Escape in “Time Machines” with Megan Kennedy’s debut single

There’s an earthy energy about Megan Kennedy. She’s one of the humblest people I know. Her guitar is like a thread on Time Machines, weaving an entire world. You are transported to expansive landscapes and these threads glistens like waves just beyond a tropical shore. The dry vocal take is understated and lets the shimmering words float to the top of your mind. 

“You’re an asteroid, I’m in your path.”

“You’re a scalpel to an open heart.”

“Tropical islands, see how they glisten, breaking like champagne.”

Megan Kennedy’s debut single is as grounded and effortlessly cool as she is. I remember asking her once if she’d record some of her songs so I could have a soundtrack for a road trip along the coast, and she finally did. I caught up with Megan to discuss her new release.

So, what’s your songwriting process like?

I live in my Notes app, it’s hilarious. One note is like, remember this and this from the shops. Another note could be a sentence that I’ve heard or just one word. And then I just have big collating pages trying to write songs that didn’t work. It’s the ultimate collection tool.

My lyrics just get reduced down. I’ll start with this (makes an imaginary stack of pages with her hands) and then a small portion of the pile slips through into a song. Sometimes things that don’t get used can get recycled.

I will always start off with some kind of guitar arrangement or a random melody that I think I need to put some chords to. It’s actually quite structured. I’ll start off mucking around and sing melodies over the chords. I really look to pick out melodies. So, sometimes I’ll just play the voice memo of the guitar and I’ll get a keyboard and listen to it and pick out perfect melodies. Then, I go back to the lyrics I’ve collected and see how they slot into those melodies. Sometimes you fit lyrics in perfectly but when they come out of your mouth they don’t have the right feel, so sometimes I’ll do things like totally switching lines around.

This song Time Machines definitely started with lyrics. It started off with covering a 50s song actually. I think it was All I Have to do is Dream by The Everly Brothers. It’s your classic C Am F G, four chord, and I think I was just singing a different melody over the top and I kinda had this really boppy, poppy, four chord typical thing I was like “How do I break that up and make this less of a 50s pop song and I came up with a Fmaj7 to G verse.

It’s interesting that you bring up The Everly Brothers because I know you used to sing some covers from The Everly Brothers in your duo but there’re obviously a lot of harmonies in those songs, but in this song, you’ve chosen not to include many harmonies. Why’s that?

I guess directly from having sung the song on my own for so many years, harmonies didn’t immediately spring to mind. But also we didn’t want to cloud the vocals too much, because I wanted the lyrics to pop. I thought, that maybe if there’s too many vocal layers the lyrics wouldn’t sink in. There are three guitar layers on the track. There’s my guitar, there’s the slide guitar in the background and there’s another guitar picking through the chorus.

Who did you choose to work with to record this?

So, there’s two brothers called Matt and Jack Harrison down Mornington way. They’ve got an outdoor granny flat that they’ve just been reconfiguring for years. It’s this beautiful little studio in their backyard, they’ve called it Magic Mountain Records. They’re both really great musicians in their own right and producers and were such a good team to work with. They helped with things like laying down the drums and the bass and Matt did help with the slide guitar as well, with the intro, he chipped in. It was a few sessions to get Time Machines down but we’d do something like guitar tracking and then all go down to get lunch and just have chats in the backyard. They’ve got this lovely backyard pool. We’d go back in. I remember in between vocal takes Matt was like, ”Let’s go for a walk around the garden and just reset.” It was the most comfortable I’ve felt in a studio, for sure.

I feel like they realised what I wanted, or pretty close to. I remember saying “I want this song to feel like a dreamscape. I want the vibe to be dreamy.” I think that reflected in the way the vocals came out with the slide in the background. There are a few other synth effects that I think came out beautifully. It could have gone more swing, 6/8 feel, a bit more of a moody, less dreamy-surfy, but I’m happy with where it landed.

Do you have a favourite line in the song?

Maybe “Love is a landscape” or “Tropical islands, see how they glisten”.

I wrote a chunk of those lyrics when I was overseas in Hawaii for my brother’s wedding. I was in such a happy place. It was 2019 and just one of those days, you know when you have one of those days that you don’t want to end? Like a warm shower, you don’t want to get out. Which of course, pre-pandemic, holiday in Hawaii. Just collecting those lyrics and putting them to back to something when I got home.

It’s about daydreaming. I was imagining the idea of getting caught in a daydream. The feeling of bliss or daydreaming or crushing on someone that just continues. Kind of like a crescendo stuck on repeat.

The chorus lyrics came in last; I was a bit stumped. I was just randomly watching a Netflix documentary about the human brain. They said “Our brains are like time machines always looking forward into the future or back into the past.” It was about the idea of perception, you’re always here or there. And then I was just thinking about daydreaming, and it is kinda cool how your mind can just slip across time and place. It’s like we do have these proxy time travel machines in our heads. It’s gotta be the happiest most indulgent song that I’ve ever written. It’s just about feeling good.

Megan Kennedy’s single Time Machines is out everywhere now. You can catch her live at her single launch at Old Bar on Thursday 23^rd of February, supported by Low Key Crush Music and Chelsea Dewitt. Tickets on door.