The only song I've written this year: The Ballad of The New York Times {patron-only} (Patreon)

WELL HELLO MY LOVES.

**edit! i've stopped answering comments on this post. head to the next one! https://www.patreon.com/posts/58272984**

THING TIME.

Greetings from Waiheke Island, Aotearoa New Zealand.

LONG STORY SHORT: I'm dropping a new song, right now.

It's only for patrons.

You can play it from the embed above, or… here’s the unlisted video link: https://youtu.be/1An19HhhNvw

I hope you love it.

Please leave a comment on the youtube (and a more personal one for me, here...I'll be reading both, but the youtube ones are for the public).

Share the link with loved ones, but not with the internet, please.

That moment may....come later. See below.

If you’re a $3/download patron, you'll get an email in the next few days with an mp3 download link. If you wanna bump your patronage up now to get it, that'd make my day. 

And don't forget, y'all $1 people, that if you're at $1 and capped at $3, you may as well bump up to $3 and get this sort of stuff...since I generally put out 3 things and charge you $3 a month anyway.

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

The song, in brief:

It's the only song I've written this year, it's called "The Ballad of the New York Times", and it's coming to you in a new form, since my original intention was to do a more "professional", slick-ass studio recording of it, but then....lockdown happened. 

So you're getting the live video, but in a strange way, I think it's better. Life's weird like that. I think this video says everything I need to say. For now.

The whole saga of the song and the credits and lyrics are below. 

Thank you for being my patrons so that I can write music like this, produce music like this, put out music like this and get paid. It's changed....everything. It's shackled me to timelines, as you'll see below, but artistically, it's liberated me. 

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.....all of you.

AND NOW....

..........

For those of you with patience and time to read....

It was halloween last night in New Zealand and it's literally halloween night RIGHT NOW in the UK and America and I BET YOU THOUGHT I WAS GONNA DO SOMETHING PREDICTABLE, like send you some adorably weird pictures of the kid in his halloween costume (spoiler: he was a Wolf Pirate Ballerina) or I bet you thought I was gonna come crying and emoting about the 21st anniversary of my band, which is today.

Well....I'm not gonna do either of those. 

I'll be honest with you.

I would like to be doing BOTH of those things right now.....but the clock is ticking, I've only thing-ed one thing this month (the Althing/State of all Things, about 11 days ago)....and so......I'm gonna put this sucker OUT. 

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

For those of you who've been with me on this patreon journey for many years...you may have noticed that I often scramble to get someTHING out by the end of the month. 

That's because I'm paid "per thing", and not monthly, which means if I "thing"/put out two pieces of content (or, more exactly, charge for two posts) instead of one, I make a chunk of extra change. If you've followed the Althings, you'll know that the bluk of the page's profit comes from the first post of the month. But I'm not touring, bills and rents and staff and insurance and yada yada yada still all gotta get paid, and it's very hard to only put out one thing a month. Two is better, three is even better, and four, eh, at that point it brings in a very small amount of extra money. I've discussed many times maybe moving to a monthly system, and I may do it...when I have the goddamn time. 

For now: we are at the end of the month and I had a few other Things in the "queue" (that's British, and Kiwi, for "line"). 

The new podcast was supposed to be ready, but solo parenting in lockdown meant that I did not have any time to sit down and work on it: it's just been impossible while caring for a child all alone. When?

I also had an essay I wanted to write, and it looked like I was going to get some childcare relief, because we "bubbled" with another family who were rading off child care with me. 

But then the first case of covid hit Waiheke Island, and the family - who are pregnant and understandably exercising an abundance of caution - shut down the bubble. 

The week that I was hoping to spend on that essay, and possibly the podcast, all wound up going to....Ash. Being a solo mom in lockdown. Grocery shopping, doing endless dishes, cooking, cleaning, laundry-ing, and trying to kid a id in a house entertained....while watching most of my emails and texts slip away.

No time for patreon projects, songwriting, or art for the whole last month, or even time to apologize to all the collaborators I've disappointed.

I've simply been caring for my kid. 

It's been frustrating, but as I've said many times: I refuse to be bitter. It's hard work. But I'm killin' it. I'm "taking the donut" of this time with my child during his own and only childhood. 

So I'm not here to complain about that. 

I'm here to do the opposite: I'm here to count my goddamn blessings that six years ago, I started this patreon, which it makes me possible to do what I'm doing right now:

Put out a new song - to my private community - with minimum effort, without any drama, without any fanfare, without any marketing, and without any social media.

The song, the whole song, and nothing but the song.

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

The song itself?

It's damn good.

It makes me cry.

I can't really write songs anymore that don't make me cry.

I'm starting to worry about that a little bit but I figure it'll pass.

.......

So, a good question ya'll may ask:

Why is this private?

Why not put this out publicly?

Aw, I don't know guys. Because I'm fragile as hell. Because people are still talking about the mashup and that's great. Because I think it'd be good to get your feedback. Because it might be good to keep this song, like "The Man Who Ate Too Much", totally private (do you realize I never relased that song to the public, ever?) until I have the energy and the time to actually "release" them to the wider world.

Nobody understand what I'm "doing" here. Not even me. Nobody on my team has ever done a patreon before, with an artist like me, living in this world. I make random decisions all the time - "Let's put the whole show out as a thing! No let's just do the song! No let's record it in the studio! No let's make a music video" - and it's all just sort of pretend at the end of the day.

Art is art.

As we saw with the Reb/Blurred Lines/Rape Me/Mashup...some things just resonate in their moment. I have a feeling this song might be one of those songs. So maybe thats what's going on here: you're my focus group. If this song resonates with you the way that one did, maybe it's best to just unleash into the world in it's raw form.

If not...and you're all just like "yeah that's nice, Amanda"....perhaps it's better to leave this one as a hidden demo and only release them to the public when I release my "I SURVIVED THE FUCKING PANDEMIC AS A SOLO PARENT AND CONFUSED FOREIGNER IN NEW ZEALAND FOR TWO FUCKNG YEARS AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT" album, (or since I've only written two fucking songs, seven inch?).

I mean....you're my patrons. You tell me.

I'm happy for feedback, input, ideas.

For now, I just know I wrote this awesome song and I wanna share it with you, and get paid, and we'll see how you like it. If it feels like the right thing to then flip the youtube clip public, I can do that, well....anytime I wanna.

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

As you can see above.....I made some homespun artwork for it. This is the new piano (thanks Debra!!)

Dude. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

When life gives you a child who insists on making "traps" on your upright piano, make album art.

I also made this little cover....but....

.....I think I like the piano one better.

You?

Tell me.  

Here's me, slaving over my art-drafting table:

...........

This is the only song I’ve written - well, that’s not quite true, it’s the only song I’ve finished writing - since I wrote “The Man Who Ate Too Much”, and put it out to patrons only - over a year ago.

That song was another mid-tempo ballad, and a love-letter of sorts to the kind, gentle people in Hawke’s Bay who literally and figuratively held me together when Neil left the country, when everything fell apart, when I was scared, alone, frightened. 

I hit rock bottom, and that was the song that emerged from....the bottom.

If you haven't heard it yet, I'd almost like to ask you to listen to it befroe you hear the new one. Here's the link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/song-i-wrote-in-40706236

.........

After that....I found it very difficult to carve out any time to "songwrite".

Write. Songs.

Why?

Well....I focused on getting the podcast out the door, in order to keep the patreon lights on and the staff paid, and moreover, I just wasn’t in a song-writing kind of headspace. I was too traumatized, too fragile, and never really alone enough to hear the music in my own head. 

That’s not true, really…my head is a little like a song-radio receiver. The ideas flow all day. I often record song fragments onto my phone. But the presence of mind to sit, complete a thought, write a whole song…that just takes a kind of alone-ness and focus I simply haven’t had. 

Back in December of 2020, when Neil got his spot in managed isolation here in NZ and returned to the country, I focused only on holding the family together. 

It was....really hard, and I was proud that I could mainly give time to Ash and his fragile little feelings. We also hauled our whole cohort to a new place; we left behind Havelock North, in Hawke's Bay, and we all moved to Waiheke. A new town. A new community. A school for Ash. I did not have time to write songs.

I also didn't even have access to a piano. And I kept thinking that we'd head home....soon. Covid kept raging, New Zealand kept being fine. I kept staying.

It took months to stabilize. 

When I could finally turn my attention away from Ash settling in....and finally give some attention to the little shows I planned on this little Island, a song that had been signing itself to me for months asked to be finished.

I had my little tiny "Small Hall" shows to motivate me to finish it, so I could play it live for the human people.

If you guys know me, you'll have noticed that I crave a good live-show deadline to get a song finished.

I didn’t have a piano to write on, so I wrote it over two long sessions while Ash was in school (this was in July, a month before we locked down here in New Zealand) on two different borrowed pianos: one session at Hinemoa Elder’s house....

....where this rainbow showed up halfway through the Song-Writing...

....and one session at the Whittaker’s musical museum (they were so lovely and let me borrow their museum piano for a day) around the corner from my rental house here. 

Here's that lovely borrowed piano:

And here's a photo of A TON OF PATRONS AT THE MUSEUM, A DAY LATER!, at the Waiheke patron party we had the day of the Morra Hall show (note, to those who were there: I STILL HAVEN'T SHARED all the amazing photos i took that day because i am a very behind person in lockdown....but they're coming....)

So.....

I wrote and finished the song just in time for the show, which is my usual cram-for-the-exam approach to songwriting, and also why patronage works so well for me. I’m weird that way, but at least I understand myself: nothing inspires me like a concrete goddamn deadline (a show at which I can perform as song) and a goddamn paycheck I can understand (that song being released on patreon for cold, hard cash).

This song, like the one I wrote last year, is a real time capsule.

Even the performance is a moment in time, a singular, strange moment in time, with context needed.

In the MOMENT of the filming, I’m singing this to a Small Hall Crowd of un-masked people in a little hall on my newly adopted home of Waiheke Island.

At the time I was singing, New Zealand had been out of lockdown and living “normal” life for over a year. Covid had not happened. Yet.

The line in the song about "the toy store" got a gasp and a giggle because that sort of thing was foreign to us. 

Obviously, everything has changed now. We’ve been in lockdown in Auckland for 75 days. But I still wouldn’t trade being here for anywhere else at the moment. We’ve still only had 28 deaths from Covid.

And as far as the headlines in the songs, they’re all real, and they all gobsmacked me as I sat there reading about all the Covid deaths mounting.

News is news. But it was the shocking contrasts.

Here’s the Cher story. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/11/cher-mall-gorilla-world-loneliest-elephant-bua-noi-bangkok

And Harry Styles. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2020-11-13/harry-styles-vogue-cover-fashion-interview

And American Swimming. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/sports/olympics/swimming-results-olympics.html

A note about the Maple Syrup lyric/story: the ant apocalypses continue even though I do my level best.

The other day, i THOUGHT the cap to the maple syrup had been fully closed, and I went to put the maple syrup on Ash's pancakes, and there was ant party ONE FULL CENTIMETER DEEP at the surface of a BRAND NEW BOTTLE OF FUCKING EXPENSIVE MAPLE SYRUP. They'd somehow snuck in.

It tells uyou a lot about my state of mind that I actually tried to figure out a way to salvage the maple syrup. I tried pouring the hundreds of party-ants off the top with the hopes that I could somehow separate the ants from the syrup. I quickly realized it was hopeless and I had to dump out the entire contents of the fucking $10 bottle of fucking maple syrup down the sink. 

With ant corpses.

I don't know why I'm telling you this story.

I do know.

You know, too.

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

So, as I said far above, I was hoping to do a "profesional" studi demo of this song, but lockdown happened. Funny enough. I think that's kind of a blessing.

This recording feels, in a way, complete as it is.

I didn't want to "thing" this show and have the new song get buried in the mix, which is why I'm not putting out the whole concert quite yet....and and on that note, I’m hoping to put this entire show out sometime this coming month. 

Fingers crossed on that. We’re still working on the sound and edit, and getting a beautiful release post ready (Alex, as usual, is helping me with that one).

While you WAIT....here are some gorgeous photos from the show, all by Xander Charity.

With my openers and drama-nerd-friends, Princess Chelsea and Constance Maraj:

(this one's actually from Rocky Bay Hall, the next day, also by Xander):

........

The Credits:

Filmed and edited by Hugh Sundae
Mixed live by Paul Jeffery of Gentle Audio Ltd.
Lighting by Jordan McGregor
Live recording post-mix by Steve McGough at Stebbing sound  

The Small Hall Live Sessions Crew:
Jamie Macphail
Milly Macphail
Olivia Robertson
Sinead Hegarty
Maria Walsh
Naomi Prowse

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

the LYRICS.

The Ballad of The New York Times

they sell canadian grade a maple syrup in new zealand
it’s expensive but i splurge so we can put on our pancakes
sometimes i forget to put the lid on and the ants come
into the kitchen of the airbnb we’ve been renting for nine months for a fortune
and some days i take a magazine and i escort them
two by two on a little paper lifeboat to the garden
and some days i just create an ant holocaust and kill them all
with a paper towel

i don’t understand which part of me is kind
and i don’t understand which part of me can be so goddamned unkind
and i don’t understand why i’m tired all the time
all i know is last night i had to go to bed by five o’clock

and i took off my necklace
and i turned on the heater
and i couldn’t stop shaking
so i put on a sweater

and i read the new york times
on an app in my phone next to my sleeping child
and the headlines hurt my mind
five thousand dead
cher got an elephant back into the wild
and the light hit his face and his curly-haired head
and i knew i should be reading a good book instead
i can’t fit all of humanity into this bed
with me

yesterday i walked by a homeless man in queen street
i gave him twenty dollars and then i went into a cafe
and someone’d sent a crowdfund from their cousin in milwaukee
whose seven-month old baby died
and they don’t have any money
for a funeral for the baby
so they started a gofundme
and i fucking deleted the email
i didn’t give them any money
and i didn’t put it up on twitter
or share it on facebook

and later in the day i called my friend in boston
she has a five year old boy too
and i asked how they were doing
and she said we’re doing really great
we’re just getting out of lockdown
and yesterday we finally left the house and went out walking
and we all went to the toy store
and i said “ah that’s amazing”
and she said “yeah…
but you know of course the kids had to wear masks…”
and i was like “oh, you know, know that’s fine…”
and she said “…and also the kids couldn’t, like, touch any of the toys…
but anyway enough about me, how are things going in new zealand?”
and i said
“they’re pretty good.”

i don’t understand which part of me is fine
and i don’t understand which part of me can be so goddamned un-fine
and i suppose that it makes sense that i’m so random all the time
all i know is that last night i had to go to bed at five o’clock

and i took off my necklace
and i turned on the heater
but i couldn’t stop shaking
so i put on a sweater

and i read the new york times
on the app on my phone next to my sleeping child
and the headlines hurt my mind
ten thousand dead
and how that dress looked hot on harry styles
and the light hit his face and his curly-haired head
and i knew i should be reading a good book instead
i can’t fit all of humanity into this bed
with me

and emily’s dad just died of covid
and neil’s first editor just died of covid
and justine’s mom just died of covid
and michael got real sick but didn’t die of covid
and look a lot of people are vaccinated
and look a lot of people are lying on facebook
and look a lot of human life’s getting wasted
and american swimming took gold at the olympics

i don’t understand why the world can be so fine
and i don’t understand how the world can be so fucking un-fine
and i don’t understand why i’ve been drinking all the time
all i know is that last night i had to go to bed by five o’clock

and i left all my clothes on
and i pulled up the covers
and i got ash his dinner
and let the dishes just sit there
and i brushed ash’s teeth and
we read harry potter
and then i turned all the lights out
and i should have known better

but i read the new york times
on the app in my phone in the pitch black room
and the headlines hurt my mind
four million dead - and billionaires are sending shit to the moon
and the light hit his face and his curly-haired head
and i knew i should be reading a good book instead
i can’t fit all of humanity into this bed
with me

shhhh

mama’s trying to read....
mama’s trying to read....
mama’s trying to read.

.....

I.....love you.

My dear patrons.

Thanks for reading this far.

Thank you for helping me make this song, and record it....and share it. just with you. today, it's enough.

Patronage is saving my soul.

Every one of you....

Thank you.

xxx

A

p.s. The set of the album cover photoshoot....

....featuring "A Good Book Instead". I'll let YOU untangle whether it's Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" or "Where Is The Green Sheep?"

———THE STUFF I SAY AT THE END OF EVERY POST———

1. if you are a patron and new to my work, don’t forget your patronage allows you access to ALL of my patreon releases to date. HERE is the link to download my latest big solo record, “There Will Be No Intermission”, and HERE is a link to download the PDF of the art/essay book that goes with it. 

2. if you’re a patron reading this post via an email notification, please click through to comment on this post. at the very least, if you’ve read it, indicate that by using the heart symbol. that's always nice for me to see, so i know who's reading.

3. see All the Things (over 150 of them) i've made so far on patreon:

http://amandapalmer.net/things

4. JOIN THE SHADOWBOX COMMUNITY FORUM, find your people, and discuss everything: https://forum.theshadowbox.net/

5. are you new to my music and TOTALLY OVERWHELMED? TAKE A WALK THROUGH AMANDALANDA….we made a basic list of my greatest hits n stuff (at least up until a few years ago, this desperately needs updating) on this lovely page: http://amandalanda.amandapalmer.net/

6. general AFP/patreon-related questions? ask away, someone will answer: patronhelp@amandapalmer.net