Amanda Palmer shares “Machete,” her first full-band recording in four years

Amanda Palmer has a new song, "Machete," that is her first full-band recording in four years. She made it with frequent collaborator Jherek Bischoff, and Ben Folds plays drums on it. The song is a tribute to her friend Anthony who died from cancer last year and Amanda describes as "best friend, cancer victim, weapons enthusiast, life-saver and….it’s a long story." She shared that long story with Stereogum:

He was 24 years my elder and moved next door when I was nine; he served as my spiritual mentor, the one who taught me yoga, compassion, Fugazi and John Lennon. He was the ersatz-parent who constantly reminded me not to take myself, or him, too seriously. Wise words, because he was a total goddamn contradiction. He yelled at waiters, he yelled in traffic, he gave me my first can of mace, and he collected guns, sabers, brass knuckles and nunchucks. He had boxes of exotic knives. A Buddhist weapon-obsessive. His private therapists’ study where we did our deep talking and bonding, my teenage haven, was decorated with boxing gloves and rifles. We did not hold the same stance on gun control. I told him I wanted all the guns to be bought back by the government and hurled into the ocean.

He often told me he would leave me the whole collection, and when he died this summer, I knew there was a song in there somewhere. And there was; it emerged about five months after he died and two months after I gave birth to our son (we named him Anthony).

Read the whole thing at Stereogum. Amanda also notes that this is a production funded by her Patreon, where she currently has "7,000 kind, intelligent patrons all pitching in a buck or more every time I release a song. They don’t fund me for exclusive content, they aren’t hopping a paywall to get to my songs: they fund me so I can make music at my own pace and share it for free."

Stream "Machete" below: