Amanda Palmer has joined up with Jherek Bischoff on Strung Out in Heaven, a David Bowie covers EP.
Well we are finally starting to see it, the dawn after the passing darkness. Whenever the music world sees a massive tragedy, as it did with David Bowie’s passing, there is always one positive to surface from the insurmountable negative and that is cover songs. Amanda Palmer and Jherek Bischoff have come together to provide us with just that with their new EP, Strung Out in Heaven. The EP is set to be released on February 5, according to Pitchfork. Other than Amanda Palmer and Jherek Bischoff, the album includes contributions from Anna Calvi (who sang and played guitar on “Blackstar”), writer/director John Cameron Mitchell (who sang on “Heroes”), and Palmer’s husband, the author Neil Gaiman. The album can be streamed below.
One of the most amazing thing about Strung Out in Heaven was that it was financially supported by Palmer’s Patreon Supporters. Patreon is a crowdfunding platform where artists can get funding from fans (or patrons) on a recurring basis. The new EP will be sold for a whopping $1 on Bandcamp and part of the money will go straight to Bowie’s publisher, while the remaining funds from the first month of sales will be donated to the cancer research wing of the Tufts Medical Center. This donation is obviously in memory of the late David Bowie. A full track list for the EP can be found below.
Here is a statement by Palmer:
We found out he’d died – by text from Neil’s daughter – at 3 a.m. in Santa Fe. We were visiting family, to introduce them to the newborn lying in bed beside us. A tiny fleshy reminder that Bowie, like our other friends, mentors and heroes who’ve been consumed by cancer in the past few months, was just…passing through. The baby is Ash. Dust to dust. Funk to Funky.
Music is the binding agent of our mundane lives. It cements the moments in which we wash the dishes, type the resumes, go to the funerals, have the babies. The stronger the agent, the tougher the memory, and Bowie was NASA-grade epoxy to a sprawling span of freaked-out kids over three generations. He bonded us to our weird selves. We can be us. He said. Just for one day.
The next day I was on the phone to Jherek, discussing another project (and I was feeling a bit trapped in the non-productive new-mother cave, so we joked that we should do a flash Bowie tribute. And suddenly, we weren’t joking. I had funding from my 7,000 fans on Patreon to “make stuff.” What better “stuff”? We started that night, giving ourselves a deadline of two weeks to release it as a surprise. I emailed a bunch of visual artist friends that night.
It didn’t hit me until a week later, in the studio, why this was such a fitting project. We were immersing ourselves in Bowieland, living in the songs, super-glueing up some fresh wounds. Not just “knowing” the songs, but feeling the physical chords under our sad fingers, excavating the deeper architecture of the songwriting (especially with a tune as bizarre as “Blackstar,” which we realized was constructed like a sonic Russian nesting doll).
Jherek worked like a madman: one day arranging each song, recording the strings in under four hours, and mixing in antoher two. He says recording the strings quartet for “Blackstar” in particular “was like therapy for the loss of such an incredible artist, and there was a palpable silence after every take as we sat in awe of the genius of The Thin White Duke.”
John Cameron Mitchell, who most people know as the force behind “Hedwig,” recorded the German and English for “Heroes”/”Helden” on his iPhone in his New York apartment. Anna Calvi, our honorary Brit, booked a studio in London on three days’ notice.
Bowie worked on music up to the end to give us a parting gift. So this is how we, as musicians, mourn: keeping Bowie constantly in our ears and brains.
The man, the artist, exits. But the music, the glue; it stays. It never stops binding us together.
Goodbye, Starman.
Strung Out in Heaven:
01 Blackstar [ft. Anna Calvi]
02 Space Oddity [ft. Neil Gaiman]
03 Ashes to Ashes
04 Heroes [ft. John Cameron Mitchell]
05 Helden (Single Version) [ft. John Cameron Mitchell]
06 Jherek Bischoff: “Life on Mars?” [instrumental]
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