"rainbow's end" (the first amanda+edward song - download) (Patreon)

hello my loves.

it feels very good right now, to give you some brand-new, handwritten music. it's been a while. and we need new music right now, oh we do. 

many of you know the story that has been leading here, but if you're new to the patreon, i'll give you some background on the me+edward record.

edward ka-spel is one of my most treasured songwriting heroes. he's the lead singer of a band called The Legendary Pink Dots and it was their music and his lyrics and voice that really liberated me as a teenager. my Pink Dots CD collection (probably 40 CDs, if you include all the side-projects) was my most prized possession and came with me to college. edward's songwriting shaped my own. the band was never huge, but my gratitude to them is endless. if you read my book (the art of asking), there's a passage about edward in which, when i'm 19 or so, he sort of taps me with the wand of music-reality and encourages me to keep working and writing. that moment changed the direction of my life and i feel i can never truly repay him.

when The Dresden Dolls became A Real Band, the Pink Dots became our professional comrades and we played some shows together.  it's been a dream of mine to actually co-write and record with Edward for YEARS - i think we first toyed with the idea 6 or 7 years ago, and it's just been on the list of things to do before i die. when i was 7 months pregant with ash, i went to england to start working on the record. the first day of recording, i got the phone call that anthony was going to die within the week. i sobbed into edwards arms at a train station where he had come to pick me up for the days' recording, promised i'd return within the year, and made good on my promise: when ash was about 8 months old, we got on a plane and went back to london to write.

i don't know what record we would have written if anthony hadn't decided to die that week. it would have been a very, very different record.

the poem: when the record was aborted, i was pregnant. in pre-grief for my dying friend. and filled with confusion about what was about to happen with and to my life. my body was coursing with hormones and fear and sadness and delicoous motherhood-anticiptation.

i'm sure it would have been an incredible set of songs, but we'll never know those songs. that month of july 2015 wound up being a deathed month instead of a recording month.

by the time edward and i really sat down to write these songs (nine in total), i was a different person.

anthony was dead, ash was born, i was a mother of a baby.

so here, without further ado, is the album title:

I CAN SPIN A RAINBOW

edward came up with it, and it's perfect, and you'll know why when you hear all the songs together. the art that you see pictured here is a TINY DETAIL taken from the actual album cover painting about 6 times the size, which we won't unveil until the album is out but OH MY GOD is it an increidble painting. it's done by judith clute, who lives in london, and she and her husband john clute (who is the editor of the encyclopedia of SF) are dear friends of neil's and mine...we stay with them often and they've played a huge part in our relationship. i'm so happy i could finally collaborate with judith on a real record. she spent over four months with the record in her ears, working on the painting.

the record in FULL will be out (for you guys as a Thing, and on vinyl and CD, which will almost certainly be discounted for the patrons...and/or we will do a special pressing or signed version that only the patrons can buy).

writing with edward was a spiritual experience - hard to explain, really, and i suppose i'll write and talk more about it when the whole collection comes out, but it was wonderful. eevry song had a different process.

some of the songs started as little voice memos i found on my phone from four years ago, some of them were scraps of lyrics that edward had saved on his computer, some came out of conversations we had over tea in imogen heap's house (where most of the the record was made, in essex, UK).

this song, "rainbow's end", closes the record. this was edward's pick for a pre-release gift to you guys, and i agreed - it's beautiful, but i'd like to remind you that if it's not your cup of tea, every song on the record is very different, there are some songs that bear no resemblence to this tune at ALL.

i had a little lyric snippet i'd emailed to myself back in, oh i dont know, 2010. it said simply: 

i am a little blue dot, lost in a sea of gray.

the fucking iphone map inspired it. you can understand, i'm sure.

i shared it with edward and started telling him the story of a friend who'd just posted to facebook that she'd jumped out of a moving uber, because the driver was starting to drive her away from the city...to....who...knows....where.

and that feeling - that sense of only being oriented because you can see that blue dot on the map that fills in on your little device, patch by patch, street by street. but if it doesn't tell you where you are....do you know?

we made up a story.

it is, in its way, a ghost story.

the process...

edward played me a variety of loops he'd had sitting in his machine and i picked one that seemed to match the feeling of the story and i built the bass-line from there. so what you hear (that looping, thrumming, timgling sound), is an organic loop from edward's computer, and the string bass-line was played by me, by hand, on a synthesizer. the other sounds (the higher strings, like the pizacatto strings, the glockenspiel-like bells, and the angelic mellotron-like-sound, are played on keyboard as well, by yours truly). the VERY real violins that you hear are played by patrick q wright, who recorded himself in layers from his own studio in italy and sent us the files...he's another treasure from the world of the pink dots (he played on some of my very favorite dots records, including asylum  - highly recommended listening). the sound effects that you hear - the car door alarm, etc, are all edward's masterful sound-effects library and mixing orchestration. 

we recorded everything on edward's computer, and he mixed everything himself after i left the UK. it was mastered by raymond, the pink dots forever-sound-man.

the beautiful vocal mic is thanks to imogen heap, who let us use it.

and now

here's your download code for both MP3 / WAV: https://we.tl/GNqCtGnupK.

it is going to ALL patrons (incliding $1 ones) when the full record comes out, the $3+ folks will get the free download, $1 folks will stream.

and since this is a little experiment and we aren't making this song public for a few days, just be respectful....play it for people, share it internally if you want or share the link to this patreon post so that people can join and get the full story/download if they like, but PLEASE PLEASE don't put it anywhere public (like youtube) or share it on torrenting sites. i trust you guys.

the lyrics:

RAINBOW'S END...............

i am a little blueish dot
lost in a sea of grey
the web of streets around me
in a box has gone away

nothing loads it only spins
and the child-lock keeps me in
the signal flashes green
and then decays

i maybe should have just ignored that little voice inside.
you know, the aimless one that counts to 3 then whisper “Drive”
the one word that was uttered,
at the moment that it mattered
we would leave then
hoping someday we'd arrive...

i reached out for the shiny button
but it wouldn’t scan
i heard a voice from in the static shouting ‘bout a land
where the highways form a spiral .
and the stories all go viral
for a day that lasts a lifetime
in a frozen block of sand

i am blinking in the night
he is turning to the right
"we will get there in the end"
he whispered,
reaching for a light...

i am blinking in the grey
it is not night it is not day
“i will take you where you want to go”
he said.

…and then we drove away.

we’re somewhere on the telly
in the middle of a road
the story isn’t finished
cos this picture still won’t load

they say that i’m not breathing
but i simply don’t believe them
and as soon as this is working
i will make it take me home.

(home).

home?

home.

.........

that's it.

i love you.

home.

over and out.

AFP

--AS ALWAYS--- 

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