To me, it’s my only dream and my biggest fear.” I used to be really scared of acknowledging that, but now I’ve realised that these things are two sides of the same coin. The fear of failing at it has been alongside the dream the whole time. “I would be so shaken by the idea that I might fail, and it was so intense to feel that at the time. I still wasn’t able to give myself 100% to it, and my dad, who has been very supportive of me, would sit me down and be like, ‘What are you doing? Why aren’t you trying harder? This is the only thing you care about’, and I would just cry,” McMahon confesses. “I remember being around 18/19, when I was starting to play more shows and write more songs. “It’s the thing that has taught me so much along the way: what it is to really love and want something.” This lends itself to the fear of fucking it up and finding yourself off balance having no purpose. “I think I understand more now that you can’t have one without the other, as they feed each other,” she tells me. Music has always been the only thing she has ever set out to do, yet her fear of failing has often been crippling. This is the next step of our foray into the levels of yin-yang, where she finds herself at the crux of two opposing ideas. Even if she wasn’t technically big enough at the time, McMahon was a natural.īecause of her early induction into performing music, McMahon has never seen any other route for herself. You can just see my feet dangling off the chair” – she can’t help but laugh. When McMahon describes a photograph of her first ever performance – “I'm quite young, so you can't even see my head sticking out over the keyboard. Her tone of voice is warm and you can sense the reverie as she recalls going to group concerts around the age of four. She lived next door to “free-spirited, very encouraging” neighbours who would invite her over to play with their kids, allowing her the freedom to make as much noise as her heart desired. In her early years, she took piano and trumpet lessons, and taught herself how to play guitar. McMahon grew up just outside Melbourne, along the Yarra River. So how do we begin to shed light on the shadow parts of McMahon’s faith system? At what point did McMahon go from believing in music, to trusting the universe? A lot of these musings were uncovered during her late twenties, as she was experiencing her Saturn return – an astrological coming of age and period of intense transformation where you’re able to reflect and confront your past, with a deeper understanding of how this new perspective will help you navigate your future. “I don’t really know what I believed in – I know I believed in music, but I didn’t really have something to put my trust in.” “There’s a big gap in my life in-between me understanding that I didn’t feel good in the Catholic church, to now, where I feel like nature is God and I have so much belief in it,” she explains. She reveals that she was brought up in a Catholic household, but no longer practises religion. McMahon wasn’t always a spiritual person. As our conversation deepens, the philosophy of complimentary forces maintaining the harmony of the universe, and influencing everything within in, comes around time and time again. At first, the allusion feels like a passing remark with an air of poeticism – it’s 8pm on a rainy evening in Melbourne where McMahon lives, whilst the working day has just begun in sunny London.
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