Amanda Palmer has taken part in a new episode of a podcast, living the dream many of us share, and confronting someone who made negative remarks about her in the past.
In the modern age, it’s never been easier for fans and artists to connect. After all, who could have imagined back in 1984 that you’d one day be able to send a message to Bruce Springsteen and have him respond to you in moments?
While the relationship between fans and artists has become ever closer, it has also made it so much easier for detractors to do what they do best. While hate mail might have been easy to ignore back in the day, the digital age means that it can now be there forever, constantly staring at you from cyberspace.
But have you ever wanted to find someone who said mean things about you, only to ask them what it was they were thinking at the time? Well, that’s exactly what US writer Dylan Marron thought.
As NME reports, Marron’s Conversations With People Who Hate Me podcast recently returned for 2019, with Amanda Palmer as its guest.
Throughout his podcast, Marron aims to track down people who write negative messages online, or moderate calls between strangers, as they attempt to ask their hater one question; ‘why?’
In the latest episode, Dylan Marron caught up with famed musician Amanda Palmer so she could speak to a Twitter user named Colleen, who wrote “I’m not sure I hate any celebrity the way I hate Amanda Palmer” four years ago.
“Do you think you would’ve still written it if you could’ve imagined me on the other side of the computer reading it the next day?” Amanda Palmer asked her one-time troll.
“No,” Colleen responded. “Honestly, like, I kinda wanna cry right now. Because I’m telling somebody, who’s also just a human being, ‘here’s this horrible thing I said about you.’”
“Like, hate is a really strong word, and for me to say it about someone who could come across it…”
I don’t know what I was thinking,” she continued. “I don’t know why I thought that was acceptable – I was younger then – but I never thought that you would see it, and if I had known you would see it, it never would have gone out there.”
In a Tweet about the podcast, Amanda Palmer referred to its recording as “one of the hardest and best things i’ve done with my time for a while.”
“I talked with colleen – the person who penned this tweet – for an hour,” she continued. “We went to some really difficult places.”
If you’re keen to listen to the full podcast, you can head over to Player.FM, where it can be streamed. It’s a rather interesting listen, and a rather eye-opening insight into what goes into the mean things people write on the Internet.
Check out Amanda Palmer’s ‘Leeds United’:
