During an emotional talk at the recent TedxSydney conference, Brisbane singer-songwriter Megan Washington discussed her life-long struggle with stuttering, revealing the true extent of her own stutter and explaining the benefit of various stutter “loopholes” and the therapeutic merit of singing.
“Singing for me is sweet relief, it is the only time when I feel fluent,” she explains. “Somehow, through some miraculous synaptic function of the human brain, it’s impossible to stutter when you sing, and when I was younger that was a method of treatment that worked really well for me.”
Washington opened her talk by explaining that despite spending “a lot of my life on the stage,” she has spent her life “up until this point and including this point living in mortal dread of public speaking. It’s the first time that she has discussed the impact of her stutter in such vivid and humorous detail.
The singer concludes her talk with a performance of her new song To Or Not Let Go, the second single from her forthcoming album — the follow-up to 2010’s I Believe You Liar — recorded at London’s RAK Studios and Peter Gabriel’s New World with producer Sia producer Samuel Dixon.
Watch Mark Ronson set the record Straight on sampling during his TED Talk!
Watch: To Or Not Let Go: Megan Washington at TEDxSydney 2014
