Amanda Palmer
AMANDA PALMER
Weekly Podcast
The Art Of Asking Everything
Subscribe here: https://linktr.ee/AskingEverything
Amanda Palmer is a musician, best-selling author, TED speaker and community leader who does everything on her own terms simply by asking. Now, with her new podcast, The Art of Asking Everything, she turns the tables on her colleagues and heroes to find out how they create art, love difficult people, work for change, and survive the worst moments of their lives. From porn stars to empathy researchers, and cartoonists to climate scientists, no topic is out of bounds.
Amanda: "One day in my early forties I looked around and realized that I occupied a very strange social space: I was good friends with both doctors and porn activists, climate scientists and avant-garde writers and musicians. When I began recording these conversations, I realized that I'd accidentally created what I've always yearned for: an excuse to randomly call up really creative and compassionate people, dispense with the superficial chat, and get to the core heart-to-heart discussion about what's important in this life. Being able to create this podcast using patronage also means that I don't have to answer to a boss, rely on advertisement, or otherwise dilute the content of the conversation. This podcast is produced purely by me and my home-team, for my community, with no added artificial ingredients."
This podcast is 100% fan supported and powered by 15,000 patrons. There are no corporate sponsors or restrictions on speech. Exclusive content is available to Patrons only, join the community at https://afp.lnk.to/PatreonPC
The Art of Asking Everything weekly podcast launched on September 29th 2020 with Elizabeth Lesser as the guest for the first episode: ‘Bullshit is Everywhere’ You can find it at your usual Podcast provider.
Notable guests in the first few seasons of the series include Tim Minchin, Laura Jane Grace, Lenny Henry, Nadya Tolokonnikova, Tim Ferriss, Dan Savage, Susan Cain, Tim Flannery and KT Tunstall. Patrons of the podcast are also privvy to a live follow-up chat with Palmer and her guests.
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AMANDA PALMER & RHIANNON GIDDENS
Release Charity Cover of Portishead’
A musical collaboration recorded from every corner of the globe with all profits going to the Free Black University Fund.
Amanda Palmer and Rhiannon Giddens have joined forces for a moving musical collaboration this month. The cover of Portishead's much adored It's A Fire was recorded from several continents enduring lockdown in the midst of one of the most turbulent times the world has ever seen. Half a world away from her home in New York, Palmer finds herself presently in regional New Zealand where her There Will Be No Intermission world tour concluded in March. The decision to stay put as the world quickly closed international borders proved to be an inconceivably fortuitous one.
"I was craving comfort during lockdown, listening to Portishead’s Dummy over and over again in the kitchen of our AirBnB, where I’d wound up an accidental single mother. Bent over a pile of dirty dishes in the sink one day, after receiving a long series of texts from my desperately sad friends in New York...I stopped in my tracks..."
'Cause this life is a farce
I can't breathe through this mask
Like a fool
So breathe on, sister breathe on
Palmer explains, "There is something about this song that speaks to a deeper connection between things happening right now. Black Lives Mattering, COVID, fear and trust are all colliding with one another... I wanted this cover version to sound more like a dark closet talk between two friends...hanging onto each other for dear life whispering, "we're gonna make it out of here”."
Amanda contacted longtime collaborator Jherek Bischof, himself locked down in Los Angeles, and asked him to arrange the song for "our times". He got on the job, and hired local string players in LA who would all play in isolation from one another.
Grammy winner and MacArthur 'Genius Grant' recipient Rhiannon Giddens (Carolina Chocolate Drops, Our Native Daughters) had also just finished her own Australian tour in March, when she was locked down in Ireland. A prolific and intensely productive artist (Giddens has acted in two seasons of TV series Nashville, is a six time Grammy nominee and has been described by Pitchfork as "so fearless and so ravenous") she was also craving collaboration."It was a delight to work on this with Amanda Palmer... Felt so good to make some art together, even separated by half a world", says Giddens. "We all need to take a collective breath together, and breathe on...it's all of us or none of us".
Finally, Palmer tracked down a French illustrator residing in Melbourne to help design the single artwork. Jessica Coppet's mesmerising realistic scribble portraits bring to life her philosophical commitment to female empowerment and they had long ago captured Palmer's attention via Instagram. "Facial Expression and Anatomy have become a focal point for my art...Amanda wanted to portray two women supporting each other along with vintage and retro aspects to represent the inspiration for the song", Coppet adds.
All profits from this collaboration are going to go to the Free Black University Fund, a hub for radical and transformative knowledge production.
Melz Owusu of the Free Black University team says: “We are overjoyed at the generosity of Amanda and Rhiannon in choosing our project to give proceeds from this beautiful song to. The donation will go so far in us building a sustainable programme of radical education that aims to transform the world.”
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ACCLAIMED ALBUM THERE WILL BE NO INTERMISSION OUT NOW
“This is not so much pop music, as music that might make your ears pop.” - The Telegraph, 4*
“Dense and intense, the new record from cult hero Amanda Palmer is loaded with the drama of real life.” - NME, 4*
“A reminder of why she’s adored by many.” - Q, 4*
“It’s a crucial, brutal, honest album on which Palmer faces off against all that’s going on in the world as well as all that dwells inside of her.” - The Line of Best Fit, 9/10
“There's something exhilarating about the verve with which she throws herself into dark corners." - Uncut
Out now via 8Ft Records/Cooking Vinyl, There Will Be No Intermission is Palmer's third solo LP, and it's the multi-faceted artist's most powerful and personal collection to date, with songs that tackle the big questions: life, death, grief and how we make sense of it all. While the themes may be dark, the album's overall sonic and lyrical mood is one of triumph in the face of life's most ineffably shitty circumstances. Recorded over a single month in Los Angeles by John Congleton (who previously engineered and produced 2012's acclaimed Theatre Is Evil), There Will Be No Intermission was entirely crowd-funded, this time by over 15,000 patrons using Palmer's community hub on Patreon. There Will Be No Intermission is now available in stores and on all DSPs.
"The last seven years have been a relentless parade of grief, joy, birth and death, and all of it has galvanized me to the core: as a writer, as a woman, as an artistic servant," says Palmer. "I also had no idea that my 15,000 patrons - who held my hand through this entire process - would have the profound effect on my songwriting that they did. Everything feels inseparable now: my crowdfunding through patreon, the birth of our son, the election of Trump, two abortions, the Kavanuagh hearing, the death of my best friend, being in Ireland for the repeal, the miscarriage I had on Christmas day. I sat in a theater in London and watched Hannah Gadsby decimate the blurred lines between entertainment and naked truth, I saw the brave women of #MeToo standing up against their rapists, and I saw Nick Cave in concert and on record working through his grief using art as a necessary and generous tourniquet that others could re-use. They all reminded me to try harder and harder still to tell the real, unadorned truth. I've seen how infectious the darkest truths are, when spoken without shame, and I felt like taking any other path would have been a cop-out.”
ABOUT AMANDA PALMER:
Amanda Palmer is a singer, writer, pianist, activist and blogger who simultaneously embraces and explodes traditional frameworks of music, theatre, community and art. She first came to prominence as one half of the Boston-based punk cabaret duo The Dresden Dolls, earning global applause for their wide-ranging theatricality and inventive songcraft. Her solo career has proven equally brave and boundless, including such groundbreaking works as the fan-funded THEATRE IS EVIL, which made a top 10 debut on the SoundScan/Billboard 200 upon its 2012 release and remains the top-funded music project on Kickstarter. In 2013 she presented The Art of Asking at the annual TED conference, which has since been viewed over 10 million times worldwide. The following year saw Palmer expand her philosophy into the New York Times bestseller, The Art of Asking: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Let People Help. The Art of Asking audiobook, which Palmer recorded herself, also topped the New York Times bestseller charts.
In 2015, Palmer joined forces with Patreon. to further develop her revolutionary model of fan support and artistic community, and where 15,000 people help support Palmer’s seemingly infinite creative output. The growing list of “Patreon Things“ - Palmer releases an average of two a month - now includes songs, original films (her politically charged video “Mr. Weinstein Will See You Now”, a collaboration with choreographer Noemie Lafrance, took the internet by storm), performance projects, and such full-length collections as I Can Spin a Rainbow, her acclaimed 2017 collaboration with Edward Ka-Spel.
Connect with Amanda Palmer: AMANDAPALMER.NET
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