amanda palmer

Interview by Madeleine Dore

Amanda Palmer: Performer

Transcript

“Your internal combustion engines are always working on something and your experience is always being composted or synthesised into whatever is going to come out in the tray at the end of the day, whether it’s a week from now or ten years from now.” – Amanda Palmer

Madeleine: How many times have you stepped back from a project or stopped pursuing an idea, or maybe said no to an opportunity because the leap between where you are now and where you want to be is too great?

It’s a confronting gap for many of us, especially those, like myself, with perfectionist tendencies. We might fear being bad at something, at failing, falling short, or being imperfect. But, as author of The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron wrote, “Perfectionism is not a quest for the best, but a pursuit of the worst in ourselves. The part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough.”

Perfectionism can both stifle and punish. With the former, we might fear not doing it right or not being good enough, so we do nothing at all. The latter, we might fear that we’re not doing enough, so we create a punishing relationship with productivity. More, more, more, optimise, optimise, optimise, all in the pursuit of perfection.

This weeks’ guest is unquestionably productive and gifted in an astonishing array of disciplines. Amanda Palmer is a singer, songwriter, filmmaker, playwright, pianist, author, director, blogger, and ukulele enthusiast. It’s easy to compile Amanda’s successes.

A start in music as one half of the Boston punk cabaret duo, the Dresden Dolls, a solo album that became the top-funded music project on Kickstarter, a record-breaking TED talk, a New York Times best-selling memoir called The Art of Asking, and now more than 15,000 Patreons who fund her work on the platform Patreon.

All of this could be accredited to Amanda having a perfect, productive creative schedule, but Amanda freely dismantles this. In fact, there was a time when her relationship with productivity was punishing.

What I really took away from this conversation was that, yes, it can be really futile to chase the perfect routine, the perfect outcome, the perfect success, or the perfect version of ourselves.

I spoke to Amanda while she’s currently on tour in Australia, with her partner Neil Gaiman and their son Anthony, for the critically acclaimed solo piano album and stage show There Will Be No Intermission. It’s Amanda’s most ambitiously personal and intimate song collection to date, with themes that span everything from motherhood to loss and grief.

She describes her days as currently being mid-air, so for this conversation we dive less into the specifics of her daily routine, and instead look at how our daily lives are constantly influx and how the world around us shapes our internal routines and our ruts.

In this episode, Amanda talks about how we can crush progress with perfection, both as a culture and as individuals. We talk about reframing and resizing your suffering, why we need, more than ever, blanket compassion for each other, and also things like balancing parenting and creative routines, as well as setting boundaries, pausing projects, and, most importantly, finding your own internal measure for success.

In her own words as seen on her Twitter bio, here’s Amanda Palmer. “Imperfect, full of love, and here to help.”

Amanda Palmer: I am currently in mid-air in a lot of ways. Right now is very strange, but also when I look back at the last 10 or 20 years of my life, it’s not like there has always been some real long span of mundane, predictable routine days that all of a sudden has catastrophically disrupted.

But even just the last couple of weeks, even for me, has been a bit insane. Neil and I, my husband, and our four-year-old got to Melbourne a couple days before Christmas. We moved into an Airbnb that we then needed to leave a week later because I went to the Woodford Festival, Neil wound up getting sick, cancelled his appearance at the festival, stayed in Melbourne, we found a friend who had a friend who needed a housesit.

So Neil stayed at their place, so I came back from the festival, we moved into our new Airbnb, which was supposed to be our home for the next two months. We found out it wasn’t safe for a child, we spent the next three days looking for a place to live. We moved into Neil’s little writing office, then we found out that we couldn’t have our kid there, so, by this Sunday, we will have moved four times in three weeks.

MD: Very mid-air then.

AP: Right, and even though we’re not moving our entire household, we are currently living out of seven bags and suitcases. And meanwhile trying to run our lives and I’m preparing for a tour and Neil is trying to write a book and three other projects, and we’re also trying to take care of our four-year-old.

We are living a really itinerant life at the moment, including today. But there’s a really poetic perspective, giving that people right down the road have just had their houses burnt down and are living in their cars.

It always seems to be that way. Any time I find myself about to bitch and complain about my current discombobulated situation, there always seems to be some giant universal signal that my situation is actually pretty stable compared to a vast variety of other situations. And I think that’s a really important attitude to adopt in life.

Not so much that suffering is a competition, but almost the opposite. That you can always reframe and right-size whatever routine, lack of routine, or discombobulation you happen to be going through, and remember that you’re fine.

MD: And that can be quite grounding in itself. Has that taken a while to get to using those examples as something that helps provide empathy and compassion, rather than a sense of guilt and shame?

AP: That is such a good question. That feels like one of the main emotional tightropes of existence, especially now in the era of extreme wokeness where any and everybody, no matter what their position is, people are, in a good way, often being confronted with and trying to assess their privilege.

That’s a really healthy thing to do, but you also have to come to that assessment with the tools that you need to be equipped to wrap your head around a healthy perspective and not just go, oh my god, because I have all this privilege, I must therefore be really guilty and angry and start yelling.

MD: So what are some of those tools then, that you’re playing with or learning about?

AP: It’s funny, I’ve been touring the show now for seven months and the underlying theme keeps backing up against the same point again and again and again, which is you have to just have a blanket compassion for self and for others, and if you can work from there, you can do anything.

If you start being selective in any way for any reason, the whole thing falls apart because the minute you start being selective about who deserves empathy and who deserves compassion and who is less or more deserving and who has too much privilege and who has too little privilege you really fuck the whole thing up.

And the tool is… if you’re trying to exercise a muscle to get it strong, the tool is, are you able to actually have compassion for literally anyone and everything? Can you get there?

It’s hard.

MD: Yeah, I feel like it’s constantly stopping yourself with every interaction to think, am I having compassion for this moment or for this person? It seems like it would be a constant stepping into presence.

AP: Well, it is. It’s the ultimate mindfulness practise and it’s also what the Buddhists have been banging on about since day one. The thing that can trip everybody up is it’s really easy to have compassion for the person who’s house just burnt down. It’s a lot harder to have compassion for the woman who’s screaming into her cell phone in line in front of you in the grocery store.

There’s a part of your brain that wants to look at her and think you’re part of the fucking problem, you’re the problem. If you would just shut up, if you would just be more sensitive, if you would be more compassionate, and then if you can be mindful and step back and just go, ah, right, I don’t know what she’s been through today. I don’t know if her house burned down. I don’t know what water she’s swimming in right now. I’m the asshole.

MD: It reminds me of This is Water by David Foster Wallace. Have you ever seen that commencement speech?

AP: Yeah, it’s the same thing. You really do not know what is going on in anyone’s heart at any given moment, and you don’t know their traumas, their backgrounds, their sufferings. What you can bet on is that they have them. I have yet to meet a human being who isn’t struggling. I just don’t know one.

MD: Well, this is a lovely segue to something, if you would do me the honour, of reading your own Facebook post.

AP: Sure. “You can do nothing, or you can do something. If you do something, you will be told that you’re doing it imperfectly. You will be scolded for getting the tone wrong, the sentiment wrong, the wording wrong, or the timing wrong. Do it anyway. Do it anyway. Keep doing the things. The only alternative is doing nothing and, nowadays, that’s exactly what nobody needs. Keep doing. Get it wrong. Get it wrong. Get it wrong and keep going. The enemy of progress is perfection. Keep going. Keep doing. I am Amanda Palmer and I haven’t brushed my hair in a long time, and I believe in you.”

MD: What I love about what you wrote is that you can do anything and often I think that it feels as if, at times like this, we need to do something grand. We need to do something that really shows our compassion. It’s almost like trying to verify that we care, but I like the idea of do anything. Do you think that it can be anything? Can we do trivial things during these times?

AP: Yeah, I think we have to. I think one of the problems, especially with social media and performing ourselves and presenting ourselves and presenting our grand actions and our great carings and our beautiful, compassionate souls at one another, is that nothing is the right size anymore.

The main problem with the climate crisis, with the way society is becoming unsustainably dysfunctional, is that we just aren’t grounded in our basics. We just aren’t getting the basics right in terms of how we communicate and how we take care of each other, and I’ve been thinking about this really deeply, even just for the last week.

Neil and I are here in Australia, we’re here for another two and a half months, and I find myself thinking the same thing. I’m like, oh, we have to make a grand gesture. We have to really show that we really fucking care. We have to find the right charity, we have to do big things, we have to make a big noise.

And you see, when you’re having those thoughts and you can slow down, how much ego there is in there. Like everyone has to see us doing a thing. Everyone has to see me caring a lot. Which doesn’t cancel out or mean that my caring isn’t authentic, but it does show you how insecure and fragile we all are, and how desperately we need to appear.

Neil and I have been having these long conversations, and I’ve been having these long conversations with my manager and also even my publicist and anyone I bump up against in Australia who’s just standing here in shock at the minute, kind of like, what actually really is it that we can do?

Is it money? It doesn’t feel like it’s money. Is it raising awareness on social media so that people know this is happening? I don’t know if it’s just that.

And what is so interesting about this moment is that it’s a little microcosm of how I have been thinking about my tour, my life, my record, my career, my business as a human being in the last year. It’s like, what’s actually helpful?

If I can get myself out of the fucking way and my ego out of the way and my needs and desires for myself out of the way, what can I do right now that’s really going to actually help?

That’s a really hard question to answer. Once you really, really get down to brass tacks. And I think one of the big paradoxes is you never get to know. You never get someone to come down from the sky and go, gold star, you fucking figured it out, you got it right today! You did the correct thing to help humanity, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding! And a jackpot just drops into your spiritual well.

It just doesn’t work that way. You have to fucking live your life everyday knowing that you don’t know and that you just are bumbling around like every other motherfucker trying to do something right.

And one of the things that does drive me crazy about social media is the degree to which everyone is getting punished for getting it wrong. It’s so hard right now, to do anything, because of the purity police and the people who really, fundamentally, desperately do want to help, but feel like their job is to punish the slight infraction, and everyone I know feels this.

Everyone I have a conversation with feels this. And yet, when you step onto the internet, whether you’re me or Lizzo or just some person with two Twitter followers running your teeny life as a student just having come onto social media or whatever.

It’s scary. And no one wants to not get it right. And no one wants to be yelled at and punished and scolded and I worry so much right now about how badly the left is eating itself and how badly all of the people who really do want to help are crushing progress with perfection, like I said on my post.

MD: Yeah, and even your Twitter bio. “Imperfect, full of love, and here to help.” I feel like that’s all we can do but it is scary to be imperfect.

So with this, with this uncertainty both in terms of whether what we’re going to do is the right thing and then the uncertainty of your day-to-day right now where you’re moving between places, what are those trivial basics that you try to put into your day?

AP: It’s so interesting I should be having this conversation with you right now because when I came back from Woodford and started to settle into some kind of a routine, in Melbourne I made a commitment to myself to go to yoga every day, even though I was massively behind on work, even though I knew it would mean there were things I wouldn’t get to, PR things I wouldn’t get to, tour prep and promo things that I wouldn’t get to, rehearsing that I wouldn’t get to.

I was like, if everything else is in flux right now, especially if Neil and I aren’t even going to be living in the same house for more than a few days, I need, I need to do this. I felt it physically because I’d also just been at Woodford, scheduled hour-to-hour doing gigs, and running around with my kid, and going to sleep, and waking up, and hitting the ground running every second, and not a moment to meditate or self-care.

So I was just like, fuck it. Every day four o’clock, I’m going to stop what I’m doing. I don’t care if there’s a million things on fire, literally or figuratively. I’m going to go to yoga. I’m going to take two hours and I’m just going to practice. I need it for my body, my heart, and my brain.

And I stuck to that for three days.

Yesterday I failed because I decided to get together with a friend instead and I did the cost-benefit and I thought, my friend is important. And today I had a friend that Neil and I were going to get together with during yoga time, so I scheduled it for ten, and I woke up at 8:30, got Ash ready to get out of the house, and I felt exhausted. I ran the cost-benefit and I was like, do I go to yoga or do I go back to sleep and get another hour sleep?

I was like, what’s more important? What’s more important? Go back to sleep.

So I went back to sleep, woke up at 11 o’clock.

I have a new relationship with sleep, especially since beginning this tour. I read an incredible book by Matthew Walker called Why We Sleep that’s about his last 25 years of sleep research, and I have now completely rejiggered my relationship with sleep and, basically, I put it before everything.

It’s my new first fidelity. It doesn’t matter what else is going on. If I can get eight hours sleep, that’s my first fidelity in life. You always sense it and you know that sleep is really important. Looking at all the science, I was like, oh my god. If I get five hours of sleep, I’m just going to be a terrible person, make bad decisions all day, and probably get cancer.

MD: I’m a big sleeper to the point where I think that – I don’t know if he speaks about it in his book, it’s on my list to read, but whether oversleeping can have reverse effects because I can get the eight hours, but I will just want more, and I can indulge in that if I have the morning there to just snooze, snooze, snooze.

AP: Yeah, there’s some huge simple takeaways from the book that I’d be happy to share with you. One of them is that waking up to an alarm and then pressing the snooze button is actually incredibly unhealthy physiologically.

MD: It feels it, yeah.

AP: When you wake up to an alarm, it shocks your nervous system. It’s bad for your heart. And so you’re a lot better off looking at your schedule and, if you have to set an alarm, which you should not do if you can ever possibly avoid it, just set it for the last possible moment that you would need to wake up so that you can actually get pure, productive, healthy sleep.

If your last hour of sleep is you hitting the snooze alarm six times, you’re not actually getting productive sleep and you’re shocking your system ten times, which will just not ultimately benefit you.

MD: Oh, this is good to know. I’m going to go alarm-free. But back to this, you stuck to your yoga commitment for three days. I actually really love hearing that because I think we should have the freedom to change our minds and our plans, and I’ve heard you speak about how you’ve had a very tested relationship with productivity and procrastination before and how that’s sort of shifted for you now, and it sounds like you’re being kinder to yourself if the plans don’t go to plan.

AP: As a creative person especially, I was an incredibly masochistic teenager in terms of creative productivity. I don’t know if you would call it masochistic or sadistic or a combination of both, but I was punishing and really deeply, painfully self-critical, well into my twenties, and it took me a long time to shake that.

MD: What did it mean, being self-critical about your productivity? Did it mean that you were working really hard?

AP: I can point out years of my life where I went through entire days going, Amanda, you’re a piece of shit because you’re not writing any music right now.

MD: And it’s hard to write music when you’re speaking to yourself like that, I’d imagine.

AP: Yeah, and I also was too undeveloped to understand the broader context of my environment. When I was 19, four people very, very close to my core existence all died within a six-month period. Two grandparents, a boyfriend, and my brother. And it didn’t occur to me at the time that that was a pretty traumatic six months to go through, especially because it was also the first time I left home, I was in a strange new environment, I didn’t really have a social circle, I didn’t have any tools to process what I was feeling, and I became really paralytic for a while.

And to make things worse, I threw myself on my university psychiatrist and asked for medication, so I basically was just asleep at the wheel for four years. And it really took me a long time to tease out. I think for a long time, I had an idea that if I identified as an artist, that if that was my core identity and that’s what made me worthwhile and made be good and made me real, that if I wasn’t creating, like right then, right there, and finishing that good song idea that I got two weeks ago, that if I wasn’t doing that, I was bad.

Just core bad. That I was a bad, useless, worthless person who shouldn’t even be allowed to identify as an artist or someone who had any cool credibility or anything to say because, really, I was a lazy piece of shit. And all of that stuff was going on in my head, but of course, when you’re in that, especially when you’re early 20s, you can just be lost in it.

And I was lost there for a long time. It actually took meeting Brian and starting the Dresden Dolls to really spark and kickstart the unlocking of all of that insecurity and self-doubt and that it was a long climb out.

MD: This is so tricky. I grapple with this because I still feel like I’m there in terms of I’m not worth anything until I’m doing something, but then it’s also sometimes doing things is the antidote to that feeling. It’s complicated.

AP: Right. Somewhere in the middle, there’s a gorgeous, blurry Goldilocks zone of contributing, producing, acting, helping, making, expressing, breathing out, and then breathing in and exhaling without feeling like every second you have to be active.

And our culture is really bad at this. And once you gave us smartphones, oh, we were just fucked. The problem with our devices nowadays is that they’re catch-alls, so your work is in there, your emotional life and your relationships are in there, your mundane domestic organisation is in there, the weather is in there, your taxes. Anything you have to tend to is all in this one device, and that’s just very dangerous.

Neil and I have had so many good, interesting discussions about this and I think that we’re still on a really harsh learning curve, but we’ve tried to put in practices, even just in our house and in our relationship, that when we get sloppy, we get sloppy, but a couple of them are don’t plug the phone in in the bedroom. Don’t get on the phone first thing in the morning. Don’t take it to bed at night. Turn it off.

If we’re out at a meal, I’m a real fascist about phones at the table. I think we shouldn’t do it. And the rule we’ve tried to implement in there is, if you do take your phone out, just as if you were getting up from the table and leaving the room, you just need to announce where you’re heading. So, I’m going to take my phone out of my pocket because I need to check the weather for tomorrow if we’re making plans for tomorrow, so I’m going to be in here checking the weather.

You don’t just take your phone out of your pocket and listlessly start looking at it while other people are at the table because it’s incredibly rude. And that kind of etiquette and stuff is really important to me because I think if we all let each other slip, then we’re just living in a haze of distraction and we’re never really there. Like, we’re never really present for each other if we’re always sort of half there but half on our phones and half on our Instagram feeds.

MD: So, how does such an interesting couple be alone together? How do you share alone time or make space for ordinary, quiet moments?

AP: We could do a fucking three-hour deep dive into the boring and mundane domestic arguments of Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer. We’ve been together for a long time, but we’ve actually only lived together a fraction of that time because, even when we “shared a house”, we’re often both on the run and on the fly and trading off, so we get into our various grooves depending what the agenda for the day is.

I’ll give you a really classic example. This morning, I slept in. We had a plan. I got up with Ash very early, I spent the morning with him, I read to him, I cuddled him, I got some great mama and Ash time. I was going to go to yoga, I was going to leave at around 9:30, I decided to go back to bed and I wound up getting up a little before 11 o’clock.

I looked at my agenda for the day, I knew that I was fucked. I knew that the gorgeous expanse of time that I was going to spend on self-care and hopefully catching up with my email was dwindling away by the second, and Neil was in the living room, Ash was gone, Neil was just answering emails on his phone, and I put on my protective ‘I have to get shit done’, I don’t actually have time to chat this morning.

Neil and I both have this way of being where it’s the ‘I am busy, do not fuck with me’ way of being, and I got myself dressed, I went to the bathroom, I brushed my teeth, I combed my hair, I looked at my schedule, I thought about where I was going to head to do my admin because Neil and I don’t do admin well in the same place and he had already usurped the kitchen table, so I was going to go to a coffee shop, I have about an hour, I’ll have to call an Uber.

And Neil literally said something so sweet and off to the side. So I announced myself to Neil. I was like, “I am very busy, I am very late, I have to go, I have to go, I have to go. I love you very much, but I have to go because I have so many things to do, oh my god, I have 67 things to do in the next 45 minutes”, and he was like okay.

And then I was pouring myself a glass of water, had called my Uber, was sticking on my jacket, and Neil comes over to me very sweetly and says, “I charged your phone charger. It’s just right here.” And I was like, “Neil, not now. I just can’t discuss that now.” And I was like, oh Amanda, why are you being so mean?

But he does the same thing to me. We will get into these modes of productivity and because we don’t work in offices, we just work wherever we’re sitting. We have to have these forcefields around ourselves, where it’s just like, do not fuck with me.

And one of the things that Neil and I have learned about each other is we have very different styles. We have very different styles of being at home. We have very different styles of how things get scheduled, how things get done, how lists get done. And I have friends, touring friends, social friends, who I actually am really good at sharing alone time with. Like you sit there, I’ll sit here, we can bang out our email together. Every once in a blue moon, we’ll check in. Do you want to go, should we grab a coffee?

Neil and I are unable to do that. And one of the reasons is that, and I’m probably guilty of this sometimes as much as Neil is, but Neil has a really bad habit of just needing to announce interesting things every two minutes. Like, “Darling, did you know…?”

And so he has a really hard time being alone together without constantly engaging. And even if I’m like, don’t engage, let’s just sit here quietly for an hour and just do our email and not chat with each other, he just finds it impossible. So I just leave.

I go off to a coffee shop so he can sit there alone, and I can sit there alone. And these are the sort of things that you learn about your partner and you don’t judge, you just make space for it and you figure it out.

MD: So what’s the forcefield that you have to put around yourself, if you do need to, for songwriting or before you’re about to go on stage? Is there any kind of ritual around that?

AP: Ooh. Yeah, those are two very different things. Songwriting, I have found I just have to be completely undisturbable.

MD: I’m curious about times where you haven’t been able to be undisturbable or far away from the household, for example when you’re a new parent. How do you deal with having to press pause on your creative practice, or that time in between?

AP: One of the reasons I’m so grateful that I waited, I was 39 when I had Ash, is I felt stable enough that I could press that pause button and not freak out. And even then, I think that’s a multi-layered tetrahesion of creative weirdness because I’ve been experiencing things on the one hand and making things on the one hand long enough to know that there’s no such thing as a pause button.

Your internal combustion engines are always working on something and your experience is always being composted or synthesised into whatever’s going to come out in the tray at the end of the day, whether it’s a week from now or ten years from now.

But you don’t really learn that until you’ve been through massive cycles of experience, confusion, pain, grief, whatever. Sometimes there’s a rush, but mostly there’s no rush. It’s going to be there when you go to pick it up. And you have to experience that to know it in your bones.

MD: Is there a particular project that comes to mind, where there was no rush?

AP: No. I think I’m more talking about a general sense of panic and urgency. It gets back to the sadistic punishing teenager is a deeper understanding as a human being and as an artist that you don’t have to fucking do everything right, right now.

That it’s allowable to just stick the car in park and just not have your foot on the gas every second, and that actually the act of running around in a playground with a kid or taking a couple weeks off and just doing your admin and reading books and having meetings with people and going to yoga is the deeper well that you fill up, so when you get to your creative desk, you’re not in a panic.

MD: So going back to the forcefields that you have to put around your work, with your current tour of There Will Be No Intermission, you speak a lot about grief, loss, and pain. How do you show up for that? Are there any specific rituals?

AP: Yeah. I have a really simple answer for that, which is, as I did the tour more and more, I just learned that about 35 minutes before the show, I just needed everybody to go away and that I needed to shut off all my input.

That’s also hard-earned and hard-won knowledge from tours past where, again, that you need to get shit done, you need to get shit done part of me would just stay switched on, literally until I was walking up to the lip of the stage, and then I would shut off and be like, okay, it’s time to perform.

And I have learned not to do that. I’ve learned that actually having a little bit of a transitional stage is important for focus. Even at Woodford, my manager was backstage because he was also acting as my tour manager, this great guy Jordan, and he was backstage with me at Woodford, I was on stage in 20 minutes, and he was checking his phone, and he said, “So about the promo on Tuesday…” and I looked at him and I was like, “No. If it isn’t about the show, don’t ask me right now. That can wait until after.” And he said okay.

But you need to be able to say no. And you need to be able to instruct people as to what kind of boundaries you’ve got and the bubble you need. I’ve talked to so many, especially female, performers about this exact thing and how it’s taken some of us 20 years to finally understand that we’re allowed to ask that there not be random people walking around during the venue and soundtrack. That we’re allowed to say, right now, we need you to not be chatting five feet from the stage while we’re trying to soundcheck our really emotional songs because that’s distracting. Could you not do that right now?

And a half-hour before I’m about to perform this really emotional stuff, I need you to not come into my dressing room with random requests for people who want to say hi. And, again, that’s just a reflection of everybody’s life. You can then go, oh my god, everybody’s going to call me a demanding diva. And that’s the fear.

MD: Exactly, yeah. You’re working on your own podcast at the moment, The Art of Asking Everything, and you were saying before we started our conversation that that’s on pause for now while you’re touring and I think that really speaks to what you were just saying about how you can’t do everything all at once. I’m wondering how you’ve cultivated this patience with your own creative process.

AP: Most of it is just painful experience and watching the log jam that can happen when you try to do too many projects at once, and I really have a lot of back and forth and huge gratitude for my teeny staff. I have two people who work with me every day in New York, Michael and Hailey. Hailey’s been with me for ten years, Michael’s been with me for three. My manager over in Sydney, Jordan, and the four of us basically make all of these decisions together.

A lot of my learning curve has been to give more power to the people who see the patterns, because my bad pattern is, “I want to do it, I have this idea and I just want to do it right now and let’s put it out right now, and let’s move all of our energy over here and help these people and do this thing.”

And my staff has suffered to consistently under the constant, if you want to call it the figurative moving house of, this project, no that project, no this thing, no that, but let’s change this all around, let’s do this. And the thing that is awesome about my career is the massive freedom that I have because I’m not on a major label schedule, I don’t work with huge corporations.

I really am completely rogue, off-grid, DIY. It’s us and there’s no higher power. If I want to put a song out, I fucking put it out. If I want to put an album out, I put it out. If I want to put a podcast out, I just do it.

And because I have 15,000 Patreons paying the bills who are like whatever, whatever, just go for it, we trust you, take our money, I literally can do whatever I want. And that kind of freedom can be intoxicating and also really dangerous because I am making up everything and it can be really hard to know, what do we do this month?

What do I put out? Do I put this podcast out every day, every week, every two weeks? If I have a song to come out, if I have a column to come out, if I have an essay that I want to come out, if I want to do a collaboration with someone, when does this shit come out? I don’t know. Let’s just do something.

And my team has really become the other legs on the chair to make sure that we don’t do things too fast. When we do things fast, they get done wrong. Things can get sloppy, collaborators can wind up getting under spotlighted, and so we really try to work together now as a team to figure out when will we have time to do this right, to get this right, to give this the intellectual/monetary/energetic publicity attention it deserves?

And, again, knowing we’re always shooting in the dark. We might not get it right. Whatever.

And this podcast was supposed to launch in November and then I saw how punished we all were by my schedule on tour and how everyone was working on one cylinder and on not enough sleep and we all agreed collectively, no way do we have the bandwidth to also put out a podcast, talk about it, promote it, clean it up, make graphics, do all the hoo-ha that you need to do, and so I didn’t even blink or fight back or say like, no, we wanted to put it out, no, all these podcasts are going to be outdated.

I was like, yeah, you guys are right, we’re all on the same page. Let’s delay it until January, February, March even. Let’s do this when we have time. And a lot of it comes down to really even personal mundane stuff, like if I do this, if I put this podcast out in November, how many hours out of my week is it going to mean that I don’t spend with Ash? And how will I justify sitting in a room alone listening to edits of podcasts instead of putting my kid to bed? Because I have limited hours literally every day if I’m on tour to do work.

A lot of parents have told me this about having children, but they really do shuffle your priorities around big time. Your fidelities and priorities change a lot because you start looking at your day and I’m like, well, if I say yes to that, I don’t spend time with my kid, so I’m just going to say no to that. Once you get into a rhythm with having a child and knowing what the time syncs are and what the hidden time stealers are from your child, I’ve got really mama bear about it.

It’s hard. You don’t know what the cost-benefit of anything is. You just guess. You just guess and then you forgive yourself.

MD: Do you think that pausing or waiting is actually a luxury for those who are already established and only once you’ve figured out how to monetise projects?

AP: One of the things that I will point out, just in terms of the cyclical nature of life, is when you’re at the beginning of your career, you have to work at a certain clip or shit just does not happen. And as hard as it is to look back on the Dresden Dolls schedule in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, if we hadn’t toured as much as we had and really put in the driving all night and the connecting with everybody and the real bootcamp of being in a band that was barely even getting paid most of the time, I’m not sure we would’ve succeeded.

You know, to everything, turn, turn, turn, and there’s a season in your career as an artist or as a doctor or as a lawyer or as a painter where you just bust ass because you have to. And then you earn yourself a little bit of reflection time and you can coast a little bit.

And then you go through another period of ass busting and, in my career, at this point, I’m in the middle of an ass busting. I know that you can’t put an album out and go on a world tour and have it really feel leisurely. It doesn’t fucking work that way.

And even then, I set this tour up about as leisurely as possible so that I could still spend chunks of time with my kid and not just be doing six shows a week, and even then I feel like I’m maxed to the gills.

If you look at Madonna’s tour schedule, when she goes on a global tour, she goes. You don’t just play one show a week and then spend the rest of the week at the spa. You have a crew, you have a staff. If you don’t play one show a week, you’re going to lose 500 grand keeping everyone on retainer so you have to just go, go, go, go, go, go, go.

And every artistic career and anything in general has these cycles that you just need to take in, respect, and work around, and then have enough understanding that you don’t stack them back to back to back. It’s why one of the things that I’m doing this spring is just taking a full couple months off. Off means I’ll still be sitting at my desk and I’ll still be answering emails and I’ll still be working on my podcast, but I’m not going to be on the road, and I’ve said no to every single gig offer.

Because I know that after a year in change of being on the road and playing shows for a full year, I’m going to need to recharge because I’m going to be at the end energetically. And that’s really hard to do.

Neil and I wind up reflecting each other a lot and I watch us both getting trapped in the endless cycle of wanting to add another thing and wanting to add another thing and wanting to say yes to this tasty project and wanting to say yes to this delicious collaboration, and finally you’re there at the buffet of ‘things are working’ and I can eat the foods because look at all the desserts. But if you don’t stop, you get sick. Like literally. You get sick and you’ve got to be able to sit. Digest.

And it can be really hard because the minute you have a modicum of success, you want to just keep going and say yes and you want to keep climbing and keep doing the things, but it’s not sustainable and once you’ve gone through a few of these cycles, you realise that the temptation of constantly saying yes to everything leads down a slippery slope of you get sloppy.

MD: Yeah, it’s just making me think that it’s such an anxious period, I think, before you’ve done that huge chunk of work. You wonder whether your career will ever… well, I’m speaking very personally actually, I don’t think I’ve actually ever done that really hard work to earn the rest.

AP: Well, I think you’re speaking directly to that thing that I think I struggled with a lot in my 20s and I still struggle with it now, and I see Neil struggling with it now. He’s almost 60 and he doesn’t think he deserves a break yet. And he’s Neil Gaiman. I’m like, dude, it’s not like you haven’t done stuff.

And it just goes to show how much of it is in your head and you can spin cycle eternally and not think that you deserve a break because you just keep ratcheting up the stakes and the scale. And you know that the answer is not an answer I have. Only you’ve got that answer.

This is the thing that I’ve talked to so many artists about, who look at me and they say, okay, so when am I successful? What does it mean? And I’m like, only one person has that answer. You have to define that. If success to you means that you get to play a couple of gigs in your hometown and make enough money to just pay your rent, and that’s success? That is real. That’s real success.

If success to you is that you’re not going to be happy until you sell out Wembley Stadium? That can be real to you. Your life is going to be really hard, but you have to have an internal compass because if you’re asking me or you’re asking Rolling Stone magazine or you’re asking Twitter if you’re successful yet, the answer is no because they can’t tell you.

MD: When hearing Amanda talk about blanket compassion, I was not only reminded me David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech This is Water, but also some words that really stayed with me after seeing a recent Creative Mornings talk by Esther Perel. If you’re not already familiar with Esther’s work, she’s a psychotherapist and also the host of a brilliant podcast called Where Should We Begin? where you get to be a fly on the wall to a real couple’s therapy session.

So in the Creative Mornings talk, Esther was explaining how we have a knack for thinking that other people are simple, and we are complex. For example, when someone else is late, we blame them for being disorganised, whereas when we’re late, it’s because of some complex interruption, something outside of our control like the train being late. We’re able to have a generous assumption or justification for our own lateness, but not for somebody else’s.

And this might be a really small and trivial example, but I think it’s also these moments where we can actually practise having blanket compassion and making more generous assumptions.

As David Foster Wallace explains in This is Water, which is one of my favourite commencement speeches, it can be really difficult to keep practising to stay alert and attentive because it’s all too easy to get hypnotised by a constant monologue inside our own heads. A script that we play over and over again, which might be judgement, it might be shame, it might be guilt, it might be self-doubt. Whatever it is that’s our kind of default setting.

But when we do pay attention, we start to see that we can choose how we construct meaning from experiences and often change the default setting. So, as David Foster Wallace says, we can make conscious decisions about how to think and what to pay attention to, and we can force ourselves to think of other scenarios and also place ourselves a little bit out of the centre and maybe that can make us all a little bit kinder to ourselves and be almost this habit that can really have an effect on our compassion for each other.