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Six songs, nineteen minutes, and by the second one you’re checking your own pulse.
“Bye driver,” the shortest thing on this EP, spends its minute and a half asking “can you hear me” and “am I alive” like someone patting themselves down after impact, making sure all the parts are still attached. You only ask that kind of question out loud when you’re genuinely not sure of the answer.
MEGGO, the solo project of Montreal musician and producer Megan Ennenberg, titled every song on this record like it’s the conversation of someone who just had an accident and is still trying to figure out where they are. The crash. Bye, driver. Jaws of life. Explosion. Just my luck. On paper it reads like a demolition. On tape it sounds hopeful almost the whole way through, and that’s the first thing worth sitting with before you get anywhere near the lyrics.
This is chapter two of a three part project she’s calling eavesdropper. Chapter one, death stories, was upfront about what it was doing. Named for real people she’d lost, credited them by name, didn’t ask you to guess. The crash doesn’t extend that same courtesy, borrowing the vocabulary of an accident without ever quite telling you if there was one.
Track one opens on footsteps and humming before you’re sure you’re listening to a song at all, and the first line that lands clean is “I came back through the backdoor dream.” Not a memory. A re-entry. Then the crash itself: asleep while someone else drove, awake the moment of impact. She wasn’t driving. Whoever was doesn’t get named, doesn’t get blamed, mostly gets forgiven and left behind. The song ends the way it started, on humming, plus a scrap of home movie audio, somebody’s parents narrating a house that isn’t the one being built here. Every jolt on this record gets absorbed back into something softer before it fully wakes you up.
Every jolt on this record gets absorbed back into something softer before it fully wakes you up.
“Bye driver” is the disorientation right after, and it’s where the record’s best line shows up, the kind you underline and can’t stop thinking about: “I forgive you, but I won’t follow you back.” Not reconciliation, exactly. More like someone deciding they can let go of the anger without agreeing to relive the moment that caused it. This isn’t a song about getting blindsided. The warning signs were there before she ever got in the car, which makes the forgiveness harder won and the refusal to go back sharper. Read it as a breakup line and it holds up fine. Read it as an instruction she’s giving herself about the dream she just got yanked out of, and it holds up better.
By “jaws of life” the record has flipped its own premise. A jaws of life is a rescue tool, the thing that cuts you out of wreckage rather than causes it, and the song plays like the one fully lucid stretch on the whole EP, all “there’s only now” and wanting a house with a rocking chair in it. Some of these lines have a plain, almost bashful honesty, the kind that doesn’t build to anything or apologize for not building to anything. The want just gets said out loud, and the song moves on. Worth knowing the room on this track is genuinely crowded. Family in the house while she recorded it, harmonica from her brother, friends stacked into the backing vocals. Love building a home isn’t a metaphor here so much as a credits list.
“Explosion” is barely two minutes and never actually explodes. Officially it’s “explosion (inevitable),” and that parenthetical is doing a lot of quiet work. The piano’s a little bent, not broken, and somewhere in there she rakes her fingers across the strings instead of the keys, either the most violent or the gentlest gesture on the record depending on how you’re listening. The lyric only ever describes an explosion as inevitable, past tense, hypothetical. I’ve come around to hearing it as a breath instead of a fuse. A catch in the voice between two thoughts. Proof of being alive rather than evidence of damage.
Then “just my luck” actually lights the thing. Opens with “clue me stupid,” three words that put you on the back foot before you’ve had time to find it, followed immediately by “no one’s laughing,” in case you were about to. Densest, loudest thing here, practically a different band by comparison, and the track where the crash imagery finally gets pointed at an actual person instead of an event. By now you know how this ends. She got in the car anyway. Somewhere in all that noise there’s a kid peeking through a memory that has nothing to do with any of it, proof the drifting hasn’t stopped even at full volume.
The record’s only fully awake moment is also its last one. “Even if you’re happy” sounds like nothing else on the EP, soft trumpet instead of noise, a second voice in the mix courtesy of her regular collaborator Owen Chow. The lyric says the quiet part outright: harder to write when you’re content, easier to reach for the wreckage than the good moment sitting right in front of you. Five songs of dream logic and disaster vocabulary, and the one place she sounds genuinely present is the one admitting how much effort presence takes.
Turns out MEGGO would probably be fine with all of this. She’s said as much herself, more or less: however you find your way into this record is the right way in. A record this interior doesn’t hand you the meaning. It hands you the wreckage and the rescue tools and leaves you to sort out which is which.
A record this interior doesn’t hand you the meaning. It hands you the wreckage and the rescue tools and leaves you to sort out which is which.
What I keep coming back to is that nothing here resolves the way a crash record is supposed to resolve. Nobody gets fully rescued. Nobody fully wakes up until the last ninety seconds, and even then it plays less like waking up than like realizing you never quite went back under. Closer to how mornings actually work than most songs about mornings let on. You don’t sit up and know exactly where you are. You just notice, eventually, that you’re standing in your kitchen, not entirely sure how you got there, and it’s fine, you’re just going to go ahead and make coffee anyway.
Nobody gets fully rescued. Nobody fully wakes up until the last ninety seconds, and even then it plays less like waking up than like realizing you never quite went back under.
Chapter three’s still coming. She’s building a three album architecture on her own dime, six songs at a time, with nobody but her friends and her brother’s harmonica helping carry the weight. Worth pointing at before the algorithm decides to. She’s playing Second Summer Festival in Toronto this September and a hometown show at P’tit Ours in Montreal come October, if you want proof this holds up outside your headphones. Give it your nineteen minutes, then go find chapter one while you’re at it.
