Post Description

Alternative, baroque pop, singer songwriter.

Performer, writer, giver, taker, listener, love-lover, rule-hater and co-founder of the Brechtian punk cabaret duo, The Dresden Dolls.

Amanda Palmer, who spent over two years waylaid in Aotearoa (New Zealand) with her young son during the pandemic, returns to the Antipodes for a very special and intimate run of shows in Australia and NZ.

Palmer has lovingly collected the material she wrote and recorded during her accidental Kiwi pandemic period into a EP titled “New Zealand Survival Songs”, which was funded by the 10,000 patrons who support her unusual, fully-crowdfunded career as a touring songwriter and recording artist.

 “It is still shocking to me that I wound up living in Aoteroa New Zealand – unexpectedly – for over two years of my life, and that my young child was raised in a foreign country while Covid raged around the planet. I came to New Zealand at the end of a world tour and was supposed to be in the country for four show dates and eight days total. I wound up living within the borders for two and half years. Sometimes I wake up in New York and find myself short of breath and cannot believe that this all happened. I wanted to come back for a short tour – not only because I’m homesick for my Kiwi friends, but because I’d like to share the music – the handful of songs – that emerged from this unbelievably strange period of my life.

I’m usually a prolific songwriter, but this period that I spent during lockdown and pandemic-times – ten months in Havelock North, a year and a half on Waiheke – was anything but prolific. I was a solo mother for much of the stay, and most of my days were spent simply scared and disoriented, figuring out how to navigate normal Kiwi life, and trying to figure out my – and my son’s – place in the world. I spent much of the day, every day, wondering when we would go home. It took a very long time to accept what was happening, and there was almost no time for reflection or music-making.

I did, in the end, wind up writing about four songs in total over those few years, and they were mostly songs of catharsis and abject survival. One of them – “The Man Who Ate Too Much”, was written right after the first lockdown and inspired by the kindness of Kiwi strangers, my horror at Donald Trump, my collapsed marriage, and the local landscape; I’d been gazing at the outline Te Mata peak in Hawke’s Bay, and the lyrics draw on the Maori Myth of the Taniwha who tried to eat through the mountain and choked to death. “The Ballad of The New York Times” was written on Waiheke to try to describe my desperate relationship with the isolation of motherhood and doom-scrolling. “Whakenewha” is a howl of emotion inspired by the beautiful and haunting preserve of the same name on Waiheke, and “Little Island” is my complicated and heartfelt love letter to New Zealand and to the people who held and took care of me, as well as a pondering about our collectively difficult relationships with the past, and what “home” really means.”

Tracks:
01. The Man Who Ate Too Much
02. The Ballad of the New York Times
03. Whakanewha (with Aura Torkington)
04. Little Island
05. Two Prophetic & Haunting New Zealand Songs Played Live on Ukulele

Staat er compleet op, 10% pars mee gepost. Met zeer veel dank aan de originele poster. Laat af en toe eens weten wat je van het album vindt. Altijd leuk, de mening van anderen. Oh ja, MP3 doe ik niet aan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peyyDUs8HAg