From her lounge room in Sydney, Meg Mac reflects on her move back to the city after a period of personal and professional respite in the country.
Attempting to write her third studio album, Meg was at odds with herself and found she needed perspective; so up she got and relocated to Burroway in the New South Wales Southern Highlands.There, Meg cast a cynical eye on the direction her music had taken, ultimately unhappy with the first effort at her follow-up to 2019's 'Hope'.
Her desperate need for change paid off and has cultivated her new album, 'Matter Of Time'.
Meg's now been back in Sydney for a while. "I moved back the week the first single ['Is It Worth Being Sad'] came out [in March]," she says.
"I was cleaning my house out and the song came on triple j – it was a weird transition." Weird transition indeed, when you think about how that moment echoed events that marked her career beginnings.
"I definitely ran away, but then it was the best thing I ever did and was exactly what I needed." - Meg Mac
A drive from Perth to Melbourne in 2013 with a car full of friends, her first single, 'Known Better', was played on triple j on the approach to Melbourne, and Meg was dubbed Unearthed Featured Artist of the Week.
"I hadn't thought of that," Meg says, noting how strange it is things have come full circle.
Sometimes in the chaos of the city, one doesn't know what they sound like. Your own mind can't get a clear thought because there's so many things influencing your movements and your life.
Then, as Meg did, you move somewhere like the NSW countryside and suddenly, there's no voices at all because you're so centred.
Sometimes you find you need that to be able to move forwards with the things you want to do – and for Meg, that was 'Matter Of Time'.
"I needed to run away and have an escape, and a setting to reinvent myself, to remake the clay," Meg says. "I scrapped a whole album and had no idea where to begin – the first step was moving away."
Meg has been careful to acknowledge the adage of not being able to run away from your problems – but listening to the new album, it's not so much that Meg was running away so much as she was using her music to address them.
"I'm realising, I definitely ran away, but then it was the best thing I ever did and was exactly what I needed.
"It took a while, but I processed so many things and was able to write new songs and piece it all together."
The definitive note of reconciliation that comes for Meg with the creation of 'Matter Of Time' was that of risk. As Meg explains, she took great risk in throwing out her original effort in favour of taking time to create this one.
"I kind of let people down, wasted a lot of money, all that stuff. Making that decision was the pinnacle moment; I believed this blind faith that I could make this album – it was like, 'I know I have this album I can make, but it doesn't exist yet'.
"I guess it was taking that risk to make a hard decision, to go for something but you have to make it happen."
The process Meg created for herself isn't something she feels she'll rely on for future songwriting; it's exclusive only to this release. "I think I've learnt my lesson!" she laughs.
"I feel like I knew something wasn't right, and I knew that I wasn't into what I was making, and I let it go.
"I didn't speak up, I didn't stop it, and then I literally let it go so far as a week before the single was due to come out and snapped and was like 'stop the release'.
"Moving forward, I'm not going to make anything unless I'm 100 per cent into it." Allowing herself self-control conflicted with Meg's feelings of letting people down.
"I think that's what was holding me back, that feeling of letting people down, people being angry at me, I was really scared to do it. . . and it was fine! "It wasn't like 'oh, this album is terrible', it was good, but it wasn't right. It wasn't who I am for that time. Who I needed to be."
Evidently, Meg now has a very healthy relationship with her craft – it doesn't matter to her what those "people" think about the new music. "I haven't really thought about it, and I think when I did scrap the album, everyone was ok with it, the record label was ok with it.
"It was all kind of in my head that people were going to be so angry, it was more my head than my reality. It makes me realise how much it's myself holding myself back, thinking that people are going to be angry when they're not."
There were a lot of heavy and very dense thoughts and feelings she had to navigate, which for Meg translates into the soundscape of 'Matter Of Time' as beautiful melodies and voluminous harmonies – a tricky process when trying to uphold such intricate (and at times, intrusive) thoughts.
Made to think about it in more depth than she's perhaps previously done, Meg is slow and considered with her reply.
"One of the big things about the old album was realising that I preferred to listen to voice memos of when I made up the song compared to the finished version.
"I was like, 'I need to get that feeling, the voice memo energy'. Some of the songs on 'Matter Of Time', there's a few that were on the old album that I kind of kept going back to the original voice memo and reworking it from there.
"That was like one of the big goals was to get that voice memo feeling, but have the music bring them to life, not change them.
"I think when I started writing new songs for 'Matter Of Time', you can hear in songs like 'Is It Worth Being Sad' the lyrics are like 'I ran away / My great escape' – quite literally I escaped; I was using my loop pedal a lot and going through a big Enya obsession. Using vocals as the bass of songs.
"I think my voice is always going to be my voice and my songwriting, you know, it'll evolve, but it'll be true at its core. It's how you bring songs to life and what ideas you bring to them is what changes it or makes it more epic."
'Matter Of Time' is available.
Meg Mac 2023 Tour Dates
Fri 14 Apr - Anita's Theatre (Wollongong)Sat 15 Apr - Enmore Theatre (Sydney)
Wed 19 Apr - Altar (Hobart)
Thu 27 Apr - Melbourne Recital Centre
Fri 28 Apr - Wool Exchange (Geelong)
Thu 4 May - Astor Theatre (Perth)
Thu 11 May - Solbar (Sunshine Coast)
