"You never stop learning, and you know nothing": Angie McMahon on her second LP

Light, dark. Ground, sky. Life, death. As its title suggests, Light, Dark, Light Again considers dualities. But it's the movement between those positions – the undulations and the way states return to a former shape before changing again – which Angie McMahon finds fascinating.

Before writing this album, the Melbourne musician went through a period of forced recuperation, and with it came a tuning-in. She'd lie in her front garden and stare at the sky, and every afternoon, murmurations of birds would gather and transmute in motion, creating shapes which looked to her like a wave, a fist, a storm.

The artist sings about watching this phenomenon in album stand-out Mother Nature, but the actual instruments' arrangement isn't the sort of peaceful flow you'd imagine: its beat thumps slowly and almost menacingly deep, like knuckles hitting a palm – a determined pulse.

“I think because it was such a powerful moment, maybe,” McMahon offers of this choice. “I mean, literally what I did was just watch the birds in the sky and then cry. It was such a fragile experience, but I had this big – opening? Something quite powerful opened up. It was such a significant moment depicting my relationship with nature. And I wrote a poem about it.”

Later, when she decided to assemble a track whose themes revolved around "climate despair" or solastalgia, she returned to the poem. “They’re very different worlds colliding, but that’s been my experience with nature,” she says. “Over the last couple of years, I’ve had a couple of really beautiful, spiritual moments with nature, and they were both fragile and intense... they shake your core a bit! Part of me is like, why the f-ck aren’t I thinking about this all the time and celebrating this all the time, and fighting for this all the time?”

(Of this track, McMahon mentions she's been getting her bristly conductor jag on to make sure we experience Mother Nature properly live: “[My band and I are] getting ready for a couple of shows, and there’s all these harmonies at the end – like the flocks of birds – and I was being such a tyrant. I was like, ‘You have to get it right! We have to sound like a heavenly choir of bird-angels!' And they’re like, ‘Okay...'”, she grins.)

McMahon describes first single Saturn Returning – also the album's opener, and an enormously cinematic baklava of small elements – as embodying “where [she] had landed” during the project. “I felt like it set the intention to approach the listening experience with self-compassion, and forgiveness,” she explains. “Through writing the record I was forgiving myself for a whole bunch of sh-t, and acknowledging that I was afraid of a whole bunch of sh-t. And I just felt like that song set it."

That process is apparent all the way across the album; McMahon rarely sings static statements like 'I am this' or 'it is that', but communicates the constant evolution and progression of things with phrases like 'I am learning to', 'I hope I continue to.'

“Yeah, thanks for saying that,” she smiles. “I feel that is so important for me to keep singing it. I think I’m trying to keep a record of the lessons that I’m learning, and one of the lessons I’m learning is: you never stop learning. You’re never not learning or growing, and you know nothing!

"So it’s like trying to bridge that balance, and that line of, ‘This is what I know, but what I know is nothing’. Acknowledging that the whole time helps with the self-compassion, because I’m always just trying to keep releasing the pressure that I put on myself.”

And while it's about the journey, you'll want to listen to the very final beats of all of these tracks – often, the last lyric gives a powerful switch-up to the song's approach or where it's headed next. (particularly Serotonin and Letting Go). “I probably get to the end of the song and I’m like, ‘Quick! You better make sure you’ve put in there what it’s about! You’ve been rambling for three minutes!' It’s like my English Literature training, where you put your conclusion at the end of the essay,” she laughs.

But like the undulations, the curtain doesn't close for long – it's more like the curtain swirls in and out, like that flourish matadors do with their cape. There's always a new state, a new chapter, suggested or hinted at. “I think it comes back to compassion and forgiveness again – it’s like, 'What can you insert at the end to make something feel satisfying, and like you’ve achieved what you wanted to achieve?'”

Light, Dark, Light Again by Angie McMahon drops via AWAL.