Fine, so I guess I’m a little in love with Megan Washington now. I’d always liked her in the past, and I respected her Tedx Talk, but it wasn’t until catching her showcase at Bigsound 2017 that the shoe finally dropped; this woman is incredible.
A clear festival highlight, the strength of her latest songs sees the PNG-born singer hit stirring new heights and puts her at the forefront of the country’s greatest contemporary lyricists.
“A lot of the time I feel like the Babadook,” Washington confesses with a laugh. “If the Babadook was going to write a love song, what would he write? I think he’d write something like Kiss Me Like We’re Going to Die. That’s how I feel about the record. Love songs written by the Babadook.
“There is an absolute inspiration for this record. I experienced a sort of love that was at once very beautiful, and also doomed from the start. Without being teenage and nihilistic about it, I didn’t want to write, ‘Fuck you, how could you do that’ songs. I wanted to write love songs, but include all of that betrayal and foreshadowing, all of the complicity and understanding that it would be shit,” Washington says.
“I’m a little bit older now, and I think that is actually all part of love. Every time you bring a puppy home, you may as well be saying, ‘Hey guys, we’re all going to be really sad in seven to 12 years.’ There’s this complicit acceptance of future pain in any situation, but particularly in love affairs. Instead of blithely writing ‘I love you’ or ‘I’m sad,’ it’s writing both that’s interesting.”
Part of Washington’s Bigsound set was a stripped-back, haunting cover of Anything You Want by one of the all-time greats, The Big O. You can hear the echoes of Orbison, of Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen across much of her new material and, turns out, that’s with good reason.
“I listened to a lot of Roy Orbison while I was writing this new music for a few reasons. I wanted to write love songs, but there’s a desperation and a deep sadness in the harmonic content of his music. Even Blue Bayou, it’s so sad. If you didn’t speak English I think you’d still hear that song and think, oh, it’s about lost love.
“There’s a real longing in his music that I’ve loved since I was a child. I really pulled a lot of his music apart harmonically, because I wanted to see what those tricks were. I feel like that deep red, rich, romantic, lugubrious Roy thing is something that had to be there.”
You can hear this across the tone of her latest material – seductive and shaded, like a leaf-strewn path through the woods – but within songs like Achilles’ Height and Catherine Wheel, it’s the lyric which is king. It’s always been one of Washington’s strengths, but never has it been so accomplished.
“As well as all of the thematic ideas that I had, in terms of the utility and the function of my repertoire, everything that I’ve written up until now, they’re all belters. I was putting in lots of covers, or really old songs that were almost hymn-like. I don’t want to belt for two hours a night. I’m not in Wicked.
“When I was writing, as well as thinking what I was trying to do thematically, I wanted to say more with words. Like Leonard Cohen, or Tom Waits. I wanted to do it with words. There’s one called Love Me Best that’s almost rapid-fire. I was trying to write a song from the template of I Want You by Savage Garden – where it has energy, but I’m not belting all the time. I was trying to write from that perspective, where there is a natural emphasis on the lyric,” Washington says.
“I indulged myself lyrically more than I have in the past. I don’t think there are that many pop songs on this record. It’s quite grand.”
