MICHAEL WAUGH – Beauty & Truth
It’s more than pride; it’s life.
“We talk about pride sometimes a little bit like it’s a bumper sticker, but really pride is the antithesis of shame, it’s about healing of shame, making sense of shame that I was raised with,” says Michael Waugh. “There’s a part of me that still feels like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff calling out over the edge when I say ‘here I am, this is who I am’.”
And who is he?
A singer and songwriter, for sure. One of the best, who fellow writers look at with awe: ARIA and Golden Guitar winner Fanny Lumsden says that “his lyrics stop me in my tracks”: the great Eric Bogle labels him “a gifted songwriter … a compassionate and insightful human being”.
He is an out and proud singer/songwriter whose coming out happened well into adulthood, a marriage and a successful career, in an industry that has always favoured safety over bravery. Then there’s the teacher and mentor who takes that role seriously.
“There are young people for whom I’m responsible and where I’m needed but I didn’t have role models when I was growing up,” he says. “I have a responsibility to represent them and speak my truth because that contributes to a world where others can speak as well. You can’t be what you can’t see.”
Yes, all of the above. That is Michael Waugh, and that is all through his new album, Beauty & Truth, which looks at history and looks at today and defiantly declares, We Are Here; which faces the brutal truth of fractured families and the wounds of Father’s Day, and treats with compassion the complicated lives of boys-not-yet-men too easily labelled Young And Dumb; deals unflinchingly with a culture not just antagonistic to half its population in its many Songs About Women, but destructive to the other half who hate themselves and want someone to Fix Me.
Yet it’s only part of the story of this record because “at the heart of that is being in love” and that changes everything.
“I think love between gay men is often complex, especially of my generation, because we come from a place of trauma,” Waugh says. “The journey into the record is you can’t experience some of the love that I talk about in Out and Playlist without comprehending all of that [trauma that came before]. Out of all of that, the love comes.”
And the love and the songs don’t go quietly. Right from the start, Beauty & Truth, tracked with a live band in the studio of his long-time producer Shane Nicholson, was a record that didn’t so much break from the folk and country-based sound of his previous work as build on it. Build up from it, into a record that doesn’t see boundaries.
“For me all the reference points were songs that sounded anthemic: this is what I want to put on when I’m having a blue day. My boyfriend is very good at hanging shit on me and his nickname for me is Cheeseball McGee. I in fact have a playlist called Cheesy Guilty Power Ballads, that I unapologetically love,” confesses Waugh.
Anthemic is one thing, the album packing stirring verses and the kind of rousing choruses that convince you that change is reachable, that you are changeable, that the world is not fixed. But with slowly tender songs such as Moved and Patsy Cline, the subtly filled spaces of Father’s Day and rising energy of To Be Alive, Cheeseball McGee is nowhere to be found.
“That’s the reason why you partner with Shane Nicholson: he won’t let you get away with that shit,” Waugh says. “I’m still in awe of what he can do as a musician and every musician in that room. I had this impostor syndrome standing behind the microphone, but I feel that the sound was forged in that room.”
