Try, Try Again: The Dreamy Synth Beats of mon cher

Growing up by a lake near Orlando, there was a stretch of time when Meghan Holton would go wakeboarding every single day and try to pull off a 360…only to fall and hit the water, over and over again. 

“I kept falling, and it hurts when you fall,” Holton says. “There was just a week straight where I just never changed what I was doing. I just kept trying it and hurting myself…throwing myself in without changing anything or trying to improve. And I always just think about how stupid that was.”

Years later, Holton’s wakeboarding follies inspired the dark and distorted song “nazare.” Named after a popular surfing town in Portugal, it’s one track of six on mon cher’s newest EP, you don’t feel it when you fall slow. “This song is about that experience, just throwing yourself into something because you want the pain,” she says. “You don’t actually want to change any of it, you just keep throwing yourself into shit.”

While this stubborn refusal to escape old habits may be a common theme in her lyrics, mon cher’s synthy and danceworthy dreamscapes have become a space where Holton can experiment, learn and break new ground as a musician.

“I always played guitar, but never could find a way to write songs with guitar,” Holton admits. “Then I had this beautiful roommate who knew Ableton and how to do the whole music production thing. I would come to him with questions, like, ‘What is MIDI? How do I do all this?’ So I basically started from scratch.”

Holton quickly grew comfortable producing original tracks with synths, taking inspiration from artists she’d enjoyed for years, including New Order, Radiohead and Beirut. Naming the indie electronic project “mon cher” after the chorus of Regina Spektor’s “Don’t Leave Me (ne me quitte pas)” as well as an old friend, Holton officially founded the band with Caitlyn Sullivan, her life partner and drummer, in early 2020.

“Caitlyn was always there from the very beginning. We’ve been together for ten years, since we met in Florida,” Holton says. “The first album was written with Caitlyn helping produce, but now I’ve gotten to the point where I produce and make most of the songs. I get them about 95 percent of the way there, and she’s like an editor for me. It’s amazing to have a pair of trusted ears to sound stuff off of.”

Just as Holton got a fresh start on the synths, Sullivan taught herself to play drums for the band. Holton notes that on the new EP, “she sings underneath some stuff, too, but her drum input has grown more and more. Now she’s a real drummer doing real drummer things, which is great.”

Even as Sullivan was learning the drums, the musicians’ first album, mon cher, which was released during their first year as a band, captured a dreampop-inspired sound. But when mon cher started playing live after the pandemic, Holton recognized a problem: Not all of her songs were great in front of a live audience. 

“When I got to play certain songs live, I realized, ‘Oh, this is kind of hard to play live and it’s maybe not fit for live audio,’” she recalls. “So with this more recent release, I wanted to write songs that would be really fun to play live. This set, compared to the first sets we had, is just so much more fun and I’m so much more engaged. And the crowd dances more, which is what I want.”

Adding a stronger sense of rhythm and motion to Holton’s soothing vocals and distorted synths created a winning formula. Following the release of a sophomore album, sweet & heady, and the addition of the song “this world” to popular public playlists on Spotify, the indie group gained more listeners on streaming platforms. It also began opening for major touring bands such as DeVotchka and Soccer Mommy.

Then last fall, the musicians released you don’t feel it when you fall slow. The new release uses dreamy synths and soft-yet-distorted vocals to explore the thrills and pains of falling for someone new before you can even identify the feeling.

“I crush really hard, and so a lot of it was about one person, and me working through not being able to get that crush out of my mind,” Holton says. “It’s been interesting and really cathartic to be able to get out these emotions that I wouldn’t say directly to her or anybody else. I’m very fortunate that I get to do that and then feel free of those things.”

Fans of the group’s past work will find the first three songs the most familiar; they explore the timid excitement surrounding blossoming love with a light, dreampop sound. Opener “i wake up” is a gentle track surrounded by some foreboding that Holton will fail to ‘get it right’ again. In the more subdued songs that follow, Holton’s worst fears are confirmed, and she comes to terms with the end of the relationship in “wasted love,” the EP’s poignant finale.

Holton has grown to appreciate “wasted love” after some initial apprehension about how emotionally raw it was compared to earlier work.  “It definitely is my most vulnerable song,” she says. “Knowing that I’m saying these things out loud and that this person’s going to hear it, but just saying it anyway… This is why it’s good to have Caitlyn as my producer, because I didn’t want to release it because I thought it was too cheesy, and she was like, ‘Shut up. It’s so good, shut up.’”

Although Holton may have once been that wakeboarder too stubborn to improve, she is now continually working to make her music for mon cher better. And at the mon cher show at Skylark Lounge on Friday, February 6, the band will debut a member: Emily Eicher, better known by her artist name of Best Man, playing her debut full set as the band’s guitarist. Eicher released her own first full-length album, People Pleaser, last June, and also collaborated with mon cher on “lush,” the third song on the new EP.

“I wanted to be able to play more music instead of pressing buttons to loop things,” Holton says of the addition of Eicher. “So I’m very excited about that, and we’ll have more real voices instead of me just sampling voice stuff. Emily’s just a great guitarist and she’s such a nerd with the pedals… and her voice is high while mine is low, so it just perfectly hits.”

The Skylark show will be mon cher’s first Denver gig in a year, but the band will soon book more. “There’s a dream I have, which is mon cher performing without a laptop, so I’m writing more for that now. And I really want to tour again,” Holton says.

“It’s very vulnerable to be onstage and get people to go to your show and then keep them entertained,” she continues. “But then I realize, you know, we’re all going to die, so I’m like, just do it and have fun. I love being up there. I’m thankful for the ability to make music and that I’ve been able to learn how to produce it.

“Fourteen-year-old Megan, who just played with GarageBand a little bit, would be so proud.” And perhaps less inclined to fall back into the waves.

mon cher with Claruin, 8 p.m. Friday, February 6, Skylark Lounge, 140 South Broadway. Tickets are $15 at the door.