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NEWS
MUSIC
MEG MAC
I
t’s been almost three years since Megan
McInerney – AKA Meg Mac – released her
debut EP, and in that time the artist has traversed
the mid-20s hump; now 26, the lyrics from the
titular single of her new album,
Low Blows
,
suggest a specific lesson learned: “’Cause I don’t
say when I don’t like it… I won’t say ‘no’, even
when I wanna”.
“When I was writing that song, it
was my first time realising that it’s your
responsibility when you don’t speak up
for yourself,” the multi-instrumentalist
says. “In the moment you might feel
awkward or uncomfortable about it,
but later you’re the only one that has to
deal with it – the one that will suffer. I
was realising that it’s up to me to take
control of what I want to do, rather
than just being upset when things don’t
work out.”
The piano on the track is all square chords:
powerful and definite, without decorative
vagaries. It’s the practical result, Meg says,
of the way she learned: “I taught myself how
to play piano so that I could sing songs – my
songwriting has always been really simple, block
chords. It’s just how I’ve done it since I was a
teenager, and it’s turned into what my sound
is now. I don’t know how to move my fingers,
I only know how to just hit it hard, and make
shapes.” Her demos begin almost exclusively
as a recording of herself on the piano (“on my
phone – not very professional”), and she asserts
that she can hear the difference in her vocal
approach between being at the piano, versus not.
INTERVIEW
P
erry Farrell, frontman for iconic
alt-rock group Jane’s Addiction,
lives “a little bit in [his] own world” by
his own admission (to
HuffPo
in 2014),
so when Warner didn’t quite grasp
his idea for the cover art for
Nothing's
Shocking
– the band's 1988 debut – he
grasped matters into his own hands…
twice. After teaching himself how
to sculpt, Farrell fired the Warner
employees responsible for creating the
record’s cover art. Using a full body
casting of his then-girlfriend, Farrell
sculpted a pair of nude conjoined twins
with their scalps on fire, sitting cross-
ankled on a sideways rocking chair
– an image he’d had come to him in a
dream, he told author Brendan Mullen
(see:
Whores: An Oral Biography of
Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction
).
Nine of the 11 major music retail
chains existing in the US in ’88 refused
to stock the record due to its cover
image. “I never shopped at these big
stores – they were kind of like Kmart
or Walmart stores… so when they
came back and said that they wouldn’t
do it, and that I had to change the
cover, it really threw me,” Farrell said.
His solution was to treat the cover
just like a skin mag and put it in brown
paper. “I simply wrapped the cover
up,” he said. “All the indie record stores
got [the album] without [the wrapper],
and all the others got [the wrapped]
version. Warner was scared that they
wouldn’t sell anything if [stores] didn’t
get their hands on the record, so that’s
what went down. If I were to put that
record out today there’d be absolutely
no issue, right?”
ZKR
WHAT'S THE
STORY?
We have a look back at the
fascinating tales behind some
of our favourite album covers.
This month
Nothing's Shocking,
Jane's Addiction (1988)
T
his month L.A sisters
Haim return after a four
-year break and they've got
Something toTell You
, we
speak to ersthwhile Gossip
frontwoman Beth Ditto about
her new solo album, we check
in with Australia's ownVera
Blue, and take a closer look at
Lorde's newie
Melodrama.
Plus
there's a big ol' slew of grand
new albums to chew over!
Zo
ë
Radas (Music Editor)
“I feel like I perform better when I’m playing,” she
says. “When you go into the studio or do a show,
it’s really different: you’re holding a microphone,
someone else is playing the piano. You’re not
striving for perfection; you can’t help but feel the
movement of the song, feel the motion.”
In the studio for
Low Blows,
the piano wasn’t
always used conventionally. On the off-
beats of the swaggering
Ride It,
there’s
a noise which simultaneously sounds
like a whip-crack, and also that metallic
fizz a tram makes when its cables
catch together. Meg explains it was the
result of a rather nifty idea her producer
came up with at Sing Sing studios in
Melbourne. “We got a spoon inside the
piano, and scraped the strings,” she
says. “My job was to hold down a chord,
so that when you did the spoon-scrape it
was the right notes. We were sticky-taping some
keys down because I didn’t have enough fingers to
hold the chord. It was a team effort.”
The real instrument at front and centre stage of
this record is, however, Meg’s voice. Particularly in
Kindness
and
Grace Gold,
the way Meg curls the
end of her phrases (like running scissors down a
ribbon) is extremely distinctive, as is the way she
utilises all the primary colours of the human voice.
“I really love singing without words,” she says.
“Something can still have meaning even though it’s
not a word, or isn’t continuing a phrase. My album
is made up of oohs and aahs! But there is a huge
difference between an 'ooh' and an 'ahh'. I love
using vowels – you can do so much with them, I’ve
discovered.”
ZKR
Low Blows
by Meg Mac is
out July 14 via
EMI.