Australian singer-songwriter Angie McMahon: ‘I was walking in a graveyard and was like, “Oh I’m gay”’

The 30-year-old musician rose to fame back home with the pared-back indie-rock of her 2019 debut ‘Salt’. After a period of intense emotional upheaval, she speaks to Annabel Nugent about her new album, hitting rock bottom, and finding solace in nature – no matter how corny it sounds

(Young Ha Kim)

The Australian musician Angie McMahon can pinpoint the exact moment of her queer awakening. It dawned on her four years ago as sudden as a brisk whack to the head. “I was walking in the graveyard near my house, knelt on the grass and was like, ‘Oh I’m gay,’” she recalls over Zoom. “I looked up and saw that I was in front of this enormous tree, and to the right were hundreds of Catholic graves.” The message for McMahon, a lapsed Catholic, was clear: nature would be her new religion.

McMahon, 30, recounts this story with a bemused look that says I know it sounds crazy. “I know it sounds crazy,” she then says, laughing. “But it rebirthed the spiritual side of me, which has been great because I like having a higher power to defer to and nature is the most obvious one for me – it’s where we get breath and life; it’s not some dude in the sky or a book telling me what to do with my body. It’s nice to have a spiritual reference point that feels more accessible.” Some people find that in the stars with astrology, McMahon found it at the foot of a tree.

Her reverence for the environment is all over her record Light, Dark, Light Again, which came out last October. It followed on from McMahon’s 2019 debut Salt, a No 5 hit in Australia where her rueful vocals and bluesy, shambling rock are a staple on radio stations. Recently, she washed up on UK shores thanks to a hit dance song that sampled the track “Pasta” – her wistful millennial anthem about feeling tired and ignoring food intolerances – by British DJ-of-the-moment Fred Again…

When she completed Light, Dark, McMahon was left with a few recordings that didn’t make the final cut. She’s released them now as Light Sides, a five-track indie-rock EP that offers more vantage points from which to survey McMahon’s long journey to self-discovery (sexual and otherwise). Like the songs on Light, Dark, these tracks see McMahon feeling her way out from her personal depression fog.

They came out of her “lowest low ever”, McMahon recalls, something brought on by massive changes in her personal life: a break-up, an ADHD diagnosis, panic attacks, coming out as queer – and the religious guilt she had to reckon with as a result. On top of it all, she came down with glandular fever. “I was floored for a month,” she says. “I felt dead. It was a really important, hard, and special time. I did a lot of meditating and came across the Buddhist idea of rock bottom – that you have to die before you get to emerge as a lighter, new version of yourself.”

That’s the version of McMahon who wrote Light Sides. On “Beginner”, she sings of this rebirth in a breathy falsetto: “I reached the peak of the mountain when I was crying on the floor/ Felt like I was dying but I was just being born.” And also on Light, Dark with “Divine Fault Line”, as she shifts between staccato and vibrato over a steady backbeat thump of drums.

It’s easy to slip into pat proverbs when speaking to McMahon – adages about finding light in the darkness and the healing powers of nature come to mind – but they feel unclichéd here, uttered in her Aussie drawl from beneath the wide brim of a forest green baseball cap. It’s a similar case with the mantras on her record. Phrases like “It’s OK to make mistakes” and “I am already enough” might seem dorky at face value (McMahon worried about this herself) but they earn their place here – as natural-seeming as the lorikeets cawing on “Fireball Whisky”.

That said, if you think they sound like something out of a self-help book, you’d be right. “I was fully, hand on my heart, saying things out loud to myself that I needed to hear,” McMahon recalls. “I had thought positive affirmations were really lame, but they’ve helped me so much – did you know something crazy like 80 per cent of all our subconscious thoughts are negative? They help to just stamp that out.” It also feels great in a selfish way, she says, to be reciting those words on stage every night.

(Young Ha Kim)

To step into a new self as McMahon has done means that, by default, there is an old self she is leaving behind. “I look at the version of myself [who made Salt] and I feel really sorry for her,” she says. “Not knowing so much of what I know now about my body and my wellbeing.”

She can hear that dissonance on Salt, in the slow-churn pace of her voice. Also, the restraint. “It was a simpler record with much less production. Part of that was because I didn’t know who I was or who I wanted to be and so I was really scared of being put into a box or having someone decide my sound for me,” she says. “I think really that came from a place of fear; me trying to hold on to control.”

In contrast, these recent songs sound free and layered. “Letting Go” is a soft-rock driving track with roots in War on Drugs and Bruce Springsteen, invigorated by a new collaboration with producer Brad Cook (Waxahatchee, Snail Mail, Bon Iver). Elsewhere, more pared-back songs like the lamp-lit piano folk of “Music’s Coming In” recall the best of McMahon’s early material.

For a while, during the nadir of that low period in her life, McMahon thought she might stop making music altogether. “I felt so lost in the industry, and I stopped believing that it was worth it,” she says. “I was having such a bad time; I didn’t want to sing and that was really sad.” When the songs did finally come to her, joyous and uplifting amid her period of self-discovery, it was a relief – but they came with an important asterisk. “I realised then that I could stop if I wanted. Never before had I held that option within myself,” she says. “It was a reordering of my priorities. To know that I can quit? It’s a relief.”

‘Light Sides’ is out now via AWAL