Interview: Tiny Habits on Social Media, Folk Music, and the Art of Being Happy
Written by Lucas Assagba. Edited by Millie Cain.
2023 was a year for trios. Boygenius made their big comeback; MUNA reached new heights; and with Tiny Habits’ debut EP releasing in April of that year, they proved that three is the magic number. On the aptly named Tiny Things, Judah Mayowa, Cinya Khan and Maya Rae cemented themselves as the future of folk, finding themselves part of Spotify’s ‘Juniper: Artists to Watch’ series.
On May 24th, Tiny Habits released their debut album, All for Something; I caught up with the band two days before the album’s release, breaking down their key inspirations, creative processes, and more.
One of the things that interested me about you guys is that you’re not the ‘traditional’ image of folk music; two of you are women, and two of you are people of colour. You intersect so many marginalised identities, but you’re thriving in the folk scene. Is this something that affects you, or something you think about when you make music?
Judah: It’s on my mind almost every day, because most of the folk scene is white, but I think it’s awesome, especially because our fanbase and the people who come to our shows are really diverse. It’s very cool, but also a little scary.
Cinya: It’s interesting to me that this is the first time that’s really been brought up in an interview! I feel like that’s because the music doesn’t really bring that up, as if it speaks for itself. I like the idea that it can be the fabric of who we are but not at the forefront.
Yeah, that reminds me of Laufey, who you’ve collaborated with before – her song ‘Letter to My 13 Year Old Self’ is centred around race and gender, and what it’s like to be othered, but everything else is her just doing her own thing, I think it’s really cool you’re both doing that!
Maya: Thanks! We love her!
How do your collaborations generally come about?
M: A lot of it happens through social media; that’s how we started out, just posting videos online, and it’s led to us collaborating with a lot of really cool people. Most of it is through Instagram and TikTok, like opening for Gracie Abrams and Noah Kahan.
C: We actually met Kacey [Musgraves] in real life first; we played a show in New York where we were on the same bill as her, and we became friends.
M: Social media is a very powerful tool! It has its pros and its cons, but it’s very powerful.
So, the album comes out in two days! I’m reviewing it, and it’s all I’ve been listening to all day, I love it. When did everything start to fall into place?
C: A lot of the songs have been around for a while, and we compiled them all together last summer. We flew out to LA to meet with Tony Berg, our producer, and that’s when it began! We had a couple of days with him, not recording anything, just singing the songs, and focusing on what the album needed to feel like a full body of work. We finished it in January, so it was a really long process. We were back and forth a lot
M: We were touring in-between, so it was all recorded in different chunks, which was good.
C: Yeah, it was helpful.
M: Being able to sit with the music, and then come back to it and change things was really cool.
I wanted to circle back to Tony Berg for a second; I’m a huge Boygenius fan, and I remember being excited when I saw his credit on ‘Small Enough’. How did your collaboration come about?
M: It was our manager, Steve! He’s known Tony forever. Over the summer, we were shopping around for producers, and Tony came into the mix pretty early on. We had a conversation and pretty much said, ‘Let’s do it!’ and we made the whole record with him.
This is your first time releasing music through your label, Mom+Pop. Is this a different experience to what you’re used to?
M: It was interesting because we were making the record before getting the record deal; the reason why we chose them is because they’re so pro-artist, and all for creative liberty. It was an awesome experience!
Why did you choose to call the album All for Something?
C: It was the same way we named the band actually, just texting names back and forth. We went through so many names, one of them was A Little Bit Farther, the name of the tour. Humans Made This was another one. The end of our song ‘Wishes’ has a lyric that says, ‘I wish these wishes weren’t all for nothing,’ and I was like, ‘All for Something?’ Maybe everything we’ve done was necessary, all the hardships are for something, and that’s just what life is. It felt really fitting because the album’s themes circle around despair, and then hope. Or a hardship, and then a lesson learned.
Contrasts and parallels are something I picked up on in your music, like how ‘Tiny Things’ and ‘Delay’ both talk about doing dishes; was that intentional?
M: We had this question recently! There was no reason behind it, it just sounded nice.
I’m sure as musicians you listen to a lot of music, what are you all listening to at the minute?
J: The new Mk.gee record, Two Star & The Dream Police, is in my rotation a lot.
C: We’re all listening to the new Flyte record, and I’ve been listening to a lot of Pine Grove.
M: Deeper Well by Kacey Musgraves!
C: Cowboy Carter too, that’s a bit more amped up. I’m usually in more of a chill mode, very tired and sleepy; we’re not really shaking ass!
What were the key inspirations for the album?
C: Leith Ross’s To Learn is up there, the first song on our album is very parallel to that.
M: It’s all very Phoebe Bridgers-esc; naturally because Tony [Berg] worked on it with us, it’s very organic sounding.
J: Ryan Beatty too, if you know who that is?
Yes! I love him, ‘Cinnamon Bread’ is my favourite of his.
C: Mason Stoops played guitar on that record, and he plays on ours too! Tony is so well connected and has such a historical mind for music: any time you’d have an idea, he’d have a song to show you. That sort of stuff inspired the album a lot; like, we’d listen to a Beach Boys song, and then put a Beach Boys-style harmony into a song.
You’ve described ‘Mudroom’ as the perfect lead single for the album; what goes into the process of single selection? Is that fully in your hands?
J: Yeah, it’s fully in our hands. ‘Small Enough’ was technically the first single, but we wanted to contrast that and show our gentle side. ‘Mudroom’ was the start of the album cycle, and we wanted to do something a little different.
I wanted to talk about ’Small Enough’, because the album version is quite different to the single version. What made you want to go back and revisit it?
C: That was the first song we worked on with Tony, and the turnaround was really fast because we had to put a single out. We had our qualms with it, and after we had the context of the other songs on the record, it stuck out in a really strange way. We thought it’d be nice to tweak it and make it more seamless in terms of the record.
Maya, you mentioned earlier that you think social media has its pros and its cons, and I wanted to ask, as artists who got their ‘big break’ through social media, what do you think of how it’s affecting the music industry?
M: That’s a loaded question, we talk about this a lot!
C: It’s really cool for people to have access to so many different artists all the time, like on TikTok, but it makes things really difficult for artists to stand out because of how oversaturated everything is, and how many people are doing really similar things to you. The silver lining is the connections you can make with other people, and how easily you can find a fanbase.
Do you guys have a big goal in mind? Whether that’s a collaboration, an award, anything!
C: I want to buy a house, that’d be nice!
M: A Grammy would be nice too! Even to go to the Grammys would be cool. Ultimately, and I feel like I say this for all of us, being able to live comfortably, and support the people we love, while doing what we love, is the ultimate goal. Seeing the world, loving each other and everyone else in our lives, and being happy! That’s the dream!
