Sometimes I think things...

Dear Amanda Palmer,
      Initially, I wasn’t going to do this. I know you get plenty of fan mail and that mine could be one of the many that disappears into the pile. However, the need to say thank you has invaded my life for the last six months, and so I decided to at least draft a letter.     

      I was raised on Tori Amos and Nine Inch Nails, on Fungo Mungo and The Red Hot Chili Peppers. While my friends complained about their parents’ awful music, my parents and I were dancing in my living room. I went to my first concert (System of a Down) with my mother, and the next two (Nine Inch Nails, and later, Primus) with my whole family. My fourth concert was the one that really made an impact. To see a man and a woman play music that I have listened to, performed, memorized, and integrated with all the memories and emotions I’ve experienced in the last four years of my life, to see a woman that I have dressed up as and performed as right in front of me was an experience I didn’t know I would be able to have, as their collaboration was on indefinite hiatus.

       So deeply integrated into my experiences and emotions was the music of The Dresden Dolls, that the opportunity to see them on New Year’s Eve seemed impossibly far away from both sides of the event. Only when I was there, and I felt nothing but the present moment and every single bit of my self (and I mean that in a two-words kind of way, not “myself”) was laid out before me and scrambled around, did it seem like something real. Afterward, for weeks, I felt like I was going to throw up. I was hyper and couldn’t focus on anything or anyone and I just kept riding my bike around and chattering at people and singing and being confused and feeling   like all of my insides were going to spill out of me because I was all jumbled up.

       Something happened inside me that night that brought out the past and buried the present and then blended it all together like some kind of existential soup. Sometimes, when I look back on it, I feel like I’m going to vibrate out of my own skin with anticipation of whatever the hell I saw coming in me that night, smashed in crowd of people that I was hardly aware of. I was in San Francisco on New Year’s eve with a beautiful boy, and all I don’t know if I’ve ever been more focused on anything in my entire life than I was on that music.

(I feel that I should note here: Although I am Dresden Dolls fan and love your collaborations with Brian, I respect that you have your own endeavors to pursue and have immensely enjoyed all of your projects since the band halted production)

      Shortly after I had recovered from post-show insanity, Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under was released, and I downloaded it immediately. Initially, I was dismayed. I felt like I was standing at the end of an era of Punk Cabaret and at the end of a stage of my life that I will never forget. Then I began to do something really odd: I went to the gym. Who Killed Amanda Palmer and Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under became the soundtracks to treadmill running and weight lifting. The album grew on me and I went back to following your work and waiting impatiently for your next project (8in8 was brilliant and I watched the entire webcast in my dorm). I also went back to my piano in the garage, where all three of your books live, and where I have spent the last five years of my life routinely pounding chords and singing at the top of my lungs. The people inside the house ask me if I was singing or if it is you recorded. I know I need to grow as a musician (although I am hardly a musician at all), and I know I have to make my own sound and use my own voice to do so.

      And you know, sometimes I feel like I’m getting too close. They say to never meet your heroes, and I’ve never really had a role model or someone I wanted to be like, so I never really thought about it… but then I realized that the way I feel about you is what “they” are talking about. That’s why I refuse to watch interviews, and only allow myself a cursory scan of most blog  posts or written interviews. I feel you should be allowed to be a whole person and that if I get too involved in that (as opposed to you as just a musician) I’m judging so much more than talent and passion. And that isn’t my goal. Maybe that’s wrong. Maybe you’re supposed to be involved in more than just the music, maybe you’re supposed to be involved in the life of the person, but like I said, I don’t do role models. But you’re the closest I’ve ever come to having one. And while I acknowledge that you are a whole person with a whole life, I’d like not to judge all that, because that isn’t mine. The way I connect to the music and the passion behind it is mine, and I’m keeping it.

      I want to thank you for that. I want to thank you for teaching me that my vocal range matches someone else’s that is female, and that I can sing the tenor part in a choir quite comfortably. I want to thank you for being the one thing that motivates me when nothing else will, whether it is motivation to clean, to run, or to confront someone that I am having problems with. I want to thank you for being the soundtrack to my first and second relationships, two of my high school proms, and every single one of my emotional states. Most of all, though, I want to thank you for being real. You do bizarre things and confuse me from time to time, but you say what you mean and your art reflects that.

       Thank you, Amanda Palmer, for changing my life and being my teacher.

With all my love and respect,

Arraine Elizabeth Siefert