Drowning In The Sound (shh, ALBUM VERSION), the title, track-list & artwork + US/CAN tour dates. {official Thing} (Patreon)

**EDITED ON SUNDAY, DEC 9th: I FORGOT THE TRACKLIST!!! IT'S BELOW! pls continue to use this thread to discuss - your comments are making my day (and making me weep)**

above photo by kahn & selesnick.

..............................

IMPORTANT #1: THIS IS MY 69th THING. i am just saying. AND this is the first thing i've ever let another artist THING for me. regina spektor pressed the button. we are together right now at the cyndi lauper benefit show in new york. (update: here’s a video OF THIS HAPPENING: https://www.instagram.com/p/BrJRAUWgXar/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=1a8a55ck06fr1)

IMPORTANT #2: for calendars! on public drop date, dec 11th, i will be doing my first ALL-PATRON-WEBCHAT, live from my house in upstate new york. that's this tuesday, dec 11, at 4 pm EST. i'll send you a post right before we go live that day. ** 

find your timezone here.

................................

hello loves.

okay.

i've been waiting for this day for, OH, six years.

this is me officially announcing, that my new solo record HAS A TITLE, A COVER, and A DROP DATE. and today i'm giving you - and only you, for now - the first listen to the first track.

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

it was a hard choice (WHICH TRACK? THEY ARE ALL SO GODDAMN GOOD) but we settled on the album version of "Drowning In The Sound". 

more about the song below. 

first: juicy record details!

drum roll....

the album is coming out MARCH 8, 2019 - international women's day (not an accident, given the themes).

................

it is called

THERE WILL BE NO INTERMISSION

and here's the album cover:

yes.

because why not.

right?

right.

this photo was taken by allan amato, right at the end of my recording studio dates in LA this past fall. the design/lettering is by andrew nelson, the same designer who did Theatre is Evil (and he designed the entire kickstarter/grand theft orchestra art book)

this photos is not photoshopped. i was really standing there in front of that sunset (and i tell the whole story in the artbook).

that is a real sunset! yes it is. i did not use a body double. those are my real boobs. that's really me and what i look like naked when i hold a sword and stand atop a rotting pier pillar on the edge of the salton sea, which is about a two hour drive outside los angeles.
reminder: please DO NOT share this image anywhere online, not yet. i'll have lots of imagery you can share, including a censored-for-FB/insta version of the cover (sigh).

this will all be online - the album cover, the new track, the tour dates - to the PUBLIC on december 11th. you are free to go to twitter and FB and whatever and squee in smug glee that you have seen the best album cover ever and that amanda's new track is the best thing she has ever made and you got to hear it first and nya nya and all that. on the 11th i'll come back here asking you to go out and share it with the world.

............

here's the track list. the album is 78 minutes (yowza - thus the need for double-vinyl):

there are 10 songs on the record, and 1- instrumentals (in italics) created by jherek bischoff.

you'll recognie many of these songs, but EVERY recording is a fresh one, and all of them have grown miles since their demo versions.

1. All The Things
2. The Ride
3. Congratulations
4. Drowning in the Sound (which i'm giving you here)
5. Hold On Tight
6. The Thing About Things
7. Life’s Such a Bitch Isn’t It
8. Judy Blume
9. Feeding the Dark
10. Bigger on the Inside
11. There Will Be No Intermission
12. Machete
13. You Know the Statistics
14. Voicemail for Jill (note from afp: you haven't heard this one yet)
15. You’d Think I’d Shot Their Children
16. A Mother’s Confession
17. They’re Saying Not to Panic
18. Look Mummy, No Hands (i recorded this live on the neil & amanda record, but this record sleighs that one)
19. Intermission is Relative
12. Death Thing (note from afp: you haven't heard this one yet, either)

boom.

...............

this album is the most personal and painfully vulnerable thing i've ever made. i also think my songwriting has climbed up a few notches. it's also not the record i was planning to make.

in the last seven years i've put out a TED talk, a best-selling book, and an audiobook.

i've released 69 different art/music projects with the help of...all of you. 

i've also had two abortions, lost my best friend to cancer, gave birth to a son, and had a miscarriage on christmas day of last year. so many of you were there with me, bearing witness to the relentless journey i was going through. a lot of our journeys wound up being parallel.

i've also watched in horror as my country seems to be falling apart at the seams, and i've watched in awe as women all over the world have lifted each other like never before with their truthfulness, shamelessness and bravery. 

songwriting - and my ability to process everything here on the patreon - was the lifeline that helped me make sense of everything.

(photo by kahn and selesnick....yes, please get excited about the book)

this is the most honest record i've ever written, and i felt fueled by everything that was going on around me to dig deeper, try harder, and be less afraid. 

YOU all helped me do this....these songs weren't written in a vacuum. songs like “the ride” and “drowning in the sound”, if you were there, were almost group efforts. i tried to wend and wind all of you into this record. you're in there.

this record feels like a "record" in the old-school sense of the word: a record of my personal tragedies, sure, but also a “record” of (and a love letter to) these times, to our struggles, and to the collective punch upwards, onwards and inwards that happens when we communicate honestly and without fear - with each other.

the last time i put out a full studio album was in 2012, when i released "theatre is evil" using kickstarter. many of you (about 25,000) supported me by backing that kickstarter. i’m still incredibly grateful to all of you.

now that i'm using patreon, the landscape of “releasing” has changed, and my team thought hard about how to put out this record. kickstarter? another crowdfunding platform? using my website? 

in the end, we decided to come to you directly. i feel like my web and merch team is now capable of providing everything kickstarter can provide for an album release like this.

............

meanwhile....to the music.

welcome to DROWNING IN THE SOUND, in it's FINISHED, GLORIOUS OFFICIAL ALBUM STATE.

again, it's for patrons only right now, please do not share. it'll be public this tuesday, december 11th, on digital music stores and streaming services (bandcamp, itunes, spotify, apple music etc. etc)
patrons can stream it, HERE - this link is unlisted.

https://youtu.be/Lf4djEpvVlE

$3+ download tier patrons will be getting a download link in a separate post. 

(note: patreon just changed how posts are filtered! it used to be by "money pledged", now it's be "reward tiers" specifically, so i can send a post to the $3/$5+ tiers exclusively...i used to be able to only do "$X and UP". now i don't have to bother $10 patrons with four emails!)

.................

as you can see: i am Thinging this song as a paid post, but i didn't plan on thinging every song on the record. there'll be this one, another one or two thing-singles ("thingles?") in the lead up to the album...(both songs that you haven't heard yet), and then the record itself will be THINGED in march. 

as usual...your patronage is going into the giant pile of resources we need to pay for all that's upcoming: the capital to pay for EVERYTHING record-related when you've got no goddamn label (YAY): from building the new web/order landing page on my website, to covering the costs of our publicists (they're expensive, but bless them), to the album recording and collaborator fees (paying john, and all the musicians), plus the huge capital needed to start the physical printing of the record, book and all the merch (vinyl! CDs! books! shirts! cost! lots! of! money! to print!)....plus all the very boring associated costs of releasing a full blown record without the backing of a label. 

it's all happening. 

WE.

ARE.

THE.

MEDIA.

....................

some history on the song...

for those of you who are new to the patron, i first wrote Drowning In The Sound in august 2017.

it's a special song to me: it was the first song i wrote with the help of this community (the next one was "the ride", which also, no surprise, made the cut onto the record, too). 

over 600 patrons left comments in a post i made last year asking them to share something personal...anything really. i just wanted to write a song, fast, about the state of our emotional nation. you can read the original patron post and the comments that inspired the song, HERE:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/i-am-open-for-me-14099481

and you can stream the finished demo, plus read about the process, here: http://amandapalmer.net/drowninginthesound


this was a sort of life-changing moment for me.

i'd always WANTED to do something like this....write a song with an art-gun to my head, with a promise to the patrons that i'd hand them something on a deadline...like an old-school journalist reporting from a war zone and phoning in my copy to the new york headquarters while bombs went off in the background.

people wrote to me about all sorts of things...hurricane harvey was bearing down and people were leaving their homes in texas, and afraid. the news was filling up with images of people on rooftops, isolated and hopeless. i'd just been down to tennessee, with ash, to see the eclipse, and felt the movements of the sun and moon bearing down on earth, like a warning, and i stupidly popped open my computer that morning to say something satirical about taylor swift entering a healthy, belated goth phase. people did not get the joke, and people began to yell at me (it's hilarious, you can go see the shitshow here on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amandapalmer/posts/10155182943923375)

all of this went into the song that day.

i'd also been listening to a ton of ani difranco (this record in particular...if you haven't heard it, oh god, go hear it. and i'd been noticing that ani difranco is VERY hard to cover on the piano. her guitar-playing is so staccato and rhythmic in a way that's hard for a piano to tackle - i know, because brian and i had wanted to come up with a good ani cover for our tour, and we'd had a hard time finding one we could translate to Dresden Doll. i took it as a challenge.

i stirred together my own inner world with some of the comments that had come in on the blog, and i wrote the song over the course of one day, and went to record it the morning after, the recording took about 8 hours. 

i was stuck on a certain spot, so i texted ben folds to ask if he had any suggestions.

he was backstage at his own show somewhere and he had a piano in his dressing room.

he suggested that i change the chorus.

i dug up the voice memo he sent me, and asked if i could share it with you (he said yes).

so...while this is something i would usually share with the $5+ patrons (i mean, how much more "extra-weird content" does it get than a voice memo from ben folds sent from a dressing room in arkansas) - it's JUST TOO GOOD to not send to all of you as a part of this story.

again - it's private. out of respect for ben (i need him to stay my friend) please don't post this online.

so here it is, some fun listening for you:

my voice memo to ben, which is just a very rough draft of the song.

this was made just for him, for feedback,...

https://soundcloud.com/amandapalmer/dits-rough-draft-voice-memo/s-IkOXD 

and his voice memo back to me.

i love ben, so much. he's just pounding out chords, making fun of the keyboard the venue gave him for the dressing room, and being dorky:

https://soundcloud.com/amandapalmer/dits-notes-ben/s-1Sksu 

(and $5 folks, i'm digging around for the whole text message exchange about the song...it's pretty fucking hilarious - and fascinating) - because i actually did wind up using ben's core advice to change the chorus feel)

...................

if you were reading my patreon-posts at that time, you may remember that the engineer that recorded the demo accidentally deleted 80% of our recording session (don't ask....really, don't ask) and i had to scramble the next day to re-record THE ENTIRE track - all the piano, all the overdubs, all the vocals - last minute to get it out to you before the end of august. (this is in part why i do the State of All Things posts now...i learned my lesson that it does not feel, er, great to scramble and rush art to meet the end-of-the-month deadlines if i wanna get paid by y'all).

here was me, back in august 2017, recording the song demo:

and some of the patron-comment notes:

....and when the demo version was released last year, all the proceeds from the digital single (bandcamp money, mostly) went to the texas diaper bank to help benefit people affected by hurricane harvey. 

...........

when i finally got to the studio in LA with john congelton this past fall, i'd been playing the song live for about a year, and i'd been hearing the finished version in my head. it needed MORE, but not too much more - and john, jherek bischoff, and max henry (the magical synth wizard who joined us) had a grand time trying to decode this song and how to make it sound like what it needed to sound like.

a lot of the strange, un-placeble sounds you hear are actually from INSIDE the piano - jherek and i "prepared" the piano by putting objects on the strings: paper clips, clothespins, car keys, coins, and we just experimented making sounds over the track. john recorded all of our experiments and went in later, lining them up in places that worked ... it was like making a big, grand, tetris sound-puzzle.

the chorus was kind of an impossible puzzle (that same chorus that ben suggested i change)...and after a while we decided to break out the golden rule.

we'd made a golden rule for this record (a list of rules, actually):

- no strings

- no "band" (no guitar, no bass. no drums.)

and we all sat around dismally looking at each other, trying to figure out how to make the chorus sound like what was in my head...and john was like:

i'm sorry to say it, but we need drums. but only like 45 seconds of drums. we are going to have to break our rule. and i was like fuck our rule. so john got on the phone that day and hired in joey waronker, who happened to be on a break from the little band that he was currently touring with (pink floyd).

he came in, listened, and nailed what we needed in under five takes.

ta da.

we kept chipping away at the song for weeks: john adding and subtracting little things, me needing more punch at the beginning of the instrumental (we added GONGS) and finally....it was done.

it now sounds like the thing i had in my head.

and this: my dears, is the awesome thing about this patreon. this song grew in bizarre, organic real-time into a complete, un-plannable whole.

i am SO (so) proud of us, and of it. 

it's also the only song on this album that's even remotely radio-possible, so we'll send it out to radio to see what they make of it. all the other songs are slow and like 10 minutes. i won't bother. 

here's a photo of me from the studio, working on the final recording:

and here's a few shots of the prepared piano...here's jherek with his bag of tricks:

and the final mess:

................

here's the link again to listen:

https://youtu.be/Lf4djEpvVlE

.................

NOW THAT THAT'S DONE.....

US & CANADIAN TOUR DATES!!!!!!

get ready, THIS TUESDAY DECEMBER 11th begins the PATRON-ONLY TICKET PRE-SALE

i'll be sending a post to you on tuesday with all the actual links and the password.

i can't announce the venues yet (REASONS), i thought i'd be nice to get you all a heads up so you can, y'know, PREPARE...PLAN...cancel weddings, etc. 

here they are: the dates and cities for 2019.

all of the venues are large sit-down theaters.

March 21 - Detroit
March 22 - Toronto
March 23 - Montreal
April 5 - Washington D.C.
April 6 - Philadelphia
April 12 - Chicago
April 13 - St. Paul
April 19 - Boston
April 20 - New York City
May 10 - San Francisco
May 11 - Los Angeles
May 17 - Atlanta
May 18 - Nashville
May 30 - St. Louis
May 31 - Kansas City
June 1 - Denver
June 6 - Vancouver
June 7 - Seattle
June 8 - Portland

IF I AM NOT COMING TO YOUR CITY in the US/CANADA, do not despair....i'm currently planning to do a SECOND NORTH AMERICAN TOUR in 2020 - to hit many of the cities i had to skip this season. why is the tour so thin? because i'm leaving ash at home, with neil, and flying to every one of these dates. i didn't want to bring ash with me (unfair) and i didn't want to be away from him for three months. this was the compromise. don't be upset with me. i'm trying.

i'll take a break in july/august, and then i'm going to head to the UK/Europe, then to Australia/NZ in 2020, then back to el states.

as a reminder, you'll get full information and ticket links on tuesday. most of the pre-sale ticket links will also be the same links used for the public sale. the PATRON ONLY pre-sale password is NOINTERMISSION (it's not supposed to be case sensitive, but wait til tuesday, i'll get you ALL THE INFO).

patron pre-sale starts on december 11th at 12pm local time (the timezone of the city the show is in) and runs until 9am local time on december 14th, then tickets go on sale to the public on the 14th at 10am local time.

..............

and OI! 

album & merch = coming on tuesday.

i'll be inundating you on december 11th (you got that, THE ELEVENTH OF DECEMBER) - the day EVERYTHING DROPS to the public. on that day you'll be able to pre-order THERE WILL BE NO INTERMISSION on vinyl and CD, get all the fanc-ay merch bundles we've created...all direct from my website (either from the USA/Worldwide shop or the UK/European shop - yay alex, merch queen). 

there will be several items for PATRONS ONLY (a patron-edition hardback book of photographs and writing that comes with a signed letter from me, a collection of frameable art prints, a patron-only edition of the vinyl).....the window to order the patron-only stuff is ABOUT A MONTH+  (it'll end sometime in january probably)...and i'll share more information soon for all the patrons to be able to opt in to have YOUR NAME printed in the book, that's coming soon, too...so be ready to get the special things. ART-IN-THE-MAIL folks, we got you covered...we are sending you all special prints. 

that's it for now.

please hold onto your seats for the 11th....after you've bought tickets and merch i'll need you on the internet helping me spread the word.

i am more excited than i have been in a long time.

i am more excited, even, than when my book came out.

I AM VERY EXCITED.

please leave comments - i really want to know what you think of the song. i am already in brace position for people to go "noooooo i loved the demo". you people are a fact of life: like death and taxes.

i appreciate you all, so, so much.

hear that?

that is the sound of me drowning in gratitude

xxx

a

------THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS---------

1. if you’re a patron, please click through to comment on this post. at the very least, if you’ve read it, indicate that by using the heart symbol.

2. see All the Things i've made so far on patreon: http://amandapalmer.net/patreon-things

3. join the official AFP-patron facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/afpland

4. new to my music and TOTALLY OVERWHELMED? TAKE A WALK THROUGH AMANDALANDA….we made a basic list of my greatest hits n stuff on this lovely page: http://amandalanda.amandapalmer.net/

5. general AFP/patreon-related questions? ask away, someone will answer: patronhelp@amandapalmer.net