The Long Read: Can An Artist Die From Too Much Art...? NYC, Red Carpets, Speakeasy Shows, and More. (Patreon)

Hello my loves.

Greetings from a train.

HERE is my longer post of the week, ta da.

If you were at either of the shows (NYC or Northampton) last week, I'd love to hear from you. I'm reading comments. Hit me. Say hi.

Especially if you're new (and I know there's a few hundred of you), welcome to the INSIDE OF MY HEAD. Don't be scared to write back, and don't be scared to talk in the comments. This isn't facebook. The people here are your people. We talk.

This is where I sit down, let my brain take the keys to the car, close my eyes and let my fingers to the walking. This is an EVERYTHING post, because I just...do it this way. And even this way, I can't fit everything in. I love these long and rambling posts, these screams of conciousness, they keep me alive and kicking.

Don't expect perfection, and don't worry if you see the occasional typo. I don't use a copy editor (unless it's real important), I do my own stunts.

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

It's been an extraordinary few days in New york....I feel so goddamn happy and alive.

Mamdani won, the city is wondering if ICE is going to show up in fully force any minute (probably), it feels like everybody's gearing up for battle.

In I swoop in my cancel cape! Touring is a little like extracting teeth right now, but it's balm for the soul.

Being in Boston is family and hearth, reckoning with the deep, and coming down to New York for a couple days of work is always light, future, space-ship.

I am slowly but surely pressing ahead with so many delayed projects, and the work gets shifted and moved forward down here, epseically since this is where the office and the crew is: the publishers, the book, the recordings, the patreon itself, getting management slowly sorted out. I don't find this stuff boring, and someday, I hope to write more about how patronage - you all, yes - saved my life as an artist, and also as a mother. But it's not time for that story yet.

Every old friend and work colleague I catch up with down in New York gives me back my old, centered sense of self, and it's a constant, constant stream of catch-up after being in New Zealand for 2.5 years and then being lost for a few more years upon my return in The Dark Woods (The Lost Woodstock Years? The Graveside Era? The Haunted House Administration? The, as my good friend Chris Wells calls it, Era of Necessary Upstate Ego Death?).

I miss Woodstock and the Woods Posse, my old friends up there. I miss New Zealand, and when I'm in New York, I miss my house in Boston. When I'm in Boston, I just feel like I'm in a nice bath. I collapse.

As I was talking to my editor, I said:

I can't believe I'm finally going to get this book out of me. Off of me? Out of me. It feels like a tumor.

As I was talking to management, I said:

I don't even know where to fucking start. There were already so many delayed projects, and now there's so many delays on top of the old delays I don't even know.....what to attack, what to record, what to make.

These are all GOOD problems.

Nothing ever died from too much love.

And:

No artist ever died of too much art.

Or did they....? I don't think so. I've never made art that didn't heal something in me.

So...where to start?

Amanda. Always. Do what you tell others, when they're lost and overwhelmed.

Start at the beginning. Start with who you are. Start with who you always were: before marriage, before children, before time. Start with yourself.

Start with what ONLY you can do.

Sometimes you need other people to remind you who you really are.

My friends in New York tend to do the bast job at this, as they not only have known the longest, but they know me as a hardworking artist more than anything else. They've watched me put the hours in. They're also ....New Yorkers, so they have a low tolerance for bullshit, a high threshold for pain and trauma, and a direct access to joy that reminds me to shake off my cobwebs, smile, put on a nice frock because the effort won't be wasted or glared at, and get the fuck back to work.

Every trip I take down to New York heals my work-art-soul a little more, and every year I spend in Boston in the Dear Old House gets me a little more settled in my bones. I sleep a little better every night.

My childhood path between the two cities - between mom and step-dad and dad and step-mom - between house and apartment, between kitchen and resturant, between city and suburb, feels as comfortable to me as a pair of worm sweatpants.

We tread along the same paths, digging in, looking for metaphors buried in the dirt.

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

The most brilliant production choice on Lily Allen's record was using the "Stranger Things" theme as the sonic bed for "Pussy Palace". I don't think I've heard a better musical diss since John Lennon sang "The only thing you done was yesterday" aimed at Paul McCartney on "How Do You Sleep", possible one of the most broken-hearted-friend songs ever penned.

How DO you sleep? This is one of the chapters in the book, and it's many-leveled.

Insomnia is on the rise everywhere I look.

I suppose that's a real question.

How are you all sleeping?

How DO you sleep?

I still have a long-standing fantasy that I'm going to make a sleepytime recording for you guys.

So many projects, so little time.

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

The collision of Lily's record, Florence's new record (look it up, Everybody Scream, it's astounding), and the vote really has collided into a liferaft shape of hope.

Women are pushing back, everywhere, pushing pushing pushing for the truth.

And still: so many of my queer friends are still talking about moving, leaving the states. So many of my friends - of all stripes - from other countries just won't visit. The isolation, the fear, the glitch, it's real.

So anyway: Being here in New York for the last few days has been extraordinary.

I kicked off the week by heading to this incredible event that I was honored to be invited to: a gala fundraiser for the ABORTION ACCESS FRONT.

Remember when I used your patreon monies to make THIS song mash-up/video of "Rape Me" and "Blurred Lines"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7ZDbBsjMt8

Well THAT video was a fundraiser for THIS group, the AAF, started by the amazing Lizz Winstead, who was one of the first writers for and creators of The Daily Show.

It was held, poetically, THREE STORIES underground at Sony Hall on 46th st...and the security was tight.

Everything in my life seems to be an underground speakeasy nowadays?

I guess that's on brand....when you believe in free and safe abortion access....?

This is Lizz Winstead, the founder of the AFF. She's an old friend.

And THIS is KATE SEKULES! Some of you worked with me and Kate at Campersand 2023!!! She was the AMAZING woman who taught us all about VISIBLE MENDING....a term that could not be more apt for the new recordings I am working on. Would you like to see a RIP????

I gotchu.

Kate's amazing book, which would make a great Christmas gift for ANYONE:

I brought the extraordinary Sunny Bates, above on the left, who I know through TED, as my arm candy. She made GREAT arm candy, not to mention being one of the wisest women I know.....and I drug out this lovely suit from Joshua Kane in London to make sure people knew that I may be semi-canceled, but I'm HOT.

Sunny dragged out some Red White and Blue vibes.....

The event raised $100,000 IN THE ROOM during a live donation.

ONE. HUNDRED. GRAND. In less than 15 minutes. It was heart-sizzling.

It was so good to be in this room with all the actual activists working on this stuff around the clock all year. A lot of women in the room were actual health care and abortion providers, and some of them just live their lives in abject fear from day to day. Death threats on the regular. Driving home a different way every day.

Some have had to move their families multiple times. Still....they persist. The current administration and ya-dude get-back-in-the-kitchen bro movement may be gianing purchase, but these people who defend a woman's right to safe and legal abortion are not fucking around.

They are organized, they are CALM, and they are FUNNY. Lizz's speciality is using HUMOR to show the world it's folly...and she did not disappoint....

This is one of the hosts of the evening, DOOKS, and when we realized we matched the floor, we HAD to do this:

And here's E Jean Carroll throwing down some truths.

This is the woman who accused Trump of rape.

He was eventually found guilty, and E. Jean was awarded $83 million.

Hopefully that gives you a little bit of hope - alongsidde the incredible news about the vote in the states - that the rich white pervs dudes running our country will not stay in power permanently. There is light fighting the dark.

There is light money fighting the dark money.

It's just gonna take time.

Me and Sandra Bernhard....who of course made the dirtiest jokes of the night.....

All in all, the fires are lit.

If you feel moved, PLEASE donate to the Abortion Access Fund and at the very least, give them a follow on social media....here's their Instagram.

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

And inbetween all that....the shows.

The stage is giving me life. As I said above...if you were at either of the shows last week, I'd love to hear from you.

The songs are coming together, like big, tectonic puzzle pieces. I've never, ever in the history of my career, made a record like this. Pieced it together like this, show to show, conversation to conversation. In living rooms. In basements. In speakeasys. In lofts. In kitchens.

The first Dresden Dolls album was an assemblge of my first ten real years of songwriting. I did it alone, then with my band. I talked to nobody but the producers.

The songs I'd written in my teens - "Slide", "Bad Habit" - that worked their way into the Dolls' sets and then onto the record, felt like they'd been waiting patiently to get fully formed, and nothing - NOTHING - has ever felt as relieving as that first album, the Dolls' debut. I had been waiting so fucking long to record those songs and unl;eash them into the world.

After that, nothing felt quite as urgent.

Not til now. I've been saying in the Q&As after the shows: these songs feel closer to the material I was writing when I was 15, 16, 17. Just pure bloody heart, pure muse, pure pain and love with no apology....the songs that topple out of my head fully formed (like Athena? Like a tumor?) in the middle of the night.

Get up out of bed. Go to the piano, when the music strikes. Remember who has your back. Remember your patrons. Remember Brian. Remember the arms around you that do not let go. Remember Brendon. Take dictation. Don't second-guess. Don't think twice. Don't not write a lyrics because you don't know exactly what it means.

Don't ask it to make sense.

It makes it's own kind of sense, this catharsis.

Don't get in its way.

Now, play.

photo by Amanda Eckert, at Jalopy in Brooklyn.

Just sing.

Invite your friends Lance, Teo and Matta to sing Pussy Palace with you (don't worry, we filmed. I'll send it to the surprise patrons when I get a sec. I have to have SOMETHING to tempt you to the upper tiers...)

Photos by Laura Vogel

Keep learning what these songs are. Keep working on the tempo, the key.

Just sing.

Sing your way out.

The community is here. So here.

This gorgeous guy did sound. (I love you, Brendon Downey)

And this guy tour managed...I don't have words for the love I have for Michael McComiskey - me and the Dolls' assistant/many-hat-wearer.

No words. It's a....mood.

And Northampton? It was magnificent.

We played at One Amber Lane, and they had a special drink made in my honor.

This is Will and Ximena...they made this whole gig happen....

The whole Amber Lane crew, backstage....

This was one of the most weepy I've ever played. Woodstock was similar, I cried through most of the set. This was....worse? Better? CRYier.

I think it was because it was just....SO small, and I was facing the audiencem playing keyboard, not piano, and everyone was just 4 feet from my face.

We talked, at length, after Jalopy AND Northampton, about the new songs and how to produce them.

I never, not in a million years, would have had converstions like these 20 years ago.

I trust my patreon family now. You are all in the guts of this music, all of you who have come to the last few shows. How many shows....a half dozen? Boston, NYC x 2, Martha's Vineyard, London, Minny, Portland, Seattle. How many of you have heard these songs now? 500? Fewer.

If you know, you know, now, I suppose.

I swear to god.

If one more motherfucker jokes with me about the songs I'm gonna have when I get out....

I love you all, to bits.

Wish me luck out there...!

I'm doing god's work in this hot little cancel kitchen, and I'm loving it.

xxx

Your Amanda

........

art by Niki McQueen

UPCOMING SHOWS!

November 21st @ Niagara in Millis, MA (near Framingham) - SOLD OUT.

December 4th @ Brattle Theater. Now on sale to paid patrons, on sale to free patrons and public next week.

December 19 @ Magic Room, Norwood, MA. Now on sale to paid patrons, on sale to free patrons next week.

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

UPCOMING STREAMS!

November 23rd, 3-6pm EST. ALL PATRON WEBHANG!!!
Join/RSVP here: https://www.crowdcast.io/c/6k79mtcvenof

Dec 9th, 11:11am-1pm EST. WEBCHAT TIER ONLY!!!
Join/RSVP here: https://www.crowdcast.io/c/december9thwebhang