Meg Lui’s fear of missing out

The California-born singer-songwriter had been teaching in the Catskill Mountains, which she and her partner, fellow musician Keenan O’Meara, have called home for over 12 years. Despite living so rurally and the constant flux of non-permanent residents, Lui’s debut album cannot help but reflect the resounding sense of community she’s built there. 

The sounds of the country band she’s currently in with friends and her obvious love of classic rock seep into the record, supporting her honest storytelling and introspective lyrics. With Stevens, the two of them seem to have pulled off composing something that’s “a little bit Americana-leaning” whilst tentatively commenting on the dissociative grasp of modern technology and Lui’s fears of missing out and wasting precious time.

During the mastering of Instant Validation, Lui found out she was pregnant with her first child. While it was a more-than-slightly inconveniently timed surprise, what the record unequivocally reveals is that Lui has learnt to accept the ebbs and flows of life.

“This year has been sort of like everything all at once: family passing away, my partner releasing a record, having a baby, I’m releasing a record. It’s just a lot of stuff – a lot of life happening this year, whether we want it or not,” Lui says with an enduring smile, calling in on three hours of sleep, with her new little “road dog” being soothed by his father downstairs. As challenging as promoting one’s debut album with a newborn must be, she seems aptly resilient as she talks through a record ultimately rooted in making things work.

“It all really was kind of amazing. I felt really surrounded by all the women up here, my friends in general,” she recalls of the week after her son was born, when O’Meara had to leave for tour with Zach Bryan. “My sister was able to come out, which was really awesome. And my friend Hannah Cohen stayed with me for a week, and Sufjan was helping me,” she laughs, overwhelmed with gratitude. “There’s a really amazing community of women and people up here that are just awesome.”

After being priced out of Brooklyn, Lui took a break from pursuing her solo career. Financially, music had bared its teeth plenty already, with Lui leaving Berklee College of Music before she could finish her studies to stop herself from getting deeper into debt.

“I haven’t released anything in 10 years because I kind of gave up on stuff for a while, and just was like, okay, well, this isn’t working. This path is not getting me anywhere, and I need to obviously make money doing something.”

Lui eventually fell into teaching theatre and music. In all the papier-mâché projects and explaining the basics of music theory to children at an age when they’re capable of limitless enthusiasm, her own creativity was given new life.

“Working with kids was actually a huge blessing, their endless creativity and just excitement. It’s infectious.”

Over the course of a year, Lui and Stevens worked on the album whenever they could find the time. Stevens also moved to the Catskills a few years ago and has a studio there. Ultimately, their closeness and subsequent trust is what allowed Lui to stop overthinking her process.

“If I still thought of him as just the artist Sufjan, I think I would have approached it differently,” Lui tells me. “That openness was kind of there because we were friends, and it didn’t feel like just a producer role.”

Despite Instant Validation’s dreamy vocals, mythological love song “Andromeda”, and the starry, illustrated visuals to her cover of The Cranberries’ “Dreams”, performed with Stevens, Lui is a staunchly pragmatic artist. 

“We need to, as artists, retain our assets because there are people out there buying catalogues up. It’s very interesting to see that happening more and more. And so I had a switch flipped in the last year and a half, and I was like, ‘Interesting – all of these private equity companies see this as assets, but we as artists really struggle to see it as an asset.’ And trying to make that switch. Because at the end of the day, we’re trying to build our assets, our career. This is all we have, really.”

Lui is hesitant to be seen as trying to give advice through what she writes. She’s calmly self-assured in conversation and admits to her cultural commentary, but Instant Validation offers an emotionally messy documentation of her processing loss, grief, and the awareness that attention is being lost to her phone.

“It is something I want to be sensitive to, because it can sound like I'm giving advice: like, ‘You're ruining your life’, or ‘Get off the internet,’ or ‘Stop – go out and live your life.’ It's really me talking to myself and working through my impulses with this freaking device that we're carrying around constantly.” As she tries to unshackle herself from the algorithm, Lui is set on remaining focused on her community and releasing music that speaks for itself.