Megan McLaughlin was inspired to play guitar by a Bruce Cockburn song and started writing songs in her teens. After honing her skills as a street performer in Paris she moved to California, where she studied guitar with Nina Gerber and developed an innovative guitar style. Of her 1996 debut CD, Noisy World, Victory Review writes:

1. McLaughlin's vocals are sweet and clear with a touch of vulnerability and gentle soulfulness. Finely arranged percussion, bass, background vocals and occasional electric guitar give the material an appealing full-band sound. Especially evocative is her song, Paris, inspired by memories of her year in that city.
   

By day a kindergarten teacher, this perhaps explains the bigger voice than you expect when she first steps to the mic. With songs too personal and intelligent for popular music and full of the clear, meaningful images of life, she is the quintessential folk singer. Especially evocative was her song about Paris as she knew it many years ago on a youthful trip. Listening, it was easy to recall a similar experience and you knew the memories were still very real even after all the years that have passed.

With just a hint of irony, Megan McLaughlin describes her musical genre as "girl with guitar". 

She says she decided to take up guitar after hearing Bruce Cockburn on the radio. "Among all the banal horrible stuff on FM radio I heard this song, Wonder Where the Lions Are?. I thought, 'What is that?', and went out and got the record. That was when I decided to try this myself. I got a guitar from a friend and worked at learning to play."

"Mostly I write character sketches and songs about things that happen to me or observations on personal dynamics between people. I think the job of a songwriter is to take the everyday experience people have and process it so that people can find something of themselves in the song. The paradox is that the more specific you are, the more details you put in, the more universal it becomes. "Yet at the same time you're not writing a short story. You don't have the luxury of having a paragraph to expose a character, it's more like a quick drawing where you work fast and have to capture the image in just a few words. So I try to be impressionistic in my writing and not too literal but not abstract."