Angie McMahon Is All About 'Kind Faces' & Prioritising 'Basic Self-Care'

In 2013, a "different" Angie McMahon won a competition to open for Bon Jovi on the Australian leg of their Because We Can tour. "It was a different me – more makeup on my face," McMahon chuckles. "I was less sure of myself, definitely, but, yeah! I was just 19." 

At the time, Bon Jovi advised McMahon to make good use of this opportunity, but she chose to press pause on her music career after the run of dates, instead completing her arts degree at Melbourne University. 

"You can feel like you get one shot to put yourself in the public eye and have an audience, but it's not really worth it if you don't know what you wanna say, I guess," she reflects. "Had I started touring at 19, I mean, I don't think it would have gone very well if I had tried to follow that momentum. I was grateful that I was just a bit older and I was feeling a bit more grounded, but I really feel for people who are young and maybe aren't ready, because [touring] does things to your mind and your body."

In mid-May, McMahon posted a lyric video for her song Missing Me on Facebook together with the following confession: "When I was younger, I wanted to sing loud and see how high my voice would go, and when we would visit the family farm near the Murray River, I took the motorbike out into the fields with my iPod and tested the limits of my range... This year my brother told me he could hear me doing that, so anyway, bit embarrassing..."

We just have to know how this conversation unfolded. "It somehow came up at family dinner conversation and both my brothers were like, 'Yeah, nah, we could hear you doing it'," she laughs.

"I mean, they've always been really nice, actually, about me singing, like, even in the house, probably not at such an extreme volume, but I would sing quite loudly and badly sometimes at the piano – there's only a door between me and the rest of them – and they never really got angry at me for being a noisemaker, which is nice, because I felt like I had the space to do all the work.

"My little brother started learning the harmonica at one point, he started teaching himself and he would do it on the toilet," McMahon recounts. "He'd be, like, sitting on the toilet and you would just hear the harmonica coming from the bathroom." 

We're tipping toilets are typically good acoustic environments, kind of like singing in the shower. "Yeah, really nice reverb," McMahon – whose "next mission" is to master harmonica ("I wanna take it up to the next level") – acknowledges, before pondering, "Maybe I'll take up that tactic."

On If You Call, the closing track of McMahon's first full-length Salt – which debuted at #5 on the ARIA Albums Chart and topped the AIR Albums Chart (Independent Labels) – she admits, "Where I whistle, I wanted it to be a harmonica, initially, but I can't play it and I didn't have time to learn." 

The lyrical phrase that concludes If You Call (and Salt itself), "All the loving that we've earned is gonna keep us breathing," is reassuringly optimistic. McMahon ruminates, "I haven't written that many songs in that realm, because so often I'm writing a song trying to process a difficult thing." 

"Basic self-care is much more important than looking or feeling cool."

After admitting her internal voice is routinely harsh, McMahon confesses, "I've only recently become aware of how strong that voice can be inside of me, and how damaging it can be, and it's interesting to observe and to try and work through... The journey of self-care and self-growth can sound really cheesy to talk about, and I think some people don't want to engage with the language, but actually, to me, it's the most massive thing, because it's how you find happiness and, particularly if you have mental health issues, it's how you work through those mental health issues. 

"It's such a [continuing] journey just to care for myself, particularly with touring and a really drastic change with my lifestyle over the last couple of years. It's, like, I've had these experiences with myself that I never really thought I would be open to, for example, sitting in front of the mirror and just looking at myself and talking to myself in the mirror and just saying, you know, 'You're doing ok,' or whatever it is that, in the past, I would've been like, 'Oh, that's maybe a bit crazy.' But now having, I dunno, gone through intense things in my work and in my life and in my mind, and also having a psychologist and having a more open dialogue about mental health, those sort of things, to me, are so important now and just, like, basic self-care is much more important than looking or feeling cool," she laughs. 

Fans of McMahon have probably clocked photos of her manager Charlotte Abroms, beaming proudly, in social media posts/tour diaries that document this burgeoning artist's career-defining moments (such as picking up the Grulke Prize for Developing Non-US Act at SXSW earlier this year). When asked how the pair came into each other's lives, McMahon enlightens, "We met at a bar where I was working, through a friend, John Castle, who actually recorded [McMahon's Gold-certified debut single] Slow Mover – and he's a really lovely mentor to me and also a friend of Charlotte's – and so he introduced us and then we started working together a couple of months later. 

"I hit her up to have lunch and just wanted to ask her advice on a couple of things, and she was telling me about her exhaustion in the job. We got into this conversation basically about mental health and physical health and burnout, and the basis of our friendship and relationship was discussing those things and it's been such a wonderful thread that we've had through our working relationship, because we've always put that humanness first and it's made the things that could be really difficult in the job so much easier for me and hopefully, likewise, for her. I think we just give each other the support that is the voice you sometimes need to hear where it's like, 'You need to take a break,' or, 'You're doing ok,' or, 'It's ok to not work,' or whatever it is; you know, we put so much pressure on ourselves. But she has been so wonderful... I'm really grateful to her. 

"I am so glad that that's been my experience, 'cause I think there can be some really opposite types of experiences, but basically we both followed our instincts throughout the whole thing and, you know, if anyone was asking for advice, the thing that I would say is: if you feel like you're being treated in a way that you don't wanna be treated... your gut instinct about people is so important. And Charlotte has this with all of her clients: when we first start working with people, and people are joining our team, we just work with kind faces and it's, like, not necessarily the face," she laughs, "but the feeling that you get from people you're gonna be working with. 'Cause, like, even though there are plenty of people in the industry who can open doors for you or help get shit done, if they're not gonna make you feel good – and they're just not gonna understand and they don't have that kind feeling – then we don't work with them.

"It's that same thing that we were talking about before: knowing that you can not follow the momentum if it doesn't feel right, I mean, I think it's really, really important."