The controversial, but uncontroversally-talented Amanda Palmer has collaborated with Jherek Bischoff to release a heartfelt, string-laden EP homage to the late, great(est) David Bowie.  The EP, entitled Strung Out In Heaven: A Bowie String Quartet Tribute, consists of six covers Bowie’s songs and features contributions from Anna Calvi, John Cameron Mitchell, and author Neil Gaiman (Palmer’s husband), among others.  It was released today via Bandcamp for $1 and you can check it out and buy it (proceeds to good causes) at bottom.  Our favorite Bowie song and cover from the EP is Ashes to Ashes, which you can listen to immediately below followed by Palmer’s explique for the EP.

About the EP and recording, Palmer writes:

“We found out he’d died – by text from Neil’s daughter – at 3 a.m. in Santa Fe.  We were visiting family, to introduce them to the newborn lying in bed beside us. A tiny fleshy reminder that Bowie, like our other friends, mentors  and heroes who’ve been consumed by cancer in the past few months, was just…passing through. The baby is Ash. Dust to dust. Funk to Funky. I was talking on the phone to Jherek the next day talking about our arrangement for “machete”, the song we’d just tracked in LA. Bowie meant so much to both of us, growing up. and i knew that if we didn’t do this NOW, we’d say it was a good idea and then find a million reasons not to get around to it. We gave ourselves a deadline of two weeks. We made it. Jherek put the petal to the metal, arranged a song a day, recorded his A-list string quartet in L.A. in 3.5 hours, then I spent two straight days in the studio doing vocals. It was the longest time yet i’d been away from the baby. My mom took care of him one day, a babysitter the next, and Neil took the night shifts. I’m back at work. It feels right. We’re really, really, really proud of what we made, even though we cranked it out in a short time. Music is the binding agent of our mundane lives. It cements the moments in which we wash the dishes, type the resumes, go to the funerals, have the babies. The stronger the agent, the tougher the memory, and Bowie was NASA-grade epoxy to a sprawling span of freaked-out kids over three generations. He bonded us to our weird selves. We can be us. He said. Just for one day. It didn’t hit me until a week later, in the studio, why this was such a fitting project. We were immersing ourselves in Bowieland, living in the songs, super-glueing up some fresh wounds. Not just “knowing” the songs, but feeling the physical chords under our sad fingers, excavating the deeper architecture of the songwriting (especially with a tune as bizarre as “Blackstar” (which we realized was constructed like a sonic Russian nesting doll). Bowie worked on music up to the end to give us a parting gift. So this is how we, as musicians, mourn: keeping Bowie constantly in our ears and brains. The man, the artist, exits. But the music, the glue; it stays. It never stops binding us together.