Death Thing, Revisited (Patreon)

Dear Patrons....

If you want to listen to the song I'm about to explode, it's here for easy access.

https://amandapalmer.bandcamp.com/track/death-thing

.................

Good morning, my loves. 

Greetings from post-Christmas boxing day in Woodstock, NY. The fragile and the melancholy is gripping me, but so is the quiet joy. I wrote a shorter draft of this late last night and posted it to socials, but I wanted to write something deeper and longer for you this morning.

I'm working on a little video and text for the Althing, which will come out before New Years and be on the short side. 

I felt the need to write this one on the day it mattered.

Exactly five years ago, after staying up until the dawn broke after a long, subzero Christmas Night, I experienced a brutal and bloody miscarriage. 

I was about three months pregnant with what would have been my second child. I was alone, managed to claw and moan my way through it, and the entire experience mangled me, forged me, bent me into a new shape I had never been before. 

I rose from that pile of blood a new kind of person. Strangely, a happier one, able to access something that had been previously hidden. Things became clearer.

I was, at the time of that miscarriage, still grieving the death of my best friend and reeling from having my first child. I was not grounded. I felt alienated in my own home. Things were not getting easier, or calmer. They were slipping. Help, as my favorite yoga teacher used to say, was not on the way. 

And I wondered - after losing possibility after possibility - if it was also possible to get too good at grief.

I have since sat with so many people lately who have lost pregnancies, and living babies, and grown children, and marriages…and I know there is no good answer.

I think about my friend who had eleven miscarriages. I think about my friend who buried two living babies. Two tiny coffins within two years. I think about my friend whose son took his own life. I think about my family losing my brother when I was twenty. I think about my friend who's been divorced four times. I think the number of people I know right now who are losing things. Marriages. Countries. Homes. Jobs. Parents. Children. Friends. Religions.

We lose things because they go.

I took this picture on that painful awakening day, exactly five years ago:

Someone reminded me last night about the Camus quote:

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”

The extreme color against the monochrome.

To find that photo, I had to scroll back in digital time and see the photos in the digital neighborhood. That was unexpected, and slightly excruciating. Faced with the faces, more things lost: to betrayal, to drugs and addiction, to time....seeing the broken remnants of life and connection, digging through piles of photographic corpses, all just to find a little photo of a bush with little speckles of color.

But there, within the digital graveyard: the summer within winter. 

The splashes of color. The hope. The seeds.

I know so many of you can relate to this moment.

Within the grief, within the loss: scrambling in the wreckage to to find the seeds of hope we can plant, for a new day, for a new future, for a new landscape.

............

“You always liked being good at things, didn’t you?”

Oh, to be good at something.

To have mastery over summer. Over winter.

Over what?

I look back at my life and realize with a sad smirk that I was so over-attached at being “good” at things when I was younger, and that the “things” could be almost anything. Field Hockey! Math! Backgammon! Theater! Rolling joints! Giving head! The SATs! The ACTs! Repressing emotions! Handling a broken relationship! Songwriting! Marketing Art! Getting music awards! Miscarriages!! Grieving the Dead!!!

It all sort of had...equal value. As long as I felt like I had some sort of mastery over the thing, did it matter what it was? I’d take a trophy for anything. Gimme it. 

This was the stuff I was pondering when I wrote “Death Thing”.

It’s the closing track on “There Will Be No Intermission”. (It was meant to be the closer of the touring show in 2019 - the one that dropped me in New Zealand - but “The Ride” wound up stealing its place in the encore. I was sad about that; but the show was already four hours). 

It didn’t end there, by the way. 2020 (and 2021, and 2022…) made everything that came before look like a goddamn cakewalk, miscarriage included. Things kept getting harder. Worse. I kept losing more people, things, plans. It became hilarious. I had to admit: I had little to no control over any of it.

But I never, ever lost my faith. It stayed intact, and I partly credit this album and the ears and hands that held me while I toured it, even though many people in my life were made uncomfortable as hell by the content of the record and the show.

In fact: the more people, things and plans crumbled and disintegrated around me, the steadier I slowly became. I had to.

I kept writing.

Being able to channel grief, love and acceptance into songs, into music, has been my way of staying sane throughout all this. 

It may always be this way, and honestly, I don’t mind. A cathartic-songwriting addiction is a hell of a lot better than most of the other addictions I’ve seen destroy the people I love.

I also want to take a moment and do something I often don’t get around to in these moments. I want to thank John Congleton, the magician engineer/producer who made this recording with me. He understands pain, and he understands music, he understands what happens when you put them together and try to record them, and most of all, he understands me. There is nobody else on earth who could have gotten this recording to sound this way. (John: I love and appreciate your existence so much. You doula my art).

This header photo was taken in front of a house in which I could not get comfortable. Now, with so much torment behind me and ever-fading into the rearview, I am able to look at this house not as a place of dark, but as a place of light. A place where healing is now welcomed in through the front door.

I also want to put my hand over my heart for Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick for crafting photographs that expressed the souls of the songs on the album. I was still deep in it when we did these photoshoots. They held me when others could not. (There’s a whole book of them, along with stories behind the record …. and if you’re a new patron, you can access that book HERE as a downloadable PDF).

Shooting these pictures and recording these sounds helped heal my throbbingly sore heart.

This is what art can do. It can take your hand and lead you out of hell.

And also...just so you understand how important this little website is,

I also wouldn’t have made this record without patronage. I just wouldn't have. It would not have been possible. 

So: I owe this system of patronage not just gratitude for "funding", but for allowing me to create what was needed. What I needed. 

My emotional life and my artistic life - the very shape of my new family and how we live, the bread on my table and the core of my being - are now intertwined forever with the people who have stood by me, here, as a group on patreon, while so many other systems in my life proved untrustworthy and fell apart. 

It began with fleeing a major label because they weren’t comfortable with my artistry, and it became so, so much more. It became the conversation and the relationship of a lifetime. Inexplicable to people. But understandable to me. To you, too, I hope.

Thank you all for carrying me through the hardest times in my life, and for continuing to do so. 

Thank you for helping me carry the art out of my heart, for being curious about what kind of songs this artist can pull from the wreckage of circumstance.

Thank you for being real.

I gotta say, I feel some powerful songs coming on, after surviving the last few years. I'm glad you're here for it. The Dresden Dolls will be a powerful container for all this processing.

And I hope, if you’re buried in a pile of grief that feels too hilariously relentless to bear, that this song might bring you some comfort today.

It worked for me.

I love you.

xxx

AFP

P.S./Reminder: HERE is the locked link for patrons to download the entirety of “There Will Be No Intermission”. You can use it anytime, it's yours. And HERE is a link to download the PDF of the art/essay book that goes with it.