Earlier this year, Amanda Palmer teamed up with Jherek Bischoff for Strung Out in Heaven, a David Bowie covers EP. Now the two have paired up once more to cover Prince. The 10-minute string quartet cover begins with the intro to “Let’s Go Crazy” before Palmer moves into singing “Purple Rain.” The proceeds from the cover will be donated to Elevate Hope–a charity that provides music therapy for abused and abandoned children. Stream the song, see the cover art (by Sarah Beetson), and read Palmer and Bischoff’s respective statements about the song below.
See more tributes and read more about Prince’s legacy here.
Amanda Palmer:
Jherek and I had already bonded over our deep love of Prince while were touring together in support of my kickstarter-ed record; we even decided to learn the entirety of the Purple Rain album - every strange synth part on every song - for a New Years Eve show at Terminal 5 in 2012. Unsurprisingly, there’s no evidence or footage on youtube…every fan video was wiped by Prince’s team in the 48 hours after the show. I respected that. Even though Prince’s attitude towards the internet frustrated and sometimes baffled me, I could always see things from his perspective; I found myself thinking that it must have been so incredibly frustrating for him to become fluent in a language - the language of 1908s and 1990s record labels, contracts and ownership - that was becoming a dead tongue in his own lifetime. Especially when his knowledge was so hard-won.
“Purple Rain”, the album/soundtrack, was my first cassette tape, purchased with allowance money when I was about ten years old. It became the sole resident of the book-size silver sony walkman that I wore around my neck on a nylon strap (they hadn’t quite figured out the hip-clip method back in 1985, we all walked around looking really silly with those neck-walkmen).
The Walkman was a life-changing invention for the young music listener: my entire world became a film to which Prince was the soundtrack: my walk to school, my walk home from school, family trips in the car, my own little universe at night, falling asleep with headphones on, gazing at the Prince poster above my bed (this one, to be exact). He created my universe in song, and mansions full of doves and computers and Darling Nikkis danced in my head as I slept.
In a move that’s part ironic and part poetic we used the money from my patreon, a subscription system I’ve been using (instead of using a record label for this project). My patreon greatly resembles Prince’s "NPG Music Club” , which was a proto-crowfunding website back in 2001(2001!) into which fans could pay a yearly subscription and get their Prince-content directly from Prince (it failed, alas...he, like Bowie, was ahead of his time).
Jherek and I are putting this version of “purple rain” up for as close to “free” as we are able on bandcamp.com ($1 and up), given that Prince’s publishing rights need to be paid. We are giving the remainder of the profit, until further notice, to Elevate Hope, a charity that provides music therapy for abused and abandoned children founded by Prince-coterie member Shiela E.
Jherek recorded the strings live in L.A., and I cut the vocal for this song in a huge converted church in Hudson, NY. I found myself thinking, as we started recording, that the entire experience of Prince could be summed up by those first two lines of “Let’s Go Crazy” (which we decided to mash into our arrangement, because why not). It sums up, perhaps, the experience of any human who tries to hammer out some offering that can become to soundtrack of our lives; the music to which we can dance and sing and scream ourselves clean. The mantra, basically, of any artist who humbly stands before an audience and offers their voice:
Dearly Beloved.
We are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.
…….
Thank you, Prince. With your music in our ears, we will hopefully punch a higher floor.
Jherek Bischoff:
Amanda and I had recently made the EP of David Bowie covers and when Prince passed away, we went back and forth about whether we should make something. We knew in our hearts that we wanted to, but it seemed like a bit much, so soon after the Bowie record. But losing Prince was just too much. Losing them both, just too much. Making the Bowie record had been so extremely therapeutic for us, and getting deep into those songs was such an intense and beautiful experience. It was no different working on this. It just gave me an even deeper love of one of the greatest musicians ever to walk this earth.