Home Piano. (Patreon)

Hello loves.

Deep in it. Trying my best to still write with all this absolute madness going on. Succeeding.

I made a little IG video tonight reminding everyone not to lose their shit and feel too lonely over the holidays. It’s here:

https://www.instagram.com/tv/C0c5S_iL7qe/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

……

I’m writing. I’m writing. I’m trying.

This photo in the header is where I’ve worked for 24 years and counting.

This is my Yamaha C5 grand, the first truly expensive thing I ever bought. I purchased it with my first record advance in 2003. It cost about $15k.

Hard to imagine this all going away, but this is the very spot (there was an older piano here that I brought in 1999 when I moved in, then I upgraded) where I wrote “Coin-Operated Boy”, “Mrs. O”, “The Jeep Song”, “Sing” and pretty much every Dresden Dolls song in the collection…and this is where I wrote the vast majority of my first solo record, “Who Killed Amanda Palmer”.

Then I pulled up my roots and became a sort of homeless, itinerant songwriter. I didn’t do my best work out of a suitcase on borrowed pianos, but I tried. I attempted to compose in other spaces. “Astronaut” was written, mostly, in the keg room of the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, “In My Mind” was written at a picnic table somewhere in rural New South Wales, “Drowning in the Sound” was written in a cramped little recording studio in Kingston, NY, and “Suck It Up, Buttercup” was written in a hotel in Launceston, Tasmania.

I have written very few songs in Woodstock, though the last few months have started to un-haunt the house a little. There’s enough love now flowing through it that it feels safe to write in.

But this?

This is where I feel the most at home as a writer. At this piano, in this little nook, surrounded by my old CDs. I’ve been able to finally (finally) write the bulk of the new dolls’ record here, where it makes sense. With Lee upstairs, sleeping. It’s past midnight. At 7:30am we go to radiation. I can feel the piano calming his soul through the ceiling. He knows his mission in this life. He wanted a house full of artists and people - crazy, obsessed, play-piano-at-midnight kinda people - who really felt like family.

And he got it.

Wish us luck. Things are hard. I need to get to the whole story at some point, but now, I’ll tell you in pieces.

Xx

tired little AFP