Co-founder of the Brechtian punk cabaret duo, The Dresden Dolls, Amanda Palmer collaborated with Edward Ka-Spel, founding member of the experimental rock group the Legendary Pink Dots, on the newest record “I Can Spin a Rainbow”…

I CAN SPIN A RAINBOW, engineered and mixed by Ka-Spel on his own laptop using Ableton, “is a truly collaborative effort, ‘a spiritual experience,'” says Palmer, in which both artists’ stories, song fragments, poems, and lyrics became wholly meshed with loops, melancholy piano playing, melodic beds, and strange rhythms. “We merged our songwriting heads and poetic worlds to make a new universe,” Palmer says. “We would sit in Imogen’s house drinking cups of tea, bemoaning the state of the upcoming election, binge drinking in the UK, the refugee crisis, our internet addictions, frightening news we had read, our relationships…and then we’d compost all of the ingredients of our fears and conversations into song form.”

The two musicians first met in 1992 when Palmer, then 16, attended a Legendary Pink Dots show in her hometown of Boston. In 1995, having found that the Pink Dots were looking for lodging with fans to save money on the road, Palmer hosted five members of the band and crew at her childhood home. Ten years later, Palmer’s internationally acclaimed punk cabaret duo, The Dresden Dolls, had achieved enough success that they were able to invite the Dots to support them on a German tour, and it was then that Palmer and Ka-Spel vowed to carve out time to collaborate on an original recording.