Amanda Palmer is a New Yorker by birth but spent two-and-a-half years as an accidental New Zealander. The musician visited in early 2020 to play four shows, for what was meant to be an eight-day stay. Then the pandemic escalated, the borders shut and she found herself marooned in New Zealand until 2022, together with her son, Ash. In that time, her marriage (to author Neil Gaiman) ended and her career as performer was halted by lockdowns. It was, she says, a very lonely and difficult period.
But now Palmer is sharing music written during that time, with a new EP called New Zealand Survival Songs. She is also returning to the antipodes for a run of tour dates in Australia and New Zealand beginning in late January.
Palmer now counts the pounamu (a type of greenstone found in New Zealand) she wears on a necklace as one of her most cherished possessions. Here, she tells us about the significance of that piece of jewellery, as well as the story of two other belongings – one she can’t part with, the other she can’t find.
What I’d save from my house in a fire
I’d probably grab my backpack filled with Practical Items, but I’d prefer to be the person who’d poetically – and possibly sarcastically – grabs both halves of a broken stick from my bookcase. I broke the stick in half at my best friend Anthony’s funeral. He’d asked me to do it when he was dying of cancer. It was a riff on his favourite saying: “Everything breaks.”
I talk too much and often get myself in trouble. He also used to tell me: “Say less.” So when it was my turn to speak at his funeral, I got up, said nothing and broke that goddamn stick over my head. Then, of course, because I cannot let go of anything, I enshrined the broken stick on a bookcase altar. It probably should be burned in a fire. Everything breaks.
My most useful object
I’ve been wearing a pounamu around my neck since leaving Aotearoa/New Zealand. (I actually have two: one circle and one Toki). Every morning, when putting a cold stone around my warm neck, I remember what I endured and who helped me.
An American will often ask or make a remark and I’ll tell them the story I so love, which is that a pounamu shouldn’t really be purchased for yourself. They’re more powerful when given – a concept close to my heart.
That often leads to the story of the specific Kiwis – Kya, Jamie – who took care of me and my kid at our darkest hour. They opened their kitchen tables and hearts to me when I was alone and overwhelmed by Covid, divorce, lockdown, no prediction, solo motherhood and navigating a new culture. There was a whole year there where I was just completely untethered.
I’ve never worn much jewellery, but these stones feel more like merit badges than ornaments. Ash sometimes puts my pounamu in his mouth to do what he calls “powering it up” so it doesn’t lose its magic, since he knows they were originally blessed in the ocean, on Waiheke. I love my weird kid.
The item I most regret losing
I bought a vintage Victorian-style wedding gown for $39.99 in a Boston thrift shop in 1998. I call it The Bride Dress, as opposed to a wedding gown, because it was my street performing costume before I wore it for its “intended” purpose.
For years, I stood in this dress, face painted white, on street corners atop a milk crate, and handed out flowers to strangers. It was an emotional job, I was my own boss, and I loved it. I went on a road trips with my film-maker friend Alina and wore the whole get-up in the most random American Places we could find, including the World’s Largest Field of Concrete Corn and the World’s Largest Christmas Store. She made a documentary about it called Bride-Tripping.
At a certain point, my music career with the Dresden Dolls became lucrative enough that I could stop street performing. The dress retired to a box until I pulled it out years later in an attempt to delight my now ex-husband, Neil.
I “did the bride” in Washington Square Park on his birthday, right after we’d first met. I was art-flirting; trying to woo and surprise him by telling him to meet me at a fountain in the park at 4pm. It was freezing, he showed up late accompanied by his literary agent, and the stunt seemed to embarrass and fluster them more than create actual delight. But, we later agreed, it made for a great story.
After we got engaged, I pulled on the bride gear once again for a surprise flash wedding in New Orleans, then wore the dress once for the final time a few months later, the day we awkwardly eloped in San Francisco. The next day, I headed off for a tour in Australia. I FedExed the dress to Neil’s house in Wisconsin for safekeeping and we just sort of lost track of it. It might be in a cardboard box in Neil’s old house under a pile of comic books.
I still think about The Bride Dress longingly and sometimes fantasise about hiring a dressmaker to recreate it.
But sometimes I think about the fact that both my mother and grandmother’s long, white, many-buttoned wedding gowns went mysteriously “missing” from the attic of my childhood home (my mother was completely distraught when she realised) and I think there might be larger forces at work.
My mom got divorced (it was for the best), I got divorced (it was for the best) and my grandmother probably should have got divorced (believe me, it would have been for the best). So maybe these dresses aren’t truly “missing”. Maybe they’re just quietly liberated, relieved and floating through space as a lacy trio, beckoning us gracefully towards a better world.
Amanda Palmer’s new EP is out 11 January; her tour kicks off 21 January. Details are on her website.
