Amanda Palmer
Amanda Palmer is an American singer, songwriter, pianist, and performance artist born in New York City on April 30, 1976.
She attended Lexington High School before going on to study at Wesleyan University. Alongside her work as a recording artist and musician, Palmer has worked across a wide range of creative forms, including playwriting, film directing, composing, blogging, and street art. That breadth of activity places her well outside the boundaries of any single discipline.
As a musician, Palmer has worked within the alternative rock genre, writing and performing her own material. She is also a pianist and a composer, roles that sit alongside her identity as a recording artist producing work in the English language. Performance art has been a distinct strand of her practice as well, operating as a serious creative pursuit in its own right rather than an extension of her music.
Beyond music, Palmer has maintained a presence as a writer and blogger, adding written work to her wider body of output. Her activity as a playwright and film director further extends the range of forms she has worked in throughout her career. Across all of these pursuits, her grounding in alternative rock remains a consistent thread connecting her work as a musician and songwriter.
Quotes by Amanda Palmer
Amanda Palmer's insights on:
The challenge in my life really is keeping the balance between feeling creatively energized and fulfilled without feeling overwhelmed and like I'm in the middle of a battlefield.
Those who can ask without shame are viewing themselves in collaboration with – rather than in competition with – the world. Asking for help with shame says: You have the power over me. Asking with condescension says: I have the power over you. But asking for help with gratitude says: We have the power to help each other.
There was a dance that everyone was doing that was heavily skewed with the power in one direction, but the dance was basically working, and then the dance got really disrupted with the first wave of feminism, and nobody found their footing yet – not the guys, not the women.
If you want the world to pay for projects, you have to be able to display why you’re worthy.
I get so many ideas for songs, but I’m so seldom disciplined enough to sit down and crank them out.
I draw the line at letting people into my songwriting cave. To me, that’s where the alchemy happens and where the mystery is.
If your writing is good, if it resonates, if it connects the dots for anybody out there, the lovers will come, the haters will come, support will come – sometimes in the form of money, sometimes in the form of something less expected – and it balances.