Meaghan Farrell of Cliffside Park, New Jersey thought she was going to be a diplomat or a history professor. Then she found Mona’s and became Sweet Megg.
She was in college up in Yonkers, just north of New York City. She loved singing classic blues and early jazz and played out with what she calls an artsy “anti-folk” band with a toy piano. But a random guy told her she needed to check out Mona’s in the East Village of Manhattan. Upon her first drop-in, the place was discouragingly quiet. But the bartender said come back after 11, when the music starts.
“I came back around 11:30. The place is slammed,” Sweet Megg remembers in Episode #367 of The String. “There's a four piece playing just raucous, amazing trad jazz. Like (the) 1920s - just ripping. And then the party goes to like four in the morning. All these musicians show up. All these people come and sit in. And I was just like, ‘Oh My God!’ And at that point, I went every week.”
Soon she was sitting in and then singing regularly, finding her people and making friends at Mona’s and other New York bars. Eventually, she had her own band - The Wayfarers - one that embodied what she has come to call Americana Jazz - a stew of blues, early swing, and the sound of hot club jazz manouche. That latter influence came from France, and Megg went there too, studying music and playing street shows and clubs and building a world in Paris, one that continues to feed her soul to this day.
“Last time I was in Paris,” she tells me, “I played a gig. Then I met up with my other friends who'd finished their gig at one in the morning.Then we went and got steaks, and then we went to this cave and smoked cigarettes and jammed until four. And you know, it's just living life rich, you know? Rich. And I think that it still does exist in small quantities, and it is possible. But you just have to make the choice to see life that way and live romantically and believe in love. And I think a lot of people have given up on that in this day and age and it's too bad. It's their fault. They shouldn't.”
These are a couple of scenes in a show that inspired me to open with thoughts about the state of bohemian culture, a life philosophy that we could use a lot more of. I learned in this conversation that Nashville’s bohemian quotient jumped up measurably when Sweet Megg moved her base to Music City about five years ago. She’d not been particularly focused on country music to that point, she says, but she got on board. Just this week I saw her sing at Robert’s Western World’s Lower Broadway block party, leading the Westernaires big band like a boss, singing 1930s western swing songs and a very tasty version of “Stardust,” which she said was among her favorite songs.
Megg’s also been a staple at Honky Tonk Tuesdays, Robert’s, and Skinny Dennis, even as she tours energetically. On the recording front, she’s released a string of savvy covers albums since 2020, including her latest, Massive Negroni. She’s alternated those with albums of her own songwriting, which embody a more progressive take on country/folk, most recently 2025’s impressive Never Been Home. And she’s working on a new songwriter album now, as she lives her ethos of looking back and forward simultaneously.
“I feel like life is one great equation,” she says. “You know, like mathematicians add on to it. Physicists add on to things. And I think music is the same. And I happen to like the older stuff. That's just where my heart lies. But I am trying to add to the equation. I'm not trying to do what's already been done. I guess I'm an old soul, but I also like a lot of modern (music), and I've learned a lot, and I'm mixing it together, and I'm adding to (the) new.”
Enjoy "I Don't Want To Set The World On Fire" from Massive Negroni.
