50 kilos of confetti, best laid plans, and singing for its own sake
Meg Mac hadn’t used a loop pedal on stage in more than ten years. At soundcheck she’d nearly pulled it from the set because she was, in her words, wussing out. “I don’t know guys, I don’t know if I should do this song.” She went for it anyway, hit record, but hadn’t cleared the test run from earlier, so the whole thing came blasting out at once and she swore at the room, started over, lost the timing, got about halfway through, stopped, and told the audience she was going to try again. It was an unexpected crowd pleaser. “Everyone’s favourite thing was when I fucked up something so bad and I just went, fuck!” she says, laughing about it now, just a week out from that first date on her national theatre tour for It’s My Party, her fourth album.
As we sit to talk, pre-tour nerves have relaxed a little, and Mac knows the show works, the outfits are locked in; but she’s still trying to figure out how to get everything to Melbourne because the production includes a 12-seat dining table, assorted props, theatrical lighting, and approximately 50 kilograms of confetti packed across three borrowed suitcases.
“The best I can do is put my heart into it and have fun. Whoever’s meant to find it, finds it.”
The show was designed by director Alexander Berlage, and Mac, always speaking generously of her collaborators, is frank that she couldn’t have conceived of it on her own. “I knew I wanted to do something different, but the whole idea of the table and the confetti, when I see it I’m like, oh my god, yes. But I can’t take credit for that at all.”
Her album cover was chosen by her manager. “It’s not a look that I’ve had before,” she says. “When you’re looking at photos of yourself, you’re trying to maybe pick flattering photos. But that one, it’s a bit off.” She says it looks almost like a painting and that the composition made her face unfamiliar. “I didn’t even notice that photo during the selection process,” she says. “But of course, it’s perfect. I never would have picked it, I scrolled right past it.”
Mac describes herself as someone who works on a million songs at once, her mind chasing down the new and the next, blooming wild in a bit of mess. She gives a rueful characterisation of her abandoned ideas as orphans; an affliction familiar to the creatively promiscuous among us.
She did DRAFT Magazine’s Creative Heartbeat exercise, where she dragged a marker across a piece of paper, diagramming her album-making process in realtime, the surges and dips and stalls. She was surprised to find she’d rendered an arrhythmia. “Most interviews are just, what was the album process like? And you try and answer it quickly,” she says. “But doing the Creative Heartbeat, you really go into it, and you realise oh, it wasn’t linear and it definitely wasn’t easy.”
Mac’s initial vision was a dark, witchy trip-hop record. A version of that album exists in some parallel universe, but the pressure on the idea in this one wouldn’t let it breathe. When she started working with UK producer Bullion for the first time, she found herself letting her instincts run ahead of the plan, and for long stretches of the process, that instinct outran her anxiety, leaving her with the headroom for experimentation.
Within that latitude, memories came fast and bright, high-velocity fragments of her past forming a mosaic; the foundation of what was to become It’s My Party. Mac describes a memory of her dad lying on the floor with a pillow under his head, the sound system turned up loud, listening to an album. “I remember noticing that as a kid,” she says. “Wow, music makes my dad lie down on the floor. Music is special.”
She’s loved singing since forever; every childhood birthday candle was spent on the same wish: “I’ll be a singer, I’ll be a singer.” She grew up in a performing arts family, started group singing lessons at nine, and by the time uni rolled around, was singing in pubs and clubs. She recalls the moment she began writing her own songs, during a gap year studying digital media (an unhappy detour), and discovered that yes, you can be creative, you can create. You will be a singer!
Four albums and over 125 million streams later, a feeling like that can become remote. The promotion eats into the practice, and reconciling the two can be pressurising. “Rehearsals is literally singing and getting into it,” she says, “and then promo is like, you’ve got to look nice and be a little more detached.” The lead-up to this album had her prepping a tour and doing press simultaneously, and she says she felt scattered, her mind pulled between two conflicting frequencies.
Mac says she’s approaching 2026 with less rigidity, no doubt informed by the freewheeling experience of making It’s My Party. She’s thinking about going song by song for a while, putting the work out as it comes. She knows she can’t make everyone like her work, and she’s made peace with that. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” she says. “So now I’m more like, here’s what I’ve made, and I hope people like it, but it’s out of my hands, and that’s okay. The best I can do is put my heart into it and have fun. Whoever’s meant to find it, finds it.”
Which brings us to a Monday night at the Caterpillar Club, where a friend of hers, Ollie, plays with a group called the Chameleons every week. He asked her to come up and sing. She went for it, and taking the stage that night transported her to her uni days, singing other people’s songs, having a grand old time. Her own music, she says, is always personal, her heart’s on the line. “Getting up there and singing songs that aren’t mine was like, ah, you can just sing for its own sake. I love this.”
After her most recent show on tour, a guy stood at the merch desk telling Mac he’d first seen her at the Caterpillar Club on that impromptu Monday night. He’d gone home, looked her up, bought a ticket to her show, and come to tell her so. “It was a beautiful moment,” she says. “You can get so caught up in the big stuff. It’s easy to forget that it literally starts with having an impact on one person.”
And isn’t that the truth? It’s her party. You can come if you want to.
