Center Stage
Over iced coffee and under grey, threatening skies at Upper Left Roasters in inner SE, just off the bustle of Hawthorne, and surrounded by the noise of a very young child and a very loud FaceTime conversation, I met Megan Diana. Despite the noise and commotion, she creates around her an immediate presence of intimacy.
She is engaging in that fast wit, faster-mind sort of way that makes it impossible to look away for fear you might miss something.
The first thing you notice about Megan Diana is her style. She is bright and elegant and wears her clothes with a slash of cosmopolitan sophistication that belongs anywhere but Portland. New York? Yes. Or Nashville, maybe. Even LA, where her fast smile and straw blond hair would place her as a native.
But Portland is home for her. Portland, with its fast gentrification, native quirks, and provincial worldview. But she grew up here; she moved here after being born in South Korea and living on an Army base in Italy. She grew up in choirs, jazz ensembles, and on the stage of school productions where her voice was a part of the whole. She studied French horn at Portland State and then started to wander physically and artistically in new directions.
She moved to New York and applied her creativity as a dessert chef. She didn’t sing, touch a keyboard, or even her horn for almost five years.
But, she had always been a singer and a performer. With a mother who was a musical theatre director and a serial choir director, Megan Diana had always heard her voice in unison with others. A part of the music, but never the music itself.
Returning to Portland, after a bad break-up (which always precedes a creative rebirth) and she started to play the piano again. And then she began to hear her voice. She went back to people who had offered collaboration before — friends who praised her voice and begged her to sing in their bands. Portland was full of startup bands with grand dreams and the need for strong voices that can carry a three-cord repertoire.
She started to provide backup vocals and then grew steadily into her own ambition of not only singing the songs but wiring them as well.
Ultimately she found herself rehearsing with a friend and building the dream. Always the planner and organizer, and the driver, she arranged for a gig at a local SE Portland haunt, the Savoy Tavern, with the promise of four covers and four new songs.
Just a few months before their debut, her friend dropped out and left Megan Diana center stage on her own.
And she flourished!
With her piano, haunting voice, and thumbs, palms, and fingers providing percussion, she took to the stage and never turned back. And we are all the luckier for it. She spent a few years performing at the Savoy and hearing her voice for one of the first times on its own and learning how to change and modulate it and how to project her songs differently
Her approach to music is holistic. She looks at the aesthetic of her music as well as the sound. And when she performs, and when she presents herself as Megan Diana, the performer, she is aware of the choreography, the lighting, the fashion, the story told through all the moving parts of the performance; that has allowed her to
not only craft a unique aura around her stagecraft but also in her music, which she calls ‘dream, country disco,’ which incorporates a western thematic resonance through steel peddle guitar.
To her, music and experience are about a place. And about a time. And Portland is an important place and time to her. For Megan Diana, who has been in town since the early ’90s, Portland is a transformative city. She remembers Hamburger Mary’s and when The Pearl was a warren of warehouses with more thieves and pushers than golden doodles and lululemon-clad hipsters. It’s a town that has more art than people that can financially support it. But it is also a city where artists can find their place, find a rhythm to their own creativity that allows them to grow and flourish and build an attentive and supportive audience. “People come to Portland,” she says. “because they know their art will be better. Their sound will be better. It’s like a quiet, sleepy town that inspires art and music.”
She talks about The Band, and Levon Helm, and how they influenced her. “They had a sound,” she says, and they used instruments (which she likes). Their music, she explained, was an homage to a place in time. I ask her if her music is an homage, and she smiles. “The song Waterbaby, which out of a lot of songs she is the proudest of…”.
She tells me of sitting in the water at Suttle Lake when her world made sense. She was someplace beautiful, doing something she loved, and in the water, swimming, feeling free, and it was all about the music. Music had brought her there. And that song is about that moment. “The song is about wanting to give that feeling I was feeling to others. I wanted to write a happy song. A song about being at peace… being a water baby, and not worrying that anything would overtake you. Don’t worry, as long as you can see the shore.”
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