Amanda Palmer plays Melt festival, Brisbane, February 3-4, 2017

IT’S all about personal connection for Amanda Palmer, whose powerhouse solo piano shows lift the barrier between the artist and her audience

Amanda Palmer can cut with her words - or just a chainsaw.

BEFORE the swirling ocean Amanda Palmer stands with a baby clinging to her hip, a machete in her right hand. The picture was taken for the cover of her single Machete, released last year. It conjures the image of a strong warrior goddess, ready to face anything.

The reality, though, was very different.

“We were in LA really early one cold morning and I felt like a powerful warrior goddess,” Palmer, whose son Ash was born in 2015, explains, “but I also felt like kind of an idiot. It was freezing cold. I had this shivering baby on my hip. I dropped the machete in the ocean and watched it wash away and almost slice my foot. These are the moments that no one’s going to see. They’re going to see that I’m a powerful warrior goddess but really I’m just an idiot like everybody else. So I felt very human, as usual.”

Palmer with baby Ash, and machete, by the sea.

Amanda Palmer — who began her career as a living statue performing on the streets of Boston, found fame as one half of the punk-cabaret duo the Dresden Dolls, and went on to have a solo career with an intimate following like no other — has lived a life of being both badass and vulnerable. She took the life of a jobbing, bohemian, D-I-Y performer to scales of international success and adoration, putting herself in the limelight and also the firing line of criticism for doing things her way.

She hosted a hugely successful crowd-funding campaign ($1.2 million for her album Theatre is Evil) and now champions a patron-led system for funding her art through the website Patreon. She spoke about her methods in a TED Talk and book called The Art of Asking and copped criticism for asking too much. She even addressed the issue in a blog titled, “No, I am not crowd-funding this baby (an open letter to a worried fan)”.

Her narrative includes a love story: falling in love with British writer Neil Gaiman, becoming an alternative power couple, each with their own rabidly faithful family of fans, and welcoming the birth of their son Ash, short for Anthony, in 2015, named for a dear friend who passed away the same year.

In a change of pace, Palmer is bringing her solo piano show to Brisbane.

The latest chapter includes a series of solo piano shows which will bring her to the Brisbane Powerhouse as part of the Melt festival on February 3 and 4.

“I’m in danger of overdosing on these solo shows,” Palmer says. “In Berlin I played for almost four hours because I was just enjoying myself so much and (with) wine, it always gets dicey, but that’s sort of a testament to how much I love being in the milieu and taking requests and telling stories and talking to people because that’s to me what a show should be like. It should feel like a party that could go on all night.”

That’s the nature of an Amanda Palmer show, something which she has nurtured since her early days performing with the Dresden Dolls.

“My audience is one of the most loving, indulgent, supportive, group-therapy audiences I have ever seen and I forget (that others aren’t like this). I go to other people’s shows and I go, why isn’t it everyone here in love?”

Soon Australian audiences will get to see a lot more of her. She recently announced that she and Gaiman have been granted distinguished talent visas, which will allow them to spend more time in the country and come and go freely. Palmer has long had a special bond with Australia, recording an album here and taking several Australian acts on tour with her, including the Danger Ensemble, Die Roten Punkte, the Red Paintings, the Art and actor and cabaret performer Brendan Maclean. She feels Australia “gets” her.

Palmer can be both badass and vulnerable.

“I’ve just had a string of positive experiences in Australia from the very first time I set foot here,” she says. “I’ve been here 10 times and I refuse to believe that it’s pure coincidence. This place and I fit together well.”

Both she and Gaiman are cultural icons, each with large international fan bases. She has 1.1 million followers on Twitter and he has 2.5 million.

Gaiman, the celebrated weaver of whimsy and Palmer, the curator of a costume box of curiosities, seem a perfect match, creatively and romantically, but surprisingly, she says, their respective fan bases were a little wary of the match at first, a quirky twist on the Romeo and Juliet tale.

While she may have begun playing dress-ups, her songwriting in later years has become more personal than ever. The song Confessions of Motherhood is a 10-minute tell-all revealing the mistakes and near misses she experienced as a mother.

For someone who has made a career of removing the barrier between artist and audience, now, she says, her songs are becoming more personal than ever.

Palmer’s songwriting is now more personal than ever.

“I don’t think I was busting any myths in that song but I was certainly challenging myself to be truly confessional,” she says. “It was really difficult to admit in a song that my husband and I had left a baby in a car in a song. It’s humorous and everyone laughs at that line but parents know what it feels like to have a near miss with your child. Those are really scary moments. Every parent has them but you don’t usually go around advertising the stupid shit that you do.”

Being human, as usual.

“These are the things that I love challenging myself to express,” she says. “Not the feelings that are pretty and romantic and sentimental but the experiences that are truly embarrassing and truly frightening. Truly ‘unadmirable’. Because that actually takes you to a deeper layer of connection with people. When you risk making yourself that vulnerable to an audience it takes the whole game to a new level. Because you’re trusting them with your failure and your humanity. That’s what sometimes makes the best art.”

Amanda Palmer performs at Brisbane Powerhouse, New Farm, as part of the Melt festival, February 3-4, brisbanepowerhouse.org; Tanks Art Centre, Cairns, March 11

Full Australian tour schedule

Originally published as Amanda Palmer plays Melt festival, Brisbane, February 3-4, 2017