Picking Up Flavour On The Banks Of The Tennessee

It's been almost a decade since roots rocker Mia Dyson left her native shores to chase her lifelong dream in America - where so much of the music she grew up with emanated from - but it's only since she made a pilgrimage to the famous Deep South music mecca to record her sixth album If I Said Only So Far I Take It Back that she really felt she was tapping into the source.

"I'm fascinated by American music history and I grew up listening to records from Muscle Shoals," the singer-songwriter enthuses about working at Portside Sound in the Alabaman hotspot. "I knew about its rich history because my dad would play me records and tell me about the places [where] they were made, or I'd read about them, and Muscle Shoals is one of a handful of just incredible musical places where so many great records have been made.

"And of course I watched the [2013] Muscle Shoals documentary a few years ago and got to know even more about the fact that there's all these players down there who never toured and just played on these amazing records, and the amazing songwriters from the same area, too.

"I've been drawn to America since I was little and then the opportunity to record in Muscle Shoals was just a total dream come true: it was a mythological place for me - I didn't even know where it was, just that it existed somewhere on the American landscape - so it was a total dream come true, it was great. First I visited there and went and saw the studio and got a feel for the place, and it just really had something special going on."

Dyson is a firm believer that the environment an album is recorded in can intrinsically impact the final product.

"I definitely think so," she reflects. "It's hard to quantify but I feel that the setting and environment really influence the recording, and of course the people you're with. And we were recording with people from that part of the world - it wasn't like we were just bringing an LA band to Muscle Shoals. We had myself and my drummer [Erin] "Syd" [Sidney], but then we had the producer [and Alabama Shakes keyboardist] Ben Tanner who's from there and John Paul White [from The Civil Wars] who sung back-up is also from there, and [legendary Muscle Shoals session bassist] David Hood, of course.

"And being right on the banks of the Tennessee River was inspiring, it's enormous and we don't have rivers like that in Australia so it was quite a presence. It's hard to quantify exactly how, but I feel the location definitely influences the final product. And we didn't try to go for any throwback Muscle Shoals sound, but I still feel that the place influenced it and added certain flavours on there."

For the last few years, Dyson has been crafting lyrics with the most unlikely new creative partner: her husband, Karl Linder. "He's always written poetry - although I didn't know he wrote poetry for a few years into our relationship - and the way that we started writing together is that I found a few of his poems, and then started trying to put some of them to music with mixed results," she recalls. "Then we thought, 'Let's try and write a song together,' and we just haven't stopped. I feel like he brings such a - for want of a better word - poetic style to the table, while I've got a more plaintive and direct style, and I feel that the combination really is stronger together.

"I think thematically it's very much about self-reflection, looking inward and seeing what's there, like mindfulness and meditation and all of the things that one associates with mindfulness. That's kind of where my life has shifted towards in the last few years, from in my 20s where my attitude was more like, 'I want to go out and win and be the best!' and all that shit. Now I'm happy to just let life unfold and see what I can contribute rather than what I can take."