Singer- songwriter Megan Burke told David Hennessy about her new debut EP Not All Men, Apparently.

Swords singer- songwriter Megan Burke released her debut EP Not All Men, Apparently last week along with the focus track Make Me.

The EP documents years of Megan’s bad relationships with men.

At just 20 years of age, Megan was a hopeful on The X Factor. She would make it to boot camp of the 2011 show but was happy to be let go as she knew it was not what she wanted from a career in music.

Since then she has independently built a following of over 155k across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, with her debut release with producer Denis Horgan (Kneecap, Aaron Rowe) reaching No.1 on the iTunes chart.

In lockdown, Megan would also take part in Virgin talent show The Big Deal where her talent was acknowledged by big stars like Boy George and Ashton Merrygold.

She has performed at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre and the 3Arena, and been played on national TV and radio.

Megan Burke took time to chat to the Irish World.

Megan Burke told The Irish World: “Someone said to me, You sound like you hate men’.

“But I was like, ‘I speak about the experience that I have had with men’, and they have been negative.

“In none of my tracks am I like, ‘I hate men’.

“This is what men have done to me to make me like feel this way so it’s very much taking back power.

“It’s that type of theme running throughout.”

The previous single Prove Me Right was concerned with similar themes, do you find a lot of girls can relate to the feelings?

“Well based on the experience of all the women that I know, they can relate to it absolutely.

“I have had a few people again reach out to me and just be like, ‘Oh my god, I feel ya’.

“And I’m like, ‘Thank you. I know you do’.

“I feel it’s a universal experience as a woman to go through that.”

What inspired you to write that one?

“I’m not one that can really sing songs that are about other people.

“It sounds so narcissistic but I feel like I can only connect or really perform or sell- I don’t mean financially, I mean emotionally sell a song that is about my own experience.

“I’ve been in and out of bad relationships and I won’t even get into it because it’s too long.

“I was in and out of bad relationships and I was just like, ‘You know what? I’m gonna give this all a rest. I think maybe relationships just aren’t for me’.

“And then after a while, I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll dip the toe back in and I’ll see what’s going on out there’.

“And then I was going on all these dates and I was just like, ‘I can’t believe a word out of these men’s mouths’.

“No matter what they said, in my head I was like, ‘Liar, cheater, takes drugs’.

“Obviously it’s just a response to what I was dealing with in the past.

“But that’s where it came from.

“I don’t like sitting down and writing sad songs really.

“I like a bit of humour or to make them a bit sarcastic.

“It’s about failed relationships and how that skews your image of men going forward.”

So has your experience left you quite cynical then?

“Yes but cynical for the right reasons.

“I feel cynical has that negative thing as if it’s made up or something but I’m cynical for the right reasons.”

What did you get from your experience on The X Factor?

“It made me realise what I didn’t want out of music really.

“I had great craic, don’t get me wrong.

“It was carnage to be honest with you.

“We were put up in this big massive mansion in the middle of the English countryside and you were like ladled with booze and there was hot tubs, it was mad.

“Being the responsible gal, I didn’t drink and I just went straight to bed but I shared a room with a girl and she came back to the room in the middle of the night absolutely plastered.

“I had to put this stranger to bed essentially.

“It was good craic.

“It pointed me in direction of what I didn’t want out of music.

“I had fun.

“I did have fun.”

What do you remember of singing for the judges?

“To be honest with you, I don’t remember it.

“I literally blacked out.

“I just remember opening my eyes and Gary Barlow staring at me.

“I was like, ‘Oh my god, so weird’.”

You got to the boot camp phase..

“I was glad when I was let go.

“To be honest with you, I never really wanted to do it.

“The management that I was working with at the time basically said, ‘You have to do it. It’s a massive thing. You don’t really have a choice’.

“It’s what people did then and I was like, ‘Alright, okay, it won’t harm me’ but then here I am 13 years later talking about it,” Megan laughs.

“It always creeps back in somewhere.”

Did you always know you wanted to sing?

“From when I first started talking, I just haven’t really shut up since then: talking and singing.

“My mam said that she took me to The Jungle Book when I was a year and nine months old.

“And she was like, ‘You weren’t even speaking but you were on my lap screaming to the music’.

“I was always making noise and singing along to stuff at home when I was younger and then at four, five, I went into dance class and I realised I really liked performing.

“So then my parents put me into a stage school and a theatre school that had dancing, drama, singing.

“I realised (later), ‘I’m grand at dancing but I’d be better at singing’.

“I realised that that is what gave me happiness or purpose.

“And then my Nana and my auntie bought me a karaoke machine when I was seven or eight.

“I remember so well but my mam was like, ‘You just locked yourself in your room and sang at the top of your lungs for hours and hours at a time the same songs over and over again’.

“That’s how it started.

“I haven’t really stopped from there.

“I stopped pursuing music for a while because I was really, really, really not well in my head so I wasn’t able to show up for myself the way I am now.

“But other than that, I’ve always worked in a creative field and it hasn’t really stopped.

“But the last couple of years, I’ve just put the head down and been writing so much and working with other people.

“I was just like, ‘I actually think now is the time’.

“Now all of this has brought me up to this point.

“I’m ready now to proper release all my stuff and get it out there.”

You say you weren’t pursuing music for a while but I bet it was always something you were going to come back to..

“Always.

“I have a vocal coaching business and I studied vocals in college.

“I’ve always worked in that creative field.

“I think for a year and a half I moved to Australia because it all got a bit much and I was like, ‘You know what? I’m gonna go to the opposite side of the world and work in an office that’s not creative’ and I was miserable, so miserable.

“So I ended up coming back to Ireland and went straight back into creative work.

“I never stopped doing it.

“It was always something that I knew.

“It is what I was put on the planet to do.

“It is the thing that I know in my heart and soul that I can do and I can do well and there’s no doubt in my mind that it is what I’m meant to do.

“I just didn’t know when I was going to be able to get back to it but here we are.

“We’re back at it.”

Who are your big influences and inspirations?

“I think I have quite a lot of elements in my music: Soul, R&B, neo soul, disco, motown pop and jazz so my overall sound is like a fusion of all of that so I have different artists that I’ve liked over different time periods that have helped me kind of evolve my sound.

“I started off being obsessed with Christina Aguilera and then that moved into Whitney Houston and then it moved into Amy Winehouse as a late teenager and she’s been the one consistent artist that I’ve listened to and been so inspired by her writing style and the way she makes melodies.

“I’ve always loved her and I still do so she’s the main reoccurring one.

“Then you’ve got Alicia Keyes.

“She’s unbelievable.

“And Alabama Shakes: Incredible musicians and her (Brittany Howard’s ) voice is spectacular.

“They’re kind of the main influences in terms of vocals and musical style.

“I love the writing of Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys.

“I think he’s an extraordinary writer.

“Sometimes when I’m in a writer’s block, I stop and I listen to some Arctic Monkeys or I read some of their lyrics as poems and it kind of gets me back into the writing, the conversational tone of writing that I like to do.

“If you’re going to put me on the spot and make me pick one, it’s Amy Winehouse every single time but if you want to hear all those ten artists that I just described, they’re all in there too.

“Aretha Franklin was quite big in my house.

“Ella (Fitzgerald)’s fabulous.

“Nina Simone.

“We could actually stay here for the next two days and talk about artists that I think are fantastic.

“I love the old school elements.”

What has been a highlight of what you have got to do so far? I’m guessing the 3 Arena would be up there..

“Yeah, that was pretty class.

“I really enjoyed that.

“That was a good few years ago when I was doing a TV programme, that was brilliant.

“And then also the Bord Gais.

“I’m a big, big musical theatre fan so I would spend a lot of time in the Bord Gáis and to be on the stage, looking out with just me and a piano was class.

“And then also, this sounds like such a flex but I’ve had quite a lot of videos in the past go viral and it always led to the most random people commenting, celebrities and stuff or people that I would have known. I think that’s still such a thing that I will never get used to.

“The Bord Gáis, the 3 Arena and then just like a random person just being like, ‘I really enjoy what you do’, that’s kind of the biggest highlight for me anyway: That I can connect with people and they are able to come up to me and say they enjoyed something I did.

“That’s quite a feat in my brain.”

You spoke about mental health, do you find songwriting therapeutic?

“Yeah, it’s definitely cathartic for me.

“It absolutely is.

“Now don’t get me wrong, I go to therapy all the time and I’m riddled with bad mental health problems.

“I think that honestly is just the price you pay for being an artist.

“I think it’s like a price you pay for being able to have such a vast kind of spectrum of emotion.

“In order to feel that, your brain just has to work differently.

“It’s the tortured mind of an artist, isn’t it?

“It’s so- I hate the word empowering but it’s really satisfying, it’s really cathartic.

“It does feel like I get to get out all of my frustrations or my feelings and say it exactly how I want to say it in the exact order that I want to say it.

“I like shocking people but not necessarily in a bad way.

“I just like to be open about what has happened to me or what I’ve been through or the relationships I’ve been in.

“And I like when people are like, ‘Ah, I didn’t think of it that way’, or, ‘I never saw it from this angle’, or, ‘Your lyrics made me think of this situation I’ve been in…’

“I find that quite healing the fact that my pain and my experience has potentially brought enjoyment to other people or relief to other people or made someone else feel validated, that is really nice and that, in itself, is like a form of therapy to have people acknowledge your existence or acknowledge what you’ve been through.

“So yeah, quite therapeutic for me.

“I was only writing there last week and I ended up writing two songs about something that happened six years ago but obviously it was in my brain.

“Even though I’ve spoken about it million times to my friends, my therapists, my family obviously there was still other things in there that needed to be processed and I found myself then the second day after writing was a lot better because I’d gotten all of that out of me.

“I would highly suggest people do writing even if it’s not music.

“Writing those feelings down is always a good idea, whether that’s in the form of a song or journaling or whatever.

“But my therapy bill is still so expensive, it hasn’t eased that so it is therapy but it’s not healing me.”

Obviously the EP is called Not All Men, Apparently. I guess it takes us back to Prove Me Right. I just wondered, do you think you could be proved wrong? Do you hope to be proved wrong?

“You know what? My dad is the most incredible man I’ve ever met and the way I try to rationalise it in my head is that if my dad exists, there has to be other men that exist like that.

“There has to be.

“He has done everything for me and looks after me and my mam and my family so well.

“And I’m like, ‘There has to be another bloke out there that has the same values as him’ so I live in hope that maybe someone like my dad will come in and prove me wrong but I don’t know.

“I suppose time will tell.

“I’m open to being proven wrong.

“I don’t think I will be but I’m open to it.”

The EP Not All Men, Apparently and the single Make Me are out now.

Megan Burke launches the EP at Whelans in Dublin on Saturday 11 July.

For more information, click here.