“Never Be” by Meg Mac

"Never Be" arrived as a download on 7 August 2015, the Australian singer Meg Mac's follow-up to "Roll Up Your Sleeves", and it gave her a first spot in the ARIA top 50, peaking at number 39. The chorus came to her behind the wheel: tapping along on the steering wheel with her phone dead, she had to keep singing it over and over until she got home, and she suspects that's where all the repetition comes from. It's her favorite thing about the song: a hook that works like a chant.

What that chant pushes back on is envy, the grass-is-greener habit of assuming someone else's life is better. People pictured hers as glamorous; she has pointed out that touring America mostly means hours in a van. At the 2015 ARIA Music Awards it was up for Breakthrough Artist, losing out to Courtney Barnett.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.