Meg Mac sings to her own beat
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Dressed for success … American tastemakers have been raving about Australian soul pop singer Meg Mac. Picture: Supplied
Source: Supplied
MOST people listen to music in their car so it stands to reason songwriters would dream up a tune while behind the wheel.
Australian indie soul pop discovery Meg Mac found out the hard way that you can’t drive and record your next hit single.
When the hypnotic beat for Never Be arrived as she was motoring around Sydney in her mother’s car, Mac repetitively tapped it out on the steering wheel to remember it until she arrived at her destination and could record it.
“I record everything on my phone but it was dead so I had to tap the beat and sing it all the way home for half an hour. I think that’s why it has that chanty feel to it,” she says.
The 25-year-old musician has taken the world by storm since uploading her first song Known Better to Triple J’s Unearthed in early 2013.
That unexpected gospel soul song immediately conjured comparisons with Adele which have followed her around the world as the quietly-spoken artist slayed audiences throughout America with her powerhouse voice.
Star opener … Meg Mac opened for American soul superstar D’Angelo on his recent US tour. Picture: Mark Cranitch.
Source: News Corp Australia
Her self-titled debut EP won her thousands of fans here and in the US and her festival performances became supercharged with loud crowd singalongs to her single Roll Up Your Sleeves and it’s “everything is gonna be all right” refrain.
Mac was signed to seminal American indie label 300 Entertainment — also the label home of another Australian star on the rise Conrad Sewell — and scored the coveted support slot on the recent US tour by soul r&b superstar D’Angelo.
Mac, who shortened her birth name of Megan McInerney, said she was completely unprepared for the onslaught of attention when she uploaded Known Better to the radio site for scrutiny.
“I started getting lots of emails from labels and publishers and I had no idea what I was doing. The one thing everyone wanted was ‘send us some more songs’,” she says.
She quickly wrote her next offering Every Lie and emailed it to Triple J directly, bypassing the usual music industry conventions of how to “service” a single to stations via radio pluggers.
“How did I even have the guts to do that?” she says with a wry smile.
The new single Never Be, which will buy her time to finish her debut album later this year, cautions against the “grass is greener” envy of other people’s lives.
“I noticed people think my life is super cool; it’s crazy to hear what people think the reality is of what I do,” she says.
“The most popular misconception is probably that touring in America is glamorous when it’s counting your pimples while sitting in a van for hours.”
On the flip side are those extraordinary moments when thousands of people flock to the festival stage to sing back “Everything’s gonna be all right” to her as she conducts them during Roll Up Your Sleeves.
As they did at the recent Splendour In The Grass festival and no doubt will do again during her national tour next month which is close to completely sold out.
“That is the one everyone wants to sing. Even my mum. She sent me a message about how she was feeling stressed out and she sang it to me on the phone and it made her feel better. I’ve realised that song is bigger than me when it helps someone else,” she says.
“When everyone is singing like they were at Splendour, they are sometimes louder than me and they sound so nice. That makes me feel good.
“I was just trying to write a song to calm myself down.”
Mac speaks quietly and sings loud. Brought up on her father’s Motown and Ray Charles records with her own forays into Edith Piaf’s catalogue, Mac discovered she wanted to be a “belter” even as she whispered song ideas onto her phone late at night so as to not wake her family.
“I don’t want to sing pretty, I want to belt it. You can damage your voice doing what I do but it feels so good to physically let stuff out,” she says.
“In between gigs I have to not talk to people, don’t go out drinking, go to bed early and be really boring.
“The hardest think is when your band mates are saying ‘Just one drink’. But I actually like being by myself and chilling out after a show.”
Broken bones … Mac matched Dave Grohl’s heroics by continuing to perform her American shows with a fractured foot. Picture: Supplied.
Source: Supplied
Clearly she wasn’t chilling out when she fractured her foot mucking around in her hotel room during gigs on the D’Angelo tour.
Still wearing a boot weeks later, Mac said she didn’t think it was broken until towards the end of the tour because the adrenaline of performing would mask the pain.
“At the end of the tour I thought if I could do shows with a fractured foot, I can do anything,” she says.
Never Be is out now. Meg Mac plays The Metro Theatre, Sydney on September 11, Corner Hotel, Melbourne, September 26 to 29, Max Watt’s, Brisbane on October 2 and The Domain, Sydney (with Mumford and Sons) on November 14.
