AMANDA PALMER will join the BOSTON POPS and Keith Lockhart for the Pops annual New Years' Eve shindig at Symphony Hall this year, the Pops announced today. Tickets are $45 to $160 and go on sale tomorrow at 10 am. The Pops just wrapped up a date with Amanda's pal (and producer) Ben Folds on Friday. First Night will be the third date for Lockhart and Palmer, who previously teamed up for a pair of gigs last summer.

Earlier this afternoon we received an e-mail from Merge Records with a subject line that piqued our curiosity: "Neutral Milk Hotel need your help to save The Paragon Carousel." 

The e-mail consisted of an impassioned plea -- written by Julian Koster of Neutral Milk Hotel and the Music Tapes, and co-signed by elusive NMH leader Jeff Mangum -- to save this historic landmark, a small carousel located in Hull, Massachusetts. The fact that members of a legendary indie rock band were asking for help for a cause like this was interesting enough. Second, Koster's letter referred to the carousel as his "neighbor" -- and did that mean he was currently living in Hull? And if so, did he know about With the Needle That Sings In Her Heart, the Amanda-Palmer led high-school musical based on his old band's classic album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea?

Clearly, we needed to know more, so we made some calls and got him on the phone. Our brief question and answer session follows, including a deliberately vague quote about Jeff Mangum that nonetheless may strike joy into the hearts of people who wish these guys would just reunite already. READ THE Q&A AFTER THE JUMP.

Saturday at Coachella brought Amanda Palmer to the WFNX house to chat up her high-school Neutral Milk Hotel musical and perform, as has become the custom, yet another Radiohead cover on ukulele. This time it was "Fake Plastic Trees." Plus Cage the Elephant play the hit, and Fleet Foxes speak into the microphone without spontaneously breaking into falsetto harmony -- a first, quite possibly.

Trust us: at $10, these are gonna go quick. So if you want to head to Lexington High on May 7, 8, and 9 for With the Needle That Sings In Her Heart, Amanda Palmer's high-school musical based on Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, we suggest you get them now.

If you're in need of a late pass, Amanda posted a looooong update on the state of the play the other day -- including the news that Neil Gaiman had stopped by to check out pre-production

High School Musicals: Amanda Palmer (left, in 1992), Kelsi Nielsen

In one of the spring's most face-melting developments, AMANDA PALMER announced earlier this month that she was returning to Lexington High to collaborate with her old high-school drama teacher and 20 current students on a production based on Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane, Over the Sea.Palmer's drama teacher, Steven Bogart, told Palmer's publicist that this isn't really much of a stretch since, as a senior, Amanda wrote a play based on the music of the Legendary Pink Dots called Asylum. Apparently it was quite the hit: the "theatrical post-modern form of the piece challenged the Massachusetts High School Drama Guild to rewrite their criteria for judging the state drama festival," Bogart says. 

Palmer, for her part, credits Lexington High's drama program -- in which students wrote their own plays from scratch over the course of two months -- with turning her into an artist: "This is the way I grew up understanding theater," Palmer says in the press release. "We created magic out of nothing. I always hated the boring stock plays and musicals, they seemed lifeless. Bogart always encouraged us to use our brains and hearts to dig deep and find something meaningful and original to put on the stage."

At around this point in the press release, we suddenly felt like we were reading an abstract of the High School Musical script, and we were suddenly reminded how much Kelsi in HSM#1 reminded us of Amanda (only with Brian Vig's signature bowler thrown in). And wait, don't we have Amanda's high-school yearbook photo floating around here somewhere? Ah, yes: thus, the images above -- that's Palmer's 1992 Lexington High yearbook photo. Wait for it, we've got more after the jump . . .including bonus-round photos of then-Lexington-High senior EUGENE MIRMAN!

Yeah, we swiped Pitchfork's photo.

We're still trying to figure out how to react to this: apparently, Lexington High School will be performing a musical based on Neutral Milk Hotel's revered album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. That on its own is one of those news stories that makes one think "this is simultaneously both awesome and weird."