Washington – Where The Wild Things Are
Megan Washington is fierce. She’s intense. She says what she feels. Her heart beats in her voice and passion surges through every inflection, every f-bomb.
It’s evident that, as a musical artist, Washington is perhaps the freshest, most complex singer songwriter to hit the Australian scene in like… forever.
With a fringe framing jaw-dropping features, Washington delivers music that is painfully bittersweet, ballads that are amped on rhythm and ‘fuck with me and I’ll fuck with you’ attitude that can turn as quickly from lust to loathe to love.
‘I’m sure I don’t really have an accurate perspective on the depth and breadth and shape of my music,’ Washington said when asked about her recent ARIA double win for Best Breakthrough Artist and Best Female Artist.
‘I don’t have a television. I very rarely listen to the radio. I don’t read anything that’s like an indication of that. I don’t really know who likes my music. I know there are people on Facebook who message me all the time, and I love that, but as for the rest of it? I’m not entirely sure.
‘I’ve just been doing the same thing for like three years and writing songs and trying not to fuck any of that up too much. So it was really really great to win and I don’t actually remember giving the speech because I was so… not nervous, but just wondering fuck, is this really happening to me.’
Washington first hit the scene as a jazz singer. She then grabbed a band, dropped her first name and hit the road as Washington… still the same fierce girl, just branded differently.
She released a number of EPs before striking gold with the dizzily intense ARIA nominated album, I Believe You Liar.
‘It has been said that I am very excitable, eager and enthusiastic, but a lot of the time that comes from the fact that I’m an incredibly fucking pessimistic person and I often need to like retreat from the world just to like process and synthesize everything coherently and I guess that time is when I write songs,’ Washington said of the process behind writing her album.
‘Songwriting occurs when there is a balance of information and inspiration coming into
you like reading a book, listening to music, being in relationships, going out, seeing things, being curious and then you synthesize all that and write a song.’
But this hasn’t been happening in recent months. All too often – like today – Washington has had to spend the day talking about herself, a process she partly loathes. After all, surely the music says more about her than she ever could.
But there’s a small light in the entire process, Washington points out.
‘For me the act of articulating those songs every night is a mix of therapy and fantasy.’
Washington appears at Southbound January 1, 2011. www.southboundfestival.com.au
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
