The album art of this record is a “cover version” of Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home with Amanda Palmer’s father Jack holding up his new grandson. The album features covers of songs they love, with folky, stripped-down arrangements that feature Amanda’s smoky alto and Jack’s rich, bass voice. On “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” Amanda plays Richard Thompson’s baroque guitar part on the piano, while her dad slides down to his deepest register to accent the song’s drama.
Amanda plays ukulele on Kimya Dawson’s wrenching “All I Could Do” and sings the tune in a trembling voice that captures the hope and uncertainty of a woman’s first pregnancy. Jack wrote some new lyrics for Phil Ochs’ “In The Heat Of The Summer,” a song about African-Americans rioting after a shooting of a young black man by the police. Unhappily, the song is still as relevant today was it was in 1965.
—j. poet
