Mia Dyson - Tender Heart

Tender Heart is the seventh studio album by Australian blues singer songwriter Mia Dyson, released in February 2024 via Black Door Records, Echo Magic and MGM.

Mia Dyson is a multiple ARIA-nominated and award-winning artist from Melbourne with a powerful grit and gravel voice and guitar playing, landing her voted amongst the top 25 Australian guitarists of all time. Releasing six critically acclaimed albums and touring the world with the likes of Stevie Nicks, Bonnie Raitt and Eric Clapton, Mia has cemented her place as one of the great Australian troubadours.

Tender Heart is a fittingly-titled collection of ten songs that stand tall as life-affirming, grippingly honest and unapologetically joyful all at once. Tender Heart finds a topic that's nearly beyond words handled deftly with intimacy and nuance by a long-respected crafts person of her field.

There’s something electric and urgent driving Dyson's latest album, Tender Heart. Something momentous, that has her plunging open-heartedly into the magical, terrifying, mundane, mysterious business of life.

It started with an earthquake.

Karl (Dyson’s husband and writing partner) felt the earth move one evening during the pandemic, literally, when a quake rumbled through their LA home. He heard, moments later, Mia calling his name from the bedroom. Entering the dark room, he spoke to her, heard nothing, touched her motionless hand, and fumbled for a light. That was when he saw Mia ‘slumped against the wall’, he said later. ‘Your eyes looked like they were made out of wood.’

Being able to recover while taking her time to create Tender Heart with her cherished collaborators has been a joy. Syd Sidney (drums), Dan Wright (vocals, bass), and producer Scott Hirsch are friends and creative partners in the real-time musical processing of one small moment in time that almost prevented the album from happening at all.

Tender Heart comes right at you with this and more in its opening track, ‘Dare’; a deep, golden whisky of a song that somehow also skips along as though it has its hand out the car window dipping and weaving through time. Written before Dyson’s near-death experience, there is a jaw-dropping prescience to this piece. Maybe Dyson knew, on some deeper level, as she wrote these words, what was going to happen. ‘The ground beneath my feet will always be shaking’, she sings. ‘The blood under my skin will always be racing’. It’s when the song builds to ‘The death inside of me will always be waiting’ that things start to feel truly spooky.

It's a profound album. It’s gentle and thoughtful and you can listen to it without knowing any of the depth of experience and love behind it. The love song, Golden Light, inspired by the golden light between Mia and Karl at the portal between life and death, could just be about a Sunday morning, light pouring through the window. Bare feet padding about on the cold floor. A stillness and a slowness and the kind of love it’s easy to take for granted.

The crafted simplicity of this album – the lyrics, the easy, rolling musical journey of each track – hints at larger, more magnificent, harder, tougher, deeper things. In that way, it’s less like a series of short stories. It’s like poetry. A poet, breathing life into a poet, beaming joyful, unfettered love out to the rest of us.

Perhaps the most profound song on the album is Thank You. Living life after a moment of death showed Dyson that there weren’t too many words she would have regretted not saying. They have become in Thank You, a life-affirming, honest, surprisingly joyful chorus: “Thank you. I love you. Forgive me. I forgive you.”

credits

This album is on black vinyl housed in a gatefold sleeve, pressed in Australia via Black Door Records, Echo Magic and MGM.