The Brag

Washington
I Believe You, Liar
By Steph Harmon
Megan Washington is a tiny pale ball munching on an apple in the middle of a big brown beanbag. It’s 3:30pm and she hasn’t had time for lunch – but with a schedule like hers I’m not too surprised. The 24-year-old writer, namesake and frontwoman of Melbourne’s Washington is 33 shows deep in a 36-date national tour, supporting The Beautiful Girls. In Sydney for the Enmore show, her label is killing two birds with one stone, and taking her around to do some promo for her own upcoming release. The night after we talk, she’ll be performing her debut album I Believe You, Liar at a showcase in front of the Sydney music industry. I suggest she must be a little drained. “Well, I’m on a beanbag in the foetal position,” she says dryly. “So, yeah. You know. Tired.”

Washington’s album is the culmination of three EPs, two and a half years of touring, a handful of luck and a whole heap of Very Hard Work. After studying jazz at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, Megan moved from Brisbane to Melbourne in 2007 to develop her own sound in a more nurturing city. In her single ‘Rich Kids’, she paints a pretty stark picture of what it was like trying to be creative in a Brisbane where, “everybody’s coming down, or throwing up, or sleeping around. I remember why I left this town…” Nothing sugarcoated there – but then Washington isn’t one for sugarcoating. She’s exactly like her album, actually; fun, honest, insightful and undeniably down-to-earth. Although she’ll readily own how exhausted she is, she’s just as happy to be here.

Washington got her first real break in 2007, after a chance meeting with Old Man River’s Ohad Rein at a Melbourne bar. A week and a half later she’d joined his band and was flying off on her first international tour. One tour lead to the next and all of a sudden it was 2009, and she was launching her debut release, the Clementine EP. It was her first official departure from that background in jazz. “The next door neighbour between jazz and pop is folk,” she tells me, “and Clementine was really folky.” Following Clementine was How To Tame Lions, Washington’s breakthrough EP. “That EP was very classical harmonically, but with those electro sounds,” she says – apparently ‘Cement’ was based on a Bach sonata. “It’s about figuring out how classical music can work [commercially] – but without being Muse.” The title track from that EP won her the Vanda & Young songwriting competition, with a prize of $20 000 and return trips to the US and the UK.

All of a sudden, the doors had flown open. With two songs added to triple j rotation, Washington was invited to appear on Spicks and Specks. And then on Rockwiz. “They don’t often let you do both,” she tells me excitedly. “It was super cool!” It was on Spicks and Specks that they uncovered the notorious midget-tickling story (google it.); on Rockwiz, she got to perform a duet with G-Love. “I was high-fiving my fourteen-year-old self!” she exclaims, before launching into a startlingly convincing rendition of ‘Baby’s Got Sauce’. After the show, Rockwiz asked her on their national tour – and she was on the road again. “I got to sing with Angry Anderson, John Paul Young, Ross Wilson… You know Ross Wilson? I did a dance to ‘Daddy Cool’ when I was about seven, for my dancing class.”

When she shows me a seated rendition of the dance (which has 1993 written all over it), it strikes me that Megan has somehow gotten to work with most of the people she admires – from Ross Wilson, Ohad and G-Love to the album’s co-collaborator John Castle, and some of the artists behind her film clips: creative collectives like Greedy Hen (‘How To Tame Lions’) and We Buy Your Kids (‘Clementine’). She seems to have friends in all the right places these days. “Well, I try. I have this stupid idea: I believe that you can be friends with the people you work with. And if you’re not friends with them, then don’t work with them,” she says, matter-of-factly. “That’s been my whole career mission statement: surround myself with really talented people, and then just stand at the back.”
Washington’s third EP, released earlier this year, was Rich Kids – and the title track from that one signified her breakthrough to commercial radio. But that’s three whole EPs before an album release. An unusual choice? “Well, I just really wanted to be ready,” she tells me. “I didn’t want to just bust out with a bunch of tunes and go, ‘FUCK YEAH I MADE AN ALBUM, PEOPLE!’ – because it just wouldn’t have been very good.”

Which finally brings us to How To Tame Lions, the debut album that’s got her on the cover of this very magazine. The LP has jazz-fused folk, heartbreaking ballads and moments of the funnest, danceable pop songs out this year. When she was a kid, Washington dreamt of starring in musicals – which is pretty obvious when you watch some of her film clips. Take ‘Rich Kids’, with the pre-pubescent coming-of-age sleepover dance-off; or ‘Sunday Best’, an homage to French new wave equipped with genre clichés, period costumes, and even a cameo by Megan’s boyfriend, Yves Klein Blue frontman Michael Tomlinson. The film clips are all about characters, costumes and choreography – Megan was a dancer until she was 20. “I do think that showtune element, that theatrical element, is really present in the music that we make. So whenever we make film clips, I just want to make musicals. Because I can!” she laughs. “Suck on that, Baz!’”

The album is a disparate bundle to be sure, but it’s tied together with an undertone of conflict – and a stark, honest way of processing the past. Megan has said of her album that each song amounts to a “sonic Polaroid” of her life. ‘Spanish Temper’, for instance, is a Latin-fused anger-ballad directed at her former housemate; and when she sings “when will you kill me?”, she’s not being metaphorical. “He’s one of those really magnetic people that you end up just gravitating towards, even though they can be quite toxic,” Megan explains. “One day he just lost the plot, kicked down my door and trashed my house.” Following a chorus like “You smash my jaw, break my nose, knock me out, suck me in” with a verse like “I love you just like my brother,” it’s fair to ask if Washington waters down raw honesty to make for more palatable songs? “Nah,” she answers. “I just can’t stay mad at people. It takes too much energy.”

Curled up in a beanbag like that, it seems that energy is something Megan has to keep in careful reserves these days. When I ask what music she’s been listening to, she doesn’t even pause to think. “Nothing,” she replies. Nothing? No-one answers Nothing… “I just can’t,” she says, defeated. “I mean, I guess at the moment, it’s just – Ugh. It’s such a weird time for you to be interviewing me right now, because I think I just cracked yesterday! I mean, I’m obviously fine, it’s just…” she trails off a little, and shrugs with a smile. It’s understandable. To be on the road for so long, while intensely invested in her own two-and-a-half year project – and then to have that project come to a close… It has to be a little overwhelming. “Yeah. Having to talk about it, it’s just weird.”

At the album preview the following night, when she sings the final song – the title track and album closer, which she wrote last of all – the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. There’s something so final about the way she performs it, as a farewell, or a tribute, or something. When she comes off stage she’s kind of shaking, and I ask her how she thought it went. “That was so intense,” she replies. “I was crying before I went on. You only get one chance to do something for the first time, you know? The last two and a half years, all of that, everything I’ve done – I have to say goodbye to it. It doesn’t belong to me anymore. It’s out there now.”

Who: Washington
What: I Believe You, Liar is out now through Universal