We were in Toronto on November the 11th, the day after we heard Leonard Cohen died, and four days after the election. I was there as tour nanny, but Amanda asked if I would do something on her stage. I loved the spoken word version of Democracy Leonard Cohen had recorded, and so I went to YouTube, worked out what lines from the song he had dropped for the poem, and what he had moved, and read it on the stage.
And then I did it again in Chicago and Minneapolis.
We recorded it, me taking time from the recording of the audiobook of How The Marquis Got His Coat Back to record it, and email it to her, Amanda recording her piano accompaniment up a mountain in a snowstorm, then Jherek Bischoff and a string section doing glorious quiet things to make it sing. We gave it to PEN America as a gift, to draw attention to their sterling work and to help raise funds for them. Then David Mack painted many paintings (there's one below this), and Olga Nunes animated them into a video.
It was all funded by Amanda’s Patreon, and I thank all 9000-odd people who support her and it.
It’s a very beautiful video. I could post the YouTube video here, but I’d rather you went and watched it at the PEN America page, at https://pen.org/donate-democracy.
If you watch it, and it it moves you, reblog it. I hope people watch it. I hope they care.
You can buy the track too, at Bandcamp. All proceeds go to PEN America as well. https://amandapalmer.bandcamp.com/track/amanda-palmer-neil-gaiman-democracy-leonard-cohen
Labels: amanda palmer, Democracy, Former webelf makes good art, Jherek Bischoff, Leonard Cohen, Olga Nunes