Washington

There are certain things that you possibly already know about Ms Megan Washington: that she's originally from Brisbane, that her song ‘How to Tame Lions' won the Vanda & Young Songwriting Competition last year and, if you've seen the ‘Rich Kids' clip, that she knows how to rock a glittery bodysuit. But there's a lot more to the 24 year old than sly lyrics and catchy melodies. For example:  

She's a jazz nerd.
"I studied Jazz Voice and Jazz Composition at the [Queensland] Conservatorium [of Music], and not to blow my own piccolo I did quite well in the jazz scene. And I do still really have a healthy love of jazz - I'm quite patriotic about it, and being a jazz muso and understanding jazz is a bit of a club. You can go anywhere in the world: it's kind of like being a Mason."


She was in Old Man River.
"I'm sort of old friends with Kate Miller-Heidke and she was having a show at Manchester Lane [in Melbourne], and I thought "oh, I don't wanna go," but I did go after work and I met this guy at the bar. We shared a pizza and he seemed like a pretty free-spirited, interesting cat, and his name was Ohad [Rein]. I joined his band and I was on a plane to Europe a week and a half after I met him."

She wrote some of the songs for the recent Sydney Comedy Festival show Tripod vs the Dragon.
"I wrote one song outright and I collaborated on a few of the other songs. They're fucking genius musicians, the Tripod guys. There's no one like ‘em. But I'd like to write an opera, or a musical: something quite narrative. Maybe a song cycle."

Her album I Believe You, Liar is almost entirely about one person.
"The guy in ‘Sunday's Best' is the same guy in ‘Clementine' and the same guy in ‘Love a Solider' and the same guy in ‘I Believe You, Liar'. The overarching muse on a lot of these songs is this relationship that I had, that I am in now, but a lot of these songs were written during this turbulent, awful, hurtful time where nobody knew what they were doing. I wrote ‘How to Tame Lions' after this person had broken up with me for the third time. It was a great little gift, that song. It's the codex that explains the rest of the album."


She thinks of her album as her conjoined twin.
"Do you know what I did when it was finished? I cried. It wasn't like relief or fear, it was like somebody had died. You know those twins in the womb and one of them absorbs the other and after a while, even though it's uncomfortable, they get used to it and then when the twin gets cut out, they feel really dark and depressed about it? That's how it felt. I have a real sense of this record being pulled from me, by some unholy hand."

‘Rich Kids' is her own ‘I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman'.
"A lot of my friends went to GPS schools and they all dressed very louche and boho, but they live with their parents and have an SUV. I went to this warehouse party and that's when I realised that I had left that place and that I was never going to be part of that anymore. Age 21 to 24, that's when you kind of stop being a kid and start being an adult, and I feel when I started writing this record I was a girl, and now I don't feel like that anymore."

Actually, ‘Rich Kids' isn't her own ‘I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman'!
"Oh god. If I ever wrote that song I'd expect you to fly to Melbourne, tie me to my Hills Hoist and shoot me." Andrew P Street