The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Amanda Palmer and The Decomposers Cover Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” in Tribute to Rachel Carson

Amanda Palmer and The Decomposers Cover Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” in Tribute to Rachel Carson

I dedicated the 2018 edition of The Universe in Verse to one of my great heroes, Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964), who catalyzed the modern environmental movement with her epoch-making 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson — a biologist who never relinquished her first love of literature — launched a courageous crusade against the deadly impact of pesticides and DDT in particular on nature. Conveying her unassailable science through exquisite literary prose, she awakened millions of lay people to the chemical industry’s ruthless assault on nature — not with mere facts, but with a larger poetic truth about our relationship and responsibility to this beautiful, fragile planet we call home. The creation of the first Earth Day and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency were both direct consequences of her work. She never lived to see either — like Copernicus, Carson died shortly after the publication of her paradigm-shifting book. But she left behind a novel understanding of nature as a complex and beautiful interleaving of relationships, of which we are only a small part — a small part with a great responsibility for stewarding the whole.

It is hard, with our pathological cultural amnesia, to fully appreciate today just how far Silent Spring reached — beyond science, beyond policy. For years after its publication, after Carson’s death, the book’s message rippled and rippled across the groundwaters of popular culture. New Yorker cartoons and Peanuts strips celebrated Carson and her legacy, which touched a young musician only just making her name.

Rachel Carson (left) and Joni Mitchell

In 1970, Joni Mitchell composed “Big Yellow Taxi” — a song that would become a sort of bittersweet anthem of the environmental movement. It features this stanza inspired by Carson’s exposé of how pesticides, long marketed as harmless, were killing the birds and the bees:

Hey farmer farmer —
Put away the DDT
Give me spots on my apples,
but leave me the birds and the bees.
Please!

In putting together The Universe in Verse — a labor-of-love celebration of science and nature through poetry, and a voice of resistance against the current assault on nature, with all proceeds benefiting the Natural Resources Defense Council — I realized that among the lovely humans who had donated their time and talent to read poems were four stellar musicians. So I asked one of them — my frequent collaborator and dear friend Amanda Palmer — to reimagine “Big Yellow Taxi” in a cover dedicated to Carson. She kindly did, enlisting the accompaniment of the other three — cellist Zoë Keating, Hedwig and the Angry Inch co-creator John Cameron Mitchell, and singer, songwriter, and guitarist Sean Ono Lennon. In a lovely burst of spontaneity, this makeshift band christened themselves The Decomposers and proceeded to deliver a stunning rendition of Mitchell’s masterpiece, emanating the timelessness and growing urgency of Carson’s message.

Amanda Palmer and The Decomposers at The Universe in Verse, April 28, 2018. (Photograph: Molly Walsh for Brain Pickings)

Prior to the show, they made a studio recording of the song at Pioneer Works, where The Universe in Verse was hosted. It is now released as a record, with cover art generously donated by Pioneer Works founder Dustin Yellin. All proceeds from the downloads benefit the Natural Resources Defense Council — please enjoy, download, and join this small but significant act of resistance against the destruction of our Pale Blue Dot.

Below is the live performance with my prefatory contextualization, courtesy of Kickstarter Live and Bridgeside Productions, who contributed to this many-peopled project of goodwill by donating the livestream and the recording:

For more of The Universe in Verse, see poet Marie Howe’s stunning tribute to Stephen Hawking, astrophysicist Janna Levin’s reading of Maya Angelou’s cosmic clarion call to humanity, and other highlights, then revisit the full recording of the inaugural 2017 show.

To become a patron of Amanda’s music, a great deal of which benefits various humanitarian and environmental causes, join me in supporting her on Patreon.

UPDATE: For more on Carson, her epoch-making cultural contribution, and her unusual private life, she is the crowning figure in my book Figuring.


Published June 18, 2018

https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/06/18/amanda-palmer-big-yellow-taxi/

BP

www.themarginalian.org

BP

PRINT ARTICLE

Filed Under

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)