At Somerville concert, Amanda Palmer says she feels ‘overwhelmed'

Boston Globe

11-05-2025

'You said you'd quit, but you didn't,' she sang. Another song detailed a 'list of things you've stolen from me.' A third was a cathartic exhortation to herself to 'get divorced.'
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A second show at National Sawdust in Brooklyn was
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'I feel f—ing overwhelmed all the time,' she said, noting that she and the nine-year-old son she has with Gaiman have moved back into the Lexington house where she grew up.
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Many in the audience indicated they were contributors to Palmer's Patreon, the crowd fundraising platform that allowed her to build a solo career outside the corporate music industry. This month's shows in Boston and New York City were intended as 10-year celebrations of the launch of her subscription service.
She took the stage with Lance Horne, the nightclub performer who was music director of the 2010 'Cabaret' performances at the former Oberon in Cambridge, in which Palmer played the Emcee. Palmer, dressed in a maid's black dress and apron, joked that her new songs were conceived in her 'Cancel Kitchen.' She grabbed a whisk broom and began sweeping the stage, while Horne, wearing a tall red chef's hat, sat at the white grand piano at center stage.
Other than their laughter at that ice breaker, the audience was mostly hushed. 'I used to love playing the piano,' Palmer began one new song, which referenced the psychic toll of the charges against her. A few fans caught their breath.
Alone onstage, she let the new songs speak for themselves. When she was finished with those, she noted that going so long without editorializing between songs was 'a new record' for her.
Switching from piano to ukulele, she played 'Bigger on the Inside' from her third solo album, 'There Will Be No Intermission' (2019). The song ends with an appeal from a beloved friend who is dying: 'Trying is the point of life/ So don't stop trying/ Promise me.'
Horne returned to accompany Palmer on a number from 'Cabaret,' the dramatic 'I Don't Care Much.' 'Cabaret,' Palmer reminded the audience, is about decadence during the rise of Nazi Germany – about 'escaping so far that you go through the other side, and you don't notice the tanks rolling down the street.'
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After ending with the Dresden Dolls' anthemic 'Sing' (2006), on which some of Palmer's friends and family (including her father) joined her onstage, she sat down and took questions from the audience. Noting that she wouldn't directly address the allegations, she answered mostly sympathetic questions about her artistic process and online trolls.
Palmer spoke
about artists who have been important to her (the comedian Margaret Cho, the writer Ocean Vuong), practicing 'radical compassion,' and her despair over the Internet, which she once saw as an ideal conduit between creators and their admirers.
It has been a struggle, she said, 'to watch the court of public opinion tear me apart.' That has 'mangled' me, she said.
Earlier, in one of the new songs, she expressed her typical defiance.
'You broke me,' she sang, ''til I'm unbreakable.'
James Sullivan can be reached at
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