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A stained chair. A disgusting stew. A girls’ trip where someone buys a dumb lamp. You may not think you need to hear the backstory of such innocuous things, but if it’s told to you in lurid detail by Rachelle Hampton on the hit podcast Normal Gossip, you will change your mind.
The premise of the podcast is simple: A listener submits an anonymous story from the regular world, which the host anonymizes to protect the (sometimes) innocent. Then the host salaciously tells the tale to a guest, who stands in for the audience by gasping, giggling, and yelling at these people to make better choices. (Spoiler: They won’t.)
Listening to the show feels like finishing a second glass of wine with one of your funner friends who then leans over conspiratorially, asking: “You wanna hear something fuckin’ wild?” Hampton took over as host after creator Kelsey McKinney warmly passed along the keys to the mess chest earlier this year, and says fans have been extremely supportive of the switch.
It warms my catty soul to hear from Hampton that the Portland date on Normal Gossip’s national tour—September 18 at Revolution Hall—was the first to sell out. However, if you didn’t snag seats, [StubHubbing for $448 at time of press -eds.] this Q&A with Hampton and producer Se’era Spragley Ricks is the next best thing.
You can share your own gossip story calling or texting 26-79-GOSSIP. Rachelle and Se’era said that they’re specifically jonesing for service industry or tattoo shop gossip. Portland is nothing if not a collection of tattooed boozehounds; please tell your friends’ secrets, and do us proud.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity (even though I was sad to do it because our whole talk was so fun.)
MERCURY: It’s tradition on Normal Gossip for the guests to bring a small bit of gossip for the host. I know that I am not a guest on your show, but I still wanted to bring you some gossip.
[RACHELLE HAMPTON and SE’ERA SPRAGLEY RICKS immediately perk up.]
[Imparts extremely secret secret.]
RH: Oh that’s beautiful. That’s incredible gossip.
Thank you, that means so much to me—especially since you really don’t have to promote your Portland show. It’s so sold out. I didn’t even get tickets, so I need to get as much out of you now as I possibly can. If I promise not to tell anyone, can you tell me what the story for the live show will be about?
RH: It is going to be about a [canonically messy event] in [disaster location]. And there is a high likelihood that a version of the live show will appear in the Normal Gossip feed.
Normal Gossip has a devoted and ravenous fan base. You’ve said you all anonymize the submissions, but to your knowledge, has anyone ever figured one out?
RH: Normal Gossip has a pretty dedicated subreddit, which both of us avoid going into. I do think that people have found out the origins of episodes in the subreddit.
SSR: That’s one of the layers of anonymization we do, where once we get a story, we’re thinking like, what is the logical lead? And then we go the opposite direction from that. And it’s happening at every step of the process. Even the stories that we choose are based on whether or not we can anonymize them. We get a lot of phenomenal stories where it’s like, this is incredible gossip, and it would be impossible to anonymize. So we just won’t do that story. We want to keep people that are sending us stories safe, and also, we want to keep ourselves safe.
Do the submitters participate in the anonymization process?
SSR: Not in the anonymization process, but we will go back to them when we let them know we chose their story, and then we will give them an update like, “hey, we changed this to that, is that okay?”
RH: Sometimes we’ll somehow end up anonymizing something to the point that it’s true. Like, we’ll just add a detail, and they’ll be like, “actually, that’s what happened.” And it’s like, “well thank you, we’re gonna take that out now.”
How many submissions do you get?
SSR: We get a lot. Some of them are really, really good. But some of them can’t become anonymized, and we don’t use them.
I am so jealous someone gets to listen to all those. Do you ever get stories about famous people? It seems like that’s one that you can’t really anonymize.
SSR: We’ll be like, you can’t tell us that on the show, but also, thank you for feeding me.
Founding Normal Gossip producer Alex Sujong Laughlin recently posted on Bluesky about the gutting of the podcast industry and the consolidation of wealth among just a few players. Does Defector’s subscriber-based model insulate it in any way from all of that?
SSR: I definitely think so. I think that we are insulated from a lot of the stuff like the ad market and with business people or conglomerates coming in and making decisions that have nothing to do with the people who are actually making the product. But I don’t think anyone is entirely safe from what’s happening with Chat GPT and AI and the kind of bottom falling out of like SEO.
So, my area of gossip is mostly celebrity gossip. I would like the Gossip Queens’ opinions on some things that are happening in that world, if it’s okay.
BOTH: Yes.
Do you think that Tom Cruise and Anna De Armas are actually dating?
RH: I have actually been thinking about this for a long time. I have so many conflicting feelings about Tom Cruise. Like, on one hand, he’s part of a cult. On the other hand, that man is more committed to the project of filmmaking than almost anyone except for, like, Martin Scorsese, and filmmaking is also going the way of the dinosaurs. Also, Top Gun: Maverick was great. He gave a lot to us. And so I’m, like, this gives PR relationship, but also, I well and truly have no idea what that man is ever thinking.
Do you think that Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry are actually dating?
RH: I hope not. I hope that’s a rumor.
SSR: I was thinking the same thing.
Since these are obviously both PR relationships, don’t you think that Tom Cruise with Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau with Ana De Armas work better?
RH: Yeah, I agree. Vibes-wise, Tom Cruise and Katy Perry actually work together. If anyone can handle controversy, it’s Tom Cruise. He can help Katy Perry with that whole missile backlash, Blue Origin, whatever the fuck was happening. Ana de Armas, I feel like she’s too cool for Tom Cruise. And Justin Trudeau isn’t cool. Katy Perry is, I think, net neutral or net negative on Justin Trudeau’s reputation. All four of these white people are crazy though.
Normal Gossip hosts Rachelle Hampton and Se’era Spragley Ricks appear at Revolution Hall, 1300 SE Stark, Thurs Sept 18, SOLD OUT.
