Mia Dyson

It’s 6pm in Los Angeles and Mia Dyson places the call through to my office phone. The day for Mia is drawing a near when mine is just beginning, and it’s been a busy one for her.
“I’ve been writing a lot today and I was looking for a new place to live and we’d been looking for a while and it just got approved,” Mia beams.
It seems a lot of time lately for the musician has been spent in creating new music, both as a soloist and alongside Jen Cloher and Liz Stringer for the Dyson Stringer Cloher band.
“We just had three or four days together, it just worked amazingly well that Liz was touring America and Jen was over here visiting,” she says.
“Lately though I’m just getting ready to release a new EP, one track of which will be coming out ahead of the tour with the Waifs and also working on a clip for that. Also some clips for some covers I’m doing as well which is a thing for the fans.”
Over a musicians career, many of them find themselves living in America either through a permanent relocation or something a bit more temporary. In 2010 Mia made the move, but it wasn’t a conscious decision, more so a matter of things falling in the right place.
“I didn’t know what I was getting into really,” she adds with a laugh.
“I didn’t go, ‘Oh I want to move to LA!’ I just had the opportunity to work with some people and once I got here the west coast just really suited me, LA specifically. It gets such a bad rap but it’s got so much to offer.”
For Mia, the move to LA has been a reconnection with her creative side. Something in the city triggers her writing and she’s found that she’s writing more than she ever has before.
“It’s not like I’m specifically writing about geography or LA as a place, but it definitely gives me a lot of inspiration in terms of the energy here – I need to stop using that word,” Mia says.
“There’s just so many people making art and encouraging each other, it’s just really vibrant and I feel so supported. I feel really driven to write and I’m writing more than I ever have. I’ve just been doing it every day and writing with other people – I never used to do that.”
While she’s loving her time in LA, Mia looks forward to returning to Australia where she is set to support the Waifs on their tour.
“I feel like this is the best way to come back to Australia. The Waifs are quintessentially Australian, they’re friends of mind and we’ve known each other for a long time,” she says.
“They were super inspiring when I was coming up and just had that real independent spirit. They didn’t sign a distributor deal and Donna was taking orders online and getting a supermarket trolley, hundreds of mailers from the post office and she’d go back home and stuff them with CDs and send them to people.”
Written by Alexander Lightfoot
When & Where: Palais Theatre, Melbourne – October 24 & GPAC, Geelong – October 28