Angie McMahon Climbs the Mountain

Angie McMahon has held her calling card in spades for most of her life. Even when she was just a young kid humming around Melbourne, she had a dream of singing to people and writing songs. But, she didn’t always have the confidence to fashion that into a reality. “I’d do it in my bedroom and in my house, just annoying my family by playing piano and singing really loudly,” McMahon says. Her dad raised her on Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan and the queer Aussie folk legend Missy Higgins. When she joined The Fabric, a nine-piece funk band, as a teenager it became a blessing for her, as she was able to assimilate into the rigors of performance on her own terms. “I had a couple of years to really get comfortable with the idea of being on stage and landing my body with it a bit more. The fantasy stopped being a fantasy. That was really powerful,” she adds. But being a vocalist in The Fabric wasn’t the type of artist she wanted to be. McMahon was wearing short dresses and dancing around on stage and making noise, but she was never 100% convinced about what she was singing about; she didn’t yet have the life experiences to write songs that, to her, felt deep enough to make a career out of.

Around the same time, at university, McMahon studied literature and creative writing but admits that she was dreaming about doing music instead. She’s upfront about the whole thing: She wasn’t the best student, and she attributes that to having her priorities affixed towards a career she almost had while playing in The Fabric. By the time she finished school when she was 23, McMahon felt regretful that she hadn’t yet pursued a solo career. Her life had barely started but, back then, she chalked it up as a failure. “I’d felt like I failed my shot,” she tells me with a slight laugh. “But, I just decided to go pretty hard with it and believe in myself. It was always my dream, it just took me a lot of false starts, or stumbles in my confidence, to get to the first record.” Cut to her assembling a batch of songs that, as she calls them, were “sad and angsty things” she’d written up until that point. Those tracks marked the genesis of what would become her debut album, Salt, in 2019.

Hearing McMahon be so candid about what she perceived as a failure resonates. It’s frustrating how, when creatives are in their early 20s, they’re expected to produce substantial art. We’re pushed into these places where we have to reach giant milestones when we’re young, that our bodies of work must reflect a lifetime of experience before our own silver jubilees. I know far too many writers who’ve plum given up because they’re 25 and don’t have a book, too many writers who are flirting with quitting all the same. McMahon is 29 now, and she’s trying to resist the urge to feed into the idea that, as she’s nearing 30, she’s becoming old and, suddenly, worthless in the equation of contemporary music’s attention span. She craves the intensity of being alive, not just to start making art but to find the motivation to finish it. What McMahon felt nearly 10 years ago about her own shortcomings also cropped up again while she was making her newest LP, Light, Dark, Light Again.

“I get frustrated by the ageism in the music industry,” she explains. “One thing that has been a real breakthrough for me is landing fully in the feeling of failure. I wonder if we have to feel like we failed and if we have to really believe that we’ve failed to expand our capacity to make art. I don’t subscribe to ‘you have to be depressed and you have to be really dark to be a successful artist.’ But I do think that, maybe for us to make something that is more meaningful and understands human nature and what it is to be alive and write about it, you have to have actually lived—authentically lived—the feeling of having failed. I think I was feeling that quite deeply in my early 20s. And I felt it again in the process of making [Light, Dark, Light Again]. Before I could conceive what the record was going to be, the place it came out of was, honestly, what felt like rock bottom. Now I’m wondering: Is that just part of the cycle?”

Four years passed between Salt and Light, Dark, Light Again—and part of that can be credited to COVID, as is the case with an insurmountable number of artists. McMahon wanted to put out a record pretty soon after Salt was released—not least of all because that’s what industry cycles have come to expect of the artists who work within it. Most artists would probably embrace the fruits of being able to put out a record every year—or, in the case of some acts, multiple records in a year; but McMahon is fully aware of how, even though that kind of schedule would be rewarding from a prolific place, it’s just not the kind of musician she is. Not to mention, after Salt, she was learning, in real time, what the universe’s intention was for her. Her life was falling apart and the team of musicians and producers she’d been working with changed. In making Light, Dark, Light Again, McMahon herself fully changed. The record became a mountain she had to climb, but that’s what it always needed to be.

“I didn’t want to be defined by the one record that I had just finished, but had also finished in my body a couple of years before it was released,” she explains. “I wanted to be able to keep on freely expressing myself as an artist. And I still want that after this record comes out. My hope is to immediately start writing the next one and have it come out in a year. I can tell you, I know that’s not going to happen. It’s just not the way that my life works. It’s not the lack of trying, I would really love to be more productive. I learned a lot about myself in between these records. I really lost courage and confidence after [Salt] and I’m grateful for the places I had to go to climb out of that. I feel much stronger now, and I don’t think that’s going to happen to me again in the same way. My sensitivity and my own pain is so intertwined with this job and the releasing of these songs—I just couldn’t pull myself together very quickly. I ended up writing through that process and feeling a lot of new pain that was coming up. I had some songs written within 12 months of putting out [Salt], but I don’t think it would have been a very cathartic record. It would have just been enough. I don’t find this easy. I want to do it, but making a record is hard—and I want to do it well. I’m just having to unlearn a lot of bullshit.”

There’s a continuity between the songs on Salt and those on Light, Dark, Light Again. It’s a really special convergence that is, largely, a product of McMahon’s journey deeper into her own self-discovery. What drives her is trying to understand her emotional experiences and trying to understand the world by, first, understanding herself and sharing whatever she learns about surviving through vulnerability and connecting while remaining a sensitive, open-minded person. Salt germinated from a naive understanding of where her own imbalances and plateaus might have stemmed from, while Light, Dark, Light Again is this deftly mature and bold excavation of self-actualized truths and discomforts. There’s this sense that the call is very much coming from inside the house, and hearing McMahon work through that hard reality is, often, a revelation.

“These songs, they’re always just an exploration of ‘What the fuck am I going through and why does this hurt so much?’ And [Salt], it came from a place of thinking that those things were coming from outside of me,” McMahon says. “Finishing the second record, I realized that it’s now a realization that everything is a projection. We can only understand ourselves through our relationship with ourselves. I turned the mirror inward and I learned how to do it through songs—and, probably, therapy at the same time. The thread of trying to understand myself and life is the same but, by now, what I’ve learned is that I can work on self-compassion and restore compassion to a way that I can get myself to find the answers and I can find joy and figure things out by personal practices of acceptance and absorbing and learning and not trying to blame other people for my pain and not trying to project the pain outwards. [Light, Dark, Light Again] became more of a spiritual study.”

There’s a bit of sentimentality on Light, Dark, Light Again. It interacts and intersects with the record’s recurring themes of self-care and spirituality. But, sometimes, the songs transcend sentimentality into something that’s much more precious. McMahon, while making this album, started to feel found and known by nature. Reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass opened her mind up to the idea that “nature knows us even when we’re lost.” It helped ground her in mantras that bound her to the earth. While struggling, personally, over the last few years yet still wanting to make music, McMahon’s focus became taking the rough edges of her own life and channeling it into something that resembled clarity.

“That’s where my center started to land, this idea that wisdom within nature and sentimentality that I have in myself, it was validated and became alive through these epiphanies that I was having by just taking in the world around me,” McMahon says. “All of these places were charged with beauty and hope and the opportunity to see them as much as they could, that came from slowing down and staring at trees and the sky and the ocean. Life just became more colorful and inspiring, just surrendering to the cycles and rhythms of nature. There’s a lot of love in what I’m trying to make, and I’m forever empowered by the ideas that I’ve gotten from observing the natural world.”

But the songs don’t always siphon momentum or energy from nature. On “Fireball Whiskey,” McMahon writes about using alcohol as a means of navigating her own anxiety. Mental health in music is here and there; some folks are quite open to articulating how their mind is hard-wired, others just aren’t. It’s such a common throughline between us and our neighbors that it takes precision and risks to make it feel refreshing. “Fireball Whiskey,” through double-entendre verses, achieves that uniqueness. When the song was pouring out of McMahon, she was trying to give some structure to her own anxieties and better understand it for herself. It was written before she had come to the realization that alcohol doesn’t work for her. In fact, she doesn’t drink anymore at all, except occasionally at celebrations. Lyrics like “I threw it up, washed my mouth and sat back out on the couch with you” and “Now everywhere I step into, I’m thinking of you fondly” and “I could love you anytime, I cry about you all the time” are so visceral and punctuated, nursed to fruition by McMahon’s vivid command of familiar language. It’s a standout track for how personal it is, how its approach to spirituality comes from memory and not hypotheticals.

“I find that interesting, to look back on writing the song—because I can’t quite remember what my relationship with alcohol was at the time,” McMahon explains. “But the reason for writing about it is that I feel a calling to try and express what is hard and what’s moving through me. That’s what I’ve experienced so far, as an artist, that, if I can do that as authentically as possible and if I can do it in a really true way and just give it my best and find the simple, honest way to express it, then someone else is going to connect with it and it, suddenly, becomes universal. I think the real joy of this job is connecting with people and feeling seen and feeling like, ‘Oh, that intimate vulnerable thing that I was feeling? Someone else connects with that, as well.’ You don’t know if that’s going to happen when you’re writing a song. It may happen later on. It’s kind of a gamble, trusting the instinct that is driving the creation of the song. I needed to be writing that out of myself. It’s not really just coping through alcohol, it’s also loss and change and trying to heal things and find direction in life.”

The thesis statement of the album begins with its title: Light, Dark, Light Again. This idea of cyclicality and emotional timelines, it’s palpable and you can hear the intervals of joy, sorrow and hope spinning across the project. The deepest, full-bodied experience of being in the dark came two years ago, when McMahon was floored by the loss of a relationship, came to understand that she has ADHD, is queer and is, maybe, on the autism spectrum. All of that was new territory for her. “I’d never used those words or ideas to describe myself a couple of years earlier,” she says. “They felt like really big doors to be going through, and I was grateful to be learning them because, through that knowledge, I became much more empowered and much kinder to myself—which is the light again. But, in the dark, there’s just this episode of my life that I had no option but to surrender to.” In that time, McMahon turned to meditating and slowly tried to climb back into a place where she felt joy again and could summon more hope. She was reading about Buddhism and especially finding importance in the idea of accepting the suffering that comes with life—that with love comes fear and with joy comes pain. Embracing that duality was huge for McMahon, as she’d been very sick with mono and was suffering intense panic attacks around the same time. She had nowhere else to turn but towards the potential of self-compassion.

“It’s important to encompass the whole story, because they live alongside each other, life and death,” she says. “But the light again was me writing songs to try and bring joy back into my life. I am looking around and seeing all the things that I should be grateful for, but I couldn’t feel them. I knew that I had a lot to heal from. I was learning about psychology and the power of the mind and neuroplasticity and how we can be so nasty to ourselves. I realized that I was being nasty to myself a huge amount of the time. Subconsciously, we do it naturally, we speak in harsh ways to ourselves without even realizing—because our brain is trying to keep us safe. I was coming to understand that idea and tuning into my mind a little bit more and catching myself being really harsh and realizing that I’d been doing that all my life and grieving that idea as well.”

In turn, McMahon began writing songs that were encouraging a new voice in herself, to get louder. There are mantras on Light, Dark, Light Again that came naturally and turned the record into a home for hopeful promises and kind reminders. The album’s final track, “Making It Through,” serves as a strict remembrance of the cycle that we never stop going through. “I’m starting to fully accept that this is what life is about, that there is joy and then it goes away, because it’s temporary,” McMahon says. “And whatever is replaced by it will also go away, because it’s temporary. I was realizing that I’ve been really trying to hold control, that I am, naturally, a perfectionist and a controlling person out of anxiety—and letting go of that and trying to become a person who’s more accepting and surrendering, I was really trying to lull myself into that state. Something that I’m doing in the music, and also trying to in my own meditation, is continuously let go.”

McMahon admits that she’s not particularly good about sitting down just to practice music, that she does it because it’s part of her job. Lately, she’s been thinking about how, if her body is an instrument inviting energy of an idea through, then she has an obligation to make it into something physical and expressive. “Sometimes that just happens in a magical way, and that is addictive,” McMahon says. “It’s a really beautiful flow state and it’s exciting to try and connect with that and invite that in. So much of the joy of making music lies there for me. It’s also nice to just sit at the piano and play something. I think that is quite meditative. Sometimes you just sit down and do it and it’s good for you. Sometimes you get to have a really enlightened experience where you leave behind your worries and your tension. That is where I am looking to find truth. It’s just my favorite thing, it feels like I’m accessing authenticity and it feels like a song makes sense.”

A song that does make sense, “Letting Go,” shares a stylistic DNA with a song like Florence + the Machine’s “Free”—a track from Dance Fever, which McMahon was listening to pretty frequently while making Light, Dark, Light Again—in that McMahon uses her voice as an instrument that fills up just as much space as a guitar or a drum kit. She was listening to a lot of The War on Drugs, too, and taking stock of the way they layer their songs, and wound up demoing the record during lockdown and, since she couldn’t be with her band, began trying to fill out the arrangements by building a choir by herself or affecting her vocal in a way that expanded the construction. “It’s a really expressive thing to be able to do, I release a lot of my intense emotion out of my throat and that is just something I really believe in doing,” McMahon says. “I think there are studies about how it actually shifts your vagus nerve, that your nervous system can be reset by humming or singing. I’m just expanding on that, whether it’s yelling or making strange sounds. I don’t really think of myself as being particularly experimental with [my singing]. It’s just become more natural to practice singing in that way, and I want to do more of it. I’m always like, ‘What else can my voice do?’”

I’ve spoken with enough musicians about the dynamics of writing sad and happy songs that it’s quite clear that leaning on the latter is so much easier to do—as if the easiest creative checkpoint to reach is whichever one is closest to agony. So, placing such an intentionality on joy and on hope across Light, Dark, Light Again was a liberating moment for McMahon. She didn’t want to sit too deeply in her own sadness; she wanted to acknowledge its aches and write and move through it. Life is neither only beautiful nor really dark, and it’s so deeply important to hold space for both of those sides. You can likely attribute that to her being a disciple of the Bruce Springsteen school of songwriting, how she is so keen on building monuments for her heartbreak, triumphs and failures all in one astounding breath.

“It was obvious to me, by a certain point, that what I had to do was transform that sadness into something else—and it didn’t necessarily have to be joy,” McMahon says. “I didn’t want to bypass the darkness, and I’ve had to be quite careful about that, becaus eI don’t think it’s realistic to just make something that is about joy. What I really love, as an artist, a lot of the time is melancholy—something that touches both sides. I couldn’t just sit in my sorrow, and I didn’t want to put it back out in the world. I really wanted to believe that I could use it and transform it. And that was where I was finding a lot of my hope. The artistic license to write about sadness, and in sadness, I’m trying to practice a way of being both and doing both and balance both of those things.”

Light, Dark, Light Again is bigger, grander than Salt—a level up, if you will. The songs aren’t much like the stripped-down vibes of “Slow Mover” or “Pasta,” at least not sonically. While McMahon loves the imperfections of Salt, she wanted to experience making a different type of record, one that is much more layered and felt riskier to pull off. “I really didn’t want to hate my first record,” she says. “I wanted it to be simple enough that I could always look back on the decisions as really true and not coming from a place of fear. With this record, I also didn’t want the decisions to come from a place of fear. I wanted them to be riskier and I wanted to try and expand who I am as an artist.” McMahon let go of ideas that she held close while making Salt, opting to not use a click-track or fake drums—instead replacing drum sounds with samples to make the percussion bigger.

“I don’t know if I’ll do it again, but I have to try as an artist,” McMahon adds. “There’s something about recording in a certain way that might mean the song has a better chance of getting a sync placement on a TV show. I was learning that I don’t really want them to be the decision-makers throughout my career, but I wanted to make a record that tried to touch those things more and see what happens if I play the game a little bit. I really treasure the imperfections of Salt. On [Light, Dark, Light Again], I really treasure the big, cosmic sounds and the opportunity to be testing my limits more. I just wanted to be able to not limit myself to doing the same thing, just because Salt has its own little success story. I want to be brave enough to not rely on that and see what else is in me.”

After releasing Salt four years ago, McMahon could have just become a piece of the woodwork and churned out records like that forever. She would’ve made a killing doing just that. But, then again, Angie McMahon is not the type of artist who will ever let herself buy into reluctance or fear. Every record she makes will be two steps ahead of wherever anyone else thinks she’s going to land. Light, Dark, Light Again has a bevy of lyrics that, even at their most anthemic, are sincere and entreated with optimism. But it’s a sword that is also sharpened in honesty, an honesty that survival requires stumbling. There’s so much beauty in this, in surrendering a part of yourself to the inevitability that you can, and will, fail. If McMahon did fail after Salt, if she did hit rock bottom, then the monuments she’s built on Light, Dark, Light Again are nothing short of a rebirth.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.