Sutja: Hello Megan, first of all thank you so much for accepting this interview with me. My name is Jesus, and I am truly honored to be here talking to you. How are you doing today, and Where Have You Been?
Megan: Hello, Jesus. I'm home from a long weekend away, so today has been full of laundry and grocery shopping. And my weekly ukulele lesson. And coffee with my husband. Last week I went to Virginia Beach, Virginia. It's about a 6-hour drive. I went to visit two dear friends, one of whom is turning 89 in a few days. She is bedfast, requiring daily nursing care. But, oh, what a mind! What a sense of humor! What a curious, generous spirit. We laugh a lot. I tell her fairy tales. She critiques new stories I'm working on, and her criticism is always spot on. The other friend used to be a storyteller, but now she is full-time caregiver for her husband, who disappeared into Alzheimer's. She has turned her creative energies to art, and her work just gets deeper and stronger every time I see it. I'm rich with good people in my life. That's where I've been and how I am doing.
Sutja: Let's start at the beginning. What was your childhood like in terms of art and music? Were there creative influences around you growing up? And as someone who became such a compelling storyteller, where do you think that impulse to share stories originated?
Megan: My mother was a born performer. She sang in school choirs, and after she married my father, who worked in the oil fields—all hours for days at a time—and had a toddler and an infant (me) in a small West Texas town, she and her closest friend started writing songs. Country western songs. "Honky-tonk" is what we called it. They wrote dozens of songs, some of which were recorded by regional groups, and they played on the radio and on jukeboxes in the area.
Mom sang to my sisters and me at bedtime. I took piano lessons and sang when I thought I was alone, and fantasized about being on TV. People told me I had a pretty voice, so I thought I had to make my singing soft and pretty.
Sutja: When did you first discover your voice—both literally as a singer and figuratively as a songwriter? Do you remember the moment you realized music was your language? Did you play any instruments?
Megan: I discovered that I had a voice that people would listen to when I was about 14 years old, in high school, and entered a talent show, accompanying myself on my brand new guitar. I still have that guitar, even though my fingers can no longer reach across the fretboard.
For several years music wasn't my language so much as it was my safety shield. And my sanity. I never excelled playing either piano or guitar. I gave up piano at age 19 and focused on guitar, playing well enough to accompany myself.
Sutja: It's quite a journey for a girl from Oklahoma City to end up recording at EMI Studios in Australia and releasing through Warner Brothers. How did that opportunity come about? What was that experience like for someone so young—the studio environment, working with a producer, the whole machinery of a major label?
Megan: My father's career started in oilfields, working on drilling rigs. But he kept getting promoted and transferred from one town to another and another, until he was made a vice president of the company he had worked for since graduating from college. I was born in Texas. Two years later, we were living in Riverton, Wyoming. Three years after that, we were in Oklahoma City. (Oklahoma is where both sides of my family originated and where my parents both grew up.) Four years later we moved to Southern California, where I decided I was going to grow up and be a rich and famous singer/songwriter. And after 9 years in Southern California, we were in Sydney. I had just turned 20, and did NOT want to live with my parents. I met two young women who were looking for a flatmate, so we all rented a flat together. One of my flatmates worked for the Sydney bureau of Go-Set Publications, a weekly magazine covering Australian pop and rock music. That's where I met Doug Rowe, who led a very popular band called Flying Circus. Doug heard me sing and told me if I could come up with enough material to fill an LP, he'd produce it. I had no idea how records happened. I just knew that a famous Australian rock star had offered to help me record an album. He's the one who arranged and produced and played on every track, with the possible exception of "Vespers." I think the only instrument on that one is Orlando Agostino playing acoustic guitar.
(Megan takes a pause here, she wants to say something else…)
Just so I'd get an idea of who I was responding to, I did a quick tour of your website. My goodness! What a range of talent and expression. Fascinating sounds. And so many forms of expression.
Sutja: Thanks Megan, that is sweet of you to say. You made me smile…
The album is filled with emotion and melancholy and touches on sensitive subjects in a very simple and innocent way. In your experience as a storyteller, why do you think it has clicked with people again after all these years? What kind of stories do you tell or share nowadays?
Megan: Well, I was a sensitive, simple, innocent kid. And I honestly can't fathom why these songs have come to anybody's attention, much less why Elemental Music has taken interest in it. Maybe because they are naive, raw, and unvarnished.
After I left Australia—when I turned 21, legally an adult, I no longer fell under the "family visa" that my father had been issued. I realized that my dream to become a rich and famous singer/songwriter wasn't going to happen. I had no music connections in the U.S. I still wrote songs, though. And I sang whenever the opportunity presented itself—mostly in the churches I attended. I was deep into The Jesus Movement. You can look it up on Wikipedia if you're curious.
I gave up the music, but I couldn't let go of writing. Short stories and three novels—all unpublished, for which I am thankful. They were pretty forgettable. Writing fiction is hard work, and by the time I had a file folder full of rejection letters, I decided I didn't want to work that hard. But I do love my mother tongue! I had to build my life around words.
When my two children were young I started working in their school library, and that's when I was first exposed to Storytelling as performance art. It was literally a seismic shift for me when a woman I had never heard of addressed a roomful of librarians with, "There was once a shoemaker who, through no fault of his own, had fallen upon hard times." The Shoemaker and the Elves was my favorite story when I was a small child, and here I was as an adult being transported by the telling of it. I have identified that experience as the moment I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was 36 years old at the time. Twenty years later, I was able to quit my job as a public librarian and go freelance full-time as a storyteller. My favorite stories to tell are fairy tales, mostly Western European fairy tales, because that's where my DNA is from. But if a story comes to me wanting to be told, I'll do my best to craft an honest version of it.
Sutja: Do you listen to the album and see yourself reflected somehow? If so, how does that make you feel?
Megan: I do not listen to my album. I have learned to appreciate 20-year-old Megan's sincerity and her drive to express what was on her heart, but hearing that voice singing those songs hits me in a place I can only describe as eerily uncomfortable.
Sutja: It's interesting, the connection between storytelling and the Bible—it's such a human thing to me. "Come Lord," prays the title... How do you feel today about Catholicism and music?
Megan: I went from being a fundamentalist "Jesus Freak" to being an Episcopalian. And then I realized that I no longer believed the recitations or the prayers or the words to the songs we were singing. I have not practiced Christianity for about 35 years now. I have not missed it. But I must say, that what made the Episcopalians so attractive to me was the music and the fact that I could sing in the choir. I do still enjoy singing. Just not in church. I'm glad the Catholic Church was there for Bach and the rest of them so they could make a living doing what they did so well. Not so glad about the Inquisition.
Sutja: Your song "Hey Can You Come Out And Play" has forever haunted me. Its lyrics and the melancholy they exude—they break my heart and hug it at the same time. It's one of those go-to songs I pick to comfort myself every now and then. Could you tell me more about it, about how it came to be? You wrote it very young, didn't you?
Megan: I was 19 when I wrote that song. The guy I had just broken up with started dating another girl, and when I saw them together, I regretted breaking up with him. In the words of Joni Mitchell, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone.”
Sutja: "Peter's Song" is such a beautiful ballad, and I believe it has a beautiful story too. Can you share it with me?
Megan: I had a desperate crush on a kid named Peter. Never even knew his surname. About a month after we met, he left Sydney and traveled to London with a friend. I sat on the dock in Balmain, the neighborhood where I lived with my flatmates, and looked out across Sydney Harbor making mental notes of what I saw. As I recall—since I haven't listened to it in a long time—the bridge makes reference to the Second Coming of Christ. As I said before, I was not only religious, I was evangelical.
My flatmate, Cleli, later wrote to me that after he returned from London, Peter had dropped by the flat and she played "Peter's Song" for him and that he had a big smile the whole time he listened. So...unrequited crush, but solid connection.
Sutja: "Cle's Song" sounds very motherly to me, in the best sense of the word. Can you tell me a bit about the lyrics and the feeling that was put into it?
Megan: My flatmate was getting pressure from her family, who lived in a country town, to "come home." The lyrics to this song are an imaginary letter I would have liked to have written, in her voice, to her family. I pictured them wanting her to "return to her roots" and her needing to experience life on her own terms.
Cleo has had a very successful career as a country singer in Australia. Cleli Adams. Her songs have charted in Europe, and she's sort of a grand dame of Australian music scene in the 70s and 80s. She was office manager at Go-Set Publications when we knew each other. Strange, huh?
For the record… Cle, Cleo, Cleli, and Clelia are all the same person. You probably figured that out by yourself.
Sutja: "Martha's Song" resonates with me deeply. I'm in a long-distance relationship myself—I'm married to an American citizen but we're not able to be together just yet. I wonder—have you ever been in a long-distance relationship or felt the weight of it in any sort of way?
Megan: My best friend Martha was in love with a singer/songwriter—Bill Hughes—whose band, Blue Sky Investment Company, was signed to a major (at the time) label. They moved to New York, changed the name of the band to Lazarus, and were soon beset with groupies, which really messed with Martha's head. We all lived in Abilene, Texas, at the time. It was a song to comfort her.
I have been in a long-distance relationship. My husband (third husband), Jack, and I met in 1996, when he was in the process of closing up shop in the little town we lived in—Fredericksburg, Virginia—in order to move to the Philadelphia area with his ex-wife and her partner, who had both been offered career opportunities that didn't exist in Fredericksburg. He and his ex-wife were/are still good friends and shared custody of their children who were then aged 6 and 10. I was still happy being a librarian and getting going as a storyteller where I was. We saw each other about twice a month, took a few big trips together and found out we were compatible travelers, talked on the phone every second night, and worked crossword puzzles together, each with a copy of the same puzzle, when we ran out of things to talk about.
It was cumbersome sometimes. But I had good friends and neighbors, most of whom knew and loved Jack. It was sometimes inconvenient, but never achingly awful. Thirteen years ago I sold my house in Virginia and moved to Philadelphia. Two years later, we decided we'd better get married. He's got kids; I've got kids, and we share ownership of a house. Settling our estate after we die would be really messy if we were not officially married.
There's an ocean between you and your spouse; and travel to or from the U.S. is not something to take lightly. Especially in this political climate. My heart goes out to you both.
Sutja: "Prefaced With Maybe" touches on a delicate subject such as two important people in your life parting ways, and so many of the songs on this album are about either comforting, giving advice, or dealing with complex situations such as long-distance relationships, unrequited love, etc. How do you feel now, looking back at it as an adult—seeing yourself trying hard to understand and give so much through music at such a young age?
Megan: Yeah. My parents' already strained relationship couldn't withstand the global shift—a different culture, another side of the world. I had no idea how strained they were. As a family, we were very good at pretending and at not talking about unpleasantness. So there was a lot of pressure built up between my parents, and when the cap blew off, it was seismic for me. Knowing what I know now about life, about their individual lives, I can see that they were never a good match for each other. Now, I am amazed they stayed together for 27 years.
That song was my letter to them, full of magical thinking and belief that they actually did still love one another.
Sutja: Is there a song on the album that means something different to you now than it did when you wrote it?
Megan: Unlike the stories I craft, these songs have not burrowed into my soul or kept on teaching me what they're about. They're a collection of little treasures that hold sweet memories. Stories keep teaching me, opening new meanings, digging deeper.
Sutja: How has time changed your perspective on your own work?
Megan: When I made Maranatha, I was shyly proud of the endeavor. But reticent to talk about it.
My first husband naively entertained an expectation that because I had made an album, I was poised to become famous. When that didn't happen, I felt I had been a disappointment. Two years later, I remarried, and my second husband played guitar and created beautiful tunes. He pointed out, repeatedly, that my songs were pretty run-of-the-mill harmonically and my guitar skills were rudimentary at best. I did not believe in myself; there was no one in my life who believed for me. I hid my voice in the soprano section of my church choir, so I was able to sing but not stand out. At that time, I was actually embarrassed whenever anybody brought up the subject of my recording experience.
Sutja: Beyond this album, what other creative work have you been involved with over the years? How has your artistic expression evolved?
Megan: I discovered that I can write. Maybe not New York Times bestsellers. But I can express my thoughts and feelings, in my own voice, on the page. And then I discovered that I can tell a story that will hold an audience. Not only that, but I have no stage fright. Singing, I was terrified. Closed my eyes. Couldn't look at the audience. When I tell a story, I feel connected to the audience. Especially when it's a fairy tale. Not only that, but whenever I hear my speaking voice on a recording, I like it. It sounds like me. I'm not the least bit shy about saying, I am a storyteller. A good one. Actually, a very good one.
March of 2020 shut down public gatherings here in the U.S. for a good long time, and, like all the other professional storytellers I know, the Pandemic dried up our gigs. Many of my cohort adapted to online telling. I told myself, I'm 70 years old. Maybe it's time to retire. Now I perform whenever I am invited; but I don't do much in the way of marketing anymore. However, that might change before long. I'm starting to feel an itch to un-retire.
During the Covid isolation I discovered fiber. Spinning. Weaving. Knitting. Stitching. Thinking about the significance of fabric. Cordage. String. Where humankind would be without it. And now I'm probably starting to put you to sleep. So I'll leave it by saying that Time has provided me with opportunities to sing, to write, to tell, and to make. If you were to sum me and my work up, you could simply say, "Megan Hicks is an artist.”
Throughout ALL of this story of my life, since I was 9 years old, I have been fascinated with and been a student of origami.
Sutja: As a musician myself, I'm fascinated by how a piece of art such as a music album travels—mouth to mouth, ear to ear, finding people in different times and places. How does it feel to witness your album making that journey, reaching new listeners after all these years? What has that experience been like for you?
Megan: The experience of "Maranatha redux" has blown me away. "Gobsmacked" is a word I learned while I was in Australia. I'm gobsmacked. I am curious to know how it will be received by people who peruse the Elemental Music catalog. It has a life of its own now, and I wish it well.
I wish you all success and sweet reunions.
Sutja: Thanks Megan! Same goes for you.
—
This article was originally written for The Ransom Note.
Megan: Hello, Jesus. I'm home from a long weekend away, so today has been full of laundry and grocery shopping. And my weekly ukulele lesson. And coffee with my husband. Last week I went to Virginia Beach, Virginia. It's about a 6-hour drive. I went to visit two dear friends, one of whom is turning 89 in a few days. She is bedfast, requiring daily nursing care. But, oh, what a mind! What a sense of humor! What a curious, generous spirit. We laugh a lot. I tell her fairy tales. She critiques new stories I'm working on, and her criticism is always spot on. The other friend used to be a storyteller, but now she is full-time caregiver for her husband, who disappeared into Alzheimer's. She has turned her creative energies to art, and her work just gets deeper and stronger every time I see it. I'm rich with good people in my life. That's where I've been and how I am doing.
Sutja: Let's start at the beginning. What was your childhood like in terms of art and music? Were there creative influences around you growing up? And as someone who became such a compelling storyteller, where do you think that impulse to share stories originated?
Megan: My mother was a born performer. She sang in school choirs, and after she married my father, who worked in the oil fields—all hours for days at a time—and had a toddler and an infant (me) in a small West Texas town, she and her closest friend started writing songs. Country western songs. "Honky-tonk" is what we called it. They wrote dozens of songs, some of which were recorded by regional groups, and they played on the radio and on jukeboxes in the area.
Mom sang to my sisters and me at bedtime. I took piano lessons and sang when I thought I was alone, and fantasized about being on TV. People told me I had a pretty voice, so I thought I had to make my singing soft and pretty.
Sutja: When did you first discover your voice—both literally as a singer and figuratively as a songwriter? Do you remember the moment you realized music was your language? Did you play any instruments?
Megan: I discovered that I had a voice that people would listen to when I was about 14 years old, in high school, and entered a talent show, accompanying myself on my brand new guitar. I still have that guitar, even though my fingers can no longer reach across the fretboard.
For several years music wasn't my language so much as it was my safety shield. And my sanity. I never excelled playing either piano or guitar. I gave up piano at age 19 and focused on guitar, playing well enough to accompany myself.
Sutja: It's quite a journey for a girl from Oklahoma City to end up recording at EMI Studios in Australia and releasing through Warner Brothers. How did that opportunity come about? What was that experience like for someone so young—the studio environment, working with a producer, the whole machinery of a major label?
Megan: My father's career started in oilfields, working on drilling rigs. But he kept getting promoted and transferred from one town to another and another, until he was made a vice president of the company he had worked for since graduating from college. I was born in Texas. Two years later, we were living in Riverton, Wyoming. Three years after that, we were in Oklahoma City. (Oklahoma is where both sides of my family originated and where my parents both grew up.) Four years later we moved to Southern California, where I decided I was going to grow up and be a rich and famous singer/songwriter. And after 9 years in Southern California, we were in Sydney. I had just turned 20, and did NOT want to live with my parents. I met two young women who were looking for a flatmate, so we all rented a flat together. One of my flatmates worked for the Sydney bureau of Go-Set Publications, a weekly magazine covering Australian pop and rock music. That's where I met Doug Rowe, who led a very popular band called Flying Circus. Doug heard me sing and told me if I could come up with enough material to fill an LP, he'd produce it. I had no idea how records happened. I just knew that a famous Australian rock star had offered to help me record an album. He's the one who arranged and produced and played on every track, with the possible exception of "Vespers." I think the only instrument on that one is Orlando Agostino playing acoustic guitar.
(Megan takes a pause here, she wants to say something else…)
Just so I'd get an idea of who I was responding to, I did a quick tour of your website. My goodness! What a range of talent and expression. Fascinating sounds. And so many forms of expression.
Sutja: Thanks Megan, that is sweet of you to say. You made me smile…
The album is filled with emotion and melancholy and touches on sensitive subjects in a very simple and innocent way. In your experience as a storyteller, why do you think it has clicked with people again after all these years? What kind of stories do you tell or share nowadays?
Megan: Well, I was a sensitive, simple, innocent kid. And I honestly can't fathom why these songs have come to anybody's attention, much less why Elemental Music has taken interest in it. Maybe because they are naive, raw, and unvarnished.
After I left Australia—when I turned 21, legally an adult, I no longer fell under the "family visa" that my father had been issued. I realized that my dream to become a rich and famous singer/songwriter wasn't going to happen. I had no music connections in the U.S. I still wrote songs, though. And I sang whenever the opportunity presented itself—mostly in the churches I attended. I was deep into The Jesus Movement. You can look it up on Wikipedia if you're curious.
I gave up the music, but I couldn't let go of writing. Short stories and three novels—all unpublished, for which I am thankful. They were pretty forgettable. Writing fiction is hard work, and by the time I had a file folder full of rejection letters, I decided I didn't want to work that hard. But I do love my mother tongue! I had to build my life around words.
When my two children were young I started working in their school library, and that's when I was first exposed to Storytelling as performance art. It was literally a seismic shift for me when a woman I had never heard of addressed a roomful of librarians with, "There was once a shoemaker who, through no fault of his own, had fallen upon hard times." The Shoemaker and the Elves was my favorite story when I was a small child, and here I was as an adult being transported by the telling of it. I have identified that experience as the moment I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was 36 years old at the time. Twenty years later, I was able to quit my job as a public librarian and go freelance full-time as a storyteller. My favorite stories to tell are fairy tales, mostly Western European fairy tales, because that's where my DNA is from. But if a story comes to me wanting to be told, I'll do my best to craft an honest version of it.
Sutja: Do you listen to the album and see yourself reflected somehow? If so, how does that make you feel?
Megan: I do not listen to my album. I have learned to appreciate 20-year-old Megan's sincerity and her drive to express what was on her heart, but hearing that voice singing those songs hits me in a place I can only describe as eerily uncomfortable.
Sutja: It's interesting, the connection between storytelling and the Bible—it's such a human thing to me. "Come Lord," prays the title... How do you feel today about Catholicism and music?
Megan: I went from being a fundamentalist "Jesus Freak" to being an Episcopalian. And then I realized that I no longer believed the recitations or the prayers or the words to the songs we were singing. I have not practiced Christianity for about 35 years now. I have not missed it. But I must say, that what made the Episcopalians so attractive to me was the music and the fact that I could sing in the choir. I do still enjoy singing. Just not in church. I'm glad the Catholic Church was there for Bach and the rest of them so they could make a living doing what they did so well. Not so glad about the Inquisition.
Sutja: Your song "Hey Can You Come Out And Play" has forever haunted me. Its lyrics and the melancholy they exude—they break my heart and hug it at the same time. It's one of those go-to songs I pick to comfort myself every now and then. Could you tell me more about it, about how it came to be? You wrote it very young, didn't you?
Megan: I was 19 when I wrote that song. The guy I had just broken up with started dating another girl, and when I saw them together, I regretted breaking up with him. In the words of Joni Mitchell, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone.”
Sutja: "Peter's Song" is such a beautiful ballad, and I believe it has a beautiful story too. Can you share it with me?
Megan: I had a desperate crush on a kid named Peter. Never even knew his surname. About a month after we met, he left Sydney and traveled to London with a friend. I sat on the dock in Balmain, the neighborhood where I lived with my flatmates, and looked out across Sydney Harbor making mental notes of what I saw. As I recall—since I haven't listened to it in a long time—the bridge makes reference to the Second Coming of Christ. As I said before, I was not only religious, I was evangelical.
My flatmate, Cleli, later wrote to me that after he returned from London, Peter had dropped by the flat and she played "Peter's Song" for him and that he had a big smile the whole time he listened. So...unrequited crush, but solid connection.
Sutja: "Cle's Song" sounds very motherly to me, in the best sense of the word. Can you tell me a bit about the lyrics and the feeling that was put into it?
Megan: My flatmate was getting pressure from her family, who lived in a country town, to "come home." The lyrics to this song are an imaginary letter I would have liked to have written, in her voice, to her family. I pictured them wanting her to "return to her roots" and her needing to experience life on her own terms.
Cleo has had a very successful career as a country singer in Australia. Cleli Adams. Her songs have charted in Europe, and she's sort of a grand dame of Australian music scene in the 70s and 80s. She was office manager at Go-Set Publications when we knew each other. Strange, huh?
For the record… Cle, Cleo, Cleli, and Clelia are all the same person. You probably figured that out by yourself.
Sutja: "Martha's Song" resonates with me deeply. I'm in a long-distance relationship myself—I'm married to an American citizen but we're not able to be together just yet. I wonder—have you ever been in a long-distance relationship or felt the weight of it in any sort of way?
Megan: My best friend Martha was in love with a singer/songwriter—Bill Hughes—whose band, Blue Sky Investment Company, was signed to a major (at the time) label. They moved to New York, changed the name of the band to Lazarus, and were soon beset with groupies, which really messed with Martha's head. We all lived in Abilene, Texas, at the time. It was a song to comfort her.
I have been in a long-distance relationship. My husband (third husband), Jack, and I met in 1996, when he was in the process of closing up shop in the little town we lived in—Fredericksburg, Virginia—in order to move to the Philadelphia area with his ex-wife and her partner, who had both been offered career opportunities that didn't exist in Fredericksburg. He and his ex-wife were/are still good friends and shared custody of their children who were then aged 6 and 10. I was still happy being a librarian and getting going as a storyteller where I was. We saw each other about twice a month, took a few big trips together and found out we were compatible travelers, talked on the phone every second night, and worked crossword puzzles together, each with a copy of the same puzzle, when we ran out of things to talk about.
It was cumbersome sometimes. But I had good friends and neighbors, most of whom knew and loved Jack. It was sometimes inconvenient, but never achingly awful. Thirteen years ago I sold my house in Virginia and moved to Philadelphia. Two years later, we decided we'd better get married. He's got kids; I've got kids, and we share ownership of a house. Settling our estate after we die would be really messy if we were not officially married.
There's an ocean between you and your spouse; and travel to or from the U.S. is not something to take lightly. Especially in this political climate. My heart goes out to you both.
Sutja: "Prefaced With Maybe" touches on a delicate subject such as two important people in your life parting ways, and so many of the songs on this album are about either comforting, giving advice, or dealing with complex situations such as long-distance relationships, unrequited love, etc. How do you feel now, looking back at it as an adult—seeing yourself trying hard to understand and give so much through music at such a young age?
Megan: Yeah. My parents' already strained relationship couldn't withstand the global shift—a different culture, another side of the world. I had no idea how strained they were. As a family, we were very good at pretending and at not talking about unpleasantness. So there was a lot of pressure built up between my parents, and when the cap blew off, it was seismic for me. Knowing what I know now about life, about their individual lives, I can see that they were never a good match for each other. Now, I am amazed they stayed together for 27 years.
That song was my letter to them, full of magical thinking and belief that they actually did still love one another.
Sutja: Is there a song on the album that means something different to you now than it did when you wrote it?
Megan: Unlike the stories I craft, these songs have not burrowed into my soul or kept on teaching me what they're about. They're a collection of little treasures that hold sweet memories. Stories keep teaching me, opening new meanings, digging deeper.
Sutja: How has time changed your perspective on your own work?
Megan: When I made Maranatha, I was shyly proud of the endeavor. But reticent to talk about it.
My first husband naively entertained an expectation that because I had made an album, I was poised to become famous. When that didn't happen, I felt I had been a disappointment. Two years later, I remarried, and my second husband played guitar and created beautiful tunes. He pointed out, repeatedly, that my songs were pretty run-of-the-mill harmonically and my guitar skills were rudimentary at best. I did not believe in myself; there was no one in my life who believed for me. I hid my voice in the soprano section of my church choir, so I was able to sing but not stand out. At that time, I was actually embarrassed whenever anybody brought up the subject of my recording experience.
Sutja: Beyond this album, what other creative work have you been involved with over the years? How has your artistic expression evolved?
Megan: I discovered that I can write. Maybe not New York Times bestsellers. But I can express my thoughts and feelings, in my own voice, on the page. And then I discovered that I can tell a story that will hold an audience. Not only that, but I have no stage fright. Singing, I was terrified. Closed my eyes. Couldn't look at the audience. When I tell a story, I feel connected to the audience. Especially when it's a fairy tale. Not only that, but whenever I hear my speaking voice on a recording, I like it. It sounds like me. I'm not the least bit shy about saying, I am a storyteller. A good one. Actually, a very good one.
March of 2020 shut down public gatherings here in the U.S. for a good long time, and, like all the other professional storytellers I know, the Pandemic dried up our gigs. Many of my cohort adapted to online telling. I told myself, I'm 70 years old. Maybe it's time to retire. Now I perform whenever I am invited; but I don't do much in the way of marketing anymore. However, that might change before long. I'm starting to feel an itch to un-retire.
During the Covid isolation I discovered fiber. Spinning. Weaving. Knitting. Stitching. Thinking about the significance of fabric. Cordage. String. Where humankind would be without it. And now I'm probably starting to put you to sleep. So I'll leave it by saying that Time has provided me with opportunities to sing, to write, to tell, and to make. If you were to sum me and my work up, you could simply say, "Megan Hicks is an artist.”
Throughout ALL of this story of my life, since I was 9 years old, I have been fascinated with and been a student of origami.
Sutja: As a musician myself, I'm fascinated by how a piece of art such as a music album travels—mouth to mouth, ear to ear, finding people in different times and places. How does it feel to witness your album making that journey, reaching new listeners after all these years? What has that experience been like for you?
Megan: The experience of "Maranatha redux" has blown me away. "Gobsmacked" is a word I learned while I was in Australia. I'm gobsmacked. I am curious to know how it will be received by people who peruse the Elemental Music catalog. It has a life of its own now, and I wish it well.
I wish you all success and sweet reunions.
Sutja: Thanks Megan! Same goes for you.
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This article was originally written for The Ransom Note.