Hit List

Mia Dyson has always done things her own way with an admirable confidence that comes when one intimately understands the capability of her own voice and guitar. As she drops her fifth independently released album, the Torquay girl turned LA native describes how her sound has progressed on Idyllwild.

“I've been kind of – fairly or unfairly, I'm not sure – put into the sort of bluesier category,” Dyson, a regular contender for the Best Blues & Roots Album ARIA, begins. “I think it's definitely a part of my sound but it's certainly not all of it, but [on] this record there was definitely some of the influences from my '80s childhood – Elvis Costello, Talking Heads and bands like that, and more of a reckless rock'n'roll sound that I really love but has not necessarily come into play for me before.”

Starting off with the romping good times title track, written in celebration of Dyson's recent nuptials, and progressing onto the warm familiarity of lead single When We're Older, there's a lot of joy to be found across Idyllwild; a greater range of musical experimentation too.

“I think it's a crab shoot!” Dyson exclaims of compiling a consistent tracklisting. “I was worried with this record – can all these songs sit together? But then I go and listen to some of my favourites, like Tom Waits' Mule Variations, and he has these wild songs that are things being smashed together and sung through a PVC pipe, and then he has right next to it the most heartbreakingly sweet, aching ballad that has no sort of odd sounds – just pure piano and a slide guitar or whatever. And he's got those songs right next to each other and I didn't bat an eyelid at that. So I kind of just have to hope that it makes sense, that in some strange way the songs fall together because they were written in a certain period and they'll hopefully fall together and be songs that can live together.

“There seems to have been a theme that emerged with the record that I didn't intend. It's of either growing up or growth in general and looking towards old age as an idea of what it would be like to have experienced all of that life and have that life behind you instead of in front of you, and hoping for love to last, and hoping that you become more open-hearted rather than less.”

Dyson admits to feeling a lot of resistance in the lead-up to its release, though she's learnt a liberating lesson with Idyllwild.

“When I sit down to write, I want to be able to create something; it's so fulfilling, it feels so good to create that I want to force it – I want to have control over it happening. And it refuses to comply with that; the very nature of creativity is that I can't make it happen, I can only be there and put in the time. I'm aware of it at least now, but I still have to remember it and learn it every day.”