrooms, treasured objects, lost loved ones—and we projected them onto a giant scrim above the stage. We communed.

I also thought it would be fun to ask members of the fanbase to join the band onstage to play some of the string-and-horns arrangements we’d recorded on the album, instead of filling in those melodic parts on guitar or piano. I’d done similar things with musicians, dancers, and other random stage-performer volunteers over the years; the community always loved it. Hundreds of eager players volunteered via email, and we picked four or five volunteer musicians for each city. The payment for volunteering onstage was the usual crowdsource currency: free tickets and guest list for friends; merchandise, backstage beer, hugs, high-fives, love. The fans knew the drill. The first few shows worked out perfectly.

Then a French horn player wrote me an open letter on her blog, saying that while she was tempted to join the tour, she felt that the lack of payment was unethical. The blog post went viral, the New York Times ran a story, and within days a controversy had blown up.

And gotten distorted, to boot. A lot of critics on the Internet were starting to claim that I’d made a million dollars and I wouldn’t pay my band.

Actually, I did pay my band; they were all on salary, which meant they got paid even on their days off. As for the volunteers, they had volunteered. No one had anticipated that their performances were going to be seen as political statements. They’d understood the deal when they volunteered, and just wanted to play music.

The initial Kickstarter controversy regarding digital panhandling, which was just dying down, began anew, and now things were darker. Now I was not only begging my fans for money, I was also exploiting musicians in a tawdry search for free labor. It got mean. Gawker, the celebrity news and gossip blog site, referred to my use of crowdsourcing as “the smoke-and-mirrors tactic of a grifter.” A blogger from the New Yorker wrote, “Amanda Palmer’s hustle becomes a half-real and half-symbolic version of the competition to scrape a last dollar from the hides of the desperate.”

The noise was mostly from people who had never heard of me before and knew nothing about me—or the fanbase. My Twitter feed and blog comments, usually sources of comfort and community, were now also filled with people who were only visiting to voice their outrage. A classical musicians’ union started a petition against my unethical crowdsourcing. The day after the Times article ran, I received an email from a professional violinist who’d worked for years with my hometown’s symphony orchestra that opened: “Amanda, you ignorant slut…” and went on to tell me what a terrible person I was, on top of being an untrained, unprofessional, shitty musician.

That hurt. It all hurt.

After a week of this, I threw up my hands and decided to pay the volunteers. It seemed like a harmless solution: They’d be happy to get an unexpected $100 for their time (though some of them gave their surprise paychecks to charity, twittering and blogging that they’d volunteered and wanted to keep it that way). My stressed-out band and I could stop fielding hate bombs in our Twitter feeds. And we could all get back to work.

In the aftermath, a familiar feeling lingered, a leftover from my statue days. The whole controversy was pretty… GET A JOB. But we were all, in our own ways, doing our jobs.

Everybody on the sidewalk who interacted with The Bride was in the arena with me, engaged in the strange exchange. And everyone at my shows—whether onstage, or volunteering, or in the audience—was happily exchanging: favors, flowers, dollars, music, hugs, beer, love, whatever. But the critics were neither with us on the sidewalk, nor with us at the shows. They were yelling from their car windows, or from behind their laptops. They couldn’t see the exchange for what it was: a process that was normal for us, but alien to them.

A short time later, as the outrage was dying down, a paradox struck me that seemed to get at the heart of the matter: What if I’d simply SOLD the chance to come play with the band onstage by making it a package of the Kickstarter—an item for purchase, like a $25 CD or a $10,000 art-sitting? What if I’d charged $100 for the opportunity to come and play trombone live onstage with my band?

I didn’t need to do an experiment to find the answer; The Polyphonic Spree, an orchestral indie band, had already done it for me. They launched a Kickstarter that same month and offered a $1,500 option to come onstage with any instrument and join the band for a few numbers. They limited the number of packages to ten, and sold every one of them.

There was no controversy.

Why not? The conclusion I came to was that people are comfortable as long as there is money flowing in ANY direction, whether from the artist to the volunteer, or from the volunteer to the artist. People can understand a price tag, no matter what it’s stuck on. But some can’t understand a messier exchange of asking and giving—the gift that stays in motion.

I thought back to my statue days and the GET A JOB critics, who didn’t feel very far off from the people calling me a beggar when I decided to take help directly from my fans.

It said, something, I think, about the fundamental discomfort people have around the artist—or the person—who asks for direct exchange.

A big part of the reason artists feel so squeamish about standing behind their own cash registers is a direct response to the fact that many customers feel squeamish about seeing them there. Nobody would have yelled GET A JOB at the ticket-taker outside a gallery door if The Bride had been on view for a dollar a pop. It seems that, over time, artists and audiences alike have become accustomed to a legitimizing agent, a transactional middleman to throw professional fairy dust over the exchange. The times are changing.

It’s a 180-degree turn from the eighties and nineties, when most exchanges with big musicians were entirely indirect, and involved—at least in my case—getting on your dirt bike, cycling to the mall, walking into the record store, and exchanging your $9.99 for a physical album, which was rung up for you by an indifferent clerk who had absolutely nothing to do with the artist who created the music.

All buskers—and artists, and people—have different degrees of comfort with asking. Some buskers have perfect three-minute pitches in which they yell at a crowd to please give as much as possible (and watching a master at work is a treat—it’s a part of their craft). But my friend Jason Webley, who busked for years with an accordion, refused to put his case out for money… he didn’t like the idea of being coin-operated. So he would play for half an hour, build a crowd, and then he’d sell CDs for $5 at the end of his show, not accepting any donations. If somebody generously tried to give him a twenty instead of a five, he’d simply thrust four CDs at that person.

Everybody finds their own path for letting other people help.

Who’s allowed to ask? Well, technically, anyone. And the Internet makes it possible for anyone to ask for anything with a signal that can potentially reach anyone else online. The flipside, however, is that you also can’t limit who hears your plea or control who sees your crowdfunding page.

A freelance fine artist once reached out to me over Twitter with the link to his crowdfunding page, asking if I’d help spread the word that he was asking online for help with his medical bills. He’d had a stomach operation, and there were complications keeping him from working. His was a typical tale from the failing American health system—a family, kids, a house, a sudden illness, not enough insurance coverage, mounting medical bills, and potential bankruptcy and impending foreclosure.

I hesitated to help.

I’d recently seen some articles blasting a Canadian couple who were trying to crowdfund their dream of moving to Scotland. Some of the press was nasty, calling them “bizarre” and printing headlines like, “We’d love to live in Scotland. Canuck pay our air fares? Canadian couple launch online bid to fund dream,” while the online comments (as often happens) were even worse:

Someone actually commented (I’m not kidding):

They raised only a few hundred dollars, and from the interviews it sounded like they actually had expected total strangers to get excited about their dream. If they’d raised thousands of dollars from friends and family who were happy to have a formal mechanism through which to help them, it wouldn’t have been a sad story at all. It would have been a cause for celebration. But the story was kind of sad because they didn’t realize how futile their asking was.

So when I saw the email from the artist needing stomach surgery, there was a part of me that cringed, fearing that he might be asking an invisible crowd, crowdsurfing into an empty room. I sighed and shared the link, ready to be disappointed.

Within twenty-four hours, he’d made his goal of $10,000 from what looked like a tight-knit community of forty or fifty friends and family.

And as I looked at his success, I realized that I had been thinking like the trolls, standing on the periphery, judging.

Who can know? He risked, his crowd helped. He asked, he got. There was no reason for me to be skeptical. The only people who can really judge if a request is fair are the ones being asked—the ones who have the relationships are the ones who understand the complexity of the situation.

Unfortunately, some people try to use crowdfunding not understanding this concept, hoping that somehow there’s magical “free money” out there. There isn’t.

Effective crowdfunding is not about relying on the kindness of strangers, it’s about relying on the kindness of your crowd.

There’s a difference.

When I came across the work of Walt Ribeiro, a composer/arranger on YouTube, it delighted me: he takes current pop songs and arranges them orchestrally using computerized instruments. He’d uploaded his arrangements of Adele, Radiohead, and MGMT and they’d gotten hundreds of thousands of views, but as often happens with popular digital content creators, the hit tally wasn’t translating into real money. Walt wanted to make a record with a real orchestra but couldn’t figure out how to make it happen.

I had another fancy show coming up with the Boston Pops Orchestra, and I reached out to Walt over Twitter, got his email, and asked if he would be game to do an arrangement of “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga for the concert at Symphony Hall. He was beyond game. We chatted about crowdfunding; we became friends. His arrangement rocked.

When Walt emailed me a few months later excitedly telling me about his new Kickstarter campaign, I happily plugged it and thought that he would easily achieve his goal of $7,000. I twittered about it, I blogged about it, I told the story of this nice arranger/orchestra dude who was embracing the future of music and trying to Kickstart his orchestra album.

His Kickstarter didn’t get funded. It more than didn’t get funded: it only raised $132 of a $7,000 goal, from three backers. I was one of them.

Hundreds of thousands of people had enjoyed Walt’s work on YouTube, but he hadn’t cultivated a long-term relationship with them, he hadn’t yet built a bridge of exchange between himself and his potential supporters.

There isn’t always a crowd from which you can fund. Sometimes you just don’t know until you jump.

It also appeared that my enthusiasm for somebody else’s project held little or no sway with my own fans. Some clicked the link, they looked, they decided it wasn’t for them, they moved on. I could boost the signal, but I couldn’t build the bridge.

Which, as I thought about it, wasn’t a bad thing. It made me consider one of the reasons I loved my fanbase so much: they are wholly independent and have their own unassailable, discerning tastes. They weren’t looking to me as a leader to follow blindly, there to dictate their choices. They were looking to me as a connector, a coordinator, which was the role I wanted.

Standing above everybody is lonely—I knew that from experience. I liked the idea of being with everybody.

(Two years on, Walt is still working on his arrangements and just launched a Patreon.com page. He has eighteen backers. I’m one of them.)

My friend Sxip Shirey is a crazed multi-instrumentalist composer with a huge white Albanian Afro who used to tour with small punk circuses as their live one-man band. His music is absolutely entrancing, but it’s miles from mainstream. Sxip’s been touring for almost twenty years as an MC and impresario: he’s a connector, a carny, a lover of food, whiskey, randomness, people, and laughter.

He never landed a record deal with a label, but he wanted to make a high-class official recording of his music, so he decided to crowdfund. He surpassed his goal of $20,000 with the help of 531 backers. Most of these people were Sxip’s friends and fans from New York, and a few hundred people from other states or countries who had seen him on tour over the years. I’d estimate that Sxip had, at one time, probably shared a drink with at least 37 percent of his backers. They just wanted to help him make his record and… Be Sxip.

Sxip’s Kickstarter proved a theory I’d had, but never tested.

Beyond the basic CD option for $20, he didn’t give many details of what he was going to give the crowd. He just asked them to trust him.

These were the descriptions of his Kickstarter backer levels:

He reached a total over $21,000. Most (350 people) bought the $20 package and another seventy-six bought the $50 package, while fifty-nine bought the $100 package. Two people bought the $1,000 package.[8]

My theory: one of the biggest reasons people usually want to help an artist is because they really want… to help an artist. Not get a fancy beer cozy. If they make the decision to help, they will help at the level at which they are able, no matter what token, flower, or simple thank-you awaits them at the other end.

I emailed a pal at Kickstarter to see if they had any hard evidence to support this, and indeed, they had the numbers: Since Kickstarter began, 887,256 backers have asked for the artists to refrain from sending them any kind of reward—which represents a little over 14 percent of their user base.

Sometimes people just want to help. You never know until you ask.

The night my Kickstarter campaign closed, at the stroke of midnight on May 31, 2012, I threw a free celebration party in Brooklyn. I announced it ninja-style on Twitter and on the blog the day before. A few hundred people gathered in a parking lot with a rented sound system, pizza, booze, and spontaneous circus performances, and we counted down the final hours in style.

A friend loaned us a gigantic plastic tank—to create a human-sized aquarium—and I paid a handful of artists to source dozens of phone books. They spent three days gathering them and handwriting, each on a separate yellow page, the names of the over twenty-four thousand backers. My band and I donned old-fashioned swimsuits, sat in the life-sized fish tank on the back of a truck, and began ripping every page out of every phone book and thanking every backer individually by holding each page up against the front wall of the tank, where a camera was recording a live webcast.

After we held up each page, we’d crumple it up and drop it to the floor of the tank. By midnight, we were sitting chest deep in an ocean of crumpled yellow-page names; it was glorious, and a few of us even went for a yellow-page swim.

When we mailed out the physical album to thousands of backers a few months later, we included a single random yellow-page surprise with each order. Someone started a “find your yellow-page person!” database online.

Two years later, people are still finding each other.

When they do, they tell me. And I tell everybody else. The net keeps tightening.

Here are three Kickstarter stories.

An indie musician named Deakin from the band Animal Collective presold a limited-edition CD and other rewards through Kickstarter in connection with his trip to a festival in Mali, Africa, and to support an anti-slavery charity there. He raised about $25,000 from a few hundred people. Then he dropped off the face of the earth: no communication, no record, no nothing. He never posted anything to the backer update page, and his backers started to grumble after a while.

In the backer-only comments, which are visible to the public, you can see the story slowly unfold. They start out excited, then patient, then everybody starts wondering what the hell is going on. A year in, people begin asking if they can please get their money back. But there is nobody to ask: the ship had been abandoned by its captain. Then comes the anger. They were miffed, but mostly because they’d been abandoned as collaborators.

The backers started to complain that they been “duped”; they begged for information, they resented the fact that he was off making a new album with his band. One backer posted: I gave this to my boyfriend as a fucking gift… which was never delivered. Ungrateful fuck.

A couple of years later, he gave an interview in which he explained that he’d been struggling with making the album, confirmed that all the money had made its way to the charity, and promised to deliver when he could. But there were still a lot of unhappy backers.

If Deakin had sent out a message to his backers saying:

Hey guys! So sorry but the recording fell through, here’s why, and here’s some pictures from my trip, and here’s a deep, personal story of what I saw while I was there… how do you feel if I just send you some signed photos instead?

…I think his crowd might have been less upset.

John Campbell is the creator of a webcomic called “Pictures for Sad Children,” who ran a Kickstarter to produce a hardcover collection of his work and raised $51,615 from 1,073 backers. After reaching his goal, making the book, and fulfilling many of the orders over the next year and a half, he posted a long, rambling blog piece about affluence, capitalism, and consumerism, and included this announcement:

He also posted a video of himself burning a copy of the book. It looked like he was having a meltdown, and was out of resources (both in the money and energy departments) to complete fulfillment of his backers’ book orders. But here’s the interesting thing: If you look at the backer comments, his supporters weren’t actually all that angry. Most seemed worried about his well-being more than anything else.

His backers rallied. Most showed a high level of concern for the artist—you could tell that this was a community, not a soulless storefront. One backer offered to make a digital version of the book to send to those who hadn’t received their packages. Another set up a “Sad Children Book Club,” posted his own email address, and offered to serve as the intermediary post office for anyone who wanted to donate their book to someone who’d missed out.

Three months later, another artist named Max Temkin stepped in, drove to John’s house to collect the unfulfilled books, and paid the shipping fees out of his own pocket to get the remaining books to their backers.

There are patrons everywhere. The point, though, is that even though John fucked up royally and did the unthinkable—Insulted his fanbase! Burned his own book!—at least he communicated. And that act—no matter how dark the story had become—kept him connected with the crowd.

Josh Ente is an artist living in a part of New Orleans that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. On his block, there was a collapsing, abandoned house, and he launched a Kickstarter to fill it with thousands of colored bouncy balls. He raised about $3,000 in backing from about two hundred people, but after everybody’s accounts had been charged, the city got an anonymous complaint and threatened to arrest him if he went forward—even though he had approval from the homeowner and the city permits department. There’s no reverse switch on Kickstarter—you can’t automatically refund people once their credit cards have been charged—but Josh couldn’t stand the idea of leaving people hanging.

So he got in touch with every person who funded the ball pit and offered them a choice: he would pay them back individually, by check, or put their money towards the charity of their choice. He even ran into an old friend at a party a few months later and gave him cash straight out of his wallet. Here’s how it broke down: about 40 percent asked for their money back, 40 percent sent it on to charity, and 20 percent said, Just put this towards your next art project. Josh had already spent the starting capital to build the project; he’d already bought the bouncy balls. Which means he paid all of those people back—and donated to all those charities—out of his own pocket, at a loss.

I wondered what he did with all the balls, so I asked him. His response: I was able to intercept them before they were delivered; as far as I know they’re still in a warehouse in Dallas waiting for me to pick them up. I also had two hundred pool noodles that were supposed to be used for safety padding on my porch for almost two years before I gave some to a Mardi Gras float and some to a Viking funeral.

My relationship with my fans is like a friendship. I have faced a slew of screwups over the years: accidentally double-booked shows, mail-order albums that shipped five or six months late. But most of the time, if I explain the backstory and the behind-the-scenes logistics of the situation, the audience stands with me. I’ve apologized tons of times. The only thing I must not do is break the code of honesty and steady, forthright contact. You can fix almost anything by authentically communicating.

The most expensive bundle package of the Kickstarter was the ten-thousand-dollar “art-sitting and dinner,” for which I promised to draw your portrait or vice versa… or whatever (clothing optional). Two people bought it. I delivered the first one in Washington, DC, and brought Neil along.

Nobody got naked. Instead, Neil and I painted a mural on a bedroom wall belonging to the unborn baby incubating in the belly of the Kickstarter backer, Chanie. We created a surreal scene featuring a moon-man playing the piano and a killer rabbit in a hot-air balloon while Chanie and her husband sat on the floor of the empty nursery, chatting with us about bad films, sibling feuds, and local politics. Then we took them out for Indian food.

I delivered the second art-sitting in Perth. The backer’s name was Yana, and it wasn’t until I met her at my public concert the night before that I realized I knew her from Twitter. We’d been casually communicating for years… and I realized she’d brought food backstage to a show a few years before.

Yana’s hard to miss. She was born with achondroplasia. In her late twenties, she’s four foot six inches tall, and she’s undergone ten operations to lengthen her arm and leg bones. After she gave me a tour of her folks’ cozy suburban Australian house and the backyard jungle where she’d adventured as a kid, we all sat down for a home-cooked feast, during which I chatted happily with her younger brother Sebastian and her French mum and British dad about everything from homesickness to the new Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott (nobody was a fan). I felt very at home; they were such a loving, warm family. And I was so impressed by Yana, how confident, self-possessed, and funny she was. She’d studied music business in college but was working shifts in a hospital, and she seemed determined to not let her condition get in the way of her happiness—she exuded positivity.

After the family meal, Yana bundled up a canvas, blankets, and brushes into boxes that I helped carry across a street and a soccer field. She had it all planned out: she wanted to pose nude in the park where she’d played as a child. I told her that if we got arrested, it would probably be the most cred-building event in my life since I was jailed in Amsterdam for doing a ninja gig in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Yana wasn’t a natural exhibitionist, but as soon we settled into a shady gazebo near the playground with nobody around, she took a deep breath and shed her clothes. I picked up a paintbrush.

Her body was a beautiful landscape of snow-white skin, her legs and arms covered in constellations of scars from her surgeries. As I focused on sketching her outline, I felt a quiet, profound sense of honor. I’m an amateur painter, and completing a passable likeness took two hours, which included a couple of close calls in the indecent exposure department. One old man wandered over to us and asked us what we were doing, as Yana dived under the blanket.

We’re art students, I lied earnestly.

Yana shared the stories of her life: about how she was constantly ill as a result of her condition, and about Jeff, her best friend, who had turned her on to my music years ago.

We were both hospital babies, she told me. We never had to justify ourselves to each other.

Jeff had died the month I launched my Kickstarter. Yana had bought the art-sitting as a sort of parting gift to his memory. I didn’t ask where she got the money.

Everybody always looks at me, she mused, as another passerby wandered too close and she grabbed the blanket… but never for the reasons I want.

I kept messing up her eyebrow.

Everybody I know, I said, especially the performers, has such a complicated relationship with being looked at. But seriously, I cannot imagine what yours is like.

It’s hard, said Yana.

I erased and redrew, thinking about how we judge one another. Was I trying to make her more beautiful? I shook off the thought and kept trying to get her left eyebrow to at least look like an eyebrow.

I’d sold thirty-four Kickstarter house parties for $5,000 each—anywhere in the world—and promised to deliver within eighteen months. I laid out some guidelines, having already sold and successfully delivered a handful of them as part of my Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under record. No more than fifty people. They could happen anywhere (outdoors, indoors, anywhere in the world, and I’d pay my way there) but they couldn’t be publicly promoted shows. The package included about $1,000 worth of merchandise as well: the vinyl, the high-end art books, the record player, and so on.

Very few people could afford the price tag of the party, so only about five parties were sold to single individuals; the rest were impressive efforts of community trust. Facebook groups started, volunteers coordinated to pool funds, find locations, and whip the parties into shape. From South Africa to Israel to Canada to Germany to Australia, total strangers trusted one another. When I showed up at the parties, there were often three hosts: the person who volunteered their house, the person who volunteered to throw down the five grand and trust that forty-nine people would kick in $100 each, and the person who dealt with potluck logistics. These hosts often became friends with one another through the very act of combining their efforts. It was an innovation in collectivist fandom that I’d never seen before.

Eric, my manager, wears about eighteen different hats—including making himself personally available on email and Twitter to thousands of fans who had questions about the Kickstarter. He was in charge of being the liaison for all thirty-four house party contacts. He juggled my travel schedule, along with my booking agent, to make sure I could hit all thirty-five cities while I toured—hopefully not having to zigzag or backtrack too much. It was an exercise in organizational Zen. (At the time this book goes to print, I’ve delivered thirty-three. The last one, in South Africa, remains undelivered. They’ve been really understanding… they’ve even uploaded a song-video to YouTube about how much they’re looking forward to it.)

Delivering the house parties felt like cresting a peak of crowdsurfing or couchsurfing. As I bounced back and forth on a regular basis between playing for a crowd of 1,500 in a standing-room-only theater one night and fifty people in a living room the next, I realized what the difference really meant.

An official show in a club or a theater is repetitive work: soundchecks, dressing rooms, testing lights. The environment is set up to do business, not art: security checkpoints; cash registers ringing open and slamming closed; bored bartenders loudly scooping ice into drinks, waiting for you to finish your screaming and swearing so they can clock out.

At a house party, everybody improvises and cobbles together a space; there’s nobody who doesn’t want to be there. Dogs and kids run freely, curfews don’t exist, strangers become real friends under the magical umbrella of a unique, shared experience. The music is important—I always play for at least an hour or two—but it isn’t the absolute center of the evening. Nor am I, the so-called star, the center. I slink back and watch as people warm to and bond with each other.

Throughout the post-Kickstarter year I got better and better at the house parties, which took place in cleared-out wheat barns in rural Germany, illegal basement speakeasies in London, suburban backyard barbecues all over the States, the UK, and Australia. Something surprising happened every night, and I started to enjoy the feeling of absolute uncertainty. No matter what happened, I twittered, instagrammed, and blogged the results. The crowd followed along.

The Tel Aviv house party featured a pole dancer and a rendition of one of my songs sung in Hebrew by the entire group—they’d all rehearsed a translation. On a remote hillside in Oslo, the whole party engaged in a game where everybody took turns drawing on an easel provided by the host, and one by one described the best and worst things about the various Nordic towns they hailed from. I got a pretty thorough education in Norwegian-Swedish rivalry that night, along with a great massage from a bearded man who, hours later, set up a DJ tent and blasted music into the dawn as the fire pit died down.

At a party in Nashville, a girl asked her parents’ permission to graffiti the outside walls of their guest house; fifty people attacked the huge structure with spray-paint cans. A few weeks later, a house party in Chicago picked up the theme and we spray-painted an entire garage.

I fell into the crowd at every event, talked late into the night over wines and beers, and freely discussed what was on my mind. I got pulled aside a lot, told a lot of dark stories, held (and was held by) a lot of people. Arriving at a house party in the carpeted basement rec room of a family home in Ashburn, Virginia, I asked my party host if there wasn’t, perhaps, a giant closet available. I explained to the fans that I’d played a show at Lincoln Center in New York City the night before and been soundly clocked on the head by a metal lighting rig pole that hadn’t been securely fastened, that I’d sustained a minor concussion and was going to need a cuddle—preferably a horizontal one. We dragged a futon into a giant walk-in closet, which was stocked with three racks of theatrical dresses and costumes.

A bunch of musicians had brought their instruments along to my party, so after taking requests for an hour or so, I invited them all to join me in some impromptu Nirvana covers—moshing included. I then announced I was hitting the closet, leaving the party to happily rage in my wake. I figured it’d take about two hours to get quiet time with everyone if they joined me in the closet one at a time. I misjudged: I was in there for four hours—but, man, I heard some stories. It was like Spoon River Anthology live. By the end of the night I had heard about two impending divorces, about the deepest fears of a nine-year-old girl (the child of one of the guests), and about losses secretly mourned: the deaths, the cancers, the miscarriages, the abortions, all the secrets they carried beneath the sheen of the dancing and mayhem outside the closet.

I arrived one night at a remote house in the woods, a few hours outside San Francisco, filled with high school kids and their parents. Bill was the dad who’d organized the party, and he welcomed me and my friend Whitney, who had driven me to the party, like long-lost family members into the already-jubilant festivities. Home-cooked food abounded, homemade beer flowed, and everyone sat together on the living room floor, playing instruments and sharing songs. In the kitchen, Whitney and I agreed that we were experiencing a classic case of Family Envy. How was it possible that all these seventeen-year-olds wanted to HANG OUT with their parents?

I took my plate of cake and fruit outside onto the porch, smelling the redwood trees and watching the kids take turns igniting a ten-foot-tall metal sculpture that blew fire out the top. I talked with Bill, the Perfect Dad.

His teenage daughter had died the year before. He showed me her paintings. He told me the party was for her, in a way; it was a celebration of her life. Later in the night, I played a song called “Lost”—which was on the Kickstarter record the party had helped to fund—on the living room piano while the entire gathering, young and old, linked arms and formed a kick line, singing along. I couldn’t believe they all knew the words.

It all felt so real.

The Kickstarter album had taken a few months to record; Jherek, Chad, Michael, and I spent a solid month in Melbourne between practice rooms and a recording studio bringing my preciously hoarded songs to life in full-band color. Only one song was recorded on solo piano (“The Bed Song,” which took at least two dozen takes to get right); the rest were awash with accompaniment, created by all three members of the band, who brought their sounds and structural ideas to the table. Michael programmed the drum loops. Chad spent hours finding the right synthesizer sounds. Jherek created beautiful string-and-horns arrangements for five of the songs and we hired local musicians to come into the studio for a few days. We twittered for a glockenspiel at one point. I named the album Theater Is Evil, which I changed to Theatre Is Evil (the British spelling) by a popular demand that arose the day I announced the album title on Twitter, and the Brits and Americans took up arms against one another. No bloodshed was necessary: they took a vote, and the British won.

A few weeks before the album was officially released in stores and hit the fans’ mailboxes, the whole band and road crew of five embarked on a mini-tour to deliver the Kickstarter art parties we had sold, which were backer-only events limited to two hundred and fifty people held in strange little galleries, pop-up art spaces, and small clubs. The community would commune, the band would play a special acoustic set, and the original album art would be displayed on the walls. I’d hired about thirty-five painters, sculptors, and photographers—mostly friends of mine—to create work inspired by the lyrics of the songs. Every artist was paid $500 per piece of artwork, and we shipped all the art to the parties, which were held in New York, Berlin, LA, San Francisco, Boston, and London. We put together a variety of gift bags for the attending backers that included blindfolds, surprise CDs, custom stationery, and in most cities, a locally purchased used book. The morning of every art party gig I popped into a used bookstore, buying about three hundred used books (it felt like a giant supermarket sweep) and hauling them over to the venue.

A few days before the first art party, I got the random idea to let the fans draw on me—I’m never sure where these ideas come from—and texted my assistant, SuperKate, to buy a package of markers to pass around. Washable if you can find them, but maybe do some tests. I’ll probably be sweaty, it’s summer.

The people in those rooms were my fan-family, I had faith in them. They’d trusted me to deliver an album, and letting them draw on my naked body was a gesture to show that I trusted them right back. At a couple of the parties, I prepared to strip but decided not to if the winds in the room just didn’t feel quite safe enough. We tried different drawing utensils on different nights: one of the first nights was kind of a disaster since we could only find tiny, cheap drugstore markers that didn’t write well on clammy flesh. Everybody tried their best to draw on me, but it mostly felt like being stabbed by fifty pointy little forks. We all had a sense of humor about it. One night we used paintbrushes. Another night we tried finger painting. That was interesting.

Every one of those nights—with my arms wide, closing my eyes and letting the fans draw on my body—felt like a final exam in trust.

There was that feeling again, the same one I’d had standing in front of Felix and Michelle’s doorbell at midnight: an electrifying combination of fear and a tenacious, underlying trust that refused to take no for an answer.

It reminded me of the shiver you get in the split second after leaving the edge of a diving board, knowing that your every pore is about to experience a shocking, full-body sensual assault: you brace… with joy. Nakedness with strangers is such a powerful feeling, even when—especially when—there’s no sex involved. I squeezed my eyes shut, outstretched my arms, much like I had done as The Bride, and felt every vulnerable inch of flesh exposed to the room. Every paintbrush, finger, or marker that touched my skin—even if it hurt or was shockingly cold—felt like a loving caress. Some people didn’t dare venture away from my arms; some happily drew designs right on my tits and outlined my pubic triangle with flowers. I laughed and allowed them to decorate with abandon.

It was a question to the crowd, really, in the form of my own naked body.

I trust you this much.

Should I?

Show me.

I took a short break from touring to do some yoga. There was barely any cell service at the retreat, but I walked up a hill one day to wave my phone at the sky and download a few days’ worth of text messages. One was from Anthony.

He’d been to a doctor, he said.

They’d misdiagnosed him up to now.

It was cancer.

Bad cancer. Leukemia.

They’ve given me six months, tops, he texted.

It’s over, beauty.

My head stopped working.

I walked down the hill. The yoga teacher, Nigel, and one of my other new British yoga friends, Max, were sitting on a stone wall, laughing in the sun. Max was playing a Spanish song on his guitar.

They could see my eyes were red and beckoned me over. I didn’t want to avoid them. I wanted to tell them. But how could I explain this? They barely knew me, let alone knew who Anthony was and what he meant to me. They’d probably think I was being a drama queen. They probably wouldn’t believe me.

I just got a text… I said. I think my best friend is going to die.

I looked at them, and they looked at me. They saw me.

Nigel reached his hands out and held me. The sobs came from the bottom of my gut. I stood there, rocking in Nigel’s arms, so happy that these two strangers—of all people—were the ones I’d encountered.

We stood there for a few minutes, saying nothing, while I cried into Nigel’s neck and then calmed down. Max offered to play me a song on guitar, and I sat on the wall, holding Nigel’s hand and losing myself in the sound. Then the reality of it would hit me again.

Anthony is going to die.

I had to leave.

I was barely able to think. I walked to the pay phone in the retreat office and called Neil collect.

Anthony just texted. The doctors told him he’s going to die in six months, Neil. I have to get home. Fast.

Oh god. My love, I’m sorry.

I need your help. I have no cell service here, just the pay phone. Can you help me? Can you help me change my ticket?

Yes, yes of course I will. And you mean… He hesitated. You’re fine to let me pay for it?

Of course, I said. It’s fine… I’ll pay you back.

I’d rather you didn’t pay me back, Amanda. Just let it go. I love you. Now let me hang up and see if I can book you a flight. When do you want to leave?

First thing in the morning, the earliest flight you can get. I love you, too. Neil?

Yes?

I’m sorry, I said. Thank you. Thank you for helping me. I’m sorry.

Amanda, he said, listen to me. I want to help. I know how much Anthony means to you. I want desperately to help. All you have to do is ask.

I hung up the phone and packed my bags, feeling blank and blurry. The next morning, before leaving for the airport at sunrise, I walked off the retreat property, into the woods, to find a stick.

The trip back to Boston took about twenty-six hours—a bus ride, a ferry, two planes. When I got to the first airport, I walked catatonically into a news shop and bought a blank journal, sat down at the gate, and started writing. Everything I could think of that Anthony had ever told me, every piece of advice, every stupid skit we’d made up together, every memory, no matter how small. I boarded the plane and kept writing, unable to stop.

That ink flowing to the blank pages of that book was my lifeline, my IV, my only escape from collapsing. In that moment, I understood something about my writer husband that I’d never understood before. I had a small glimpse into the act of writing something down as a direct, very viable escape from pain. I had no desire to publish this writing; I wasn’t thinking about an audience. I just needed to do it, or else I’d weep and not be able to control myself. For the first time, I experienced the physical truth of what it felt like to dwell in the act of creation as a direct escape hatch from an unbearable reality.

If I stopped writing and started thinking, I’d start crying and wouldn’t be able to stop, or make sense of my thoughts, so I kept the pen to the paper and barely lifted it for the entire journey.

Neil picked me up from the airport, and together we drove to the hospital. We sat for a moment in the parked car, and talked.

I can’t leave again. I’m going to have to cancel the whole European tour, I said, staring out the windshield onto the gray wall of the hospital garage. And the Australian and the New Zealand tours. I can’t go, not while he goes through this.

My mind started to race. It’s already on sale, Neil… thousands of tickets have sold. Jesus, honey, this is going to be so fucked. The fans will get it. But it’s going to lose tons of money if I reschedule, and I won’t be earning anything… and… the band… I’m going to need to give them some money to bridge the gap… they’re all going to be out of work on three months’ notice, I need to pay them, and—

Darling, slow down, slow down. First of all, don’t worry about the money, Neil said.

I’m not worried about the money, I said. You’ll help cover it, right?

Of course I will. Wait, hold on… He looked skeptical. You mean you’re fine just letting me help? he asked.

Yes. Honey, I’m more than fine. This isn’t like last year when I hit the black spot. This is easy.

Why is this easy? he asked.

It’s impossibly easy… I said. It’s Anthony.

It hurt enough.

I got up off the nail.

The second time I saw Anthony cry was about ten years after I gave him the letter about Laura.

He needed chemo, they said. Thirty-six trips to the hospital, and he couldn’t get there and back himself, because the side effects made him too tired to drive safely. His friends scrambled into action, and a carpool was organized so that everyone could take turns driving him to and from the treatments.

Neil seemed scared of my sadness, afraid that he was going to do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, react in the wrong way. But I could feel how much he really wanted to help, to see me. Neil and Anthony had become a lot closer, but I still didn’t know if Neil understood what he meant, how big it was. All I wanted was to plug Neil into my brain and show him the entire history of our friendship. The love.

All my life, Anthony had been my go-to, the person I’d gone to with every sorrow, every problem, every heartache.

The only person I really trusted to understand how I felt about Anthony’s cancer was Anthony, and I couldn’t call him and collapse. That was out of the question; he had cancer. Asking for his help on this one wouldn’t really be fair. I felt a kind of loneliness I’d never felt before.

I was driving him home from one of the first treatments. We were on the freeway, and I was deliberating whether I should drive in the slow lane (he was feeling nauseated and fragile) or the fast lane (he also wanted to get home and back to bed as soon as possible). It had been a relatively normal drive for the first ten minutes—you know, as normal as it can be when your friend-who-had-just-been-given-a-death-sentence is sitting silently next to you steeped in chemicals and you’re trying to maintain a stable state of mind. We were approaching a patch of traffic.

Get off, he said.

You want me to exit here? I mean, I can. But…

GET OFF. GET OFF. And he tried to grab the steering wheel and pull the car over to the right.

HEY! Hey. Hey. I snapped. Watch it. Seriously. Don’t kill us.

Then he hit the glove compartment. Really hard.

I don’t want to go through this, Amanda.

And his voice choked and his fist hit the glove compartment again. And again, and again.

I DON’T WANT TO GO THROUGH THIS.

I felt my eyes sting and took a giant breath.

I DON’T WANT TO GO THROUGH THIS.

I DON’T WANT TO GO THROUGH THIS.

I DON’T WANT TO GO THROUGH THIS.

He hit the dashboard so hard it frightened me.

And he started to cry.

He wiped his eyes and sounded so weak, and so tired.

I don’t want to go through this, Amanda.

I breathed in and out again. I put my hand in his and kept my eyes on the road.

I know.

I know.

I know.

There was nothing else I could say.

I didn’t want to see him like this, I didn’t want to fuck up, I didn’t want to say the wrong thing.

And I felt dark and selfish. I didn’t want him to be sick. I didn’t want him to fall apart.

I wanted him to take hold of me and help me. He always had.

But this was it. He was breaking down in front of me. Which, I realized, was the ultimate act of trust and love.

He was asking me to see him.

Not as my mentor, not as the guy with all the answers, but as himself.

Human. Afraid.

He’d been taking care of me all my life.

It was my turn.

I hadn’t really talked about Anthony to the fans before. He was the magic friend behind the curtain.

My close friends all knew The Anthony Deal, but now I had to talk about him on the blog and to Twitter. It was a shitty reason for introducing someone (Dear Everybody, meet my lifelong best friend and mentor! He’s dying, probably!), but otherwise there was no way to explain why I might have to postpone all the upcoming shows.

Launching the Kickstarter gave me a new level of pride in the fanbase, but the outpouring of support they showed when I told them about Anthony and his cancer was astounding. They truly held me up, sending me love, but more than that, sharing their own stories and pain, past and present: parents with cancer, wives with cancer, teachers with cancer, children with cancer. I didn’t feel alone.

Neil and I had been about to head to New York, but instead we canceled our move and rented a house in Cambridge, near Harvard Square, so we could be on hand. Neil offered to cover the whole rent there, and for the first time, his wanting to help didn’t send me into a fit of anxiety. The money, and who was covering the rent, didn’t seem to matter as much as the cancer, which was all I could think about. Neil was paying, I was paying, whatever.

I rejiggered my schedule and tried to leave town only when necessary to deliver the remaining house parties, then came home to drive Anthony to and from chemo when it was my turn in the carpool. I got used to the routine: pick him up, drive to the hospital, take a parking garage ticket, walk him up to the ninth floor, wait for his treatment to start, bring him a sandwich, sit and wait while they prepared and administered the chemicals while Anthony lay in the hospital bed, go get the car four hours later, drive him home.

Neil joined the carpool, too, and sometimes we’d drive in together. Then we’d sit in the treatment room or go for walks to the hospital cafeteria while Anthony dozed off.

First they said he had six months, I complained. Then they said it was a sixty percent chance that the chemo would save him. Then the guy today said it was more like a fifty-fifty chance. What exactly are they basing that on? I mean, if his type of cancer is that rare… doesn’t it sound like such a perfectly random bullshit number? Fifty-fifty? Really? They expect us to take that seriously?

Neil was silent. He’d spent the entire night before researching T-cell leukemia online. Then he said, I don’t know. If we believe the Internet, it’s much worse than that. More like a five percent chance, darling. Who knows what the truth is. I think fifty-fifty means what it means. He might survive, and he might die. And they don’t know.

Somewhere inside, I had no doubt he would survive. He had to survive: he was Anthony.

We picked him up, we drove him in, we sat, we waited.

The chemo made him tired.

Sometimes, sitting next to him as the clock ticked, I’d start feeling confused and guilty about the choices I was making. I’d finally released my Kickstarter record, and instead of touring, promoting, and connecting with the fans, I was staying at home, sitting in a hospital, watching a bag of chemicals drip into my friend’s arm.

But then I’d look at him, sleeping there.

Fifty-fifty.

Anthony.

He had loved me more than enough.

He had loved me way beyond enough.

I would give him everything.