Still got the blues

Andrew Mathieson
STRUMMING a few notes on the guitar should have come naturally for Mia Dyson.
But the Torquay youngster was oblivious to what took place in a room next to hers.
There stood father Jim, diligently carving away at his latest musical creation.
The accomplished performer in his own right had gained a reputation for making perfectly handcrafted guitars, with a sweet shape and sound.
They were always floating around the house, Mia vaguely remembers, but tickling the ivories – aged just four – and taking up piano lessons proved more important.
She even pleaded with dad to buy her and her sister a drum kit – and he did.
“In fact, I didn’t pick up a guitar until I was about 13 or 14 and only after a friend of mine asked my dad to make her one,” Mia reckons.
“I was really envious because it really was such a beautiful instrument.
“I must admit it had never occurred to me, even though dad made them all the time, to play the guitar.”
Jim would eventually make his daughter a standard copy of a Fender Stratocaster and, as her burgeoning musical career developed, so did her sophisticated tastes.
The 27-year-old still plays one of her first-ever instruments to this day.
“I asked Dad to make me a lapsteel guitar, which had a new design, a bigger body and was binding,” Mia explains.
“It was a beautiful tobacco-coloured instrument.”
It only took a year or two before Mia was writing her own songs and selling the virtues of her music for a few gigs.
“It all started at the Barwon Club – that was my first professional gig, in inverted commas,” she professes.
Mia loved the Geelong music scene and has now moved closer to the city.
At the same time, the roots guitarist felt Torquay was “lacking a bit culturally”.
Only its landscape had any impact on her songwriting.
“It’s always been a surfie town and there is a focus on that,” she sniggers.
“My dad is also a surfer and I enjoyed it when I was a kid but it didn’t really stick with me.”
Her dad’s record collection largely influenced Mia’s early musical direction more so than his surfboards ever did.
Listening to blues and folk legends Tom Waits, Ry Cooder, BB King, Muddy Waters and Bob Dylan, she would mouth their words and imitate their soulful voices around the house.
But despite an ARIA award for best 2005 blues and roots album suggesting the contrary, Mia doesn’t fit the typical blues-singer mould.
With no hard-luck stories to sing about, Mia’s more comfortable as a teetotaller than slurping down a flask of whisky in traditional blues fashion.
“I went through an early teenage grunge phase and I still think Nirvana, Pearl Jam and a bunch of those bands that came out of that era are really great bands but it’s not what I’m into any more,” she says.
“I came back to that early music, which is really powerful because it got in my head when I was little and it hasn’t let me go.”
That playful banter extended to sharing a stage with her hero.
Mia considered nine-time Grammy award-winner Bonnie Raitt her only female guitar role model growing up.
She can still envisage watching Bonnie perform at Melbourne’s Hamer Hall for the first time when she was just an awestruck teenager.
“Thirteen years later I’m opening for her in the same venue and she got me on stage with her and we had a little guitar act,” Mia laughs.
“It was totally surreal and it still is now.
“I kind of had to rub my eyes like to say ‘Did that really happen or have I imagined it?’.”