SINGER-songwriter Meg Washington is touring her award-nominated new album GEM on a 23-date run and stopping at Brunswick Heads in February.
The four-time ARIA Award-winner and masterful storyteller said the new single Natural Beauty is at the heart of the album, and took her a long time to write.
“It’s the only piano song on the album and is really a list of various complaints I have about being an artist inside a capitalistic world,” she said.
“I never imagined I would use ‘superannuation’ as a lyric, but the songs always find a way to startle me, and the song was born from a real place of feeling that everything I care about is not really connected to money.
“We live in a world where the religion is money, and while money is essential, it’s not everything and I see so much in the world that that that gets forgotten because it doesn’t have a material outcome.
“One of those things is that music and art and singing actually belong to people, to everybody, but people think that unless you’re shockingly, brilliantly, and outstandingly good at it, you shouldn’t continue. What’s that joke? Don’t quit your day job. I hate that joke. It’s demeaning.”
Mother Nature inspired the album itself, Washington said.
“It’s about animal nature, human nature and my own nature and the album came at a time of reckoning for me, because I had just left the major label that I was signed to for 13 years, and I was questioning everything; like, why make records? What am I doing this for?” she said.
“I was searching for a while, and I eventually realised that, because I sing all day, and have ever since I was a kid, in the shower, going to the bus, in the supermarket and in the car, that if I was on a desert island and there was nobody around, I would still sing all day.
“That helped me to find a way into writing about why that’s important, singing for no reason, and singing without capitalistic intent, and that’s where the record was born.”
Amid the friction between artistic and commercial imperatives, Washington is secure in the knowledge that she has always been an artist and will always be.
“You can retire out of spite or rage or sadness, but it doesn’t stop you from wanting to because all you have to do is pick up the guitar again and you’re back where you began, with a song in your heart and a story to tell,” she said.
“People say it’s a compulsion, but I feel like it’s more of a vocation, something that you do, because you feel it is a calling.
“I had a great time writing the guitar songs with Ben (Edgar), and I loved the process, but really the guts of the record is Natural Beauty,” she said.
“I think it was quite angry, it seems so crazy to scroll through the terrible atrocities in war zones and what Taylor Swift had for lunch and this algorithmically targeted thing that you just mentioned to your friend two days ago you’re now getting ads for.
“Music is just the way that I communicate and make sense of the world, and that song and this album are very much about that.”
Meg Washington plays the Brunswick Picture House on February 21.
For tickets, visit brunswickpicturehouse.com/meg-washington
