The second coming of Megan Washington is upon us, with the release of her new single 'Dirty Churches' heralding her long-awaited return to live performance.
“I've really been easing myself back into things,” Megan explains.
“I had a couple of years off from performing for personal reasons and now I'm getting back into the swing of things, and it's all beginning to feel really vibey [sic] and I'm feeling like a musician, which is really good,” she laughs.
'Dirty Churches' came out mid-May and just days after its release, Megan had already seen it take on a life of its own. “There's been a really lovely amount of support for the song,” she says.
“Obviously, for me, it's quite a sentimental song, so it's always really beautiful when something leaves my psyche and my mind… and then suddenly it doesn't belong to you anymore and other people eat it and it becomes a part of them. It's cool.
“I have a personal theory: I think musicians come from either two places – I think some people make music to give and some people make music to take, and I try to be a giver when I write; that's my aim and my intention.
"The best thing ever is when people tell you they walked down the aisle to your song, that's the best. For me that's the best measure of whether a song has reached people in a deep way.”
Layered with deep, dark synth and topped by Megan's velvet vocals, 'Dirty Churches' is thematically centred around the give and take inherent in a personal relationship, though Megan is reticent to expound much further. “I wrote the song when I was living in Berlin and it's about a relationship that I was in,” she says.
“I'm always reluctant to tell people exactly what the song is about to me because I feel like that tends to remove the possibility of its Rorschach function.
“It is about a relationship but the song is a meditation or a study on compromise.
"I had this song for a while and I was really feeling that in this time of extreme sides that it couldn't hurt to release a song about compromise and somehow meeting in the middle.”
Though only recently released, 'Dirty Churches' is a song that's been with Megan for some time now and came to be after a chance meeting with producer Dave Hammer.
“The production of this song is by Dave Hammer, who I bumped into at gig at the end of last year and we hadn't seen each other in yonks,” Megan says.
“When we were chatting about our songs over a beer he asked what happened to 'that' song and told me I should look at it. It was a surprise as well because I wasn't really planning on that, so in a way I feel like this song wanted to be born.”
Megan is on tour with 'Dirty Churches' in June, playing a brief east-coast run with shows in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney. “As I said, I've been easing myself back into performing [but] I'm one of those rare musicians who actually loves to tour,” she says.
“I'm a singer because I love to sing; that's the origin of my career, is that I enjoy the physical act of singing. I'm excited about these shows because it's been ages since I've played tiny club shows like this, and for me I love intimate venues.”
Washington 2019 Tour Dates
Fri 21 Jun - Howler (Melbourne)Thu 27 Jun - The Foundry (Brisbane)
Fri 28 Jun - The Lansdowne (Sydney)
