"I see them as sonic Polaroids - they all belong together."
That's
how Megan Washington assesses her stunning debut album, I Believe You, Liar: a
series of snapshots spanning 24 years, taking in everything from family to friends,
crushes to heartbreak, trust, love, loss, lust, guilt, joy and everything in between.
Born in Papua New Guinea, Washington moved to Queensland at age 11. After
high school she studied Jazz Voice & Composition at the Conservatorium of
Music. "I'm quite patriotic about jazz, I'm proud to sing, but as a performer
and as an artist I always felt a little bit underwhelmed by my own inability to
really fulfil my creative needs or potential in the jazz genre."
It
also meant a break with her adopted hometown: "Brisbane's a wonderful petri
dish of a town. Lots of bands come from Brisbane, but they always leave because
there's just nowhere to play. If you want to be a fisherman, you need to go where
there's fish; if you want to be a muso, you need to go where there are venues."
So
Washington headed south to Melbourne with next to no money, no friends and not
even her trusty keyboard for company: "I couldn't afford to bring it down
so I went to a guitar shop on Brunswick Street and bought a ukulele - I wrote
'Clementine' on that."
Then fate intervened. "I'm old friends
with Kate Miller-Heike and she was having a show at Manchester Lane, so I went
to the gig and met this guy at the bar. We shared a pizza together and he seemed
like a pretty free-spirited, interesting cat. His name was Ohad."
That
would be Ohad Rein, the creative powerhouse behind Old Man River. "I joined
the band and I was on a plane to Europe a week and a half after I met him. I got
to go around the world with him, met lots of great people, and then I came back,
went into the studio with this guy that I didn't even know at the time [John Castle,
the album's other parent], and we started working together, and two-and-a-half
years later, here we are."
While the process of making the pop-rock
collage of I Believe You, Liar may have been challenging - "A lot of people
say that making a record is like giving birth, but it wasn't that satisfying,
or quick" - the finished result is a confident and assured Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Woman. "With all of the songs on your first record, you're
writing about what you're living. And by the time we were picking the songs to
go on the album, there were 45 songs. I picked the songs that were plot points
in this story."
And it's a story that takes in childhood ("I wrote
'1997' about my family, as though it was my eleven-year-old self writing a song"),
growing up ("What's that quote 'you can never go home again?' 'Rich Kids'
is about leaving my teenage years behind"), lust ('Sunday's Best' is a break-up,
but it just basically sounds like 'I wanna have sex with you' - which is, really,
what it's about"), close relationships ("'Spanish Temper' is about a
friend of mine: there's a lot of love but at the same time it's quite toxic, quite
volatile") and even death ('Underground' is my will - that's pretty much
as square and unflowery as I am on the record"), as well as her breakthrough
'How To Tame Lions': "In some ways it doesn't really fit, but it's so important
that I couldn't leave it off. It's the Codex that explains the rest of the album."
"21
to 24, that's when you kind of stop being a kid and start being an adult. When
I started writing this record I was a girl, and now I don't feel like that anymore."
'I
Believe You, Liar' is available now.
