All Grown Up

When Mia Dyson took the call from The Music, she was just back from a session in Nashville where she’d been recording some new songs with a producer she was looking at working with for another album next year.

“It just feels like a prolific time for me, especially as someone who’s not particularly prolific,” she admits with a giggle. After all, she’s only recently released her latest album, Idyllwild, songs of change, of growing up and growing old, and quite the diverse collection it is.

“Definitely. I did have that fear that all of these songs sit on the one album together, even though they were written in a much shorter space of time than some of my previous records that sound perhaps more of a similar ilk, but I had to trust it.

"I was just blown away to discover that I wrote a bunch of songs. I mean, that might sound silly but it really was a surprise.”

“I think moving to another country, and in my case the States, where most of the music I grew up listening to is from and a place I’ve been drawn to and inspired by for many years… Even music aside, just moving to the States was just life-changing and challenging and a crazy experience, and continues to be, and it’s really expanded my horizons. I got a whole new or expanded musical community and particularly the band that I have in the States – Erin Sidney, who’s my drummer that also produced [2012’s] The Moment and Idyllwild with his musical partner Pat Cupples – they just really encouraged me to explore and create and expand in a way that I guess maybe, in my younger days, I just didn’t have the confidence or experience or whatever was missing to do.”

Dyson moved to the US five years ago. After a disastrous period working on a project with The Eurhythmics’ Dave Stewart, a split with her agent, the end of a long-term relationship and the loss to cancer of a lifelong friend, meeting Sidney and Cupples proved a godsend. Finding her feet once more with The Moment, Dyson decided to approach the craft of songwriting in a different way.

“Where the album stylistically headed was not clear or obvious in the writing process but became more clear as we began rehearsing and arranging the songs. I spent about a month in June last year on, really the first time I’d ever taken a songwriting retreat, and I tried to put aside as much as possible the rest of my life and just focused on writing, which in the past has been something I would never want to do because the thought of just spending all that time by myself writing was too daunting for someone who’s not particularly prolific and is scared to spend that much time feeling like they don’t know the answers.

“So it was challenging but I was just blown away to discover that I wrote a bunch of songs. I mean, that might sound silly but it really was a surprise.”