Tiny Chair is getting a seat at the industry table
Image: Tiny Chair. Image: Facebook
By DOUGAL TSAKALOS-STEWART
Sydney and Melbourne are known for bringing many cultural influences that have contributed to what Australia is known for. One of these culture points is the rise of underground and indie bands within the last few decades.
One such band who is on the rise with hard hitting covers and a small but devoted fanbase is Tiny Chair, located in the north west of Sydney. Tiny Chair spoke with City Hub about their new single, inspirations and among other things.
The band consists of four members: Willow the vocalist, Aaron the guitarist, Adam the drummer and Karen, a second guitarist and proficient keyboardist.
The band have a great energy and friendliness that makes you feel included. It’s something they incorporate in their music and performance.
The group began by playing covers of popular indie rock bands such as Gorillaz and The Strokes, then moved onto writing originals when they felt the time was right.
“I think when we started writing originals, it was kind of like, ‘Oh, this is our original voice.’ Like, this is our band’s voice,” said Adam.
Tiny Chair continued experimenting with originals and practicing until they eventually made their way to playing in their first gig, Muskets at UTS. The gig came about through Karen, who was vice president of the UTS Music society. They had lots of support from friends and family, which was crucial for their upward trajectory.
“After that, we had a lot of our friends, mutual friends who are also musicians, kind of come to us being like, ‘Oh, do you want to play?’” Karen said.
The band enjoys lots of support from other bands in the industry as well as friends.
“You can’t really do anything without other people in the music industry supporting you — and everyone is so supportive,” Karen said when asked about the difference between a career in music and a non- creative career.
Tiny Chair recently released their first original song titled “Wake Up Call”. As mentioned before, the process of founding an original song idea stemmed from their friendship as well as practice and tuning with covers. Another motivation, pointed out by Willow, is themes from films.
“I had a lot of inspiration, which carried over to the final one, from wacky hotels in fictional movies. Like how everything is symmetrical. It was originally called “Hotel”, hence the bell on the cover and all the little motifs in the song,” she explained.
They met their current producer, Alex, at a gig where they debuted their new original song. He approached them with an offer. From that point they spent days producing and thinking of ways to improve the song.
“It completely just changed the way we thought about song composition, like, oh, playing the guitar like this can help this emotion come across,” said Aaron describing the process of writing Tiny Chairs first song.
Tiny Chair currently has around 1,500 monthly listeners and a host of small but enjoyable gigs coming up.
