LISTEN: Amanda Palmer Releases New Song “Floating In a Cocktail Glass”

Photo Credit: Raymond Flotat

Amanda Palmer has just added another stunning track to her highly successful career as a solo artist titled, “Floating In a Cocktail Glass.” A track that she introduces as “a beautiful thing from the crypt.”

The story behind this song does a great deal to explain this sort of peculiar way for an artist to describe her song. According to Palmer’s site, It all starts with the town of Everett and mysterious women’s scrapbooked life found in the bottom of a dumpster. A man by the name of Chicken John was the man who found the scrapbook and discovered the beauty of what was inside. The women’s name was Margaret Rucker and she was part of the founding family of Everett, but more importantly she was a talented poet and artist. In the book she included several poems to coincide with the various pictures and scrappings through out. Holding on to this treasure, Chicken John one day realized that his friend, Jason Webley, was from the very town of Everett that the book was based. After some conversation and small world realization the two then went on to put on a concert at the Historic Everett Theater and make an album from the show. For a more detailed telling of the story from Webley himself, go to his Kickstarter page for Margaret‘s funding.

Palmer then comes into the picture by asking her friend and Evelyn Evelyn partner, Webley, if there was anything that she could do to help the project and found that one of the poems from the book had yet to be used. Palmer instantly fell in love with the poem and describes it as, “an alcoholic suicide note wrapping in a glistening champagne package.” The original plan was for her to simply set a piano tone to the poem but once she started she says that she couldn’t stop and had to make it into a song.

Originally created for the purpose of the album, Webley came to realize that the track didn’t quite fit into the bonus track portion of the album. He explains that, “for a moment I thought I should stretch the project and reformat the book to make it fit. I seriously looked at doing that. But everything was too close to done at that point, and the style of the recording didn’t really match the other songs on the album, so I had to, reluctantly, continue with the original plan to just include the songs that were written for the concert.” Now the track has been released by Palmer and the magic of the scrapbook’s story and Margaret Ruckers life has another outlet to the world.

“Floating In a Cocktail Glass'” new video can be watched below, but, as Palmer suggested, it should be listened to with closed eyes and thoughts of “drowning in a sea of champagne on a sunny day.”