One song Amanda Palmer will perform at Mona Foma has not yet been written.
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She will perform the role of a "rock n roll shaman" in Launceston in a modern take on an age-old ritual.
She's inviting ordinary people to tell her "the things that have just been sitting at the bottom of your heart and you don't know where to put them", and the song will be based on what she hears.
"I will encourage people to share stories about abortions, about miscarriages, reproductive stuff if they want to - but really, anything goes," she said.
"It will be an incredibly safe space to tell me anything that will not leave the sanctity of that room, without going through a very, very, very hardcore art filter."
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The project was inspired by community theatre productions with intimate, one-on-one elements.
They reminded her of the value held in many places of allowing the community to unburden itself of the pain it was holding onto by sharing it: a practice lost in mainstream Western culture.
"I'm saying, 'I'm going to dispose of this for you', through the medium of songwriting," she said.
"There's definitely a part of our culture that has left behind those rituals, where the community did get to unburden itself and ditch unwanted baggage and move on from the past."
Amanda Palmer began her career as half of cabaret-punk duo the Dresden Dolls.
She has since accumulated a massive, passionate cult fanbase, famously crowdfunding her 2012 album with $1.2 million handed over by listeners.
She is also married to, and has a son with, fantasy author Neil Gaiman.
Part of the reason she want to do this project, she said, was to do something that is constantly happening to her anyway: by her fans who see her as a freak-mother that can be trusted with the broken parts of their souls.
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"One part I don't enjoy about signing lines is hearing people's dark, intimate details in under 30 seconds," she said.
"It's painful for me to have people wanting to share with me and having to do it as they're being shuffled along because we have to get out of the venue."
And there's nowhere else she'd do this project than Mona Foma.
"Mona Foma is the only festival that I could think of that was artistically accepting and expansive enough to do something like this," she said.
"I have a faith in the staff that if we're going to do this then we're going to do it right, and we're going to do it respectfully, and we're not going to do it as a gimmick."
The listening sessions, with the project title Confessional, will take place across three days in Launceston at a to-be-announced location.
Her concert is at the Princess Theatre on Monday, January 20, from 6pm to 10pm, $60 through monafoma.net.au.