No, I Am Not Crowdfunding This Baby (an open letter to a worried fan)
By: Amanda Palmer
Tags: Pregnancy, Crowdfunding, Music

So, dear Worried, you can see why your email stirred my darkest fears. I’m worried too. Probably more worried than you, because, I have to live with me all the time. And soon, I’ll have to live with this baby all the time. All while trying to not lose my art-self.

And, honestly, if this baby really winds up acting as a crippling, muse-killing, inspiration-sucker who saps the life out of my music rendering it totally bland…well…just tiptoe away, and leave me in my balanced, bland and happy misery.

As to your worry about whether or not this is a scam to crowdfund an infant: it can be confusing about where the lines of asking and taking should be drawn.

Let me tell you a story, one that I was going to include in “The Art of Asking” book (it wound up on the cutting room floor with 100,000 other words.)

Last year I stumbled across an open letter from Eisley, a female-fronted indie band from Texas, who’d tried to raise $100k on kickstarter so they could afford to accept a slot to support a far bigger band on tour.

Some people were confused, but I understood those logistics: when my band, The Dresden Dolls, were offered the opening slot for Nine Inch Nails in the summer of 2005, we chose to go into a financial hole in order to say yes. Our nightly paycheck covered about a third of what it cost to hire a crew and keep up with their tour buses, and we lost thousands of dollars. It’s a financial decision I’ve never regretted; I still meet fans, years later, who found me on that tour and have stuck with me ever since. Those things pay off.

Unfortunately Eisley didn’t reach their Kickstarter goal (so it went completely unfunded, as per the all-or-nothing Kickstarter model); but they went on the tour anyway and there was an angry backlash from their fans, who accused them of acting dishonestly. The fans asked: “if you didn’t need the money to begin with…why did you crowdfund??” Two of the members of the group were planning to bring their babies on tour, a fact that got dragged into the whole kerfuffle. Eisley defended themselves in an open letter, pointing out they’d managed to borrow the money from their families and their label, and they defended themselves specifically against people accusing them of tastelessly begging for money for baby formula, with the rebuttal that all their babies were breastfeeding…and thus weren’t planning to spend a dime of that crowdfunding money on baby formula.

But honestly? Why shouldn’t they buy baby formula with that money? It’s just there on the list of stuff they need to survive on tour, up there with everything else like gas, food, and capital to print t-shirts. It would be a like a diabetic singer promising her fans that she wasn’t going to spend her Kickstarter tour money on insulin.

If you are a touring indie musician, your life is NOT compartmentalized into neat little financial sections.

When you’re a crowdfunding artist, it shouldn’t matter what your choices are as long as you’re delivering your side of the bargain — the art, the music. It shouldn’t matter whether you’re spending money on guitar picks, rent, printer paper, diapers, college loans, or the special brand of organic absinthe you use to find your late-night muse…. as long as art is making it out the other side and making your patrons happy.

We’re artists, not art factories.

The money we need to live is often indistinguishable from the money we need to make art. We need all sorts of stuff to make art with. MAYBE I EVEN NEED THIS BABY TO MAKE ART. Who knows?

As to your question about the timing of all this…no, it wasn’t schemed. I’ve been intending to use patreon since it was founded two years ago, because I love the idea of giving my fans a way to just pay me whenever I actually release content, instead of relying on a tired, outdated system of making one big-old fashioned record every couple of years. It feels way more sane, actually, as the impending unpredictability of parenthood approaches, to be able to work whenever I’m inspired and can make the time, instead of working on the forced, binge-and-purge, feast-or-famine cycle that I was stuck on when I was on a major label who didn’t care much about my quality of life.

I love the idea of getting paid for my work, when I work, by the people who want me to work. (Like you. Unless you stop wanting it. Which is fine. We’re in an open relationship. You can leave anytime. You can even come back. I’m fine with that.)

And if you already think that my output is getting too weird, or too dull: at least you don’t have to worry that the baby will turn me into one of those obnoxious songwriters who picks up a ukulele and…let’s just admit that I clearly jumped the ukulele shark years ago, and it was REALLY liberating. Though, honestly, if what you’re waiting around for is “the really gritty, complex, emotional good stuff…”…I’ll be really surprised if pushing a SMALL HUMAN OUT OF MY VAGINA doesn’t also rip my heart open and provide some really, profound new artistic perspectives. It might take me a second to recover from you know, childbirth, before I start writing again, but just give me a second. Don’t strangle me if I decide to go into labor without a notebook in my hand, jotting down inspirational lyrics.

In closing, dear Worried, if you really are worried about me, and you are with me in sensitive camaraderie, I humbly ask one thing:

please don’t terrify and jinx me right now.

Not when I’m just about to jump into this net that I’m praying will appear to catch me, my art, and this baby…all at the same time.

I love you,

Amanda