Mia Dyson“Right now we are putting the lining boards on the inside – we’re doing tongue and groove lining boards for the walls,” exclaims Mia Dyson. “And you just see the walls go up. It’s amazing!'“
The acclaimed blues and roots singer-songwriter-guitarist is excited about her latest project – building a tiny house back near her childhood home town of Torquay.
This picturesque seaside rural setting in Victoria is a long way from the heady days of LA-living a decade or so ago when she recorded with Dave Stewart and opened for the likes of Stevie Nicks and Chris Isaak.
This is a passion project for Dyson. It's brought her back to her roots where, as a child, her guitar-making father encouraged her to learn the tools of his trade.
“He showed me all that stuff,” she enthuses. “It’s just been wonderful, a really different life: physical labour, all the planning and then the actual experience of building something where after a day’s work you can see the result.”
Hearing Dyson’s delight in her tiny house construction is captivating, listening to her describe the project is almost as enthralling as listening to her music. Admitting that this has been a dream of hers for 15 years – influenced by her parents building a mud brick home when she was an infant – Dyson explains what spurred her on.
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“I don't like big houses with big rooms that you have to clean everything," she notes. "I love the idea of really simple but gorgeous, well-built, well-insulated [home]… lots of light, all those things.”
So, after a quarter of a century on the treadmill of the music industry, Dyson decided to “step back”. She muses, “It’s been like 25 years of releasing records – at least pursuing releasing records in that cyclic way: touring, releasing record, touring, releasing record. Or writing. That whole thing has been going on for almost 25 years.”
California Dreaming
Before stepping back however, Dyson got involved with another passion project, the California-based Echo Magic Sessions – a loose collective of renowned players that is connected to the Echo Magic studio in Ojai, California.
Dyson takes the lead on the collective’s first release, a cover of the late Terry Reid’s Faith To Arise. The recording is nothing short of stunning – a wistful breeze of west coast country that is both technically exquisite and soulful, Dyson’s vocal aching with nostalgia.
Dyson’s connection to Ojai goes back more than a decade when she recorded her ARIA-nominated fourth album The Moment there with producer Erin “Syd” Sidney.
“He just introduced me to all these amazing players and producers,” she recalls, “and they formed this sort of collective over the years and have made records together, played in bands together.
"We all play in each other's bands, it’s just been this incredible source of inspiration and encouragement and support of each other, you know, all of us being pretty much, you know, we don't have major labels or any of those kinds of support so it's just kind of making our own way, managing each other ourselves, you know, that kind of thing.”
Like many California communities, Ojai – about an hour inland from Santa Barbara – is a haven for the artistically-inclined. Famously home to Donald Glover, Dyson even mentions that it’s the kinda place where you can stumble across Neil Young playing at a small bar in town.
The allure of Ojai was such that Dyson began splitting her time between there and LA. “It's beautiful," she affirms. "It's in this amazing valley, sort of surrounded by these really big mountains that will have snow in winter but it's just gorgeous.”
“For a while there, probably a couple years, I would spend a week a month up there and rent this little airstream trailer which was so fun," she continues. "It was like overlooking this arroyo riverbed and the mountains in the distance and it was just so special.
“And that way I could… basically my whole band – Syd and Dan [Wright, bass player], and then other peripheral players – they all lived up there so I would be up there a week, a month and we’d either be rehearsing or recording or just hanging out playing music.”
Dyson went on to record multiple albums in Ojai [2014’s Idyllwild, 2016’s collection of Leonard Cohen covers and 2020’s Parking Lots (Revisited)], leading to her involvement in a series of community concerts that evolved into the Echo Magic Sessions.
Dyson explains, “A bunch of the guys and me up there would play these… we just called them ‘the Ramble shows’. So it was purely for our own entertainment, picking some of our favourite… sort of country rock, or just country, favourite songs, giving each other songs to sing.
"One of our missions was each of us had to go away and pick a bunch of songs that we thought would be good for one of the other members of the band.”
It was here that fellow session participant, and folk rock musician, Brendan Willing James introduced Dyson to Terry Reid’s Faith To Arise.
“Brendan thought this song would suit my voice,” she says. “I’d never heard it before, I’d never heard of Terry Reid and I listened to the song and loved it. Just love that riff, you know, the ascending guitar riff that's like a really prominent feature of the song.
“It's an incredibly difficult song to sing because there's not much repeating melody. I mean, the chorus repeats but basically… every line is a new melody. It's not just like a really simple repetitive motif and the lyrics are really hard to remember too ‘cause they're kind of complicated and weird… but I just love that song.
“We started playing it and it was just so fun to play," she adds. "Everyone loved playing that song and so when we went to just put some of these songs down on record it was an obvious choice to throw down and then everyone was like, 'Let's let it be the first one we put out.'”
Faith To Arise, a track that originated on Reid’s 1976 Seed Of Memory album, is the first release from the Echo Magic Sessions which are described as “a rolling series of recordings that re-imagine deep-catalog songs”.
Alongside Dyson, James ,and Wright, this single release also features musicians Scott Hirsch (producer of Dyson’s Tender Heart album from last year), Ethan Glazer and Jesse Siebenberg (son of Supertramp’s Bob Siebenberg).
Together they recorded “somewhere in the range of seven or so songs,” according to Dyson. And the rest of the songs they will be “putting them out overtime as we feel like it.”
Finding A New Approach
With Dyson now on a complete break from her music career – “I’m basically not writing” she admits – there are no plans for a return to gigging until “the second-half of 2026.”
She began the physical work of building her tiny house back in January, after she’d finished a RocKwiz tour late last year. The break has also given her time to take stock of the current state of the music industry. Dyson has found it difficult to embrace social media’s overwhelming presence in the music scene and is wary of AI’s growing dominance.
“I’m not someone who ever took to the whole social media model of being someone who likes to speak into the camera for instance,” Dyson confesses, “and so things just stopped making sense and I just knew that I needed to step back rather than become cynical and embittered.
"So that's what I'm doing and I don't know what's gonna happen. I'm just hoping that I'll find another approach – music is just in my DNA… so we'll just see what happens.”
As for AI, she says, “There’s a feeling of inevitability that AI is going to take opportunities and money away from actual artists in the long run. But if you want to create music, artists have always created music because they wanted to anyway. I’m pretty unhopeful about the future of music as a career but the creation of music can never be taken away itself.
“Even now, it’s like most people in the industry would say you can’t have a music career without social media, for instance, and they are probably right but… I know people are quitting Spotify and saying ‘You can only get my music at shows.’ I think that is fine for anyone who is happy to just accept whatever level that allows to have and that might be me.
"I don’t know if I’m interested anymore in trying to crack the code of virality," she adds. "I’d just love to be able to keep making music and have an audience that enjoys it and it doesn’t have to be a big audience but enough of an audience to make it sustainable.”
Dyson has been on an even longer break from another very successful side project, the Dyson Stringer Cloher trio she formed with her friends and fellow revered solo artists Liz Stringer and Jen Cloher.
Initially coming together in 2013 and reuniting in 2020, the group not only released a critically-acclaimed EP and album but also headlined national tours and played highly regarded festivals such as WOMADelaide.
However, Dyson views that as having run its course. “That chapter is over," she admits. "But we loved it while it lasted. And, yeah, just very unlikely to reform. But we had a good run.”
For now she is in no rush to finish her latest labour of love, her tiny house. “Time scale has changed for me,” says Dyson. “I remember when I used to have two weeks between gigs and I was like, [gasps] ‘That’s too long!'
"I thought if I didn’t play for two weeks I wouldn’t know how to play. It was ridiculous. [laughs] Now I can take a year and not play a single show and I still know how to do it.”
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
