Thank you, Prince. With your music in our ears, we will hopefully punch a higher floor.
Jherek Bischoff:
Amanda and I had recently made the EP of David Bowie covers and when Prince passed away, we went back and forth about whether we should make something. We knew in our hearts that we wanted to, but it seemed like a bit much, so soon after the Bowie record.
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In a move that’ s part ironic and part poetic we used the money from my patreon, a subscription system I’ ve been using( instead of using a record label for this project). My patreon greatly resembles Prince’ s " NPG Music Club”, which was a proto-crowfunding website back in 2001( 2001!) into which fans could pay a yearly subscription and get their Prince-content directly from Prince( it failed, alas... he, like Bowie, was ahead of his time).
Jherek and I are putting this version of“ purple rain” up for as close to“ free” as we are able on bandcamp. com($ 1 and up), given that Prince’ s publishing rights need to be paid. We are giving the remainder of the profit, until further notice, to Elevate Hope, a charity that provides music therapy for abused and abandoned children founded by Prince-coterie member Shiela E.
But losing Prince was just too much. Losing them both, just too much. Making the Bowie record had been so extremely therapeutic for us, and getting deep into those songs was such an intense and beautiful experience. It was no different working on this. It just gave me an even deeper love of one of the greatest musicians ever to walk this earth.
You can listen to the full song at the link below.
www. amandapalmer. bandcamp. com / track / purple-rain
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Jherek recorded the strings live in L. A., and I cut the vocal for this song in a huge converted church in Hudson, NY. I found myself thinking, as we started recording, that the entire experience of Prince could be summed up by those first two lines of“ Let’ s Go Crazy”( which we decided to mash into our arrangement, because why not).
It sums up, perhaps, the experience of any human who tries to hammer out some offering that can become to soundtrack of our lives; the music to which we can dance and sing and scream ourselves clean. The mantra, basically, of any artist who humbly stands before an audience and offers their voice:
Dearly Beloved.
We are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.
Lawless Entertainment Magazine – www. llemag. com