Megan Woods is dancing on a dirt road in her cowgirl boots and hat, filming content, when she realises the moment itself is the material. “I actually think there’s some inspiration in that,” she says, “just dancing on a dirt road,” to her own original music, out there in the dust. It explains where Megan is right now, fifteen months into an open-ended family lap of Australia. “We can be so busy on the hamster wheel that we can sometimes forget to take a moment and breathe, and just really enjoy where we’re at and what we’re doing,” says the Kiwi musician and mother of two.

Megan’s first stage was in Oamaru, on New Zealand’s South Island, when she was three and a half. “I did tap dancing as a little girl, as one does.” By eight she did her first town musical, and a guitar someone had left lying around caught her eye. She started mucking about on it, and her mother asked whether she would like lessons. “I looked at her like, is that a thing?” Megan recalls. From there the guitar and the stage never let go, through countless musicals and, later, tribute shows at the Agrestic Grocer that doubled as an apprenticeship: a Shania Twain night that had her deep-diving into “everything she’s gone through in her career,” and a Melissa Etheridge tribute set that put a rock edge into her second single, ‘I Just Want To Be’.

Country music was not the coolest thing a teenager could admit to loving back then. “Probably wasn’t so cool when I was in high school,” she says, though the genre has since gone mainstream. “Obviously country music now, every man and his dog is jumping on board — like Beyoncé. Which is absolutely fine, there’s room for us all.” Back then her compass pointed to Jewel, the Spice Girls, and above all Shania Twain, “a huge inspiration for me… I was able to appreciate everything she was doing, especially as a female in the industry.” Like editing her own videos.

Megan’s real turning point had nothing to do with music. Thirteen years ago she walked away from a marriage in New Zealand after recognising the pattern for what it was. “I ended the marriage after realising that what I was going through was actually the typical domestic violence situation,” she says. “There’s a better life for me around the corner, and I need to go and find it, and I need to go now.” Her father and her sister, already settled around Orange, told her to get on a plane, and Orange became home.

A friend in Orange handed Megan her first song idea. “It was basically a poem, and she just said, ‘Here you go’.” Born from a break-up, a shirt dropped on the floor, and the couple’s dog who came to lie on it, that poem became her debut single, ‘Shirt on the Floor’ — and gave her the nerve to be more than “just the cover artist at the pub.”

Her process has barely changed since. “I still like to have some lyrics and then sit with my guitar and work out a melody from there, and work out a rhythm, and work out the right structure from there,” she says. Dolly Parton, Shania Twain and The Chicks remain the touchstones, but never templates. “I don’t think 'How would they do it?' or anything like that, because I’m not trying to be a copycat. I’m not trying to be exactly like them. I obviously want to be authentic to myself.”

That authenticity carries real weight in ‘Shattering the Silence’, written for fellow advocate Jessica Hickman to perform at the Stars of Orange Dance for Cancer, and drawn straight from Megan’s own lived experience of family violence. “It was definitely the song I didn’t know I needed to release,” she says. It sits apart from most of her catalogue. “I like to think I’m a pretty happy-go-lucky kind of person… my music is quite uplifting and happy, and we can have a bit of a party and have a good time with it.”

The trip has been a gift for inspiration and a headache for discipline in equal measure. “There’s probably a lot of scraps in a lot of different notebooks, that’s for sure,” she admits. “And notes on my phone, and I should probably be more consistent and have them in one place. But that’s a future Megan problem.” Asked how she closes the gap to artists like Miranda Lambert or Lainey Wilson, she doesn’t make excuses. “I probably haven’t done enough of it. I’m still such a beginner, such a novice. I need to really buckle down and pull my finger out.”

Ask her, finally, why she must do this — hauling a guitar around the country with a husband, two kids, and a caravan in tow, and write music — and after a long pause the answer comes from somewhere unguarded. “Sometimes it would just be easier to be a stay-at-home mum… but then there’s this ache in me that goes, yeah, but I really love performing. I really love being on the stage.” It shows up in small moments, like a stranger at a new venue recently asking for an original song, then saying it was the best of the night. “There’s that little burst of your heart going, oh, yeah, OK, there it is.” Not everyone will love what she shares, she knows, but that was never the point. “At the end of the day, I love that I can say to our children, Mummy gave it a go.”

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