Amanda Palmer – Pain & Laughter, the 13th Floor Interview

Amanda Palmer will be in New Zealand next week for her There Will Be No Intermission tour… advertised as “a night of piano, pain and laughter.” Palmer is a regular visitor to these parts and fans can look forward to more personal insights on life, death, politics and whatever else is on her mind.

The 13^th Floor’s Marty Duda spoke to Amanda Palmer recently while she was in Melbourne. Here’s how the conversation went…

You can listen here, or read a transcript below.

M: Well how’s things in Melbourne? I think that’s where you are right?

A: Yeah, a lot better than they were about a month ago or longer. We landed here right around Christmas when things were really ablaze and I feel like our time here has been bookended by fatal fires and corona virus.

M: Well it’s been pretty crazy. New Zealand seems to be kind of just far enough away from everything that we have avoided most of that stuff but it’s very lucky.

A: You’ve got earthquakes no one is totally inoculated from the slings and arrows of fate and I also have a bad habit of touring where things are happening.

M: Well things seem to be happening everywhere these days, we’ve got elections and floods and fires and everything, viruses… So yeah, it’s hard to avoid. I’m wondering, how do these events that are occurring around you affect your shows?

A: They do affect my shows. First of all, its a four-hour show.

M: Yeah I heard about that.

A: It’s like it’s … to begin with but I’ve been starting my show in Australia with a brand-new song that addresses the bush fires. I just troll as I go and collect more darkness and spit it out the other end. There’s this part of me that’s always a cabaret artist, I’ve never been capable of just getting up on stage and delivering a show without connecting with the news of the day, it’s really hard for me not to do.

Even in Australia I managed to crank out an entire album of covers and one original, so the bush fire crises and I had to deal with how annoying it was to be on tour not promoting that record. I was like, “Wow I have these eight amazing new songs I wanna play them all on stage for you. But I have this whole other job to do and it’s already four hours long. But what I ended up doing is I cut a bunch of stories out of the second act of my show and I shoved in two bushfire covers.

M: Oh great, Ok.

A: My shows have been like that. I think by the time I get to Auckland I’ll be doing this show for the 80th time and so no two shows have been alike. The set list has been this work in progress.

M: Sure and I imagine it will change when here as well.

A: Probably

M: Do you kind of study up on the current affairs of various places that you’re going to so you can work that into your shtick?

A: Kind of. You know the news is the news and if the news is big and important, it’s gonna come to me without much deep researching. But with this tour in particular, yes I actually have been educating myself about the abortion law of whatever particular state or territory I’m heading to because a lot of my show is about abortion and my experiences with it and also it’s a rallying cry and I want to know who I’m speaking to because I have taken that show to cities where abortion is totally legal and safe to access and decriminalised and I’ve taken this show to places where abortion is criminalised and it’s important to know who you’re talking to.

M: It’s somewhere in the middle in New Zealand. It’s very strange.

A: Yeah it’s sort of in the middle in a lot of places actually. And nobody wants to talk about it. Journalists don’t even like talking about it, it’s a really uncomfortable subject, so that’s why I’m doing it.

M: Of course. Is the show kind of a give and take between you and the audience?

A: Yeah. I mean it’s mostly give because I have a lot of stories to tell and songs to sing but it’s a very conversational show even given that I’ve got the mic the whole time.

M: Does that ever get out of hand or is it a problem?

A: It has not gotten out of hand recently. It got a little out of hand one night in Portland, Oregon where I was playing the Crystal Ballroom and it was a weekend night and it was very late and I think a lot of people had been drinking a lot and there was – I wouldn’t want to call it a riot – but there were a lot of people yelling. A lot of people. And I was really taken aback by that. Not shocked by it, but I literally put the mic down and sat there quietly on the piano bench and waited for people to stop. It was like watching the internet live.

M: Oh great.

A: That’s what we need right? Facebook live.

M: You need to be able to turn it off. Now I’m curious as to how you’ve been thinking of the U.S. election, cause I mean even though we’re way down here, we follow it like everybody else does and it’s quite a spectacle so I’m wondering if you have any opinions about it?

A: I’ve been a card carrying, open throated Bernie Sanders supporter since 2015 so I’ve always been feeling the burn and I also love Elizabeth Warren and I think either of them would make an incredible candidate but I would be mortified as an American if Donald Trump got elected again.

M: Well a lot of people seem to think it could happen but I’d rather not think about it.

A: Well of course it could happen. If it happens once it can happen again but I hope from the bottom of my tippy toes to the tip of my head that America has woken up enough to what is cataclysmically possible if he stays in office, that they will galvanize and we’ll see a change…. We thought we had it in the bag because we thought it was such an obvious election four years ago, but I think we were incredibly complacent. So I think one of the things that the polls can’t show you is what artists and activists have had to reckon with regarding our own complacency and how we do not plan on making that mistake again.

The polls can’t show that. So, I have a lot of hope that we’re gonna get our shit together and hopefully cease our in-fighting about where or not you should be eating that avocado and our identity politics. All of this stuff is important but whether or not you should be eating that avocado toast should not be taking centre stage when the issue is getting Trump out of office. We just need to get Trump out of office and then we can send a stronger signal to the world that we actually care about the planet.

M: So do you see yourself as the year progresses spending more time on that particular situation and hitting the campaign trail so to speak?

A: Yes, I actually do. I am talking with my booking agents right now about where we should be playing in the fall to make sure that we can maximise getting people to the polls.

M: And do you really think that that is making a difference or are you already preaching to the converted?

A: You can’t know, so you do it anyway. You just can’t know what ultimate net effect your actions are going to have, but you just try. If you’re a musician with any kind of platform, there’s so many things you can do. At this point you can register people by the time November rolls around it’s too late. But we saw what happened with the fucking hanging chad…

M: Yes

A: If it means playing a show in Florida or Michigan, and it means that fifty more people vote… It’s not what tosses the election. It’s great do it anyway. You just don’t know, so you have to do everything.

M: I assume though you’ve been travelling through the country through the U.S. over the last four years, I haven’t been there in a while so I’m wondering, have you seen a change in the country in the four years since Trump has taken over?

A: Yes I did the biggest travelling… I also had a child right when Trump got into office. That was really interesting because right at the time that Trump shift was happening, I was batting down the hatches and spending a lot of time with the baby and breastfeeding. Getting out to marches and stuff when I could, but really overwhelmed by motherhood.

This is the first big global tour that I’ve done including all of North America since Trump got into office. If anything, I see exhaustion. People just seem exhausted. They seem overwhelmed and exhausted and I think that’s why this election cycle is so important as it’s giving people hope again. And it’s injecting people with purpose because staring our own political identity in the face is just so dismal. But also we have people really activated, and millennials are now actually going to the polls and voting. I don’t know what’s gonna happen – you can’t know what’s gonna happen. But I do know that there are a lot of a artists and activists and progressives out there getting their feet on the gas and not gonna let up. I think it’s gonna be a battle royal. And it’s gonna be an all hands on deck for the whole of our country.

M: I saw Bernie make his speech after the Nevada primary when he was in Texas and it went on for like fifteen, twenty minutes. It was one of the most inspiring things I’d heard in years on television, it was amazing.

A: He’s really good and I think our country is ready for the kind of reckoning that hopefully he will bring.

M: Well let’s hope so.

A: I’m sure there’s stuff to be afraid of in New Zealand, but I was in upstate New York surrounded by Trump supporters and they all have guns. It’s sort of frightening.

M: Yes, it is.

A: It’s frightening to think of what the blow-back will be if this weirdo commie gets into the White House and what the retaliation will be it’s frightening. When Obama got into office and all of these crazy racists were calling for his head. But progress – it’s hard.

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AMANDA PALMER
THERE WILL BE NO INTERMISSION

Thursday 12th March – Auckland Arts Festival: Hollywood Avondale
Friday 13th March – Auckland Arts Festival: Hollywood Avondale
Saturday 14th March – The Piano, Christchurch
Monday 16th March – Wellington Fringe – St Peters Church

Tickets On Sale

Nov 28th, 9am – Dec 2nd, 9am: Christchurch Patreon Presale
Join Amanda’s Patreon to access the presale and help fund her art: https://www.patreon.com/amandapalmer
Dec 2nd, 9aM: Christchurch Public Onsale via eventfinda.co.nz

Dec 2nd, 9am – Dec 4th, 9aM: Wellington Patreon Presale
Join Amanda’s Patreon to access the presale and help fund her art: https://www.patreon.com/amandapalmer
Dec 4th, 9aM: Wellington Public Onsale via fringe.co.nz