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Amanda Palmer’s new album, There Will Be No Intermission, is out today via 8 Ft. Records/Cooking Vinyl. Her first solo album in more than six years, 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 with 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 14,000 patrons using Palmer’s community hub on Patreon. There Will Be No Intermission could be heard last week in its entirety via NPR’s First Listen, and 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 14,000 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 blurted 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.”
To accompany the release of the new album today, Palmer is sharing a video (directed by filmmaker Amber Sealey) for the song “Voicemail For Jill.” The song is a searing and stark, classically-tinged piano song inspired by Palmer’s lifelong role as both pro-choice activist and confidant for women (and men) who have gone through the complicated, often-hidden experience of choosing to have an abortion. The song – penned after a tour landed her in Dublin during the landmark referendum to legalize abortion – had been gestating for ages in her pile of song-drafts and was a “white whale of songwriting” according to Palmer, who has herself had three abortions and has “struggled for years to find the right way to write about the subject without sentimentality, preachiness or apology.”
“We felt like it was really important to address the very pedestrian, and also beautiful and emotionally complex experience of what it’s like when you’re literally on your way to get an abortion,” video director Amber Sealey says. “That experience on screen can be so loaded or dramatized, but we wanted to keep the visuals fairly grounded and real. What’s it like when you’re going to get an abortion and you walk past a woman with her babies? What does it feel like to be thinking about whether or not you should terminate a pregnancy while at work when you’re seated next to a hugely pregnant woman. It’s capturing those very important, and often very conflicting, experiences, and the duality that exists when you’re just another person sitting on the subway, and yet you’re about to go and do this thing that is often momentous for many women. We were not trying to say this video is what it’s like for all women, everyone has their own stories, opinions and experiences surrounding abortion, but hoped to make women who have gone through it, or are going through it, feel not so alone. To know that even though they may feel alone, they are not alone. Not in their thoughts, not in their experiences, and not in their isolation. They may be traveling alone to the appointment, but energetically there are millions of women who support them and don’t judge them and have felt what they are feeling.”
“Voicemail For Jill” showcases Palmer on piano and vocals and features additional synthesizer and programming by Max Henry of the Canadian indie band Suuns.
Watch Voicemail For Jill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Npq_ieGCzes
In addition to the LP, Palmer has partnered with the collaborative art-team Kahn & Selesnick (along with LA-based photographer Allan Amato and Iceland-based Artist Stephanie Zakas) to create a companion volume with over 60 theatrical photographic portraits taken mostly in and around the upstate New York home Palmer shares with her husband, writer Neil Gaiman. The portfolio – also titled There Will Be No Intermission – is available on her website and will also be sold at her hugely anticipated world tour, set to circle theaters around the globe in 2019-2020. See full tour details and info on how to buy the album and associated merchandise at amandapalmer.net
AMANDA PALMER 2019 TOUR DATES
MARCH
21 – Detroit, MI – The Cathedral – Masonic Temple
22 – Toronto, ON – Queen Elizabeth Theatre
23 – Montreal, QC – Monument National – Ludger-Duvernay Theatre
APRIL
5 – Washington, DC – National Theatre
6 – Philadelphia, PA – Temple Performing Arts Center
12 – Chicago, IL – Chicago Theatre
13 – St. Paul, MN – The O’Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University
19 – Boston, MA – Orpheum Theatre
20 – New York, NY – Beacon Theatre
MAY
10 – San Francisco, CA – The Warfield
11 – Los Angeles, CA – Theatre at Ace Hotel
17 – Atlanta, GA – Cobb Energy Centre
18 – Nashville, TN – Ryman Auditorium
30 – St. Louis, MO – The Pageant
31 – Kansas City, MO – Arvest Bank Theatre at The Midland
JUNE
1 – Denver, CO – Paramount Theatre
6 – Vancouver, BC – The Chan Centre for the Performing Arts
7 – Seattle, WA – Paramount Theatre
8 & 9 – Portland, OR – Crystal Ballroom (June 8 is SOLD OUT)
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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 Timesbestseller, 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 14,000 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.
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CONNECT WITH AMANDA PALMER:
“There Will Be No Intermission reads at once like a diary, a manifesto, a chapter book and a letter to a friend. It’s almost unfathomably ambitious, made by and for feelers of grand feelings, with minds too chaotic and overstuffed to contain
all the big ideas that challenge and sustain them.”
– NPR
