The music of Mia Joy (AKA Chicago‘s Mia Rocha) is the culmination of many influences. Brought up by musician and poet parents, Rocha started singing as a baby, and the sources that shaped her artistic sensibilities go right back too. With clear nods to Kate Bush, no small debt to nineties R&B artists like Sade and Selena, as well as acknowledgment of acts as diverse as Grouper, Korn and Arthur Russell, it is clear that Rocha started absorbing inspirations and never stopped.
Spirit Tamer, the forthcoming Mia Joy album on Fire Talk Records, acts as something of a chronicle of Rocha’s history. A way of collecting the seemingly disparate pieces that make up a life in the hope of making sense of them, and learning more about the resulting whole. The range of influences on show add to this form, like snapshots from different times accumulating into something personal and unique, as well as always growing.
The first glimpses of the record highlight both the varied nature of its mood and tone, but also reinforce how such a changeable atmosphere evokes a cohesive, compelling picture of a human life. Dealing with Rocha’s experiences of suicidal ideation, ‘Haha’ is richly textured and wryly amusing, a balance of naked vulnerability and self-deprecation that ends up being something of a protection spell. In refusing to settle into any one-dimensional view of the situation, Mia Joy brings to life the true depth of such things, where conflicting and counterintuitive shades of emotion can exist side by side. If the ultimate fear is the binary of life and death, the track suggests, then embracing ambiguity might be the key to transcending the dread.
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Though in a different manner, second single ‘See Us’ is equally nuanced. The final song Rocha wrote for the record, it found her beyond some of the troubles referenced elsewhere, and within a new love. “I could see a promising future with plenty of opportunities,” she explains, “filled with optimism of love and expansion that we could better our lives.” Months after the track was finished, the pandemic hit and took the relationship as one of its many casualties, revealing what was ostensibly a song about new beginnings to be something more distant and interesting. Not a track about the new dawn, but rather the possibility of any number further down the line, waiting to save us just in time.
Spirit Tamer is out via Fire Talk Records on the 7th May and you can pre-order it now from the Mia Joy Bandcamp page.
