happy father’s day….i love you so much.
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dear ones.
happy father’s day, everybody. that’s a picture of me and my dad, taken by my mom, when i was just a tiny baby in 1976.
life is weird and long eh?. and things always keep changing. i know a lot of people with complicated relationships to their dads. me and my own dad, jack, have had a complicated relationship, a lot of it marked by separation, distance, and sometimes confusion.
what i’m going through right now in my own marriage and mothering is bringing up a lot of that old story for me…..my folks got divorced when i was about the size of ash in this picture, and me in the above picture.
walking back, over time, and carefully as i can, towards my dad has also been a walk back towards myself.
not an easy walk.
when things break and change and shift, it can be really hard to know how to put them back together.
where to start?
i imagine a lot of people are trying to piece a lot of things together right now, after long periods of shift and change, lockdown, uncertainty….. relationships, homes, patterns, routines, hearts.
the work can seem impossible, exhausting, confusing.
music has helped me.
music has been a lot of the medicine-catalyst for a lot of the coming together between me and my dad…..listening to it, making it, bonding over it.
music and art is just….magic, isn’t it?
art can be the heart-glue-soundtrack of a deeper connection and set of gears and dials that we can never really name.
brian (of the dresden dolls) and i have been discussing this over text lately, as we go over old dolls footage and recordings and start to untangle the meaning of what we made back in the 2000s.
sometimes it’s so hard to put words around what music does….to emotions, to your brain, what it does to your heart, what it can change in you. what it can be used for, to heal rifts and make space for something new to grow.
………….
a couple years ago – before ash was born – me and my dad got together for a few weeks and we made a simple little covers record, using the support and funding from this patreon.
it was, for me, a real high point of this patreon – to be supported by my art-family to make healing music with my blood-family.
it was a dream to be able to just have fun and play and sing and record what we wanted, how we wanted, without much commercial concern, in a beautiful little church-studio near my house in woodstock. my old engineer from the “who killed amanda palmer” sessions in nashville, joe costa, moved into my house in woodstock for a few weeks and engineered and mixed the record. we got to eat together every day and my dad got to spend a lot of time with ash-the-baby.
the whole thing was a joy.
so.
if you want a little cry today, here’s us singing “i love you so much” from the record….it was written by my boston songwriter pal, noah britton:
https://amandapalmer.bandcamp.com/track/i-love-you-so-much-noah-britton
…….
and to all dads, all children of all beings…..wherever you are….
hang in there.
i love you so much.
x
a
p.s. all photos by kyle cassidy.
the whole album, which is mostly covers of old songs we both liked, is up on bandcamp, here, for $1: https://amandapalmer.bandcamp.com/album/you-got-me-singing-2 (and if you’re a $3 patron, the download code is here, in case you weren’t around at the time….it’s all yours fer free: https://www.patreon.com/posts/6085767)
there’s a whole page about the record here: https://amandapalmer.net/you-got-me-singing/
track list:
You Got Me Singing
Wynken, BLynken And Nod
Again
Vincent Black Lightning
Louise Was Not Half Bad
Black Boys On Mopeds
All I Could Do
In The Heat Of The Summer
Pink Emerson Radio
Skye Boat Song
Glacier
I Love You So Much
