Amanda Palmer To Release Covers Album With Her Father

Artist, musician, activist and author Amanda Palmer will release a covers album in collaboration with her father, Jack, this year.

Titled You Got Me Singing, the album was recorded in the latter half of Palmer's recent pregnancy (she and husband Neil Gaiman welcomed son Anthony in September last year), and is intended as a thread tying together the intergenerational bond shared between Palmer, her son and her father, from whom she was separated as an infant. It features covers of songs by the likes of Leonard Cohen (the title track), Sinead O'Connor, Kimya Dawson, Lucy & Carly Simon and many more.

"The main inspiration behind this record was to share songs and time with my dad," Palmer said in a statement. "It was a really good reason to spend healing time together, sharing our musical histories, all poetically punctuated by the fact that I was seven months' pregnant when we recorded."

Jack, a 72-year-old choral singer who has performed with several choirs in Washington DC as well as at the White House and National Cathedral, reconnected with his daughter several years ago, with Palmer revealing in a blog post back in August that the pair had been discussing the potential for creating this album since the first time he joined her on stage (to cover a Leonard Cohen track). In a lot of ways, its realisation is an important step in the healing of their relationship.

"I believe nothing is more powerful than love, and that nothing expresses it better than singing," Jack Palmer said in a statement. "It was one of Amanda's songs that began healing our fractured relationship. Years later, I hope the love that went into this project will perhaps touch listeners in the same way."

Echoed Amanda: "I knew that from my post at the mixing desk and the mic, this music was being heard in the womb, and so the song selection was really important… we didn't want this album to sound corny, we wanted it to sound like the connective tissue between generations. The songs had to be simple."

You Got Me Singing, featuring Amanda Palmer on vocals, piano and ukulele and Jack Palmer playing guitar and singing, will be released on 15 July via Cooking Vinyl Australia. It was engineered by Joe Costra at Middletree studio, Nashville, and recorded at Dreamland Studio, upstate New York.

Pre-orders are available via iTunes and JB Hi-Fi.

See the track list, and hear the pair's cover of Kimya Dawson's All I Could Do, below.

jack & amanda palmer — you got me singing

1. You Got Me Singing (Leonard Cohen)
2. Wynken, Blynken & Nod (Lucy & Carly Simon)
3. Again (Melanie)
4. 1952 Vincent Black Lightning (Richard Thompson)
5. Louise Was Not Half Bad (Tom T Hall)
6. Black Boys On Mopeds (Sinead O'Connor)
7. All I Could Do (Kimya Dawson)
8. In The Heat Of The Summer (Phil Ochs)
9. Pink Emerson Radio (Kathleen Edwards)
10. Skye Boat Song (Traditional)
11. Glacier (John Grant)
12. I Love You So Much (Noah Britton)