Lube and Church Bells. (A Piece of Writing + ”The Ride” at Glen Hansard’s show) (Patreon)

Hi my loves.

This week, before the althing: a video, and a piece of writing for you. A pisa writing. A leaning towards.

I love the way so many things can resonate, clang, glimmer in so many directions.

Come with me, I'll sound.

I am a few kinda bells.

If you digested the last post about last Friday, you'll know that I hosted a webcast for patrons at my house, and Glen Hansard - an Irish singer-songwriter I have deeply admired  for ages - showed up to play a few songs. And then, in return, I guested at his show that same night in Woodstock, NY. I’m following up and making good on my promise to share the video footage - just with y’all - of me playing “The Ride” at his show.

And I'm also here to shake out the rug of my heart a little.

Read on.

Maybe read, then watch. I think yes, do that.

Ok?

Ok.

...........

The Ride. It’s a very long song - and not really a cheerful advertisement for yourself; not when you're asked to play for 400 strangers, many of whom don’t know your music.

I saw Glen right before he took stage - I was panting from rushing over from the webcast. I needn't have rushed to get there at 8, when glen siad he'd be on. There was an opener, and Glen didn't start til 9 basically put me on one song before his encore, at 11.

I almost didn’t play The Ride. I brought my ukulele and had it tuned and ready up until the moment I went on stage. In My Mind is a nice crowd-pleaser. It's simple and inoffensive and short and sweet.

I found Glen by the beers, mixed nuts and catered steamed greens.

I love you. Thank you for playing at my house. This is wonderful. When do you want me on?

Dunno yet, not near the top, said Glen.

How many songs in? I asked. Ish? Near the middle, near the end? Any idea?

Dunno, said Glen. I don't use a set list.

Oh, I said, so you're me. I'll just be...ready.

Give it an hour at least, he said.

I got you, I said.

(It was two hours).

Is there anything I should play? Long? Short? Happy? Sad? Piano? Uke?

Anything you want, Amanda, he said.

(Oh that Irish accent).

I said: I have a song you’ll love. It’s called The Ride. But it’s sad as fuck and, Glen, it's like eleven minutes.

Perfect, said Glen.

I warned you.

And indeed, perfect.

The Ride is kinda perfect. It's a kind of perfect song. Glen got "Falling Slowly". The Song Gods gave him that one. The Song Gods gave me The Ride.

But it's long. It's over 11 minutes on the record. Over the course of the 2019 tour, I managed to hot-wash it down to nine and a half. I don't repeat as many phrases, you would barely know anything is missing. Magic.

And it's a brutal song. Brutal. This is a song that only works when an audience is good and ready for it.

It needs lube.

But this particular night. Glen lubed this audience to death. He screamed, he sang, he stomped, he played ballad after ballad about pain, about grief, about love. About not losing hope. He brought the audience to their emotional knees and feet multiple times.

I knew it would be fine.

(Photos by Anthony Mulcahy)

The venue - Levon Helms Studio - is a legendary local venue deep in the woods. It was built by Levon Helms, the drummer for The Band.

For those of you who don't know The Band, they're a legendary US folk group who kicked around Woodstock. They acted as Bob Dylan's back-up band from 1965-1967 (from wiki: the tours were marked by Dylan's reportedly copious use of amphetamines) and are most well-known for their song "The Weight", recorded in 1968 right near my house.)

One one of the most awkward moments of my career, and there have been many: I was at an event with Jeff Tweedy from Wilco, and he asked me to guest with him.

We'll sing "The Weight", he said.

The audience waited.

I don't know that song, I said to Jeff.

Yes, you do. I promise you do. It's by The Band. You'll know it when you hear the chorus, said Jeff. Just sing it, I know you'll know it.

I did not know it.

Though it sounded...vaguely...familiar?

And this is how I found myself feeling very embarrassed one time, guesting with Jeff Tweedy at an event, and not really knowing the words to the song we were supposed to be playing together. (And feeling like one of those BAD musicians, who is supposed to know certain things...but it's like, I dunno, I just missed that day of class. If nobody ever played me The Band, I never heard The Band.)

I found out the other day that Holly Miranda had never heard of West Side Story. Not not heard it never heard of it.

How can that be? I asked her, while we were wrapping up cables from the webcast and about to eat brunch on Saturday.

She shrugged. I was raised in a Christian house where there was none of that music. How?

She didn't seem to be embarrassed. This I love.

I felt embarrassed when I didn't know The Band and Jeff Tweedy assumed I had to know The Band. I am not like that, so much, anymore. I take pleasure nowadays in telling people what I do not know.

There is so much I do not know.

I can't wait to play Holly the entirety of West Side Story.

I already sang her "Maria". It was thrilling. It doesn't work that well A Capella.

(By the way, musicians, if you ever need to find a tritone, that song starts on a tritone, or a flat-5, the same way "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" starts with an octave leap up, you're welcome).

If you wanna go deep down the history-rabbit-hole about Levon's, there's a lotta places to go. Their website has the whole history. To summarize, Levon, casting around for a way to make a living in the Wake of The Band, built his own home-music-party-jam-palace.

He ran "Levon Helms' Midnight Ramble" for years, an ongoing ticket where he played host and drummed and just about anybody who was anybody would show up to play with him...old, young, famous, friends, family; something not far off from the spirit of the webcast many of you watched earlier in the day.

He made his living this way. From the wiki: These concerts, featuring Helm and various musical guests, allowed him to raise money for his medical bills and to resume performing after a bout with cancer that nearly ended his career. Patreon live, people.

Levon is gone now; the venue lives on.

...........

It was so special, to be sharing that stage with Glen. Glen had played there before, and played with Levon himself on the drums. He was part of the story, the lineage of the place.

And Glen had also just played at my house. I knew Glen had probably never heard my last record.

It was possible that Glen had never heard ANY of my music, save the one song he heard the night we met, back in 2014, when Eddie Vedder asked me to guest on his solo stage in Melbourne for "Ukulele Anthem", which he was
- astonishingly - covering during his solo sets alongside "Jeremy" and other Pearl Jam songs. (I still can't believe I can type that).

Glen was Eddie's opener. We hit it off that night and wound up doing watercolors in his hotel (we were...very drunk).

...........

I am remembering, ever so slowly, what it feels like to be a musician.

Not just to make sounds and notes with an instrument, but to be connected, through space and time, with this other language that we do.

Watching Glen on stage gave me the inner musician goosebumps.

He's a true master, a sage showman. Glen's work came to me - as for many people - through the film "Once". He'd already gained fame from "The Commitments", and I will admit here, openly, I've never seen it (yes, yes, I know, I know).

But "Once" floored me.

The SONGS.

You may have seen me ask, on social media today, for favorite first song lines. I was reminded to ask because I think Glen wins the contest.

...........

I don't know you

But I want you

All the more for that.

...........

Come on.

And in the film, the busking. The street.

There is that something about street performing.

I wrote about it in The Art of Asking, and I'll repeat the theory/thought here: there is nothing quite like busking to prepare you, school you, make you ready-bent for stage.

It's a different art, a different type of being in the world. I loved watching Glen's character (Glen, basically), transmitting his soul to people in the street.

And watching him perform the other night...oh god.

He held and delighted and squeezed the audience; he screamed, he joked, he was quiet, and mainly: he was absolutely COMFORTABLE.

My friend Sxip came to the show with me (he guested on Glen's last song, we all did) and we post-mortem'ed the next day, over brunch with our friends: what was so good about watching Glen play?

I opined that one of the things we all love is to watch a performer - or anyone, really - who is so insanely comfortable doing what they're doing that you yourself feel absolutely safe. Some performers give you that feeling of security; that all will be well no matter what happens. You feel no anxiety. The stage could burn, the guitars could all break, the amps could melt, the piano could fall out of tune: this person will know what to do, and we will all be just fine.

Everybody in the room felt this way. Glen was just...in his element. He led. He was at home.

This is how I felt on tour in 2019, touring There Will Be No Intermission.

By the time that stage show (there were about 80 performances, minus one cancelled fucking show in Wellington, New Zealand) hit its stride, I felt more at home on stage than I ever had before.

I felt the beauty and the unapologetic power of what it meant to be a woman on a stage with something to give, while giving no shits about who cared, who didn't care, who left, who stayed, who believed me, who thought I was going to hell for having an abortion, who loved me, who hated me, who was going to stay the course with me, or who was going to abandon me. I was, for perhaps the first time as a solo performer, absolutely comfortable up there.

May I add: I still can't believe I did that show. The show was nearly 4 hours every night; just me, the piano, the ukulele, the microphone, and more abortion, rape, illness, death, and re-imagined Disney songs than anybody bargained for.

I closed it almost every night with The Ride.

We filmed the show professionally over two nights in London, and we were supposed to release it to the word when the tour ended. You know, later in 2020, when everything calmed down.

I still have not had the bandwidth - or the stomach - to watch the raw footage. I love what I created, but I never got to digest it. Any of it. I am not sure I can swallow it all now.

I've been thinking a lot about the whole tour, especially as the 3 year marker of "that month" - March 2020 - shudders by.

That month was, on many levels, a total turning point in my life.

I had thought I was about to wrap a world tour, head back to America, rest deeply for six months after delivering my 80 shows to 80 cities, recover emotionally from all the shitstorms I'd been navigating, move into and settle down in a house in the woods with my husband and kid, and get on with the next chapter of my life.

I was going to slow down. Garden! Work on motherhood! Answer my emails from 2019!  Instead, my tour was cut short, I found myself confronted with whole painful realities I hadn't known about, I decided to end the marriage, I hid the truth about what I was going through from most of my community, and I wound up in New Zealand for way longer than I ever could have imagined. And for a long time, I just survived.

Whatever happened in New Zealand - and that's a story for another long night - I certainly didn't get what I'd most been craving: a recovery. An assessment. A gentle sunset of the There Will be No Intermission tour. A curtain call. An END.

I had been hoping to spend six months understanding what had happened on that tour; what I'd done, what it meant. Why I'd done it. Who had come, what they'd understood.

I hadn't had the energy or bandwidth to hold that discussion during the tour itself, I was too exhausted, and too consumed by motherhood and the necessary-mundane of sandwich-and-school-days when I wasn't actively performing the show.

I never got to think about it.

It was just over in a haze of Covid and my shattering world, and shoved out of my mind.

Strangely, right before I left for New Zealand in March 2020, I'd been living in Melbourne. And I don't know if y'all remember this, but when the bushfires in Australia started flaring (remember? remember that?) it felt like the most dramatic thing that could possibly happen.

It was horrific. People lost everything: homes, lives, entire towns. Melbourne was choked with smoke. Neil bought some N95 masks (which would up coming in handy later).

I was at the end of the tour, and trying to slow down and enjoy the last few shows, but instead of wandering around Melbourne with my friends, and Ash, I locked myself in a recording studio for a week and cranked out a charity record (and put on a show to release it) to raise money for the bushfire cause. Missy Higgins dropped off the bill the day of the show due to her doctor-dad having Covid, and they were both sorta getting yelled at by the internet. The venue fit 2,000 people. There was hand sanitizer. It all felt so random, and I felt so powerless.

And then everybody promptly forgot about the bushfires, because Covid consumed the world's attention.

The tsunami was devoured by an asteroid.

The fires were swallowed by the virus.

I wonder, and I've pontificated with my friends recently, what happened in Australia to all the people who had just lost their homes in the fires, and all of a sudden had to go into "lockdown". Locked down ... where?

In what, in whose home?

I was so swallowed myself by my own little patch of hell in New Zealand in March 2020 that I didn't follow what was happening in Melbourne - the city I'd just lived in for two months prior. I lost my Australian friends in a smoky, viral blur.

...........

I had been joking all through 2019 that if I could make it through everything I was recounting on stage, plus the weirdness of sharing those stories eighty times on eighty stages for a hundred thousand ticket-buyers, I could probably make it through anything. I knocked on wood a lotta times. I kept talking about how good it felt to wrap this "difficult" period of my life up with a nice, clean bow.

When Neil left New Zealand in April 2020, and I found myself taking care of Ash for about eight months as a solo parent, I inwardly laughed at the irony as I went into full catastrophic triage. I was bouncing from rental to rental with Covid raging in New York. I knew one family in New Zealand. I could barely see them anyway. I lived week to week, then month to month. I had no prediction, no real plan, no emotional safety net, and no fucking idea what was really happening to most people in the world. I lost my footing completely.

But I had an IDEA that I really wanted to do, and did not - could not - do.

I had a near-daily desire to manifest this idea. I craved doing this idea.

I wanted, so fucking badly (and I think I may have even expressed this wanting, at some point, on a post here or there) to play The Ride, every day, like clockwork, as a livestream, to wherever.

Every day. To anyone. I wanted to become a noon church bell, playing The Ride into the chasm of the internet, whether it was 5 people listening or 50,000.

I want you to close your eyes, play Back To The Future with me, get in our DeLorean, and head back to March-June 2020, when I was living in the creakity Hill House, in lockdown, in a town called Havelock North, in a country called New Zealand, where I withstood some of the darkest nights of my adult life. Information kept coming that I didn't want to hear. I could not stop the flow of bad news from every area. I closed the blinds and held the kid. I was not only not making music, I was barely holding it together.

And I want you to imagine that I DID find the time, every night at 5pm, or some morning at 2am, no matter what was happening, no matter whether Ash was asleep to going to cry and bang at the door or sit happily on an iPad. I want you to imagine that I found time to sit at that clonky piano in the basement room and play "The Ride". I want you to imagine my red and sleepless eyes, my cracked voice, my entire traumatized body, and I want you to think of you are all there, on crowdcast, tuning in if you felt like it, making your breakfasts, knitting your knits, hiding under your duvets, driving to your fucking hospice jobs and listening in your cars, doing WHATEVER, but THERE WE ARE.

SHE DID IT. She DID IT!

She did it again. She's a church bell. She survives! It's 2:34am in New Zealand and AMANDA IS PLAYING THE RIDE.

EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY.

I imagine the 5 people listening. The 50. The 500. The 5,000. The 5. The 3. The 34. The ONE. I imagine the song having this calming, mature consistency.

Like the BBC shipping forecast.

Or the five beeps announcing the hour. Like the sun setting and rising. Like the sound of the lighthouse foghorn in the night.

Hello, hello, hello. Like the feeling you'd get when you were the last kid at school and your parents' car finally turns the corner and you know you haven't been abandoned.

It's all good, I Imagine me thinking. You thinking. Anyone thinking. Every day, The Ride came.

I lived in that Hill House for about two or three months. I don't remember, honestly. It was a truly awful time.

Now: I want you to imagine that I moved to Miller Road in Havelock North a few months later, and borrowed a piano (I really did, in fact, I borrowed two) and every day at some point, no matter what, I STILL PLAYED THE RIDE.

Every day. Before dinner. After breakfast. After dropping Ash at school. Who cares. I find time. I find energy. I find a way. I don't need to have beautiful sound. There are no microphones. There is my phone, or a laptop, and there is a piano. I don't bother to brush my hair. It doesn't matter. What matters is that I managed to play The Ride, every night, every morning, whenEVER.

I barely traveled. But when I did - the one day, let's imagine, that I flew to Auckland to record by duet with Rhiannon Giddens. I stayed with friends who had a piano, right? I did. I want you to imagine, right now, that I managed to create my entire travel, lodging and recording schedule around playing The Ride, at some point, every day.

I could have. I COULD HAVE. I was staying at Lucy Lawless' house. She had a piano. I was recording at Roundhead. They had a piano. I would have. I could have. I COULD HAVE.

Now...I want you to imagine me moving to Waiheke Island. I found a piano there, didn't I (I did). Did I use it? No, I fucking did not....

People.

Let's stop.

I did not do any of this.

Why?

I did not do any of this because I was so tired, so traumatized, so deeply, deeply exhausted. I was broken. The record player of me was un-fucking-plugged.

On many nights, I didn't even have the energy to check my texts or emails. I had just barely enough energy to smile at Ash while making him our dinner, and I would often be in bed at the exact same time as the kid. Seven. Eight. There were many days I wanted to go to bed at four.

In the afternoon, in New Zealand, nobody was awake in America, or in Europe, or anywhere I had community.

It was lonely as fuck.

I did not have the energy to do a daily livestream of The Ride. There were days I barely had the energy to get dressed.

...........

I was not a church bell.

I was whatever the opposite of a church bell is.

A leaf blower?

A forest fire?

A cowbell?

...........

So there I was.

At Glen's show, downstairs in the dressing room, having not played or practiced The Ride in a very, very, long time. I had been webcasting all day and hadn’t had more than 10 minutes to practice before leaving the house for Glen's. The Ride is hard to play and has a ton of words.

But there was, thankfully, a piano down there in the dressing room. A very rickety, out-of-tune piano.

Which is fine. I don't need a piano to be in tune to practice.

(I am a cowbell.)

You could hear the dressing room piano through the floor, up on stage, and the opening act - Via Mardot - was very quiet (and truly wonderful, I'll tell you more about them in the Althing). So I couldn't practice during the opener. All good. (I got to watch them).

Then I practiced like mad in between the opener and Glen's set - I had about 15 minutes.

While I practiced, this photographer, Anthony Mulcahy, asked if he could photograph me. I said yes, because I almost always say yes to that.

(photos by Anthony Mulcahy)

I got most of the lyrics memorized, but I couldn't nail the middle piano instrumental (the very classic sounding solo, and yes, it's very hard to play).

So I tried to air-rehearse, making no sounds with the piano, while Glen played up on stage; and then during tiny moments of applause from above, I'd let it rip. I got in an additional 2 minutes of practice that way. It was enough.

When you watch the video, you'll notice that I almost don't get through the solo.

But I make it. I make it.

Not every day in New Zealand at 5pm or 2am.

But now, here, back with my people....yes.

I missed ringing. I've been stuffed, stifled, cracked.

I played the song for Glen's crowd, and, honestly, I played the song for Glen, as a thank you for the songs he's given me.

What I say when I intro at the top of the song is true: music can be company like nothing else. It can be the most important company in the deepest, darkest, and critically horrible moments of our lives.

What you cannot see after 11:21 in the video is what happens at 11:22:

Glen and I hug each other for a long, long time.

He is a church bell.

I am a church bell.

You are the church.

Love,

Amanda

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

On this ringing note, I AM SO HAPPY THAT I AM GOING ON TOUR, BY THE WAY. All the Dolls shows are sold out. There are a handful of tickets left for the solo shows:

Saturday, April 15th - Tacoma, WA - The Temple Theatre
Wednesday, April 19th - Vancouver, CA - Vogue Theatre NinjaTED
Friday, April 28th - Poughkeepsie, NY - Bardavon
Saturday, April 29th - Boston, MA - The Wilbur Theater

https://amandapalmer.net/events/

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

P.S. This video was taken by Via Mardot, the opening act. More in the Althing.

P.S.S. I want to thank everyone who responded to "what is the opposite of a church bell?" on this twitter thread, especially Vinícius Schiavini, who suggested "cowbell". Stolen! Credit where credit is due.

I'm reading the comments. I hope you loved this. I loved writing it. I opted against posting this over to Substack because it feels very personal and of the moment, so I'm keeping it patron-only, and published only to you all. Feel free to share it with others if you want, just cut and paste it if you feel the need.

———THE STUFF I PASTE AT THE END OF THE POST———

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