INTERVIEW: Meg Washington on 'Gem', her glowing new album: “I wanted to make a wild-woodland, natural-like record.”

Words: Emma Driver
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published: 6 August 2025

Meg Washington must be one of Australia’s most surprising creative powerhouses. It’s not that her creativity is surprising, but where she chooses to use it. Back in 2010 her debut album I Believe You Liar won her the acclaim of just about everyone who had an eye on Australian music, spurred on by her song ‘How to Tame Lions’ winning the prestigious Vanda & Young Songwriting Competition. In the fifteen years since, she has stacked up an impressive number of creative lives. There have been the acclaimed follow-up albums to her debut – There There (2014) and Batflowers (2020) – then a full-length reworking of The Killers’ debut album Hot Fuss in 2022. There are not many artists who will turn “piano practice” into a whole album of stunning homage, but Washington has never been predictable. She commits to any artistic move she makes, and whatever she does – subtle or wild, exuberant or dark – is always worth paying attention to.

Washington has shone, too, on screen and behind it: as leading lady in the surreal thriller The Boy Castaways (2013); as the voice of beloved teacher Calypso on Bluey, the ABC’s international hit kids’ TV series, since 2018; and, oh, just co-writing and co-producing a feature film, How to Make Gravy, released last year. In the last decade she’s also become a parent, moved to the beach, and pulled out of the major-label record deal that shaped her career for more than a decade. Now she’s made herself a beautiful, spacious new album called Gem. Not a glitzy, sharp-edged kind of gem, though – more like the kind you unearth in its natural habitat, one that catches the light and inspires wonder without any tricks, unattached to glittering bling.

One of Gem’s many attractions is the way Washington has pushed her songwriting into new territory. Confessional lyrics about her own life have up till now been her dominant mode, but much of Gem is about fantasy and imagination. Washington establishes scenes and moods she wants to come true and projects them into an imagined future; ‘Gem’ is, after all, her own name spelled backwards.

The song ‘Shangri-La’, for instance, the album’s second single, is named after an imaginary utopia, and soaked in island-fantasy textures – subtle Spanish guitar, shakers, hypnotic melody. It’s “an ode to horniness”, Washington has said, about “going deeper into the present moment to remember that we are all part of nature, and that nature is horny AF”. This is in keeping with how she describes the rest of Gem in our interview below – as something more “natural”, like a “wild woodland”. ‘Shangri-La’ is the perfect song to introduce it.

Created in the gaps between her other creative endeavours, Gem has a spaciousness that Washington says is deliberate and that brings a welcome simplicity. Not that Washington’s jazz-tilted songs of previous albums, with their unexpected twists, weren’t brilliant too; their complexities have always offered her audience something to marvel at and study. But here the songs flow by, with images and messages carrying them along but never demanding you gasp at their cleverness.

Image: Michelle Pitiris

Opening track ‘Gem’ establishes this ease, as Washington sings that she’s “doing it all by feel”, with a solid mid-tempo track propelling her vocal through its top layers: “Don’t you miss this sparkle on me?” she asks. “What if you had known what you had in your hands?” Next comes ‘The Sound of the Feeling’, which adds intricate rhythms without sacrificing the immersive flow – distorted guitar lines weave through, there’s the odd piano burst, synths fade in and out, backing vocals orbit in space. With lyrics and specificity disappearing under the wash, it’s ripe for us to slip off into whatever alternative world we decide on. Later on the album, ‘Starlife’ explores further into unknown realms, with the space-synth setting on max and a subtle, echoing slide guitar to bring it back to earth.

Third single ‘Kidding’ also takes on the idea of heading deeper into part of yourself; this time it’s more about realising who you are amid the noise of other people’s opinions. But don’t settle down for more of the same: ‘Golden Orb Blues’ picks up the pace, Johnny Cash-style guitar bringing rhythm, horns sliding in as a manifesto of feeling and desire unfolds and words rain down: “I feel alive,” Washington repeats, and “I want to sing” – “I jumped into the abyss and I found out that it’s a featherbed.” The track ends with a full minute of spoken-word, its text taken from a conversation that American choreographer Martha Graham had with her friend and biographer Agnes de Mille back in the 1940s. It’s fitting that two highly creative women talking over dinner becomes a strident set of instructions for Meg Washington, another highly creative woman, more than 80 years later. “Keep the channel open,” the forceful (male) voice tells us, intoning Graham’s words. Washington seems to be living by that mantra.

‘Natural Beauty’ takes us back to Washington’s piano-and-vocal roots, and here comes that crystal-clear voice, finding its centre: “While everybody’s talking about superannuation / I’m singing in the garden, I’m trying to find my soul.” The song soars; it could almost be the key solo moment in a Broadway musical, when our protagonist finally realises where she’s meant to be: singing from her soul in the garden, and to hell with the neighbours’ complaints.

Then ‘Honeysuckle Island’, the first single, rides the waves to another make-believe world, a gently strummed guitar as our guide. An island paradise won’t change the things that matter, though: “I’ll be still in love with you,” Washington sings, while painting a picture of an idyll she might have with the people she loves. The album closer is ‘Fine’, written by Washington and sung with Paul Kelly. Simplicity is its middle name: no fuss, just direct lyrics and an effortless mingling of two singular voices (Ben Edgar’s delicate production shines here). Projecting some hopefulness to finish Gem feels like exactly the right touch: “I’ve been looking at the future / Everything’s gonna be fine.” And everything is fine with Washington’s creative arc. You can bet that whatever she makes next will be just as satisfying – and never, ever boring.

Meg had a fascinating chat with Women In Pop’s Jett Tattersall about the origins of Gem, what it made her realise about her own life as an artist, and what comes next.

Hi Meg, thanks so much for talking with us. So, your new album Gem is a fancy gem, my goodness! If the album was actually a gemstone, which one would it be, do you think?

Oh, that’s nice. If it were a gemstone, it would be an opal, because it’s very natural. It’s very untouched … you know, it’s unfaceted – uncut? An opal, pastel, shimmering dreamscape.

That works beautifully. I feel like this album has pages in it – it’s like a book of an album. There are so many different sounds and stories in it. You’ve described it as “reframing” your own story. Can you tell us a bit about that?

The idea of reframing the narrative was actually specifically referring to the last single, ‘Kidding’, which was born out of a desire to reform the narrative. But the whole album itself was actually just born out of my leisure time, because it’s a record that I put together in the background over the last couple of years, while we were working on our feature film How to Make Gravy, which we [Washington and husband Nick Waterman] wrote and produced. And this record was my place to go alone and be with my musical creativity, in that very pure sense. And I found myself trying to answer the question of what it feels like to be making music in these times, and what these times demand of me personally and creatively.

Was it like you were skipping around an island, playing stories in your head, putting music together?

Well, the island concept emerged from a mixture of fiction and truth during the first year of the unspeakable years of Covid. We spent quite a bit of time on Minjerribah – Stradbroke Island – off the coast of Brisbane. Until recently, you know, if I wasn’t within a walking distance to a decent coffee, or if I couldn’t get Uber Eats delivered, I would feel like I was not connected to something important! But Covid really reframed that connection for me, my connection to nature. I mean, I’m not the only one, right? Half of Victoria moved to Queensland for the same reason. But it really dawned on me – the combo of becoming a parent, and then Covid, seemed to reshape my mindset.

So I found myself thinking a lot when I was making this record about nature in general, [including] my nature: why I sing. Do I sing because I can get a song on the radio and then get cash, or do I sing because I love it, or do I sing because if I was an animal in the woods by myself with nobody around, I would sing anyway? The truth about myself is that I am a singing animal. That’s just what I do. So it doesn’t seem like much of a breakthrough, but it was quite profound for me. And a lot of this music came from an examination of various intersections of nature.

I guess it takes quite a few years in an artistic journey to check in with yourself and go, “OK, how much of this is what I would do anyway? How much of this is my desire? Am I still who I am?”

It’s a constant negotiation, right? Because once you turn your passion into your job, you’ve turned the garden into a factory. That’s how it usually goes. When you’re a young artist setting out, and you’re just writing songs in your bedroom, then all of a sudden somebody says, “Ding-dong, I’m from a label, and I think you’ve got what it takes to be that thing you’ve always heard about – a signed artist to a major label”, you’re grateful for the validation. Other people out there who do this for a living – who have jobs and salaries and company cars and business cards and expense accounts – think that your creativity is worth something important.

Then there’s this small transaction that happens in that shifting from your creativity being very small and private and just for you alone and actually becoming something that a lot of people share in. Over time, it becomes a conversation [and] that becomes a negotiation. I mean, it isn’t even really a bad thing, it’s just what happens … It’s just a conversation that’s being had with other people that aren’t you. And your career becomes like a multi-person bobsled team that everybody has a seat in.

But things changed for you? When did that happen?

I left my label about eighteen months ago, which I was signed to for thirteen years – which was a very long time – and I just really relished the sensation of working all day on our feature film projects and doing all the work that I had to do. And I loved the experience of coming to the piano and being completely alone in my own thoughts … with no direction towards this kind of genre or that kind of genre.

When we were making this record, I found myself being so fatigued by the sound of music, because everything now has been perfected, you know – synthetically perfected through the use of AutoTune. Even just rhythmic quantising – actually putting all the beats in their exact bars. Everything is created to a grid. Everything is in 4/4 time, everything has been squared off, everything has been AutoTuned. The feral sound of human sound making has been smoothed and airbrushed into this perfect package. And I was very attracted to the idea of making a record that was natural and not created with that Cartesian idea of how music should be. I wanted to make a wild-woodland, natural-like record.

Well, according to this album, that wild and natural sound is also incredibly delicate and refined. There’s elements of chaos but there’s nothing messy about it. It’s as if you’ve seen beyond what “natural” and “raw” might mean, and you’ve created something that’s superseded those ideas.

It was also born from coming to a realisation about my own musicality. I have a composition background. I went to the [Queensland] Conservatorium. I have jazz roots. So I realised that my basic relationship to songwriting, I guess on the first four records of my career, was that I had been writing every song as “the one”. So, for example, every song had to have a big sing in the bridge, and every chorus had to hit, and the whole thing had to be like an apparatus on which I could showcase my vocal prowess and acrobatics. But I realised that if I write every song like that, and I do a gig, five songs in I’m exhausted. It only took me twenty years of playing shows to figure it out!

So I started doing covers just to give myself another sort of song to sing in which I could chill out a little bit. When I was writing this record, I was really thinking about playing it live. I wanted to make sure that there was enough space in the music, and enough space in the album, for me to have a good time doing it live and not having to be pushing and pushing, just honking all the time [laughs]. I wanted to have light and shade and space … to take a breath or do a spin or say something. I had never really thought about space as a compositional device as much as I did on this record.

I love that idea – the pockets of space in the album. So where were those places for you, where you made these songs and carved out that space?

Well, the record was all made with my friend Ben Edgar, who lives in Victoria, in the Dandenongs. The first track that we collaborated on was ‘The Sound of the Feeling’. He made the bed, the track, just as a piece of music. And I heard it in 4/4 time. And he kept telling me that it was in 3/4 time. So I wrote this topline in 4/4 for a track that’s in 3/4, and the negotiation of that time signature and that metre – that rhythmic compromise – ended up inspiring the melody, the melody shape, and a rhythmic way of writing, a very different way of composing than I’d ever done before.

And so when I finished that song, I started to go back up there every time I could. Every time I had something in Victoria, I would just leave a few days on the end, and I would go up the mountain and chill with Ben and Charlotte, his wife, and their beautiful son, and we would just make these pieces of music that I would then bring back to my home in Brisbane at the time and finish. I would open up these songs and begin to work on the lyrics.

I just wanted to create a place that I wanted to be in. I didn’t want to make a space that was full of hectic imagery, dark motifs. I didn’t want to say anything negative in the songs. I didn’t want to be verbally repeating stuff that I didn’t want to come true.

In the past, I’ve been very literal and very honest about what is going on in my life [whereas] some of these songs came from future truths that I would like to be real in the future. ‘Fine’ is a song that came from that sort of writing. And there’s a few songs on the record that have been written from projected truths. And it kind of works because we ended up moving to the beach, to the coast. So I sort of wrote that fantasy into reality.

So you’ve got a very beautiful musical vision board, basically, and you’ve manifested that?

There really was a piece of paper beside the piano that said, “golden light … the way the light hits the water at sunset … fruit from the trees”. I had a whole word cloud of things.

‘The Sound of the Feeling’ is really the call to action, isn’t it? It’s a protagonist journey. With your filmmaking connections, do you “see” your songs when you’re writing them? Is there a visual component?

No, I see myself singing them live, and I feel the words coming out of my mouth. But obviously this is a record that’s full of imagery. Some records are full of psychology, and they don’t have a lot of images in them. But this one is very image based. So a lot of the visuals are just sort of making the words come true, really.

[The videos] were kind of easy, because we had this “Treasure Island” concept, so I took a creative team of about eighteen people, over to Minjerribah, and we shot three music videos: the two music videos that are out [‘Kidding’, ‘Shangri-La’], and there’s one more coming. That just really set the tone for the whole record and everything about it.

So you were looking ahead, creatively, with those videos …

Yeah. It only took me twenty years, but I’ve come to this really great creative spot where I’m about three projects ahead of what’s out, instead of having my last thing out, and now I’m working on the next thing, and I’m feeling all the psychology of that – how it’s going, how it’s going to inform the next thing, what people are thinking about it.

In this instance, I’ve done Gem. Then I’ve made the next thing and the next thing, and now I’m doing the next thing after that. So there’s two more records that I’ve got – not finished, but at least populated with what the tracks are going to be and what they are. They’re written. So it’s actually given me a creative privacy in my own mind, that I’ve never had [before], because I’m not distracted by any idea of the reaction or what I’m putting out might inform what I create next. I’ve already created it, so it doesn’t matter.

So you’re giving yourself space from your own preoccupation on how people will receive something? I think that’s incredible.

It’s a bit like the world-record line in the swimming pool: stay ahead of the line so that I can keep this privacy that I’ve got, because I’ve never had it before. It’s very convenient. And it’s also freeing.

Meg Washington’s album Gem is out now. You can buy and stream here.
Follow Meg Washington on her website, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok.
The Gem Tour is currently touring across Australia, tickets on sale now here