[Cover photo credit to Chad Cochran]
Athens, Ohio-based singer/songwriter Megan Bee will be releasing her new album, Fiction, in the Fall of 2025. Those ten original songs focus on “slowing down, softness, and enjoying the sweetness of life.” The album covers wide-ranging themes like “sensual intimacy, yearning for creativity to make the world a better place, and the heartbreak of losing a friend to suicide.”
We’re very pleased to premier the song “Mockingbird” from the album Fiction here on Wildfire + Music today. It arrives widely this week on July 24th, 2025. Listening to “Mockingbird” for the first time, it’s interesting that you can already hear the emotion and mood in Megan Bee’s voice suggesting the depths of the song, even before the lyric makes clear what the themes of the song might be. And that emotion and tone is reflective, pleading, and a little sad, in an understated way. As the song develops, escorted by mellow pedal steel, we understand more why the vocals are presented in that way.
Though the many (many!) capabilities behind the mockingbird’s songs are on full display in nature, the speaker can only express wonder at the source of their abilities, but also a much more profound sense of what’s missing–a mockingbird’s own voice and own song in the midst of all her outstanding mimicry. Megan Bee keeps things simple when it comes to the comparison being made, and leaves it up to the audience to think things through, and bear with the emotion behind key phrases. The music is built in such a way that it actually expresses profound emotion and empathy, suggesting all the possible implications behind this idea a remarkable ability being used, that’s nevertheless lacking in personal expression.
There are many possible things that might spring to mind for audiences when they hear and participate in the emotion of this song. They might think of the close comparison of birdsong to musicians performing music, and whether they are content just performing classic songs, or would rather spend time honing their own songs to meet their personal needs as creative beings. But they also might think of the bigger sweep of life, where we all still spend a lot of time adapting to the social cues around us, taking on personas of what we need to be for our families or careers. If we hurry too much, we might not ever really meet our inner selves face to face. Could our lives be said to really express our own song? If not, shouldn’t we be working on that? The question that Megan Bee poses to the mockingbird stays “open” and hangs in the air. She doesn’t pretend to know the answer, but suggests it’s a question that begs to be asked. And that it can really only be answered on the individual level.
Megan Bee says about “Mockingbird”:
Mockingbirds have the ability to learn all of the bird songs around them. I was listening to a boisterous male one day and thinking it was like a greatest hits of bird songs on repeat. It’s so easy to just repeat things we hear. This song is a wish that we can all find our own voice.
The song “Mockingbird” was written by Megan Bee, and she performs vocals and acoustic guitar. John Borchard plays pedal steel, Caitlin Kraus provides backing vocals, Chris Justice plays bass, and Ammed Solomon provides drums and percussion.
For her new album, Megan Bee spotlights her vocals even more directly and works with Production that moves through Folk and Americana to “dip its toe into an Arthouse sound at times.” The album features Bee not only on acoustic guitar, but also piano and wurlitzer.
The album was produced by Eddie Ashworth at The Oxide Shed in Athens, Ohio. A Southern California native, Ashworth brings his experience engineering chart-toppers and multi-platinum albums in L.A. in the 1990s to the Production of Fiction.
