Megan Washington’s ‘terrifying’ truth laid bare
Megan Washington felt depressed and helpless about the summer bushfires and how the arts are treated in Australia, so she made the bold decision to treat her next album like a diary.
Megan Washington is halfway through her first glass of pinot noir, and halfway through talking about how her artistic horizons have expanded across the last decade spent in and out of the public eye, when she hits on what feels like an elemental truth.
“I’m trying to the best job of doing this as I can do,” she says, choosing her words carefully.
“I’m not for a second imagining that it’s noble, because ultimately I like claps and pats on the back and treats, just like everybody else. But have you ever heard of this thing called the acrobat’s smile?”
Thinking back to a series of what she dubs “showbiz rules” accumulated and absorbed from various teachers and mentors across the years, the singer-songwriter leans forward in her chair and states with confidence that the only difference between a good acrobat and a bad one is their smile.
Why? “Because if the acrobat was actually grimacing and showing you how much effort they were going to, and how excruciatingly impossible what they’re doing probably is, then you can’t enjoy it as the spectacle that it is,” she says.
“Then your compassion would override your need to be entertained and you’d be like, ‘Holy shit, that looks really f..king hard.’ But when they smile, they’re giving it to you for free. When they smile, who are they smiling for? They’re doing it for you.”
“It’s this extra two per cent on the art,” she continues. “Yes, you have to train your whole life. Yes, you have to be a contortionist. Yes, you have to disappear entirely into a box. And yes, you have to be able to hang from a trapeze and catch people in midair and all that shit. You still have to be able to do all that — but at the same time, you need to look like you’re having fun.”
That two per cent? Washington doesn’t believe that should be considered extra; instead, she calls it the bare minimum, because otherwise, it looks like work. And that means that people will think it’s work, and then they don’t ever have a break from work. In her mind, the best art offers relief and succour from our ordinary lives, and that is precisely what she has been trying to do, and will continue trying to do as long as she is able.
“I think that the trick of all of it is to teach everyone that art is not something that you earn. You don’t earn the right to be an artist; you were born an artist. Everyone has that thing.”
It is a wet Friday afternoon in Brisbane in early August, and after six months of interviews necessarily conducted via telephone and Zoom — thanks, novel coronavirus — it is quite something for Review to be sitting at an actual table while drinking actual coffee and talking with an actual artist. During our conversation, her husband — filmmaker Nick Waterman — drops by with their young son. “That’s Amos,” she says, smiling at him. “He is magic.”
Across the space of a few hours, we relocate from a cafe near her home in New Farm to walk through the rain to a favourite neighbourhood bar. “Can I just have some fancy wine that you bring?” she asks the owner. “You always know. Whatever you think.”
We’re meeting as in a few weeks, the 34 year-old will release her first album since 2014, having spent time away from pop music by lending her voice to projects as diverse as the ABC television series The Recording Studio, the hit cartoon Bluey and a hilarious fiction podcast, CrossBread, where she played one half of a fake Christian hip-hop group alongside her dropkick brother.
Named Batflowers, it is a weighty and surprising collection of songs with quite a backstory. But before we get to the present, a little history: Washington returned to the Queensland capital two years ago, having lived alternately in Melbourne, Berlin, London, New York and Sydney since 2010, the year of release of her debut album I Believe You Liar.
A dynamic set of piano-driven indie pop songs drawn from her abiding love for show tunes and her educational background in jazz voice, that album — which peaked at No 3 on the ARIA chart and attained platinum sales in excess of 70,000 copies — lifted the singer-songwriter to a national profile off the back of extensive Triple J airplay and an exhausting year of gigging that saw her clock up more than 100 shows and appear at just about every major festival in the country.
Near the end of that highly productive year was the ARIA Awards in Sydney, where she won two awards from six nominations, including breakthrough artist and best female artist. But what truly capped that November night almost a decade ago was a knockout performance of lead single Sunday Best, wherein Washington prowled the stage and danced atop a piano while backed by a jazz big band and accompanied by a troupe of suit-clad male dancers who tore off her long pink dress to reveal a slip of a red skirt beneath.
It was — and remains — one of the most extraordinary and memorable moments ever staged at the annual awards ceremony; one of those thrilling, uplifting and rare instances where talent meets opportunity to execute something simply breathtaking. But the truth of those five minutes comprising the performance of a lifetime, where the entire focus of the Australian music industry was trained on her? It comes back to that showbiz maxim of the acrobat’s smile: don’t show ’em how hard you’re really working, nor what you’re actually thinking.
“I didn’t nail it,” says Washington, shrugging off the compliment, “because I sang real pitchy, and my shoes were about to fall off the whole time, and it was raining, and I was out of breath because I was punching durries like nobody’s business. I was really sad because my boyfriend at the time had organised his birthday party for the same night — in Brisbane. So I was alone.”
None of which was apparent to anyone who saw it back then, nor to anyone who watches it on YouTube today. “No, of course not,” she says, smiling. “Because that’s not my job. My job is to do what I did. And I loved it.”
■ ■ ■
For Washington’s third album, it’s a case of third time’s the charm, for she had already made it twice before. The final version of Batflowers — whose title she spotted in a magazine while in Los Angeles, and promptly fell in love with — was preceded by a couple of attempts that didn’t quite hit the right notes.
“There was a whole version that I made with these two guys in LA, who were amazing, but it was really professional and clean, and it didn’t sound bouncy enough,” she says. Then came a do-over with her longtime collaborator and producer John Castle, with whom she made I Believe You Liar.
“And I was going to release that, because it was good,” she says. “I still have the test pressing of Achilles Heart, the album, which I never put out. It was pressed and ready to go; we were months from release and days from manufacture, but I just didn’t love it. I really liked it — but I couldn’t hear myself in the music, every second of every song. I was missing.”
Who was there instead? “Other writers, producers — all cool people but probably some people who gave me some advice that I maybe shouldn’t have listened to,” she replies.
“There’s nothing wrong with it; I showed it to heaps of people and everyone was like, ‘It’s really nice’. But I just wasn’t terrified about releasing it. I’m terrified about releasing this album. My rule of thumb is if I’m not terrified, I’m probably not trying hard enough.”
The key to unlocking Batflowers lay in its opening title track, which Washington wrote over the summer while feeling depressed and helpless about the bushfires destroying large tracts of the countryside; about the way that the arts are treated in Australia; about what the future of the planet looks like, and about how hard it can sometimes feel to be a person with an empathic heart like hers.
“I didn’t want to write about any of that stuff,” she says, with tears in her eyes. “I just wanted to write some small truth that I knew would still be true in two weeks — which at the time didn’t feel even plausible. And the only thing that I could really write about myself, to myself, was how I felt. So I just wrote it like a diary, and I wanted to try to say to myself, if you keep going, maybe things will feel better, because it’s just such a hard time to be alive.”
That was the light bulb moment, where Batflowers — whose final lines implore the listener to keep going — crossed over from an encouraging note-to-self during a dark time to wondering whether that same sentiment might find a home in the hearts of others.
It’s this intrinsic aspect of creativity that has powered human art across the centuries, and it’s why artists seek to share their work.
“What if that was a song that other people heard on the radio?” she says. “What if they heard somebody on the radio saying, ‘Keep going, it’s going to be OK?’ Maybe I’m a stupid idiot for trying that hard, or caring that much, but I just don’t really know what else to do — so I’m trying to provide 53 minutes of something else.”
That it certainly is: from the uplifting pop hooks and layered backing vocals that drive the opening track to the propulsive beats of earlier singles Dark Parts and Switches, all the way through to the dry drum sound and unadorned vocals of Not A Machine and a handful of piano ballads in Catherine Wheel and Kiss Me Like We’re Gonna Die, Washington’s third album is the sound of an artist putting her whole heart into her art. It sounds like someone emerging out the other side of something potentially catastrophic, but feeling more in tune with themselves than ever before.
That idea she mentioned earlier, about how if she’s not terrified, she’s probably not trying hard enough? Six years ago — the same year she released There, There, her last album — Washington stepped on to a stage before a large crowd of people, not to sing, but to conquer a long-held fear by coming clean about something that she had spent her whole life trying to hide: her speech impediment. “Singing for me is sweet relief,” she said at TEDxSydney. “It is the only time when I feel fluent. It is the only time when what comes out my mouth is comprehensively, exactly what I intended.”
That stutter? It’s still there, and shows up from time to time mid-sentence, occasionally tripping her up in the course of a fascinating discussion held over coffee, wine and three hours. That stutter might always be there, too. But it’s not a problem anymore; it’s just how she talks. And Washington decided six years ago she can no longer be afraid of talking, because she’s got things to say.
Batflowers is released on Friday, August 28, via Island/Universal. Megan Washington will perform at Brisbane Festival on September 12, 13 and 15.
More Coverage
