Artist's Brain: mon cher Can Do (And Is Doing) It All
As she releases "the body" the latest single from her upcoming album, Meghan Holton of mon cher tells her story of making it happen for herself and other artists.
Meghan Holton, the mind behind the exciting, up-and-coming dream-pop project, mon cher, has big dreams for her music.
She envisions a future where she shares grand stages like Red Rocks Amphitheatre with 20 musicians—likely to include an assortment of guitars, keys, and especially orchestral strings—as her emotional yet danceable songs invoke within the audience the same transcendental feeling she found when she saw Radiohead perform while she was on acid for the first time.
And by all intents and purposes, this future she’s envisioning will be reality before long (except for perhaps the Radiohead part cause, you know, they’re like, Radiohead) because she’s been able to do everything in music she once thought she couldn’t.
There was a time when she was getting started playing music that Holton thought she couldn’t write her own songs on acoustic guitar.
A few years after falling in love with music as a child when she heard the effortless power of Bob Marley’s “Jamming”, her brother’s friend taught her to play “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd on acoustic guitar.
From there she was “addicted to guitar,” waiting for her brother’s same friend to come back and tune it so she could play more, also taking lessons briefly, but in all this time she didn’t think she could write.
“I never felt like I was expressing myself [with the acoustic guitar] in an interesting way,” Holton says. “There’s another level to bring something new to that.”
She spent many years learning covers on Ultimateguitar.com and jamming them with friends in a basement during college.
And yet today, Holton is bringing something new to acoustic guitar—using her first obsession in music to write her new songs as mon cher. All the emotion and elation and pure love for what she’s creating now starts acoustic before she reworks the ideas into electronic compositions in Ableton…another aspect of music she once thought was beyond her talent.
“I never thought it was in the realm of possibility for me,” Holton says. She would listen to electronic-forward artists like James Blake, Sylvan Esso, and Orbital, and just like she thought of her acoustic idols, creating anything in that way seemed out of reach.
Until her roommate, Matthew McGoogan, installed Ableton on a computer in their home. Then all her questions started:
What’s MIDI? How do I record audio? How do I slow it down? Every answer spawned a new question and before long she was obsessed.
“I was able to make stuff that I thought sounded really cool. I could start adding drums or bass or trumpet or anything I wanted. It felt really limitless and allowed me to find a new way to write,” Holton says.
When making her past work as mon cher, including her first album, mon cher, and her 2022 EP, tell me baby, everything came from that limitless experience.
The genesis is always something new. A sample. An instrument. A reverb pedal. A dreamy pad. A hit of a coffee cup. All of these can lead to (and have led to) the instrumentals, which, across the already significant discography of mon cher, vary in sound from ambient and longing, to groovy as hell.
“I find if I repeat what I’ve done before I don’t go anywhere interesting,” Holton says. “It unlocked an excitement in me and I haven’t slowed down since.”
A vital aspect of the mon cher project is also Holton’s partner, Caitlyn Sullivan, who plays drums during live gigs (she taught herself to play so she could be in the band), and is also an audio engineer for QSC by day, helping Holton with signal flow and other technical aspects in the early stages, as well encouraging her to take the project to the next level.
So, for the first album, one of Sullivan’s coworkers came in to help and the three of them produced the album together.
“When I started writing songs and they started becoming better, [Sullivan] said we should get these produced, mixed and mastered, and taken seriously,” Holton says. “I had written 90% of the songs [for the first album], and they would come in and help shape it. Especially because I was so new. I didn’t know how to keep a song interesting.”
With the more recent mon cher songs though, Holton handles almost every aspect of the writing production process including mixing and mastering (another aspect of music she once thought she couldn’t do).
Sullivan’s contributions on the back end have most recently consisted of sticking her head in the door and telling Holton if something sounds good, but that’s about it.
Now as Holton and I chat in a coffee shop, the results of doing what she once thought she couldn’t are more than apparent.
She tells me about her first-ever tour (which she organized herself) playing six shows in one week throughout the Midwest United States, and she’s already organizing a tour of the West Coast in October.
mon cher also has a new single out today entitled “the body” ahead of her upcoming album that is due out soon.
I had the pleasure of hearing Holton and Sullivan perform “the body” live earlier in the summer when she was opening for the indie sensation Soccer Mommy at Levitt Pavillion.
Levitt is a Denver staple and an outdoor arena that hosts free concerts with top-notch artists. In 2023 alone Levitt has on its calendar Buffalo Nichols, Chali 2na & Cut Chemist, The Regrettes, and Fishbone, and Holton ended up playing by simply emailing the booker.
It may have taken 18 months to actually land the spot, but there’s no way she would have if she couldn’t back it up musically.
“It always comes in lulls. Maybe mid-June I was like ‘What’s the point. Nothing matters. The odds are astronomical Megan’,” Holton says with a laugh. “And then we played Levitt and I realized anything is possible. Let’s do it.”
Now Holton is saving gigs around Denver for big slots like the Underground Music Showcase, where she will perform this Sunday, July 30 (which is yet another goal she set for herself after attending the showcase when she first moved to Denver).
Of late the live environment is what’s been driving the project forward. The progression of mon cher’s sound has become far more upbeat in its presentation, going from pandemic-induced longing on the debut LP to songs with an undeniable dancey quality.
“I still love my slow sad songs. I can’t avoid the melancholy style. I think I’ll always have that, but I want to have fun live. I want to dance. I want to feel good,” says Holton.
Holton has evolved into an artist who has an adept ability to manipulate that balance. For example, “the body” coasts on a four-on-the-floor kick, and includes the perennial lyrical hook, “Everything is alright.”
But the reverberant synths and the wide open spaces provide a contrast, painting a truthful picture of what it means to be alright: finding the joy even when everything may not be going your way.
Holton is still ideating details of the new album like the name and the cover art, but she intends to expand the qualities heard on “the body.” More melodic and catchy while also being more electronic and danceable, moving away from standard song patterns like verse-chorus-verse and towards club genres like techno.
“I find myself exploring different styles, leaning into being a producer,” Holton says of the new album.
Holton has also been leaning into being a producer for other artists around Denver. Working with notable names like ii/lo, Aya Maguire, and SCOTT JAMES, while venturing into different genres like indie, bluegrass, and hip hop.
“[Producing] keeps me away from doing only my style, and brought so much more back to my music,” Holton says. “I like the idea of collaborating with other artists a lot. Working with other artists—I just get to make this person’s dream come true.”
Holton goes on to imagine the caliber of artists with whom she could collaborate at the top of the music industry—the people for whom she could make their dreams come true.
And well, given how many of her own dreams she’s made come true at this point, that top of the music industry may not be far off for mon cher.
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