hayley & AFP 4 lyfe (na na na na, hay hay, good bye)
good morning and greetings from new zealand, my loves.
this is the first time in history that i’ve let somebody else title one of my posts, and honestly, the poetry couldn’t be bigger. hayley titled it. 🙂 more on that below.
first of all, thank you for the beautiful feedback on the karaoke post….it’s been so long since i’ve written anything long, and with neil gone and the to-do list backed up, and ash waking up earlier and earlier and stealing the one hour in which i usually try to write in the morning, i feel like a rusty-ass writer. but i miss writing. a lot. this year has been a year of forced inhalation – all experience, all survival, all triage – and very little time to exhale, process, ponder, share my experiences through writing…which you know (if you know me) is my happy place, my therapy, the thing that sort of makes it all bearable. i’m used to battling that tightrope on tour – so much happening, so much to say, so little time, so tired – but this last 15 months of life has been a whole new level of trying to digest without having you, my community, my readers, as my digestive juices. it’s a good gauge: you’ll know i’m doing better as i clear more time to write. i’m doing better.
and now, onto the epic topic.
the big news is that our own dear hayley rosenblum, who has been on team AFP off and on for TWELVE YEARS, is taking a dream position INSIDE patreon. everyone else here at team AFP is thrilled for her.
it’s time. she needs to grow and expand in her role and this patreon job is going to be perfect for her and the skill-set she’s built up while working with a single artist. she’s going to continue to work for team AFP as a consultant, advisor and collaborator, and she’ll still be a huge part of this community, but she won’t be your point person anymore for your questions – she’s leaving the help desk.
lots of feels.
i am so, so, so proud of this girl.
below, she wrote up an epic story about her history with me, the dolls, and the ever-changing cast of team AFP. i have so many things that i could and will say about hayley, but the first thing – which may seem small but is big to me – is that watching the development of her actual writing and the manner in which she expresses herself has been it’s own joy to experience.
i’ve worked with a lot of people. so many managers, interns, agents, helpers, assistants. my work life has been a flowing river of human beings who come and go and help and leave and take other jobs and it’s just a part of running a large operation over a span of decades.
this current team i’ve had for the past five years or so: with jordan, hayley, michael and alex at the core – with a few other constant people around the edges like fannie and kelly – has been the best i’ve had in my career. this team has cared for me and for one another through a pandemic. this team supported me through the hardest and most emotionally and physically taxing tour of my life. they often did it from isolated rooms across the world. what they’ve helped me accomplish is nothing short of miraculous.
hayley has occupied a particularly unique and special part of my life, and there’s no way she’ll be replaced. the fact that she started out long, long ago as a dresden dolls fan and an intern was the most important building block of all. her aim was true, her desire to help musicians and help the closely-knit community that the dolls gave birth to was the reason i hired and kept her, and she learned on the job. she was loyal, sharp as a tack, and always led from the place that made it all possible: compassion and service. hayley always knew that by helping “me” accomplish any particular task, from setting up some whackadoodle art idea on the internet or in real life to helping with the slogging promotion of an album, it wasn’t really about “me”. or “her”. she is wise enough to know that the whole “songwriter does a weird project” eco-system serves a wider purpose, far beyond paying our collective salary, rent, and dental insurance. hayley, like me, knows that music and community saves lives. and she knows that music and the creation and distribution of music doesn’t ever happen by accidental magic. it takes an immense amount of work.
she’s been doing that work with me for twelve years. learning about the music industry. learning about the music media. learning about crowdfunding. learning about people. she and i have been doing this and learning all this together.
hayley’s skill set is unique. she has a computer-brain and uncanny ability to remember show dates, lost songs, merch designs and other things that have long slipped out of my cerebral cortex and into the drain. she has a collective knowledge that nobody else on earth possesses. it’s a relief to work with someone who is so incredibly SMART, willing to roll with any punch, and often with a smile on her face.
the photo that leads the top of this post (by Andrzej Liguz, taken on May 31, 2012) is from the DAY the kickstarter campaign for “theater is evil” closed….and you gotta read the story about that that hayley tells below. it says everything.
many of you have met hayley in the flesh, and many of you have exchanged comments or messages or emails with her, and many of you have maybe only met her through seeing her on some of the webcasts. if you’ve met her, you’ll understand what i mean when i say she is a giver. hayley has taken her position at this team in a way that is hard to explain, but let me put it this way: she has acted as my proxy many, many times for many souls in pain.
part of being on this team and doing this job is to know how to take care of people when they come to you in distress and needing help. who would have ever through that working in a rock star’s office would mean that you’d need to put on the hat of a therapist for so many people, but hayley has, and she’s done it with the kind of grace and humanity that has sometimes brought me to my knees. there have been days where i am convinced hayley is a better person than i am. but as we know, it’s not like that, it doesn’t work that way. the truth is closer to the fact that we take turns holding up the walls of this circus tent, and the only way to keep the whole ting flowing is to know our place at any given time. there are times when hayley has held the hand of someone when i was just not there to hold it. there are times hayley has needed to walk away to protect her own mental health. this is the way it goes. we’ve often taken turns, and through doing that, and also through encouraging one another to put self-care first, we’ve managed to stay alive – and hopefully live to fight another day.
and at the risk of getting very personal here, let me say this about hayley: her immense growth in the department of self-care over the last twelve years has been inspiring to me. learning how to have your own boundaries around work, ambition, time on and off, self-care and the like is not easy…i have my own struggles with it daily. i’ve watched hayley truly step into her full stature in these departments over the past few years, and it makes me incredibly proud not just to work with her, but to be her friend. i told her in an email last week: she has often, directly and indirectly, made me a better person, a person with more integrity. it just doesn’t get any better than that.
i’m gonna miss her.
but also….
the best part right now is this: it’s not like she’s taking a job as an overseas investment banker, and she’s not running off to join a vegan sneaker company as their online brand and community manager.
she’s gonna stay right in the close family, and in new york for now, and she’s going to be working with the company i talk to and utilize every single day of my waking life. she and i will keep colluding and cooking things up.
in a way, and as i joked with her when she broke the news, i feel like i’m not so much losing a daughter as gaining a son, or whatever that engagement cliche is.
hayley is family to me. so anything that comes out of this, whatever new, wild collaborations we cook up now that she’s harnessing some power over at the mothership, it’s all good with me. i think we may have some incredible things in store.
i do ask your patience, as patrons. jordan, his assistant steve in sydney, alex, me and michael are going to try to fill the holes that hayley is leaving as we work on a transition, and YES, we may be hiring, but no time soon. i’m too wrecked to re-structure right now, so hold onto your resumes and gimme a second, that day will come soon enough. right now just know that we’re operating minus one hayley.
please help congratulate this spectacular human being, hayley rosenblum, on her new job.
and please leave comments and memories, and there’s a thread over here on the shadowbox to post photos and lovings.
and hayley, may this next chapter be full of growth, wonder, learning, and more love, music and community all around for everybody.
you’re always part of this family, for life.
….
And now some (8,000+?!!) words from Hayley:
Hello dear patrons. Are you sitting down?
No? Please, pull up a chair and take a seat, you may want to grab a hankie if you’re known to shed a sentimental sniffle like I am and a cool beverage, water, wine, whatever you fancy.
This post will be long and full of heart. It will most certainly be the hardest Patreon post I’ve ever had to help Amanda write, well, the hardest post I’ve ever helped Amanda post… since well, I’m writing my own words here and she’ll write her own, too.
I made the title of this post a placeholder “hayley & AFP 4 lyfe” as a cheeky note to make it clear that this was the draft Amanda and I were working on together. It took me days to write, and in the middle, I laughed at myself for coming up with a silly pun – the chorus of “Hey Jude” seemed to fit perfectly, so I added it as a second segement to the placeholder. Amanda liked it, and kept it. I asked, “are you sure you want to use this?” And she said “I like it!!” and so it goes.
As Amanda does, I’ll post the tl;dr and get straight to the point, but I hope you read this through and I hope you leave comments below sharing your favorite memories or times we’ve interacted.
The tl;dr – today, Friday, June 11th will be my last day working full-time with Amanda and Team AFP. On Monday I will join Patreon as their Head of Online Community. The why and what’s next for me is explained below.
But first, it’s story time. I want to share with you who I am and where I came from, and what it all means. Where I’ve been with Amanda and where I’m going.
THE BEGINNING:
If you’ve been around in the AFP or Dresden Dolls community for awhile now, any time in the last 15 or so years, you’ve may have seen me somewhere, maybe up front at New York City Dresden Dolls and AFP shows.
Or maybe you first met me on the first versions of The Shadowbox, where I went by the screen name handles “Ours” or “Fiasco!”. Or more likely these days, you probably recognize me from Amanda’s Patreon posts and the team dispatch section of the monthly Althings, and from running around at concerts, usually in the NY/Boston area, and as of late, a little more globally.
Or if you’ve written into the patronhelp@amandapalmer.net email or asked questions online, you may have received an email or a tweet from me.
Or maybe you’ve seen and appreciated my photography of Amanda over the last several years.
This is my favorite photograph I’ve ever taken of Amanda to date, and one of my favorite images I’ve made ever. It was taken on November 10, 2016 in Albany, NY as Amanda learned from the audience that Leonard Cohen just passed away, she fell to the stage instantly in gried. I didn’t hear the news clearly at the time but I instinctively hit my shudder and captured such a pure, ephemeral and intimate moment.
Or maybe you don’t know me, and that’s okay, but I’ve been behind the scenes helping Amanda do amazing things for the last 12 years and I’ve been an invisible hand for Amanda helping to hold up this community. Helping to sustain her connection with you and this very Patreon as a space to foster it.
In those 12 years working with Amanda, a lot has changed. Everything changes, as they say. The internet has changed, the make up of Team AFP has changed, how Amanda funds and shares her art has changed, and my role on the team has twisted and turned and changed along the way through each ebb and flow. And it’s about to change again, and before I go off telling the world, it’s important to me and Amanda that we tell you first.
Before I tell you what it is that I have to tell you, I want to give you a history, some context of who I am and where I came from in entering this punk cabaret.
It’s important to me to give you the full story so you understand a little bit more about my role behind the scenes, and what my work has meant to Amanda, and to you very patrons.
Some of this my be interesting to you, some may be boring, but it is all true.
My registration confirmation for the original Shadowbox, January 2006
In August 2020 I was having conversations with Amanda and Brian about the Dolls’ Return to Paradise live concert film, and my mind short circuited at the fact that I was on the phone with Brian, and then Amanda called me and the moment I stared at my phone to change lines and I saw them both on my screen brought me back to being a teenager playing their music, it’s like I had a flashback that chilled my bones and zoomed me into the present.
Those down-to-earth moments happen to me from time to time, and I always appreciate them reminding me of my roots: as someone who truly appreciates the art these artists put out, rather than just a cog in the machine getting a paycheck signed by some band.
Sometimes you stop and you pinch yourself.
HOW I DISCOVERED THE DRESDEN DOLLS: Hayley as a fan
I first became aware of The Dresden Dolls around 2004.
I was in high school at the time and I used to listen to a local radio station as my alarm clock every morning, and every morning programmed to a T, Coin-Operated Boy would pop on. It was catchy, I liked it.
But then I’d also stay up late, as teenagers are wont to do, and I’d watch MTV2 to catch indie and alternative music videos, where I remember seeing the Girl Anachronism video on late during the1-2am programming block.
And I learned that Trent Reznor saw that video and invited them to open for NIN on tour later that year. And then a friend of mine on LiveJournal named Erin would talk about the Dolls and we’d share excitement about liking them (fun fact – I met Erin in person for the first time at the Dolls show in Washington DC a few years ago, we’ve been friends on the internet for 15 years and finally, the band that we geeked out about brought us together IRL).
And a friend I looked up to in high school loved NIN and thereby The Dresden Dolls and we bonded over that.
And my best friends would constantly sing the Dolls’ songs and we’d go to shows together in NYC. I found a Dolls shirt in Hot Topic at the Mall and I wore it all the time. I joined The Shadowbox forum just before Yes, Virginia was to come out and I planted my roots as a regular, and by the time Amanda was touring solo I would be helpful however I could.
I started logging transcripts of the Twitter Q&As Amanda was doing while bored in a van on tour.
I became an active part of the Dresden Dolls fan community, I started volunteer moderating the forum. I even joined the Roadrunner Records street team to help promote Yes, Virginia in 2006.
Here’s a picture of me tabling for a live concert music club at our Spring Fling my first year of college, if you look closely you can see right in front of my left hand I was passing out a stack of promotional Yes, Virginia CDs (the cover photo is Amanda and Brian in a sunflower field)
Then, as many high schoolers are wont to do, I graduated and went to college and while at college I hosted a radio show with my twin sister.
It was called Penguins In The Desert, our tag line was “The best show on WHRW…. that’s hosted by twins” (we were the only twins at the station but it was a really good show IMO).
Fellow community members on The Shadowbox would tune into the station’s internet stream regularly, making requests and helping us break station listening records week after week, it was a thrilling time. It’s worth while to remember in these days this was a time BEFORE on-demand streaming (Spotify, AppleMusic, YouTube etc.) so it was a community event to be able to tune into a radio station and listen together and have requests honored on air.
One doesn’t become Amanda Fucking Palmer, one just is. A note I published on Facebook excited about booking the interview and taking input on questions.
During my time at the radio station, I reached out to a lot of my favorite artists to interview them and had a great time doing that.
Amanda was at the top of my bucket list of people to interview, I wrote to her then manager and had lots of back and forth.
It took a real long time to set up and it finally happened on April 20, 2008 just before we were to leave for spring break (we had our suitcases in the station to hop a coach bus right after).
Amanda Fucking Palmer (as I called her in excitement, before knowing it would soon be her official nickname), newly recovering from surgery to remove nodes on her vocal cords, was finally available to make time to chat on air.
It was thrilling to pick up the phone and hear an artist that I loved answer back, my face turned red, and my sister snapped a picture of me in the studio blushing in the pre-interview where you tell the artist how it’s going to work before you put them on air.
Amanda even recorded a station ID (where she says your name and identifies the radio station’s call letters, it’s something that’s required by the FCC each hour so it’s standard to record artists saying it so it spices things up).
If you want a trip down memory lane, you can listen to the full interview here, the station ID comes in at 25:35 in:
https://soundcloud.com/penguins-in-the-desert/amanda-palmer-interview-with
At that point, Amanda recognized me from The Shadowbox, and she knew that a lot of her fans, a lot of people from her community, were tuning into my show (I had the social media promotion think down in the very beginning days of social media). So as a treat for her community, she divulged some BIG NEWS to us before it went public on major press outlets and before she even shared it in her blog.
She mentioned that Ben Folds wasn’t happy with the first mix of her upcoming solo record, Who Killed Amanda Palmer so it was now in a second mixing phase.
She mentioned working on a project with author Neil Gaiman as a companion to the record (the Who Killed Amanda Palmer hardcover coffee table book).
And she used this interview to announce for the first time the release date of the record, September 16, 2008 (this date would turn out to be significant later on, too: Amanda and Neil’s son Ash was born on September 16th, as was our dear colleague Michael McComiskey!).
To be honest, I didn’t know who Neil was at the time, but all the comic loving station members listening in the lobby came in and squealed about him and Sandman to me. And they sure were right, that was indeed a juicy bit of information.
Two years later, Neil would propose to Amanda on New Year’s Day 2010 on a walk outside the Cloud Club the morning after Amanda performed a New Year’s Eve show with the Boston Pops, when they returned inside they saw me downstairs working away and told me some exciting news. Amanda held out her hand to show me a sharpie drawn ring on her finger.
They were so excited, they didn’t realize it was on her right hand.
I think I was the first person to hear that news.
We had a little brunch at the top of the Cloud Club and Amanda’s mom made her a “Happy Boston Pops” cake. It became an impromptu engagement party.
Photo by me, taken on my old, original iPhone 3, that was a Team AFP hand-me-down. my first smart phone. Come to think of it, I think Amanda’s wearing the same sweater she’d would wear 9 years later, in that very room, shooting the Voicemail for Jill music video…. this attention to detail and brain full of trivia facts has served Amanda and the team well over the years….
photo by me, taken in the Cloud Club during the Voicemail for Jill music video filming. Yep, I was right, that’s the sweater.
I digress, back to the story:
Here I am wearing my first Dresden Dolls shirt, the one I picked up from the mall Hot Topic, holding the self-titled album in the station to play “Good Day” because we just broke a listener stream record.
After Who Killed Amanda Palmer was finally released and before I graduated college and left the radio station, I photographed the CD in the radio station’s record library (on a film camera) and used this image as my avatar on the old Shadowbox.
I wanted to always remember how special the radio station was to me, and how this record and my interview with Amanda was so significant to me and my show.
WHRW’s record library, section “Black 9” of the CD shelves
One of the biggest honors of my life, which shows you how sentimental I am, is when the Evelyn Evelyn album came out I was preparing the college radio station promotional mailing for it, and I was able to send a CD to my old station. It meant the world to me to have an album with my name in the liner notes (credits) sitting in that music library, where “it all began” for me.
Our radio interview had me over the moon.
At this time I was friendly with some of Amanda’s staff members, Bill H, Sean, and Beth, we hung out on the internet and we connected in different ways, we became friends.
I would help Beth with some projects where she needed extra hands and I was known to be dependable. Amanda started to notice me and the role I played within her community, I’m sure that was also influenced by her team also noticing.
Here I am with a few friends I met on The Shadowbox helping Amanda and Beth pack merch packages for WKAP on the floor of the Cloud Club in Boston, the day after we took a bus up to see Amanda play a secret show she raffled pay-what-you-can tickets for on Twitter in June 2009.
So that concludes the context of HAYLEY IS A FAN OF THE DRESDEN DOLLS AND AMANDA PALMER chapter of my origin story….
…
Now on to where my journey on Team AFP began, and the ups and downs of the last decade by Amanda’s side:
I started working with Amanda in October 2009, I graduated college the previous May right as the Great Recession financial crisis started and I was on the fence about going to law school. Most of my cohorts started graduate programs in lieu of getting jobs because there just weren’t any jobs hiring new graduates at entry level, it was a time where people with years and years of experience were scooping up the newcomer positions for pay cuts simply because things were dire.
I didn’t want to be a lawyer, but I thought if I went to law school I could study entertainment law and work my way into music management that way. It would have been a long, expensive and uncertain process…luckily Amanda intercepted and by way of luck (it seemed), she offered me a position to intern in her then manager’s office to be a liaison for her non-traditional ways of doing everything and to take the best interests of her community to heart – after all, I was a long time member of her fan community.
In September 2009, Amanda sent me an email that ultimately ended up changing my life:
I was literally tasked to be the interim between the traditional management music world, and Amanda’s non-traditional way of doing things to care for and build her community.
I was the community liaison in the “business” of it all.
This is the first selfie/picture we took together after Amanda had me join the team, we were in a wine shop picking out bottles to bring to dinner which was at a restaurant that let us BYOB.
Fun fact: there was one bottle of wine leftover that night, Amanda gave it to me. I still have it, having never felt like there was the right occasion to open it. I told her this the other day and she said when she’s back in New York we can pop that baby open and see what’s inside…. maybe we’ll recreate a new version of this selfie with it first…
Photo booth picture with Amanda and former Team AFP member Sean. I’m wearing Amanda’s sunglasses, she’s wearing my glasses.
I didn’t know it at the time but that dinner/drinks team time was a test of sorts, to make sure I would vibe with the team and could fit right in.
Amanda’s old assistant Beth told me, after the fact, that she and Amanda went to the bathroom together to assess whether they’d have me stick around for the team talk, or depart early while they got down to business. I guess I passed with flying colors!
My intern stint lasted 3 of the 6 months it was offered as I quickly made my way into a staff position and eventually when Amanda got off Roadrunner, ditched her manager, and went completely independent in 2010, back to her DIY roots, she took me with her and as a very small team the four of us made magic, and internet history and did everything the scrappy but impactful way, a million miles an hour before the word “crowdfunding” was even coined.
Here’s the first picture Team AFP 2009 took together, at said BYOB restaurant. From left to right: me, Beth, Amanda and Sean.
Those first years were hard.
And the years after that were even harder. I helped Amanda settle in with a new management team in 2011 leading up to the release of Theatre Is Evil and the Kickstarter to end all Kickstarters, but at the time she hired that management team, that management company hired their intern to be a day-to-day and that bumped me, and Amanda hired her then tour manager, Eric, to work with everyone. There wasn’t really a place for me at the table anymore.
One day, nearly 2 years to the date Amanda first offered me a job, I asked to have some face time with her while she was in town, which I assumed would be solo catch up time, until Eric asked me what the plans were out loud in the office sitting next to me. He wasn’t on my email chain coordinating my face time meeting with Amanda. I should have put 2 and 2 together when Amanda’s then assistant, SuperKate told me to make sure to pick a place to meet that *I* wanted to go….
And so I walked into the after dinner drink meeting and received the news that would’ve blind-sided me if I didn’t already start picking up the clues.
I was being demoted from a full-time team member, to a part-time position.
It had nothing to do with me, it’s just with the new management team, it didn’t make sense to have her own management assistant. I was crushed. I spent 6 months in the new manager’s office teaching them everything they needed to know about Amanda and her world, bringing ideas to the table for her Kickstarter project with Neil (An Evening With Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer) and was never once asked by Amanda, or Team AFP, what my read on that team was or what my opinion/perspective of that time was like.
This is something that I’ve since spoken to at length with Amanda about and we’ve buried that hatchet and she’s apologized, it was a very wild time, a whirlwind for her and I know if she had to do things again at that point in her career she’d have done them A LOT differently. Had she had my perspective on the ground, maybe things would’ve turned out differently.
I also learned, from proof reading her book, The Art of Asking, that she was going through a very difficult personal time, having just had a medically induced abortion in Edinburgh, as described in the book and the There Will Be No Intermission tour.
Learning that – after the fact, when she was ready to tell the world about it – I realized a lot more was happening a million miles an hour for her at that bar table than I even knew.
photo by my sister Jeri
I was invited as a guest to attend Amanda’s big end-of-her Kickstarter blow out countdown party on May 31, 2012.
She had hired a professional live stream crew to broadcast the event to people all around the world, sent out a big press release about it and thousands and thousands of people were gearing up to tune in, it was a very publicized event.
Except the camera crew was disorganized and not well-equipped for the task and the webcast was hanging on a thread about to be abruptly canceled after being delayed for over an hour….while Amanda’s team tried to figure out what to do.
Here’s where I came in, I’m a person who is obnoxiously prepared and willing to do whatever it takes to make shit happen, so I stepped up and stepped in.
I had my laptop with me (thanks Sean for suggesting to carry it). I got an extension cord to attach my power supply, an Ethernet cord to get online and called Sean to walk me through how to sign into Amanda’s webcast platform (at the time it was Ustream).
For the 6 hour + party meant to document the countdown of the end of her record breaking Theatre Is Evil Kickstarter campaign and to thank each backer in a performance art demonstration, I held my laptop up and made the webcast happen.
I literally held the portal to Amanda’s fans around the world in my hands.
I feel like this moment says a lot about me, and a lot about my role on the team.
Even if it’s not my job and I don’t have a designated role, I show up and become more than useful. Throughout my tenure on the team, I have often thought of Dante’s famous repetitive line from Kevin Smith’s film, Clerks, “I’m not even supposed to be here today!” and yet, here I am, saving the day and connecting Amanda to her community. If you want a real trip down memory lane, check out the video stream archive.
Because I’m a nerd, for perspective, here’s the video broadcast at the moment Amanda is bending down towards me and my laptop:
At the end of 2011 I moved from being a full time AFP management assistant to a part time position focusing mostly on community needs.
I helped sort fan mail and archive photos, including helping to source and credit the images used for Amanda’s TED Talk and The Art of Asking book.
…..
99.99% of the emails sent to letters@amandapalmer.net or physically mailed in are beautiful and touching. But you never know when you’re going to encounter the elusive and nasty piece of hate mail.
Above is a screen shot of a shitty email sent to Amanda’s fan mail email address from someone mad about her “Poem for Dzhokhar” – his full name and email are blacked out to protect the guilty.
She received a lot of heat for that poem, and she got a lot of heat about other kerfuffles, like people not understanding her invitations for fans who played horns or strings to jump on stage with her and the Grand Theft Orchestra.
There were even a few death/violent threats the came in over the years.
The thing you may not realize, because how could you possibly know?, is that whenever Amanda was in a kerfuffle, or whenever an angry mob decided to target her for something, I was the first line of defense, her team was a wall for her.
I was a shield and I had a serious duty to report and escalate anything that seemed like a serious threat. The truth is that for an artist with a sizeable following and lots of art to make, they task staff to sort and pass along fan mail, they simply cannot read and respond to every message they receive so they need help sorting it all out and filtering out anything that is best directed to someone else – ie: a manager or booking agent. And since that was a part of my job for a long time, and because I was tasked with helping to coordinate “horntheft” (the internal name for volunteer fans that wanted to play on stage city by city during the Theatre Is Evil tour, “theft” referring to “Grand Theft Orchestra” but now, 9 years later I see the ironic joke in the band name beyond it’s original pun, simply because people got cranky for misunderstanding what “horntheft” was all about – giving her fan community a chance of a lifetime).
I often felt the brunt of the harshness, it took a toll on me and I felt very alone at the time. I was the armor getting chinked by these awful messages, protecting Amanda from it the best that I could, and I felt like I couldn’t use my voice to talk about what I thought of the whole thing because it would be taken as an official statement from one of Amanda’s employees and on top of it all, I wasn’t exactly in a place to feel financially satisfied with the arrangement I was in at the time. During those “part time years” my mantra was “I am doing this for the love, not for the money.”
Sometimes Amanda herself didn’t realize that it was also hard on the team while it was hard for her, the very person who is the target of online bullying/harassment/shit spewing.
This can wear you down in so many ways. It’s hard being a reinforcement, but you do what you gotta do because you want to protect your boss, you want to protect your fan community, and when you are tasked to do this kind of work, it’s just part of the job.
So if you ever read The Art of Asking or re-watch clips from the There Will Be No Intermission tour and get to the points where Amanda talks about all the “kerfuffles” that flung arrows her way, keep in mind there was a tiny team, including me, feeling some of those blunt blows in real time too, and there still is a tiny team trying damn hard to protect her now, too.
An email I sent in Oct 2012 to Amanda’s manager, to explain that 10 hours a week was not nearly enough time to tend to all of Amanda’s community needs.
(Amanda, this is the first time you’re seeing this, and I hope this enlightens you about how hard this time was for me and how difficult it was for me to navigate the red tape of that time. We made it through to the other side, but hot damn…).
{oh, hayley….i see you. and love you. and i’m loving reading all of this. – afp}
While I was working part time with Amanda (maxed at 10 hours a week by her management), I worked some odd jobs until eventually finding my place at Kickstarter, as their first Music Community hire in 2013.
I was there for 3.5 years, and I learned a lot about tech platforms, how they prioritize, and how in a multi-disciplinary company you have to fight tooth and nail to represent a artists and get them the things they need to build their community and treat their fans right, especially when their needs conflict with the needs (or resources) devoted to other users of the platform, other art disciplines.
During my time at Kickstarter, I also felt like I found my place, I learned and believed that I was talented at what I did, that I really had this “Fan Community” thing down, that I had thoughts and advice and strategies that were useful to more than just one artist, and to more than just the one community I knew so intimately well. I felt my value as a teammate and as a collaborator, and I learned a lot from my colleagues across all disciplines. I felt like an expert in my field and it felt good. I learned a lot about myself, and a lot about the world in that time. I began speaking at music conferences and authoring best practices in real time that literally became the foundation of crowdfunding strategy as we know it today and I developed a sense of self, what I could offer and what I could do. I felt like for the first time in my life, I grew into my own.
I was building my own path, people knew me as me, and not as a twin, and not as “Hayley from Team AFP”.
I left Kickstarter in July 2016, I was unexpectedly laid off – along with quite a few colleagues (something I don’t think was really publicly known at the time), they eliminated my position.
They were in flux and did what seemed to be a years’ long company restructure, reorganized their executive team, and eventually started down a path that shook up leadership (which included the departure of their co-founder CEO) and from reports around the net and from staff there it seems that that time created some instability internally and extremely painful growing pains.
At the time, this absolutely crushed me, I was devastated to lose the chance to do something I loved so much – working with artists and encouraging them to connect with their fans. I was lost. I didn’t know what was next for me.
Photos by me, The Dresden Dolls at the Ford Amphitheater at Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY, August 27,2016
That August I saw The Dresden Dolls play their epic show at Coney Island, and I had a brief chat with Amanda and SuperKate backstage, where Amanda learned that I was looking for my next gig. She said something off the cuff about finding space for me back on the team. And sure enough, two months later in October 2016 I re-joined Amanda’s team full time.
It was a bit of a rocky start, trying to find my place and settle in to use my skills and talents and all the growth I had in my time away, but eventually I fit like a glove and was empowered to tend to the Patreon and the massive community Amanda built here.
Everything I learned and knew about working at an art focused tech company informed my empathy about how Patreon operated and why it was hard to get features or requests we had.
Once I had my lane and the team was clearly tasked we doubled the number of patrons, tripled them, and eventually went from 3,000 patrons to 15,000+ patrons. We went from releasing 1 Thing a month to releasing at least 3, we built up this Patreon to bring in enough money to sustain Amanda’s business, outside of all the other work she was doing (merch, tour, selling music etc.). I felt my growth, as a person, and as a team member and rolled with it to service Amanda and her community to the best of my ability. I felt the tremendous privilege of being the advocate of our community, something I do not take lightly, and I’ve weathered many storms with Amanda right by her side.
I felt respected and knew that I brought a lot to the team’s table, more than I ever had before.
Here I am posing with one of the cards Amanda used in her first Patreon video to announce that I was back on the team.
Original Amanda below:
These last 5 years have been incredible.
It feels like we released a million Things (I counted, I’ve helped release over 140 official Patreon paid-posts which is mind-blowing when you realize only 19 paid-posts were released before I joined the team).
Working on the release of There Will Be No Intermission was my greatest work achievement, to have sat at a table in London and been part of the meeting deciding the release date, all the way through helping out at in-stores on the tour, taking group photos of patrons at our patron-only meet-ups, and working on music videos, and everything in between, it was truly the most substantial work I’ve ever been apart of. I am so appreciative of everything I’ve gained along the way, and for all the friendly faces I met on the road.
I made it a silly tradition to take a selfie with everyone right after I took the group patron photos on the TWBNI tour dates I went on. This was the first one I did in Washington, DC. (The selfie tradition originated here because it’s the mother fucking White House and I had never seen it before and wanted to be in the picture with everyone) in Washington, DC. Those dogs though…. Here’s my Twitter thread with all of my TWBNI patron group shot selfies
A fun fact, the very first time I ever flew in an airplane was in December 2009, when Amanda flew me to Orlando to help be a surrogate tour manager for a show she was playing at The Social. And since then, she helped me accomplished two dream travel experiences not just once, but twice each: She took me took me to London twice (once for The Dresden Dolls Halloween shows, and then again for the end of TWBNI UK/EU tour), and I made a trip to Australia in August 2019 to speak at the BIGSOUND conference representing the work I do with the team and our community.
Thinking that was a once in a life time opportunity, I sure was surprised to go back to Oz again 5 months later when she invited me with only a couple weeks notice to go back to help wrap up the end of the TWBNI world tour in Australia in February 2020. I came home to New York RIGHT BEFORE the pandemic lockdown started, so I often reflect back at how lucky we were to have the team together in London with Alex, and to have spent time with Amanda, Jordan and Michael in Australia, because it was the last pre-pandemic time we had together and it’s few and far between for us all to be in the same room anyway.
This is a photo I took on my iPhone, mostly so Amanda could send it to Neil as a wave hello, of her kissing a fan’s tattoo of “Death” from Sandman. This photo ended up making it into her TED Talk, and eventually The Art of Asking book. It was taken at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston, MA in December 12, 2010
I’ve always said that my favorite part of this work is watching Amanda at the signing lines, meeting fans, and seeing the expressions on their faces, because in that moment, all the emails, all the spreadsheets and all the hard, hard work pays off. You see the physical manifestation of WHY you break your back, you feel the meaning and emotion in the flesh, a reward you don’t experience when you’re at a computer all day typing away.
When you dedicate your work to helping Amanda get her art out there, when you do everything you can to keep the train running on time, it’s all so fans can connect with the art in a meaningful way. I started my journey as a fan, and I’ve never taken that for granted as that perspective informs everything that I do on this team. Getting the art out to the people who need it, to people who may very well get more fuel to keep on keeping on, that’s everything.
On New Year’s Day 2009, as a fan, I took a photo with Amanda and then the next year I was on stage with her as a member of her team.
So ever since then I’ve tried to make it a tradition to snap a photo with her when I’m working one of her NYE shows or every time we complete a music video or special event.
Here’s a few snaps from along the way. From left tor right: after her human statue performance in front of the NYPL for the Truth or Consequences Patreon project, New Year’s Eve 2016, after filming the Mother music video, after filming the Drowning the Sound music video, after filming the Mr. Weinstein Will See You Now music video, at the Mermaid Parade 2018, and the last selfie I took with Amanda so far – backstage at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney Australia Feb. 2020 right before I headed back to New York.
So this history post leads up to today, and why I’m writing this epic post about who I am and how I’ve been threading the marionette strings of this community for a long time.
The next chapter of my journey is about to start, and it’s not a decision I made lightly or without lots of consideration. I have the need to spread my wings in a way that I can’t quite do now, I want to grow and be challenged in new and different ways, I have so much that I want to learn, and perhaps highlighted by a year and a half of isolation especially, I have the need to be around people in a physical space and work together in person.
I feel the desire to do my own thing and show the world who I am and what I can do, I want to help more people and build more things. I want to not just move the needle of this world, I want to push it.
I have realized what I need personally, and for the first time in a long, long time I am centering on that.
Michael and I driving a shit ton of merch to the Dresden Dolls Halloween show in Washington DC.
OKAY HAYLEY SO WHY DID I JUST READ A MILLION WORDS, WHAT’S THIS POST ABOUT?
With that, this is all a big lead up to let you, Amanda’s dear patrons, the people I have served so diligently and with such heart and dedication, that by the end of this week I will be hanging up my full time duties as a member of Team AFP.
But as Amanda can attest, I cannot hang up my Team AFP hat for good, it’s glued to my head.
I will continue to be in her orbit and we will cook up plans for me to work with her and The Dresden Dolls in some kind of way, at some point(s) in time.
To celebrate the release of There Will Be No Intermission, we went out to dinner at Amanda’s friend’s restaurant called Racine’s, we slowed down to have an amazing meal before hustling the worldwide tour. We gave Pascaline the very first copy of the record, hot off the press.
From right to left: Michael, Jordan, Amanda, Pascaline, Me
Amanda has been an incredible human, a compassionate boss and completely understanding of how hard this year has been for all of us, how the pandemic has knocked us all on our asses in different ways, at different times, and repeatedly. She has especially been so generous to me – often, but especially this year. I have so much gratitude for her for trusting me with the keys to her community, for letting me be part of this ride and the punk cabaret, for seeing in me all the potential and wild ideas and heart that I have.
I am thankful for everything I learned from her, and throughout all of my time with various members of Team AFP and Team Dresden Dolls. Amanda surrounds herself with good people, and she does all of this for the purest reasons and the highest integrity – the whole team does.
So what does this mean, Hayley….where will you go and what will you be doing?
Well, it’s almost too much on the nose that it seems unbelievable…
My next chapter will start as the Head of Online Community at Patreon, a role that seems like it was literally made for me. I want to be clear here that my decision to pivot my career was mine and mine alone, Patreon did not poach me, and they wanted to be very considerate of their relationship with Amanda, as did I. I made it a point not to accept the job without having Amanda’s blessing, and knowing how supportive Amanda is and has been to me in the past, she told me, and told me to quote her on this, “There is nothing but pride and excitement for [me] in this new role.” Thank you Amanda for always having my back, even and especially when it shakes things up.
My job at Patreon will be to manage their online spaces, bring creators together and create educational materials in service of helping onboard creators to the platform and form a collective community. I’ve been tending this community for so long, it’s going to be a big challenge to bring together thousands of artists and creators to serve the whole collective creator community on Patreon, and this is a challenge I am ready to take on. I got my start in online community spaces as a teenager, frequenting message boards for bands I liked and eventually becoming a moderator, or administrator, of them (The Shadowbox included).
I started my own street teams and joined many official street teams with street work and digital promotion missions. I have actively been part of online spaces for 20 years (which feels really weird to quantify).
I have spent the last few years influencing Patreon, providing feedback on features, reporting tons of bugs and wonky things around the site, urging them to better serve Amanda and other creators, and adding value to what they do in the shared mission I have with Amanda – to create a space on the internet for artists to connect with their fans and sustain their career on their own terms. And in that mission, this is my next venture to try to accomplish it – for what I believe to be all the right reasons. An authenticity that is much needed, in my opinion, in this space.
Jack Conte, the CEO and co-founder of Patreon use to host a monthly Crowdcast series called “Hang Time with Jack” where he would answer questions and chat with creators/creator teams about different things. I was invited in November 2018 to join in for a segment to talk about how we were using their new Reddit integration (it was in Beta at the time and is now currently defunct). Imagine my surprise when I went to Patreon’s integration page and saw a screen shot of myself used specifically as an example of their integration with Crowdcast. Of all the people, of all the Hang Times, they chose to use my mug as a feature. Weird. But cool?
For the longest time I had 100 different plates spinning in the air as we moved from project to project to project.
Sometimes I felt like the superglue holding Amanda, and the team together, which is a heavy weight to carry.
But right now, as Amanda has mentioned many times, she’s slowing down more, and more, and even stopping, in a way that she hasn’t quite done ever before. And with this slow down I felt that this transition was possible and perhaps well-timed in that there is a lot of restructuring happening already, and it’ll be easy to pass the ball, rather than drop it. So in the coming days you may see more of Alex and Michael and others on the team reply to you or help you with whatever it is you need.
I like to say that I grew up with Amanda and the Punk Cabaret, and there will never be enough words to fully capture my gratitude, and the privilege I have felt to be part of all of this, and to have the chance to play a role in getting Amanda’s art out the door and into your hands/eyes/ears/hearts and providing influence in all of this.
Celebrating my 30th birthday in Woodstock with Ash and our AFP art family (not pictured: Neil, Amanda, Michael, Sxip and Coco) as we first welcomed Michael to the team. This was also the weekend we spontaneously recorded and filmed The Mess Inside music video.
I am staying put in New York and will not be a stranger.
I will be at every AFP/DD area gig I can get to, I will do whatever I can to keep Amanda’s engine running and this community vibrant.
My AFP email address (hayley@amandapalmer.net) will stay active, but I will not be as attentive to it as you all may be used to me to so please reach out to patronhelp@amandapalmer.net if you need help with something – Alex is on hand to help you there.
If you need anything on the business side of Amanda’s world, management@amandapalmer.net will always be the go to place for that.
If you want to follow me along on my adventures, and maybe even peep more of my concert photography (I have a bounty of unseen photos of Amanda I ought to go into my archive to share!), you can follow me online on social media, my handle is @HayleyFiasco everywhere (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook).
And to close this long missive out, Amanda wanted me to share this photo of us that she took in the Melbourne Airport in February 2020.
It was the first time I ever visited an airport lounge, we planted ourselves at a table and we and released the Bushfire charity flash record, if I remember correctly.
She wrote one of the sweetest photo captions about me I’ve ever read:
THIS ONE RIGHT HERE. @hayleyfiasco has joined me & @mwmccomiskey in australia for a long leg of this tour and…just in time to get totally sideswiped and help us put out a last-minute how-did-that-even-happen??? bushfire charity record with everything that goes along with being our own label and releasing an epic offering. 🤘🔥dude. @hayleyfiasco does so many jobs for team AFP…photographer, patron concierge, fan help desk, community therapist, management assistant, random-task figure-outer, archivist, live history and photo outbrain rememberer, asset organizer, copy editor….it would take me 100 posts to list them all, but mostly, she’s got my fuckin back and moves at the speed of light to take care of this community, often while being totally invisible, like a muso ninja. she’s an amazing and patient and superkind human being and has been working for and with me and the @dresdendolls community for ten years on and off now in various roles. hayley: you’re gold and we fuckin love you. also, watch out adelaide. three members of team AFP are about to see what you’re made of. do not disappoint. see you tomorrow @ bonython hall. we will be there in force. 💃🔥💃🔥💃🔥🍷
….
To say it’s been a privilege and an honor to work with all of Team AFP in the trenches, and to connect with all of you patrons – virtually and IRL – would be an understatement. Everyone on the team is extremely talented and they do amazing work, every damn day. It’s not an easy job, but it sure is something special to do it with some of the best humans you’ll ever meet. I am sure there are only great things ahead for the team, for Amanda, and for you all – our community, and hopefully for me, too. You are everything.
Amanda, I’ve got your back always and I’m honored to know that you have mine. To hear that someone who inspires me daily is inspired by me, in a feeling there are no words to fully describe. Thank you for making art that matters, for bringing me into your life and you int mine, for building a community so kind and authentic, and for trusting me all these years time and time again. Thank you for everything.
This is not a good bye, it’s a see you later.
Until our paths cross again, much love and much respect,
Hayley
LONG LIVE THE PUNK CABARET!
Photo by Gordon Hight taken at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, TN in May 2019
P.S. If anyone is wondering why Amanda often refers to me as “hay hay” now is as good of a time as any to tell you the origin: back in the day and while on tour, Amanda used to run frequently while listening to music. Eminem was among her favorite music to run to, he has a daughter named Hailie and in a song he says, “C’mon Hai-Hai, we going to the beach” and it was from then and there Amanda knew, I had to be Hay Hay, and so it was and so it shall be.
——THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS———
1. if you are a patron and new to my work, don’t forget your patronage allows you access to ALL of my patreon releases to date. HERE is the link to download my latest big solo record, “There Will Be No Intermission”, and HERE is a link to download the PDF of the art/essay book that goes with it.
2. if you’re a patron reading this post via an email notification, please click through to comment on this post. at the very least, if you’ve read it, indicate that by using the heart symbol. that’s always nice for me to see, so i know who’s reading.
3. see All the Things (over 150 of them) i’ve made so far on patreon:
http://amandapalmer.net/things
4. JOIN THE SHADOWBOX COMMUNITY FORUM, find your people, and discuss everything: https://forum.theshadowbox.net/
5. new to my music and TOTALLY OVERWHELMED? TAKE A WALK THROUGH AMANDALANDA….we made a basic list of my greatest hits n stuff (at least up until a few years ago, this desperately needs updating) on this lovely page: http://amandalanda.amandapalmer.net/
6. general AFP/patreon-related questions? ask away, someone will answer: patronhelp@amandapalmer.net