In support of her third solo album, There Will No Intermission, the astonishing Amanda Palmer will be touring the UK, visiting cities all across the country.
Amanda Palmer is a singer, writer, pianist, activist and blogger who simultaneously embraces and explodes traditional frameworks of music, theatre, community and art. She first came to prominence as one half of the Boston-based punk cabaret duo The Dresden Dolls, earning global applause for their wide-ranging theatricality and inventive songcraft. Her solo career has proven equally brave and boundless, including such groundbreaking works as the fan-funded Theatre Is Evil, which remains the top-funded music project on Kickstarter.
There Will Be No Intermission is the multi-faceted artist’s most powerful and personal collection to date, with songs that tackle the big questions: life, death, grief and how we make sense with it all. While the themes may be dark, the album’s overall sonic and lyrical mood is one of triumph.
“Most of these songs were exercises in survival,” says Palmer. “This isn’t really the record that I was planning to make. But loss and death kept happening in real-time, and these songs became my therapeutic arsenal of tools for making sense of it all.”
Somber yet exultant, There Will Be No Intermission presents still more dimensions to Amanda Palmer’s already voluminous talent, once again confirming her as a master songwriter at the height of considerable power. This one-of-a-kind artist has miraculously molded humor, tears, confession, and naked personal pain into a matchless piece of work that could very well have been morose and gloomy but is, instead, deeply relatable, healing and inspiring.
Her latest single, “Voicemail for Jill” is a searing and stark, classically-tinged piano song inspired by Palmer’s lifelong role as both pro-choice activist and confidant for women (and men) who have gone through the complicated, often-hidden experience of choosing to have an abortion. The song – penned after a tour landed her in Dublin during the landmark referendum to legalize abortion – had been gestating for ages in her pile of song-drafts and was a “white whale of songwriting” according to Palmer, who has herself had three abortions and has “struggled for years to find the right way to write about the subject without sentimentality, preachiness or apology.”
Here’s the video:
“I wrote this song as a gift, a handbook,” Palmer says, “for any woman on her way to have an abortion, and as a reminder that this is not an experience you have to face alone.”
The touring show will feature Palmer on solo piano and ukulele, with no band accompaniment; a night of graphic, honest, and funny storytelling and songs that Palmer claims will be be her “most human dn vulnerable stage-show to date.”
UK 2019 TOUR DATES
Wednesday 16th October De La Warr Pavilion Bexhill
Saturday 19th October St David’s Hall Cardiff
Sunday 20th October Corn Exchange Cambridge
Saturday 26th October Ulster Hall Belfast
Friday 1st November Carnegie Hall Dunfermline
Saturday 2nd November City Halls Glasgow
Sunday 3rd November Albert Hall Manchester
Monday 4th November Opera House York
Thursday 7th November Tyne Theatre Newcastle
Thursday 5th December Union Chapel London
Friday 6th December Union Chapel London
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