Ruby Calling

The fourth installment of the Take Note! review series is of a CD called Nighty Nite by 8in8. The year 2013 conspired to make me aware, in a big way, of both Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer. This summer a friend invited me to a reading by Neil at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, OR as part of his last signing tour. I was aware of him but didn’t really know anything about him. I went and was charmed by him and his stories.

I found out about Amanda Palmer through the exceptionally funny and completely unsafe for work blog called The Bloggess. Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, suffers from depression and writes about it regularly. One of her posts linked to an Amanda Palmer song called, In My Mind, which made me sob. This led to a post about Amanda Palmer seeing tweets from Jenny Lawson about being unable to attend Amanda’s concert because of anxiety and Amanda conspiring to make it happen anyway. At that point my heart split open, grew 3 sizes and other miracles occurred resulting in me falling a little bit in love with Amanda Palmer.

Neil and Amanda are very prolific in the areas of blogging, twitter and Facebook. Through Amanda’s blog I learned about a project that the two of them worked on along with Ben Folds and Damian Kulash (from OK GO). The goal was to write 8 songs in 8 hours. They didn’t quite meet the goal. They only got to 6 songs in 12 hours. Oh my goodness! How awesome is that?  Can you imagine writing, arranging and recording just one song in 12 hours? Forget 6!!! Considering I am currently working on participating in the RPM Challenge which gives us the entire month of February to record 10 songs, I’m really impressed!

I guess they got song ideas from twitter with Neil curating tweets and then helping to write them into songs. All participants sing at least one song and many play instruments. It’s astounding really. In Amanda’s post about the project, she included a link to a fan made video to go along with the song “Because the Origami” which I watched before listening to the album in its entirety. The video is absolutely haunting. It is difficult to remember that as far as I know, the story the song tells is make believe and per a blog post about the project was started from a line posted on Twitter: “ben started the lyrics for “because the origami” from someone answering a twitter call from neil for ‘ways love goes wrong.’”

Amanda Palmer has this to say about the project:

So back to the point of this post. No, really, it has a point! I listened to the entire album and there was one particular song that stuck out to me and that was…”Because the Origami.” I keep seeing the chilling images of the fan-made video. After seeing that, none of the other songs really had a chance. One thing I liked about the entire album was the diversity in the singers, arrangements, and musical instruments used. Also, the fact that they made the entire album in 12 hours really blows my mind. The entire album can be purchased for as little as $1 (you choose what you pay). I hope you’ll purchase it in support of crazy creative musical projects everywhere.