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My instinct to look away, to fight it, and to do anything but be here and now. “It’s too hard,” I tell myself, feeling the emotions swell and move up and through my body. I look for anything to escape the rising tide of feeling because, fuck, it’s hard. But Amanda Palmer doesn’t want me to. She won’t let me. It doesn’t matter how hard I fight, she fights harder, commanding my attention like some dark fae queen. Wherever I look, she’s already there, smiling, whispering softly that it’s okay to feel.
I don’t believe her, but what else can I do but acquiesce? How can I not give in and follow Palmer down this road she’s laid before me, the one paved with raw creation and emotional vulnerability? There Will Be No Intermission won’t allow for half-steps or background listening. It is a flood of art at its most naked that won’t relent until you are submersed. It doesn’t matter where I look or how I try to distract myself. Amanda Fucking Palmer has something to say and she won’t let me not listen.
And it hurts. It hurts in the best possible ways, in the ways that we all hope that art can hurt, but it still hurts. Eyes closed, giving in, immersed, I listen as Amanda Palmer rips open her chest to pull her still beating heart from its cavity and show it to me, as if to say, “I made this; do you like it?” I do, in fact. More than like it, I love it. I stop fighting. I let it hit me. I weep.
I weep as she lays bare her soul in ways that most contemporary artists are afraid. Hers is a truth that has always been tinged in darkness and shrouded in shadow. But shadow, There Will Be No Intermission reminds us, is a function of light. It’s easy to forget that. It’s easy to focus on the dark shadows that swirl and pulsate across our lives and fail to remember that they wouldn’t exist were it not for the glowing brilliance behind them.
“I want you to picture me sitting and singing beside you,” goes the refrain of “The Ride,” the album’s true opener. It’s less a lyric than an instruction; the intimacy displayed across the record works only if you treat it like a late-night confession made by your oldest, dearest friend. The kind of heart-rending stream of consciousness that allows you both to purge the poison of a lifetime of living into a moment of true catharsis and love. Palmer wants to have that with me, specifically, and what can I do but allow it?
As much as it hurts to watch her do it, I no longer want to look away. Even while every song seems to have at least one gut punch of a line that punctuates the rising tide of feeling that came before it, I let it hit me. I weep as she sings, “And I call my grandfather, and he doesn’t answer, and I have to make peace with that fact” on “The Thing About Things.” And again in “Judy Blume” where she sings “Judy, I can’t believe sometimes that I’m an adult/and that girls like I was think that I have this shit figured out.” Each song rips a layer of ego off, revealing more and more of who and what Amanda Fucking Palmer is. And it’s hard to watch, but it’s beautiful to see.
It’s difficult to remember that this is the same woman who once told me to “stop pretending art is hard” because nothing about this could have been easy. I can no longer do much but sit in a state of wonder and awe and she forces feeling from the depths of her piano or her ukulele. The more she strips away the indignities of living, the more I do too. The farther along we get, the more I realize that sometimes the indignities are what make life what it is. The beauty and pain, the horror and joy, the despair and elation are as intertwined as the shadow and the light.
I’m going to die. And so are you. Bad things are going to happen to us. Those we love most will hurt us and be hurt. Our best friends will suffer tragedy. We will feel, often, as if we can do nothing right. Failure might be the only option. Darkness and shadow swirl all around us. That’s okay. There’s no reason to run from that. To hide it. To pretend like it doesn’t exist.
It’s okay to lay yourself bare or to weep. That’s the ultimate lesson I get as she’s sitting and singing beside me. That’s the gift she gives to me, to you, to all of us who are willing to take her hand and walk the long and difficult road of There Will Be No Intermission. At the end of the day, we’re all of us just feeling. And sometimes the light that gets hidden by shadow is a masterpiece, but only if we can stop ourselves from fighting it.
One Response
Beautifully put. I could not word to others that I wanted to share this album with what it feels like, my explanations have just been making weird sounds of *!$? that just end with jamming headphones on to their skull…but youve captured a raw experince into the perfect messy literary bow that it Thanks for shareing.