Making A Move

Meg Mac, or Megan McInerney as she’s known to her family and friends, finds herself in a pretty incredible position. The 23-year-old has recently sold out five of her seven tour dates across the country, with the date in Perth and the second Sydney show sure to follow suit shortly. McInerney was tagged as ‘one to watch’ earlier this year by triple j, and the young, soulful powerhouse is certainly living up to expectations. The most astounding part of her rather sudden critical acclaim is that she is yet to release her first body of work.

"I found out I was going to do a headline tour and I was thinking, ‘Oh, no! What if nobody comes?!’."

Her debut EP, titled MEGMAC, is to be released mid-September. All the while, McInerney is still trying to get her head around the whole situation and trying to adjust to the pace at which she is gathering momentum. “When [the first Melbourne and Sydney shows sold out] it was more a relief than anything else,” she admits quietly, almost timidly. “I found out I was going to do a headline tour and I was thinking, ‘Oh, no! What if nobody comes?!’ Then when something like this happens, it’s like, ‘Wow, I’m going to be singing to all these people.’ It’s made me more and less nervous at the same time. I’m massively nervous, but I’m also massively excited. Even doing an interview right now, like, I haven’t done many of these, and it’s all about this EP and tour that hasn’t happened yet, so that just adds to the suspense. It’s my first CD, like, real CD. It feels real now. Before it was just a few songs on the internet, so yeah, it feels good.”

While answering interview questions and coming to terms with performing to sold-out crowds is nerve-rackingly new for McInerney, she has this strong and determined way about her that creeps through as she talks. As the conversation moves towards her earlier years, it’s evident that she is confident in her ability, and while she might not have expected things to happen this quickly, being a singer was always what she had planned to be, and she set her mind to it accordingly. “I was always singing, but I didn’t actually start writing until I was 17,” she recalls. “I loved photography and video and stuff, and I went to uni for a year in Sydney and studied that, but I found instead of doing my assignments at home, I spent all my time singing. Doing something I didn’t want to do made me realise what I wanted to do.”

Although McInerney grew up in Sydney, she found herself leaving everything she knew and loved and jumping on a plane to Perth to pursue her career in singing, taking up a music course at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). It was a long way away from home, but it was important to McInerney that she kept her focus on the task at hand, and part of that meant not being distracted. “Being somewhere that’s not your home and feeling like you’re only somewhere for a reason makes you work harder. That’s why I’m living in Melbourne while all my family lives in Sydney. I work harder if I’m somewhere for a reason. Making such a big move to Perth wasn’t a huge deal though, I was one of those people who went to uni and then every holidays I’d be back in Sydney. It didn’t feel like I was going far away. Leaving Perth was always the plan. It was never a starry ‘I’m going to move over east’ thing, I just always knew I’d be straight back in Sydney once uni was over. [Being at WAAPA] was fun. Studying away from home was fun. It was fun because I just got to sing, and it was okay to sing, and I got to sing every day in an environment where it was cool to do so. Being around amazing people that also like singing as well, it doesn’t feel like a joke, or a dream.”

"I want to show people the person I have been, and once that’s done, I can move on."

If McInerney had ever worried about feeling like what she was doing was a joke, you wouldn’t tell by listening to her music. Her voice is a powerhouse – she sounds bold, confident and in complete control of where she’s heading. In 2013’s Every Lie, she asks, “Release my soul beneath my naked bones” in a bittersweet soul-pop fashion, and that seems somewhat appropriate given what she wants to express with the release of her EP. “There’s five songs on the EP, and four of them are the first four I ever recorded,” she says warmly. “The EP’s kind of just to mark what I’ve done, so I can move on to new things. There’s one song in the middle called Grandma’s Hand, which is a cover we recorded just recently, so the four originals, it feels like that’s what I’ve done and that’s who I’ve been, while the cover is more like where I’m planning on going next. I want to show people the person I have been, and once that’s done, I can move on from what I’ve done and focus on the new songs I’ve been putting together.” Subsequently, her latest track, Roll Up Your Sleeves, has made its way to listeners in the US, having been played on KCRW.

Writing has always been a bit of a daunting task for McInerney, but it certainly hasn’t stopped her getting into her zone and putting her pen to paper. It’s a practice she takes very seriously: “When I’m writing and singing, I like to do it alone. I feel weird when people listen to me or can hear me. I find it hard writing when my housemates are home because after I’ve been writing they’ll be like, ‘That sounds good!’ and I’m like, ‘Nooooo!’ And then I have shown people stuff before and it’s just confusing. I think when I started writing, I discovered that you could make up something that hadn’t been done before. When I was learning to sing, I was singing songs I liked by people I liked, and then I discovered I could sing something and do it my way. It’s scary, because there’s so many ways to sing one word, and there’s way too many options within songs. When you’re writing your own songs, there’s no one to copy or to draw inspiration from, and that’s a scary thing. That’s why I need to be free from distraction...  I like to be my own judge and just do it myself.”

While she has her head wrapped around these upcoming tours and the release of her record, she hasn’t restricted herself to the near future – McInerney is already looking toward the horizon and desperately wants to keep the ball rolling. “I’ve been working on heaps of songs, so it’s all just going to be about recording new music and my new stuff, which is who I am now. An album would be the next logical decision, but it’s still a very loose plan – I need to work out how I want to sound and who I want to work with, and just go from there. We’ve got to see how the EP goes first.” Loose plan maybe, but Meg Mac is driven, determined, and has thus far ticked every box on her way toward becoming a significant figure within the Australian music scene.